Doing the Little Things for your Website

As we're getting close to launch...it's time to worry about the details of our website. I'm a "closet" perfectionist. Meaning, I think it would surprise people to know that about me. I don't want to launch anything with potential surprises lurking behind the scenes. I'm NOT saying that we're going to launch with a perfect product. Because we won't. That's impossible. I just want to try to plan for as much as I can.

It's these details that are a time consuming but necessary piece of preparedness. It's the static website content. The copy.

Of course we need to have our message squared away and all that good stuff. But even the team pages. It's time to gather photos and write-ups about everyone who has contributed positively to the project. While this may be a bit simpler for a company where people are in an office - this is a challenge for our distributed company. We have people in Indonesia, Boston, Vancouver, and all over the Bay Area who have helped us out. So it's requiring a bit of extra effort to gather this up!

And then there's the about pages, terms and conditions, FAQ, and all that stuff. You sometimes try to ignore this stuff or put it off... but inevitably there comes a time when you just have to do it.

What Happened to the Valley? TechCrunch 50

You guys know I'm hurting for a paycheck. So when Tech Crunch 50 decided they were charging $3,000 a pop to get in, I knew there was no way in hell I was going. Until... someone from our Haas distro list started asking for volunteers. Yes, another perk from business school. In addition to all of the other things, opportunities abound. So I signed up to volunteer on day 1 and was given a pass for the conference.

The volunteer work was pretty menial. Stuff envelopes... or whatever. But I met some good people. I watched the TC 50 companies present and I hung out in the demo pit for a bit.

What was my overall reaction after day 1 (and 2)? What the hell happened to the Valley? What was once a hotbed for innovation and creativity is now a hodgepodge of copycats, aggregators, and one off's. What do I mean by all of this?

CopyCats

Copycats are basically sites that do what another site does. They add some incremental value, some new graphics, some fancy text, a celebrity... or nothing at all and call it a day.

One of the sites that I put in this category is Blah Girls. Yea. Nice name. And Ashton Kutcher was there presenting it. What does he know about the internet? So blah girls is basically these 3 girls that talk about what's cool and hip for teenagers - using videos and other media. It's basically a content distribution play. Except I found it a bit unsettling. In the first video, one of the girls is introducing another girl, her black friend, and says, "this is my token black friend". A bit inappropriate for a website promoting what's cool with teenage girls. Is it cool to have a token black friend?

While this site may ultimately do well... they obviously have big backing. It seemed a bit like a big media company launching a new tv show or something. A little surprising Arrington let this into TC.

Aggregators

This needs no real explanation. Aggregators basically take a bunch of disparate stuff on the internet and put it together on one site. Kayak is a great example of a useful aggregator for the airline industry. And it's a great one. And many aggregators are, in fact, good. But it's such a crowded space and very few markets have good business opportunities. I'm definitely bearish on this space. Look at SeminarFeed. They "aggregate industry and university events". While this might be useful - where's the business opportunity?

One off's

Ok, so these companies provide an incremental benefit over an existing service. The problem with one off's is that it's not very difficult for the incumbent to add the feature or service. While I hate to call this company out...because I really liked the founder whom I met, this site may ultimately suffer from this fate. KallOut provides search technology from within any application - not just a browser. You can right click on a word in your Word document and a search can take place, while remaining within your document. Nice touch - BUT... how many apps would you use this in? How good does the UI have to be for you to be comfortable using it? What happens when Chrome...or another browser becomes your desktop? Well, there goes your opportunity. Or Google creates the same thing?

So where the hell are the innovations? The groundbreaking technologies? Technologies that will actually make things better (online, offline, whatever)? There were certainly a few of these there... but it just got me thinking about the Valley - and where it's gone...

Ebay Sucks - Continued

After my ebay fiasco several weeks ago (here), I got in touch with a friend, who is a VP at ebay, because I was really at wits end with this whole ordeal. He, in turn, had people from both ebay and paypal contact me about the issues I had with ebay fraud and their crappy customer support. I had two vastly different experiences with the paypal and ebay representatives that contacted me. Here's what transpired.

Paypal

I received a call from the office of the president of PayPal. We went through my entire ordeal, him interrupting me with apologies left and right. It was nice, maybe a little too nice, but hey, at least I was speaking with a real person at this point in time. While he assured me that ebay was doing something about my specific case, he couldn't tell me what they were doing. In addition, even though I had contacted the police and FBI myself - they still couldn't engage law enforcement on their end. It had to come from law enforcement. There were lots of useless reasons behind this. But it was apparent that it wasn't changing anytime soon.

While the call was cordial. I actually felt better after speaking to him. Not because anything was changing or going to change - but because he admitted that their situation certainly was in a less than perfect state.

According to this person, they are constantly revisiting their procedures for dealing with situations regarding fraud. And they're happy to take my advice into account. While it felt good to hear that, I just don't buy it. Nonetheless, he left me his phone number, asked me not to give it out (which I won't), and told me to get in touch again with any issues I had in the future. span style="font-weight:bold;">Ebay

I was expecting a similar discussion when ebay contacted me. Well, wrong again. Ebay, while courteous, kept our discussion to email. It was also a very defensive exchange rather than a how can we be helpful to our customers. In fact, several times in the email, the woman explained how and why ebay couldn't do anything about my situation. She said something along the lines of, well, since it wasn't ebay's servers that were compromised, and it was your account, there's nothing we can do. Some people who aren't computer literate may take that comment and say. Oh, ok. But I don't buy that. Just because ebay doesn't think their servers were compromised, certainly doesn't mean that. A simple password attack could have compromised the servers. Or, like old Unix servers, a password file may have been left encrypted somewhere for someone to hack. Whatever the case, she was dead wrong. For some background on Vladuz - a Romanian hacker who compromised ebay's site without them knowing... here.

She responded that she was wrong and babbled breathlessly for the rest of the email. I had already stopped listening. I just hope ebay doesn't stop listening to its customers.

Writing Negatively.

Well, I got quite a bit of traffic the other day when I wrote about Google Chrome sucking. Apparently there aren't many other people who decided to write negatively about Google's jump into the browser market. I'm fourth on a Google search of "Chrome sucks". Pretty nice! Days and several comments later - I still feel the same way. But it taught me two pretty interesting things.

1) Writing negatively about popular companies/things will get you traffic. People may not agree with you, but hey, people will take notice. And they'll engage in discussion (complimenting or insulting - but either way, it's publicity). I thought about writing a "sucks" after everything I wrote from now on. It would definitely drive traffic.

2) There's a tipping point for companies. It's a precarious place where a company loved by many crosses into the land of the damned. Microsoft did it long ago. People don't remember, but Microsoft was once a lovable company. Windows? Do people remember when that came out? Wow! And then there were our big 3 auto makers. Yea, people used to love them (and some probably still do). There are many other examples out there. Apple mabye? Companies can cross back - but it's a difficult and expensive course - one that's best avoided.

Google Chrome. Part 2.

What's a EULA? Oh, just the licensing agreement you sign when you want to use some software. Chrome has one. And it sure sucks. From what Google says, they just tried to apply their existing EULA (that they use for other products) to Chrome. Not such a good idea. And here's the nugget - Chrome wants users to sell their souls over to Google and to provide them with a:

"perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content."

If Chrome really wants to be the desktop of the future, which I'm sure they do, how could they thoughtlessly attach this EULA to Chrome? Imagine Google using your desktop for whatever they wanted. Imagine having a document open in Chrome and now Google can take it? And use it for whatever they want. Or people, not me of course, looking at offensive material (uh, porn) online and Google exposing that?

While Google pulled that piece from their EULA yesterday, I think this speaks volumes about some tiny holes that are starting to open up in Google's armor. As with the release of their browser - which never would have happened at the Google I worked at, a EULA like this would never have been blindly attached to a product that is expected to have such a huge impact on the market.

Google needs to start paying attention to what has made them so great.

Google Chrome. For Real.

I was asked for some advice recently about starting a company. And some of the basics of how to go about doing it (incorporation, finding people, networking, etc). So I referred them back to my early blog postings when I detailed going through that stuff myself. Now that I'm at the point where I don't have any sage business advice about Vyoo (for the time being - release, marketing, and fundraising will ultimately follow), I'll continue to highlight mistakes and even the rare promising moves that I notice in other companies.

I've written glowingly in the past about Google. I love almost everything they do. Maybe to a fault. Well, I finally found a flaw in one of their products. I hope it's not a result of their growth that I wrote about several weeks ago (here). Maybe they're too big for themselves...

Google released Chrome yesterday. Their foray into the browser space. I was pretty excited, because I knew it would be great. Low on resource use, clean, simple, better! I mean, when has Google ever f'ed up a product release? Ok. Maybe they have for some products I haven't used. But a big release like a browser?

I downloaded it right away (here). It's pretty slick (from a UI perspective). And you can read a host of reviews and comments about it elsewhere, so I won't go into too much detail. It's very clean though. And it spawns separate processes for each tab you open so a problem with one browser window shouldn't shut you down like Firefox or IE.

Let's just say that Chrome didn't work as advertised. I installed it on an XP box and a Vista box. And it sucked. On both. It froze. It crashed. It hogged resources. I'd click tabs and it would close windows. It wouldn't respond. It would reload windows as I scrolled down the page. I understand that it's a beta. But damn, they shouldn't be releasing a piece of crap. Which is basically what this is.

Ironically, I'm at Google today. I have to teach a GMAT class down here and I ran into a b school buddy. He works at Mozilla, but he's on the Google campus every few days because they work fairly closely on things. While Google publicly stated that they were moving towards more collaboration with Mozilla on the browser side, my friend told me specifically that they've been moving away in terms of collaboration for the last two years. And that the release is viewed as quite a competitive move. I agree.

The second ironic event was that through reading about other people's issues with Chrome, it has come to my attention that the winner in all of this is IE. Their new beta apparently uses far fewer resources and has far fewer problems than resource hog Firefox and bug riddled Chrome. I'm apprehensive about trying it. But I think I have to.

Let me clarify!

So I'm out over the weekend and I run into a good buddy of mine, Mr. Schneeds we'll call him. He runs his own blog, Rude Not To (rudenotto.wordpress.com). Don't go there unless you're old enough. That's all I'll say. Anyway, he chastises me for my last post on screen scraping. If it wasn't clear enough, let me break it down right here.

Our business is not and will never be based on screen scraping. I hate screen scrapers. Especially when that's their business. We're simply using it initially to prove our technology. And that's it. We've begun initial partnership discussions with several sites and we're using this as a way to demonstrate the power that our technology can provide for them. In fact, when we go live, you may not even see any screen scraping or any use for the screen scraping we have. We will be happily sending lots of traffic to these other sites. It will become clear when you see what we're doing... Stay tuned...it's coming.

That's it.