16 Saturday Sep 2006
Posted in Technology
Tags
Great article on PC World on the worst sites on the web.
But is MySpace the worst site on the web? Probably not. I know that De Gaulle is the worst airport in the world. But I’m sure that I could create a site worse than MySpace. I’m sure anything involving Rachael Ray has got to be worse.
09 Saturday Sep 2006
Posted in Homestead, Technology
Wow, it’s been over two months since my last post. Dood, what have I been doing?
Well, lots of work, playing with my son, and planning and running the Homestead Talent Show. Someday, I’ll get my act together and get up some good pics of the Homestead Talent Show, but until then, trust me. It’s awesome.
Over on Justin’s blog, he’s got a little controversy brewing over how to rank the importance of customers versus other aspects of business like employees and products. Check it out.
Now, obviously, I’ve been with Homestead for almost 12 years now, so I can’t possibly disagree that much with the man. It might a bit bold (or silly, or stupid) to say that customers are third, but don’t worry, Homestead really does care about its customers and we work really damn hard to keep them happy. Running a business is all about finding the right balance between all the priorities that are ripping you apart.
01 Saturday Jul 2006
Posted in Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0
Really interesting read on Business Week on Google’s hype but lack of actual market delivery on many of its products beyond its flagship Search.
The stats cited (assuming they’re accurate) are really eye-opening:
Google Talk, an instant-messaging service launched last August, now ranks No. 10, garnering just 2% of the number of users for market leader MSN Messenger, according to comScore Media Metrix. Three-month-old Google Finance, heralded as a competitor to market leader Yahoo! Finance, has settled in as the 40th-most-visited finance site, according to data from Hitwise, a competitive intelligence firm. Gmail, the e-mail service that was lauded at its 2004 launch for offering 500 times as much storage space as some rivals (they quickly closed the gap), today is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail…
…Take Orkut, Google’s two-year-old social-networking site. Since making an initial splash, Orkut has seen limited changes and has faded in popularity everywhere except Brazil. Today it draws less than 1% as much U.S. traffic as MySpace.
The article does admit that there are some great successes to tout, like Google Maps. But in general, despite some really fancy technology and cool features, they can’t reach the marketshare they want.
Clearly, Google is still a successful company and every company out there would love the level of press coverage (read: hype) and batting average that Google has (Homestead included). But I think the facts show what many of us already believed: while it is a great technology company and great recruiting company, it’s currently only a decent product company and a worse product marketing company. Oh, and they’re run by engineers.
As Don Dodge writes, their products’ success “depends on how much effort Google puts into making them better, and how much real value they deliver to users”.
Also, given the unbelievably favorable opinion that the blogosphere (and Internet industry in general) has of Google and everything it touches, the fact that most of their launches haven’t gotten much traction reminds us of something else. It reminds us that most of the world doesn’t listen to us.
Update: The discussion continues: Michael Parekh focuses on how Google and the others can better market these hyped products.
29 Thursday Jun 2006
Posted in Technology, Web 2.0
Tags
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:
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…
26 Monday Jun 2006
Posted in Blogging, Technology, Web 2.0
Tags
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.
26 Monday Jun 2006
Posted in Technology
Tags
Everyone is commending Warren Buffet and Bill Gates for their philanthropic efforts. I don’t know who am to commend them as well, but bravo!
A major problem we have in this capitalist society is that wealth accumulates. Everybody knows this (except the trickle-down supporters and complete free-market purists) and what you’re left with a totally unbalanced society where people like Buffet collect ridiculous amounts of wealth. He’s an example of how you can use money to make more money without actually producing anything.
So I’m ecstatic hear that he’s giving away so much. That’s the only way that the poorest in the world will get help because the free-market won’t do it.
Now if we can only get the Waltons to do it. Sam left all his money to his kids and they pretty much just sit on it.
21 Wednesday Jun 2006
Posted in Technology, Web 2.0
Tags
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.
20 Tuesday Jun 2006
Posted in Food
Beer Battered Deep Fried Bacon Double Quarter Pounder. Thanks, Roger!
19 Monday Jun 2006
Posted in Gadgets, Technology
But how can I buy one?
17 Saturday Jun 2006
Posted in SEO, Technology
Tags
Great article on how easy it is to exploit search engines’ algorithms.
Google Adsense (and things like it) make things like this profitable. And it’s really annoying. But Adsense also makes Google tons of money, so is how strong is their incentive to fix it and to fix click fraud?
Ramblings of a Short Man 