defenestrate99

Google Street View Just Kills

Every time I think that I've just about had enough of Google and their inevitable dominion and lordship over all things informative, electronic, and webby, I see something like Google Maps Street View, which may just be the coolest thing ever. I will let people who are way less easily distracted than I am to debate the heady privacy concerns that appear whenever a great deal of information is unceremoniously plopped into the collective lap of the unwashed masses.

In the meantime, I see myself monkeying around with this for hours to come (in the Vegas, Denver, Miami , NYC, and Bay Area betas), and even more when they get Seattle plugged in and I can use this to help with house hunting. I love the idea of using this to see how a potential house looks on the street, what the neighbors houses look like, etc. This is way better than many of the craptastic Realtor sites I've been tortured by.

 

A co-worker is also looking forward to downloading this to her PDA when it becomes available. Awesome. I'd start investigating other revenue streams if I made navigation systems for a living.

Nice job, Google.

WishRadar is bending my mind

So WishRadar is up and running now, in case I haven't told you about it in person. It's a free service that lets you track the price and availability of items on your wishlists (CDs, books, DVDs, etc.) in one place. You set your target price and we watch your targets on Amazon and Half.com for the cheapest available purchase. When we see a target at the price you want it, we alert you (via email, RSS and/or SMS). What with all of the "tracking" and "targeting" and "acquiring" we're doing for you, the concept of Radar seemed apt. God, I'm an awesome marketer.

It's fundamentally weird to work for a bigger company during the day and to have a side gig with friends going on for the evenings and weekends. The roles and responsibilities for WishRadar are far more varied and interesting- I do everything from writing copy, to setting up Google Analytics, to yes, even monkeying around with small snippets of code. Contrast that to my day job, where I have a more managerial and strategic focus, I am supported by experts in analytics to do much of the heavy lifting for me, and I would probably be beaten to death with keyboards in the parking lot by a roving band of JAVA developers if I ever tried to change code myself.

I like the mind-shift that the side gig forces me to confront. For one, it forces me to use bits of my brain that might otherwise atrophy. Digging in dirt and details is an important safeguard against locking oneself in an ivory tower, and my utility as an effective manager evaporates when I cease to understand the blood and guts of how things work. Also, I get a fantastic dose of perspective on how generally lost I am without good, smart people around me. I don't want to come off sounding like I can't tie my own shoes (I have my good days), but sometimes recognizing how bad I am at something renews my appreciation for how gifted my colleagues are at it.

So Anyway.

If you haven't checked out the site, please do sign up and give it a whirl. I'd be grateful for your feedback.

Paul Graham on Patents

This is my favorite excerpt from one of the best-crafted and even handed essays on the difficult topic of software patents, offered by Paul Graham:

When you read of big companies filing patent suits against smaller ones, it's usually a big company on the way down, grasping at straws.  For example, Unisys's attempts to enforce their patent on LZW compression.  When you see a big company threatening patent suits, sell.  When a company starts fighting over IP, it's a sign they've lost the real battle, for users.

So true. The funny thing is, when I read this paragraph, the first thing that popped into my head wasn't Unisys or Amazon, or even patent abuse in general. It was the RIAA. The only thing more demonstrative of a business or industry going down the toilet than random suits against your competitors is random suits against your customers.

I can't wait to teach my class on Business Management and Operations again. When the IP class comes up, I have a great reading assignment for them.

ajaxwrite

I played around with ajaxwrite this morning. It's the new whiz-bangy web-hosted word processor, that's getting all the blog press. I really don't need a new word processor. I already have one that works which was installed on my computer before it was handed to me at work. But philosophically, I love the fact that this is doing the exact same thing huge providers do, but for free. The commoditization of software will mean the end to Microsoft as we know it (sorry, I know it's cliche to pick on our friends in Redmond, but everyone knows that when the revolution comes, MSFT will be first against the wall).

That being said, I would like to post an...

Open Letter to the Guys who Made Ajaxwrite

Hi Guys,

Nice job. Keep it up.

I will never, ever, ever be able to use ajaxwrite in real life without a spell-check native to the program. If that's not in version 1.01, it should be.

That is all.

Best,

-Jason

Blog Export

Mr. Nolan at the Venture Chronicles has been pondering the exportability of blogs. With TypePad screwing up left and right, I can't blame him. And I certainly understand the desire to export a blog with images and attachments intact, and url's updated. I'd like to throw in my export request: could someone develop a way to export a blog into PDF? I know it seems backwards to take a living, breathing "conversation" and freeze it, Pompeii-like, at an arbitrary moment, but I was trying to do just that this weekend and found it impossible. Either I can export it into a flat text file (gee thanks), or I am left taking dozens and dozens of screenshots. I am far too lazy to deal with either option.

I can conceivably dig why a shortsighted company might want to make the blog-export functionality sub-par. If you were worried that your customers might leave you in droves for a competitor that, say, backs up it's customers' content properly and takes fewer than 16 seconds to load a page, wouldn't you be tempted to make leaving more complicated than it had to be?

But the PDF feature wouldn't even add any risk for that. Just saying.

I Wonder What Sort of Comment Spam I'll Get for Posting This....

This fantastic little vignette by Paul Kedrosky artfully implies that start-ups could learn a lot about emerging technology by surveying what adult entertainment vendors are doing online. I find this to be both funny and true.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a colleague several years ago while our company was sending out RFP's to best-of-breed billing companies.  My colleague already had her favorite vendor picked out. When I asked her why, she responded, "because their biggest customers are online gambling and porn. If they can handle fraud for those verticals, they can certainly handle ours."

I can't tell whether Mr. Kedrosky was being entirely glib or not with his suggestion. I'm sure he is realistic in his expectation that very few companies out there would devote resources to surfing sites of ill repute for the purpose of sorting out what's new and exciting (not that way) in technology. There's a line-item I'd like to see on an expense report.

Google Print

So Google launched Google Print, its searchable book database, much to the chagrin evidently of anybody who works in the publishing industry. I'm going to leave legality of the venture, which is certainly questionable, to people way smarter than I to debate (Here's a great Pro-Google argument, with some solid Anti-Google arguments in the comments. Go crazy).

I would just like to say, for the record, in my professional opinion, that Google Print is super cool.

Here's what I want, though: There needs to be some way to tie relevancy to the search based on the recognition or popularity of the source. Say, for example, you remember a snippet of poetry that begins with "I think that I shall never see" and type it into Google to find it in print. Here are the first five results you'll get in order:

1. Page 132 of Dangerous Liasons - "When I think that I shall never see Danceny again I could die."
2. Encarta Book of Quotations - Quotes two lines of the Joyce Kilmer Poem "I think that I shall never see; a poem as lovely as a tree."
3. Page 125 of The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write About Their Fathers - "I think that I shall never see / a boy as lovely as S.T."
4. Page 75 of A Great Plains Reader, excerpting The Rites of Autumn - "I had rewritten Joyce Kilmer's line in my mind. 'I think that I shall never see, the other side of a tree.' "
5. Page 66 of Pop Art: A Critical History - "There is an Ogden Nash quatrain that I feel is apposite: I think that I shall never see / a billboard lovely as a tree."

Sure, number 2 is close, but you have to go to the 9th selection on Google's list to get the full poem by Joyce Kilmer. And I am perhaps making an assumption here, but it is my firm belief that most people are not thinking of page 132 of Dangerous Liaisons when there hear the line "I think that I shall never see."

Give the searchers some way to vote on relevancy after the sought after text has been located. Have those votes factored into future search results. This is a beta, and I'd be more than willing to help seed the votes in exchange for access to this much fantastic information.

Web 2.0 - Don't Believe the Hype (yet).

Geez. I've had it up to here with this Web 2.0 stuff. I mean, not the actual stuff- I'm a big fan of cool technology (like Ajax) and cool business philosophy (social software/culture of participation)- but rather the faddishness of it all. We are turning very positive trends in the Internet into the technological equivalents of parachute pants and Ricky Martin.

Tim O'Reilly, one of the biggest evangelists of the 2.0 movement, posted this as his compact (!) definition of Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

Seriously?  I know that Mr. O'Reilly has more grassroots Web street cred in his little finger than most of us could ever hope to get in our lifetimes, but really. If you throw the words "scalable and robust" into that monster, you'll have yourself a vortex of double-speak the likes of which would make even the most 1.0 of web marketing professionals blush. We may be trying too hard here.

Even Venture Capitalists, a group of people much maligned for following trends like a pack of 14 year-old girls, are getting sick of it. Mr. Segal, one of the aforementioned VC's, very accurately calls the Web 2.0 hype as he smells it:

Content Management is Web 1.0 while Wikis are Web 2.0. Gimmie a break. Wikis ARE content management dressed up a web service on top of a database engine that tracks content and, wait for it, changes to that content, in other words: Content management.

We might be just a little too close to this both temporally and emotionally right now to claim adequate perspective on how we define this putative revolution. And I wonder if, when all the dust settles, and we've separated the theory from the real applications, we'll come to learn that we've just barely hit Web 1.1.

Learn to code.

It is a dangerous thing when I am left unoccupied for several hours. I take on strange projects with no obvious merit for a marketing guy.

Case in point, a little while ago I learned some basic programming on Ruby. For those of you unfamiliar with the language, it is supposed to be the next, best, coolest thing ever. Efficient, powerful, and (most important to my particular skill set) tremendously simple to learn. Jonathan gave a presentation on it at work, and the topic was evidently all anyone could talk about at OSCON, for whatever that's worth.
 

Not that these things have anything necessarily to do with a guy trying to sell stuff. Outside of some very primordial html jockeying I did back in 1995 or so, I have no programming background to speak of, and a comprehension of the mysteries of Computer Science that many of my kinder engineering colleagues refer to as "underdeveloped." Nor should you leave with the impression that I just popped open a Ruby book and bada-boom, now I'm coding my own Instant Messenger program (I figure if Google is getting in the game now, maybe it's not too late). My Ruby programs are functioning,  but otherwise ugly, simple (in the "really, really dumb" meaning of the word), and absolutely without any practical application whatsoever.

Still, I found the exercise very useful, and would recommend it to all of my non-technical colleagues for the following reasons:

1. You will have an important, renewed (or brand new) appreciation for your engineers -  This is an open apology for any coder I've ever worked with on a project. For any engineer who I asked to slip in one last feature because, heck, it didn't seem that hard from the sound of it. For any developer I ever gave crap to for missing a bug. I just didn't get it. Code is hard. It took me an hour to write a 14-line program and 35 minutes to debug it thereafter. Now that I've limped a mile in my engineers' shoes, you may consider me suitably humbled.
2. Learning Ruby (or any language for that matter) is a good brain exercise - If you are a marketer, read Kathy Sierra's treatise on blowing your own mind, and give coding a whirl just to make your head work a little differently. Otherwise you risk cranial atrophy, which might be why so many products and services suck nowadays. One-trick ponies, by very definition, don't have the breadth of experience to understand a varied customer base. This was a cool way to think differently and grab a healthy dose of perspective.
3. Personal satisfaction - I'm a crossword junky (or playbabble, depending on my mood and resources) and I will admit to a bit of a thrill when I find a word that's been driving me nuts trying to remember it. Coding was, to my great surprise, perfectly analogous. The challenge of building something that works is just fun.

Oh, and don't give me any of that "I'm not any good with math" crap. One of the biggest selling points of Ruby is the simplicity of it (indeed, Chris Pine's excellent tutorial that I used promotes the language as foundation for learning other, more complicated programming languages). You have no excuse.

I challenge every marketer out there, especially if you work online, to try this. Go here, download what you need, and get started.

Will Google Product Marketing Eat Itself?

Why, oh why did Google launch a new Instant Messaging service? That's like someone coming in right now and deciding that the world needs another social networking gig, or maybe a new browser or something. There is already too much of this. My poor Trillian can barely keep up with existing clients as it is, and I certainly don't need a fifth standalone IM client on my desktop.

There are all sorts of theories posited on why Google has perched itself precariously on the bleeding edge of 1997 technology. Are they going to buy or kill Skype? Are they playing catch-up to AOL and Yahoo in a never-ending effort to give customers exactly the same thing? Or do they really think they can googlize the design of an IM client to the point where it really IS better than everything else. That's a tough hill to climb. Ripping out features that customers use to simplify an interface does not always map to success.

It is a little frustrating to know that even in beta, Google probably already has tens of thousands of people trying to use it. Google has made such a game out of having the technorati (not in the blog-searching sense of the word) try to be the first on the block to discover its next moves and end-game, that it has a built-in launch strategy for practically any product it releases. How brilliant was it for Google to limit trials of its mail app to people with invites? People are reading Google patent applications, checking out Google public statements, and looking into Google job postings and new hires just to be the first (or 1001st) person to say they are predicting or (even better) using the latest Google thing. Total Geek Cred is yours for the taking.

I'm so jealous of this I could explode.

So few companies have this- people literally whipping themselves into a frenzy to get the newest stuff a company can produce (and in BETA, no less). Apple is one (despite Steve Jobs' efforts to alienate his evangelists). Skype is probably another. I wonder if Google is squandering its opportunity by releasing products that have all the novelty of Courtney Love being in rehab. Of course, so long as we see thing like Google Maps jump out every now and again, it will probably be enough to keep us all interested. But at some point, perhaps just after the release of Google Word Processor, or Google Desktop Wallpaper, will the earliest of adopters sit back and question why they care any more?