Category Archives: Web 2.0

Google Checkout: Why will users use it?

29 Thursday Jun 2006

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Google announced Google Checkout today, and all the world’s a buzz about it. But like TechCrunch, I’m not sure yet why end users would use it.

Now, I see a huge reason why merchants will use it. Merchants who use AdWords (which is pretty much everybody) will get the little shopping cart “I accept Google Checkout” icon next to their ad. And that is huge advantage. With Google’s very stark search results pages, a little icon does do a lot to attract attention. And of course, the more clicks you get on your ad, the higher your ad tends to float…

Forget the cheaper transaction fees ($0.20 per + 2%) or the credit against those transaction fees that AdWords users get. That doesn’t really amount to much unless a lot of customers actually use Google Checkout. The real merchant benefit is this little icon which will make their ad much more noticeable on the page.

But again, why would customers use it?  There have been a lot of online wallets before (like Yahoo) and none of them have taken off. Paypal is not a simple online wallet and, I think, has real benefit to end users (direct person-to-person money transfer). Even then, most customers’ interaction with Paypal is just a place to enter their credit card so someone else can receive money. In the case of Google Checkout, the end user can’t do simply that. They have to use their Google info to pay.

 So far, I only see two reasons that end users will use it:

  1. They are intrigued by that little icon next to all the merchants that they see, and they decide to sign up for it.
  2. They want to use it just because it’s Google.

Will it work?  I don’t know. The public uses a lot of Microsoft stuff just because it’s Microsoft, but then again, they own our OS and browser.

Anyway, I can see a lot of merchants integrating with it to get the little icon on their ads, but not getting a lot of transactions through it, unless Google provides more end user benefits.

Update: John Tokash has written a great review. He thinks Google Checkout’s shielding of your email address has a ton of value, but note how it will only forward the email to your gmail account. Tricky…

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Digg 3.0 launches, but where’s the controversy?

26 Monday Jun 2006

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As TechCrunch reports, Digg 3.0 launches on Monday, but amid all this hype (and the hype from the Netscape launch), I'm left to wonder what happened to all the controversy around the forevergeek story?

Let me say first that the the Digg changes do look fantastic and should make Digg that much cooler. Great job!

The attention span of the American people is already unbelievably short, but the attention span of the blogging community has got to be record-breakingly short. Both Digg and TechMeme demonstrate this everyday, with stories that sit at the top of the queue for a mere hours, before being completely ignored forever. It's always hard to tell what's real and what's worthless with all the hype that the community pushes around.

Yahoo! Local supporting microformats

21 Wednesday Jun 2006

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Titles says it all.

I’m curious to see what mashups are going to come out of that…

I think it’s a great move for the decentralized-data proponents, clearly. Now, we’ll be able to index, search, and organize the data more easily (but frankly, anyone who really wanted to could have scraped it before because the HTML has to be consistently formatted).

However, the problem with review sites even as far-reaching as Yahoo! Local is that there is still way too few reviews. Cruising through the site, I would bet that only a single digit percentage of small businesses in my area are reviewed. And I live in the Bay Area, where there is more density of reviews than pretty much anywhere. We still need to figure out a way to get people to enter their opinions into the computer. Let’s see Yahoo tackle that one.

Compared to that, indexing and reformatting are totally easy.

But I’m not really complaining; it’s still good news.

Netscape can make Digg popular

15 Thursday Jun 2006

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So the news today is that Netscape is launching a "Digg killer". (Note how the entry used to be say "Digg-like site" instead of "Digg killer". Gotta love the sensational headlines!)

OK, ok, I went to www.netscape.com this morning, and I was shocked to find out that it had a Google Pagerank of 9. Wow. Who still goes to Netscape? No one I know ever thinks about Netscape. Shows you how much I know about stuff.

Tech Crunch has some interesting things to say about it, but I think it's missing a big part about it. It's not really about the features or even the number of page views that Netscape.com gets. The interesting thing about this launch is that AOL/Netscape have the opportunity to reach a completely different audience than Digg. The editorial panel (who are getting slammed by the community purists out there) can guide the stories to of more popular interest than geeky interest.  And that's very important.  If they can get the mainstream market to vote on stories, and build a community around that, then they have something.

Check out Digg anytime and the top stories are the same: product launches, tech company announcements, or freakish stories of the truly weird. I know it might just totally suck, but people want to see stories about Britney's raging hormones and Brangelina's baby.

Despite the popularity of Digg in certain circles, the vast majority of people have not heard of it. And with the demographic that Digg currently has, it will never have the mass appeal that will attract the non-geeks out there. That's where the "evil" editorial panel is valuable: you can guide the direction of the stories, and therefore, guide the direction of the demographic that you attract.  And after you build up enough of that demographic, the editorial panel can step aside and let the community do it's magic.

You know who could do it better? I think CNN.com, actually, because they have the stories, they have the offline brand, and they also have a 9 Pagerank. And strangely, they also are owned by AOL-Time Warner.  Hmmm…. Conspiracy?

Google Spreadsheets falls short

06 Tuesday Jun 2006

Posted by in AJAX, Technology, Web 2.0

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Now, Homestead has as a fairly complex AJAX application for page editing called SiteBuilder Lite. I know it well and I know that while AJAX is really easy, really good AJAX is difficult.  And at that level, I appreciate what Google has done with Google Spreadsheets.  It’s a good feat of engineering.

I’m also a very experienced Excel user. I’m no great fan of MS, but I recognize that Excel is one awesome piece of software. In my humble opinion, it’s the best thing they have and is really indispensible in pretty much everything that I do, and everything that businesses (small and large) do.  So after watching the videos on Google Blogoscoped (I have to admit I haven’t played with Google Spreadsheets myself, as I didn’t get an invitation), it’s really obvious that MS has nothing to worry about.

Why?

  • Philipp Lenssen has a miserable time dealing with sorting data (can’t deal with header rows) and inserting data. (Starting at 1:28 in the first video)
  • While the formula list is extensive, the interface for dealing with them is really weak (especially it’s issues with reselecting cells for use in a formula). (5:22 in the first video)
  • No graphing capabilities.
  • Because I’ve only seen the video, I don’t know what the keyboard shortcuts are, but in Excel, keyboard interface is very important.
  • From the video, I can’t tell if formulas are translated relatively when copied.  I assume so, because if not, it is completely unusable.
  • Automatic column resizing (double click on a column border to resize the column to its minimal width).

And those are, to me, the most blatant things missing that almost all Excel users will miss. I won’t even go into the stuff that I use everyday that are missing (pivot tables, filters, cross-tab & cross-document references, borders, mapping cells to DB queries, etc).

To be fair, the collaboration is cool and could be useful in some situations, but I think it’s inadequate for most business applications.

TechCrunch lists a bunch of other AJAX spreadsheets and I still have to check them out. It’s been a while since I’ve played with them. Michael Arrington missed Tracker from Jotspot, so check that out, too.

Of course, this is just the first release and Google could make it better. But will they do that?  Or will this be one of those projects that sits on the Google Labs forever? I don’t know if Google cares enough about this to really take on Excel, but we’ll just have to see.

Mugshot, from Red Hat

01 Thursday Jun 2006

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Wow, everyone's jumping on the bandwagon.

First, sorry to all (heh) my readers. I've been gone for the past month and work was really wicked busy for the weeks preceding my break as I was preparing for the break. Homestead gives you a paid sabbatical every 5 years and I just took my second one. It was fantabulistic!

Anyway, Red Hat launched Mugshot.org, yet another social network.  Wow, how many can there be?  The buzz around is that Red Hat is more interested in getting an open source social network out there, as opposed to building a destination themselves.  Maybe that's true; in a strange way, that makes way more sense to me.

ajaxWrite: what about IE?

23 Thursday Mar 2006

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There’s buzz over at Memorandum about the launch of ajaxWrite. Some good (and good and good) and some not so good.

Technically, there’s not much there. We here at Homestead have a fully AJAX web page builder (before Google and MS), so we’re very familiar with how the designMode setting works and the power that it provides. The most interesting thing technically here is that it can open Word docs. Not rocket science, but it’s some work.

Some limitations that I noticed right away because Michael Robertson didn’t solve them (but we did):

  • There are only 7 font sizes. As I hope we all remember, HTML really only has 7 font sizes (CSS has more of course), and the designMode functions only allow you to set those 7 font sizes (1 through 7). We allow a ton more.
  • A bulleted list has a one-line gap from the line above it that can’t be removed.  Again, this is a limitation of HTML (without CSS), and so is a limitation that he just accepted from default designMode behavior.

Really, there isn’t much here. It’s still interesting; it just needs a lot of work. I hate the bloat of MSWord (I hate it when people send me Word docs when a rich text email would have been just fine), but this in no way competes with Word. I don’t think Bill is sweating just yet.

But what really gets me is this. I’ve complained about it before, and I’ll do it again. What about IE? In our experience, IE’s designMode functionality is better than Firefox’s (Homestead’s SiteBuilder app works in both IE and Firefox). If you are even remotely serious about taking on Word, why would you exclude IE? I’d love to hear any reason other than simple, short-sighted anti-MS politics. Again, Bill isn’t sweating just yet.

You gotta go faster, baby

18 Saturday Mar 2006

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Interesting article on why your website has to change, and when you’re done, has to change again. Often times, it’s too easy to think of websites as software, when frankly, it’s not. More often then not, websites are marketing. And marketing has to change and adapt to the needs, wants, and fantasies of your customer.

At Homestead, we try to push the envelope of this everyday. We want to move faster, while actually releasing stable, usable, well-written and well-designed software. Luckily, we are in a segment of the industry that isn’t as capricious as social networking, where the high-fructose-corn-syrup-powered whims of teens controls your fate. Our customers are a little more discerning and a little more consistent in their needs.

But, as we all know, only the paranoid survive and the paranoia just pushes you to move faster and faster.

Into the valley of death, walks the 20 million blogs

23 Thursday Feb 2006

Posted by in Blogging, Technology, Web 2.0

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Really interesting article from the Chicago Tribune about the stagnation of blog readership.  And tons of interesting discussion about it.  It seems like whenever anyone suggests that the blogging phenomenon is waning, the whole community comes out and bashes something with a collective large blunt object. Only human nature, I guess.

I’ve actually had many issues with the hype around the blogging phenomenon.  I didn’t understand why it was such a big deal, and the posts from Scott Karp and Rex Hammock both suggest to me that blogging wasn’t worth the hype (though I’m sure both of those guys would disagree with my interpretation).

Scott Karp writes that blogging is not a business but just a tool that helps people publish. I totally agree with that. I think he’s totally right. But a lot of the hype around blogging early on was that it was a business.  There were and still are a lot of start ups that are trying to make money on it.  There are a ton of bloggers today that are trying to make money from their on ramblings.

Rex writes that we shouldn’t compare blogging to traditional media. He lists reasons why people should blog, including “because there are two or three people who actually matter in your life or work, or who share your passion for a particular topic”.  (But if there are only 2-3 people who care, shouldn’t that be email?)  The blogging hype came with the fantasy that anyone could be a publisher, a journalist, a reknowned scholar on things that they know.  Rex and Scott know that that’s not true. And the blogging community is now saying that they never thought that in the past.  Yeah, right.

Blogging doesn’t create an audience. Streaking to the 50-yard line during the Super Bowl and setting yourself on fire creates an audience.  Blogging helps people who have an audience (whether you’re a journalist for CNN speaking to thousands/millions of people, or you’re sock-darning expert speaking to two people) speak to that audience more efficiently.  (OK, and yes, it does help grow an audience a little bit.)

So if very few people are making money on blogs, and very few people are reading blogs, and a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?