Comments (0)

By Krishna, January 19, 2009

The nation’s economic troubles have not spared the Google juggernaut. Google is following the principle of “do it quickly and do it deep” by stopping further development on (and in some cases, stopping) Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Video, Google Notebook, Google Catalogs and Google Mashup Editor.

Of these services, Dodgeball and Jaiku were Google acquisitions that went nowhere. The Dodgeball founders quit last year in frustration over the lack of support from Google. Google Notebook was a very elementary application that seemed to have been cooked up over a weekend of coding. It coulda been a contender if someone had worked on integrating bookmarks, Google documents, blog posts and other works created by Google users. As it is, it is better off killed.

Google Mashup Editor was an online mashup creation service, similar to Yahoo! Pipes and Popfly. I had previously written about the potential of Mashup Editor, but it looks like no one seriously worked on adding more functionality to the product after that. As for Google Video, it seems that it will be relegated to the status of Google Image Search: a place for finding video, instead of for uploading new content. Many neutral Google watchers had predicted that Google Video would end up in its current situation. So the news is not surprising. What is surprising is how long Google waited to make this decision.

In other news, FeedBurner feeds are being converted to Google accounts. I did the transition today and didn’t notice much of a difference. A few link changes, the dashboard changed from a bar diagram to a line diagram and Google removed the website statistics section. Why Google allowed the FeedBurner web stats to remain even one day after the acquisition is simply amazing: By doing so, Google sabotaged their own excellent Analytics product.

In general, Google seems to have some clueless episodes in their acquisitions and new products. And even after these new changes, I still think they can do more. For example, why cannot they integrate Blogger, Google Pages, Google Sites and Google App Engine into a single product? Or why are Google Webmasters and Google Analytics two different products? Or Google Reader, Google Alerts and Gmail? Or Picasa Web Albums and Google Docs into a single Google Drive? Let me also note that Google Docs needs a product like Scribd to display and export documents.

Google is leaving a lot of money on the table by not monetizing many properties like Blogger, Google Reader and Google Docs effectively. Consider Blogger which used to have a paid version before it was acquired by Google. Now it doesn’t. Many serious bloggers would be willing to pay if they could get better features and services faster. It also defies reason that Google can run ads on Gmail, but not on Google Reader.

A leaner Google is good news for employees and shareholders, as it will be able to weather the recession in a stronger condition. But Google’s actions have shown that it does not seem to have a good handle on consolidating and monetizing the myriad products it spawns and acquires. It will be interesting to revisit this topic after a year, seeing what Google does in the slow economy.

Comments (2)

By Krishna, January 16, 2009

Sometimes, when you see an odd behavior by a popular application, something that is either obviously wrong or not the standard way of doing things, you wonder if it was a conscious decision on the part of the developers, or simply something they had overlooked. I was puzzled by two such incidents recently, one from Hotmail and the other from WordPress.com.

I had not been using Hotmail for sometime and had forgotten my password. When I went to reset my password, one of the choices offered was to send the password reset instructions to the email address to which I had forgotten my password. I cannot understand under what circumstances would selecting that choice be a meaningful operation. This is like a locksmith telling you that he will drop the instructions for opening your house door through your chimney when you are locked out of your home and are standing outside.

I recently created a new cricket blog using WordPress.com. It seems that when you create a WordPress id, they send your username and cleartext password to you in email. This is a little unnerving, because most sites never send you their password or only send you a temporary password, that you are forced to change immediately at the next login. This is a security risk because someone (who can gain access to the email account) could easily view the password and use the account. If you only had reset instructions or a temporary password, you would know if someone used your account because they would also have to change your password.

Comments (1)

By Krishna, August 21, 2008

I received my beta invitation to stackoverflow.com, the discussion form launched by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, some days ago. It has been fun playing around with it. For a beta site, it is highly functional, very fast and noticeably free of bugs (I noticed just one formatting problem which disappeared after an hour or so – maybe a browser insanity issue). For the most part, it is very intuitive and easy to learn.

What do I like about the site? First of all, it has a very clean design – good use of colors, shading and white space. The up-down vote controls, the gravatars, and the judicious use of links under various elements are also well placed. It is very pleasant compared to the typical programmer sites which are poorly designed or have all kinds of ads spread all over the page. Of course, SOF will have ads at some point, an objective already stated by the founders.

The badges and reputation scores seem to have served their purpose well. There is a lot of activity going on even with just the beta users. The content seems to be free of unwanted comments. While the quality of the questions does not seem to be especially high, the comments are of superior grade. I tried a few questions (2008 programming books, software architecture blogs [You need to get an invite to see these pages], etc.) and got some good responses. As the community grows, this would only improve, because you would continue to get more knowledgeable users (the “average” level of users does not matter).

It opened up a line of thought for me with respect to this blog. Stack Overflow could be used for researching a software development topic before I post about it. I could link or refer to the different comments and viewpoints. I think this is a great resource for non-List-A bloggers who can now tap into the huge community of Stack Overflow to do research and gain feedback about their ideas.

Now for the obligatory “constructive criticism”.

Stack Overflow (SOF) needs to consolidate their FAQ in one place and have it linked from the “FAQ” link at the bottom. There apparently seems to be a question that acts as the central repository for all FAQ’s. This is problematic for the simple reason that other users can edit that page (I suppose), but only the SOF programmers know the right answers. And they have to be bothered to review edits to the question, not just whenever the rules change.

Another problem is that apparently, questions can be deleted even if they have answers and yes-votes. I don’t agree that it is the prerogative of the questioner to delete such questions, because the question obviously had some value to users who spent time answering them. Maybe it should be made visible to the answers and yes-voters. It does seem that questions are in fact “hidden”. So this could be achieved.

Editing is only available to people who have earned a certain amount of reputation. Theoretically, this is a good idea. Unfortunately, the reputation score for being able to edit posts is a little too high in my opinion. It would prevent contribution from many good users who do not have the time for earning that score. Or even worse, the enthusiasm for contributing may be highest during the initial use of the application, but they cannot do anything. It is unlikely that they would come to edit many posts that they may have seen when browsing at the beginning.

An objection to this would be that new users can add answers. But having listened to all the SOF podcasts, my understanding was that SOF questions would actually serve as the authoritative page for the question like Wikipedia. If you have a question having 10 answers with different levels of accuracy and information, it is not as useful as the question rewritten to encapsulate the right information from all the answers. It is not possible in many situations to accept a single answer. The correct answer will only be an amalgam of all the answers.

Overall, a great effort. I am amazed that this is version 1, because the developers have done a really great job and thinking through the functionality in quite some depth.

Comments (1)

By Krishna, August 15, 2008

With regard to my previous post on market entry barriers, one of my friends (who works in research at a large technology company) pointed out that it is incorrect to say that people are entirely satisfied with search results. Google (or other search engines, for that matter) does not provide a direct answer to many search queries, such as “biggest Hollywood movie hit in 2007″. Instead, it displays many possible sites (arranged by authority) that may contain the answer, and then the user has to visit those sites to get the information.

I agree with that concern. Like children who turn to their parents to get answers to their questions, we turn to Google for showing us the way in almost every activity. And increasingly, we expect Google to give the answer straight to us, instead of saying, “Maybe you should look at these sites most likely to contain your answer.” The growth of Google OneBox results is probably the result of this demand. I find myself regularly using the weather, calculator, definition and map features in OneBox. OneBox is definitely a better implementation than the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button which still leaves you with the task of finding the information in the site you navigate to.

Google and OneBox could be even better with the addition of more data sets that provide instant answers. However, this does present a business dilemma for Google. If Google is in the business of providing answers instead of search results, why should users click the results in the links? For example, if I could see the “Beijing Olympics medal tally” instantly by searching, why should I visit NBC or any sports site for the same information? (I may still visit them for sports articles or photos, but there is a different issue.)

On one hand, Google would lose revenue by providing that information. On the other hand, owners of such information may decide that their web properties would become less valuable as a result. However, it is possible to see a situation where the content is licensed to Google at a price that would balance such costs. The OneBox information could be limited in scope to encourage users to click through to the owner of the content. Or, one could have the entire content made available and Google and the content provider share revenue derived from ads displayed along with the content.

At some point, I suppose this “all-knowing” search engine could be coupled with futuristic devices so that you can talk to it and hear the results or have it displayed in some floating display in front of your eyes. That would be the ultimate nightmare for teachers who give test questions like “In what year did the Battle of Waterloo happen?”

Comments (3)

By Krishna, June 16, 2008

I have been using web bookmarks using various applications like del.icio.us, Yahoo Bookmarks and Google Bookmarks, as well as the built-in functionality within the browsers. Although all of them have good features, one important thing that is missing from them is the ability to tie actions to them. Here is what I would like to ideally do with different kind of bookmarks. Some applications have partial functionality available and I have enclosed them in parentheses.

1. Mark a bookmark as something I will use on a daily basis, such as login pages for various accounts. I should have an option to open all such bookmarks in different tabs in the browser (Firefox/IE does this).
2. Mark as something that I may need infrequently. I might have different levels of frequency of use. So I would want to classify them as such.
3. Mark a bookmark to visit on a particular date, or on a recurring basis. Example: a bill payer or bank site. I should get a reminder in email to visit the site.
4. Mark as read and archive with an option to share. This might be an article that I want to read, but I have no use after reading it. I might want to email or share the bookmark with others in my network (del.icio.us and Google Reader does this).
5. Mark a bookmark as the definitive answer to a problem I faced. The application should keep track of why I bookmarked the answer, so that it can help me answer the question in the future (Google Web History remembers the search and the associated search result I clicked on).
6. I would like to know if someone visited the bookmark I shared with them.

Most bookmarking sites are concerned with categorizing bookmarks based on content, or sharing the bookmarks with others in the social network. That is helpful, but the bigger benefit for an end user is answering the questions: What does the end user want to do with the bookmark? When do they want to perform an action based on the bookmark?

Comments (1)

By Krishna, May 24, 2008

A few days back, I received an invitation to create an application on Google App Engine (GAE). I was impressed with the ease with which I was able to create a quick CRUD application. Even though I am not very knowledgeable in Python, it took only a few hours from downloading the framework to creating a usable application (different from the example app), and that time would have been shorter, if it hadn’t been for some minor troubleshooting with configuration issues.

Google markets GAE as providing you with the ability to “build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.” The High Scalability site has some good advice on how to leverage the framework to build a scalable solution. However, I think GAE may be more attractive to those building small-scale web sites that do not need a whole lot of programming.

Consider the web sites of typical small businesses. Many of them have a few pages describing the company and their products with a few email forms for sales or support. GAE can be used to create and host such web sites. Those sites have been pre-dominantly built with plain HTML with PHP or Perl for the web forms. Now, they could be created on or moved to GAE which has free hosting and an arguably better programming infrastructure.

Personal web sites hosted on web sites like Geocities can also be moved to GAE. While Geocities charges for programming in PHP and mySQL, GAE provides a free option to program with Python and the GAE Datastore. Most of these web sites (business or personal) will never come close to consuming the 500 MB and 5 million page views that would require additional cost. And so, the value proposition of GAE is very high.

For large-scale web applications, I feel that GAE may serve more as an incubator rather than a long-term hosting solution. During the initial stages of building an application, GAE provides a convenient programming environment at zero or low cost. However if the application becomes popular, the developers require greater control over the programming environment (hardware and software). Presently, GAE does not provide scheduled processes or database export, two features that would be essential for a large consumer application.

The most important barrier, though, is the lock-in to the Google infrastructure. Being tied to GAE will keep you hostage to Google’s pricing, infrastructure and service. Porting to a different infrastructure might require time-consuming changes to your application. The longer you wait, the larger your risks. So, using GAE for creating an initial version of your application may make sense from a cost and prototyping-ease perspective, but if you have a much larger vision for your application, you may want to examine other platforms too.

Google now has a few services that are separate, but would seem to belong together: Blogger, Google Pages, Google Sites and App Engine. Let us call the amalgamation of these services as, say, Google SiteBuilder. It would provide the ability to create dynamic pages in Python (and other languages). You could create static pages and edit them visually. You could perhaps edit the dynamic pages along with the static ones in an administrative interface. You could change the site layout through pre-built or custom templates.

Google SiteBuilder could allow you to add different blogs and feeds to your website. You can also create a wiki or more for different people to collaborate. This last feature is an extension of the function of editing static pages: You are allowing other people to edit the static pages and upload documents, while maintaining the history. With all these features, Google SiteBuilder perhaps becomes more like an online Visual Studio for web applications.

I suspect that we will not see such a consolidated product from Google soon because of the possible administrative complexity for end users, many of whom are not programmers. For example, a user of Blogger simply wants a good-looking layout and the ability to add and edit posts, and may dislike seeing an interface showing the various files for the application. What may happen is these applications will start converging towards each other and co-opt each other’s features.

Comments (0)

By Krishna, November 3, 2007

Even if you don’t own Google stock, you still benefit when Google’s stock price keeps climbing upwards:

1. Ad-free services: If it were any other company, services like Orkut and Analytics, among many others, would be chock-full of advertisements. Google could be making more direct money from services like Blogger, but at this moment, that does not seem a priority and it may stay that way for sometime.
2. Lower premium penalties: Compare the standard and premium versions of Google Apps. Unless you are an organization, you are not missing all that much. Compare that with many important features, like forwarding and POP access, that are missing in the free Yahoo! Mail version.
3. Better applications: Google can continue to hire the best employees and buy out the best applications in the world. Many of Google’s acquisitions are among the best in their market. And Google continues to be innovative in different areas.
4. Better products from competitors: Google continues to put pressure on competitors to keep improving their offerings. Yahoo! has dramatically improved their email product. Microsoft Live is a much better application than it used to be, and Live Images and Maps compare favorably with the corresponding Google services.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years. If Google continues to grow and establish their complete supremacy over web applications, then you and I will be managing our entire online life through Google. Google could also move strongly into other areas such as hardware, communications, entertainment, etc., thus becoming a much bigger part of our offline lives.

That would be a different monopoly than Microsoft, which only owned the “functionality” piece. Google owns the “data” as well. The debate over how this data should be used and how well protected it is will continue to grow larger. This may not seem a huge issue for you now, but consider the information you are providing to Google products when you access them:

1. Your private and public conversations with other people: Gmail, Groups, Talk, Blogger, Orkut.
2. Who you know: Orkut, Picasa (photo sharing), YouTube.
3. How you spend your money: Checkout, Finance, Products, Web History.
4. How you like to be entertained: Web History, Reader, Analytics.
5. What political/religious/cultural views you subscribe to: Web History, Reader.
6. Which places you visit – Maps, Weather, Web History.
7. What you do every day – Calendar.
8. What ideas you have – Gmail, Documents, Notebook, Blogger (including private blogs), Page Creator.
9. What you read – Reader, News, Books, Web History, Bookmarks.

Should I go on? The question is: how much of this information would you like other people to know? And this is not just about Google. Any company, including Yahoo! and Microsoft today, that has web applications collecting vast amounts of user data as part of its operations is in the same situation.

Comments (0)

By Krishna, September 20, 2007

I recently got a chance to take a test drive of GoToBilling, an online application for business solutions. GoToBilling focuses on helping companies invoice and accept payments from their customers easily. They primarily serve small to mid-size customers. The application has other features such as marketing and CRM that aid in sales activities.

Though the product is not strictly related to project management and software development, I decided to write about it because I felt that it was an example of a good business application. For example, the application has the following features:

1. Intuitive Interface: The application has a very clean, well-designed user interface. Many business applications do badly on this. In 2000, I remember using the slow and torturous Verizon website to pay my bills, which I quickly abandoned. GoToBilling seems to have paid great attention to the layout and colors.
2. Attention to Flow: Layouts are great, but that would be useless if the application did not provide meaningful ways to accomplish tasks within the system. I liked the general use of dashboard and web parts. Some of the screens have useful buttons like “Save and Add More” which simplify data entry tasks. (I did get confused by their putting the Cancel button on the left instead of on the right.)
3. Focus on Business Need: They seem to have paid good attention to the 2 key modules – Payments and Invoicing in the application. Also the integration with QuickBooks is an integral part of any small business application. Personally, I have encountered the same need when building applications. Almost all business owners want to have data come out of your application and go into the accounting software, which is primarily QuickBooks.

The company’s general website is an example of good marketing. It clearly explains the main modules in the application, who it is meant for, the general pricing scheme and support for developers. The application has a developer area where they have a forum and also developer tools for integration with their application. GoToBilling also has other services along with their product – Marketing, CRM and Gift Cards.

A few things that I feel that this company could improve upon: They only have videos in their Guided Tour, which makes it difficult for prospective customers to easily see all the functionality. It would be nice to also provide an alternative with several snapshots of the application. The company blog has very less content.

Overall, though, they have done a good job. What I have seen is that many small business owners are still in the desktop-application-driven (or even paper-driven) world and there is a great opportunity for companies like GoToBilling to grow and capitalize on this opportunity. A well-designed software catering to a well-defined audience.

Comments (0)

By Krishna, July 28, 2007

Users of web visitor analytical data from applications such as Google Analytics and other programs use them to understand more about their visitors. They use the information to better design their website layout and content. But Google Analytics also provides other pieces of interesting information.

Using some of the statistics (over the last 6 months) from the visitors of this blog (generally people interested in technology), I am going to formulate some questions and answer them. Here you go:

Question: What are most people interested in when they search?

Trouble-shooting. Of the top 25 keywords, 15 related to “problems”, “shutdowns” and other technical issues (Yahoo! Mail, Windows Vista, Office 2007). People come to search to find solutions to problems they are facing and usually these are pressing, immediate issues. Then come the news and people related searches (Dale Carnegie, Barack Obama, Jan Grzebski, etc.). Finally, there are people who are interested in various technical and management issues.

Question: How do people find out about and visit web sites?

No marks for guessing the top answer: Google. But the next common is direct visits, which means people typing in a URL or using a bookmark to return to the site. The most-likely pages to be bookmarked are the home page and pages that have more content – it is likely that people cannot read them immediately and therefore bookmark to visit them at a more convenient time. Trouble-shooting pages that have the potential of being useful in the near future are also prone to bookmarking.

Blog sites are likely to get many visitors through various uses of their feeds. For example, your feed (if it has the appropriate license) may be syndicated by another blog or it may be shared through a blog reading application like Google Reader. Blog search engines, directories and hosting sites also send traffic.

Question: Is there a difference in the quality of traffic sent by various sources?

I used to think so when I had less data in the form of visitors. Nowadays, I find that there is no difference from the major source of traffic in terms of order of magnitude. The only poor quality visitors are referrals from web sites that have a different subject matter. For example, posting a comment on a comic strip website may bring some visitors, but they are not going to wait around to read a technology blog.

Google visitors comes right in the middle in most visitor properties. This is not surprising since it accounts for the majority of the hits and influences the statistical averages. Webmasters would be well served to spend more time ensuring that their site appears favorably in Google search results, since the aggregate benefit is much greater than other sources of traffic.

Question: What city has the most people interested in technology?

According to my data, these are the cities with the most people interested in technology (in order of priority): London, San Francisco, New York, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Sydney, Los Angeles and Singapore. It was surprising to me that London beat out San Francisco, but then I remembered the many recent trips my software friends in India have been taking to England. There is a lot happening there.

If you want country data, it reads: United States, India, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia, Sweden, Singapore, Germany and Philippines. And as far as continents go, the Americas (primarily North America) lead the way, followed by Asia, Europe, Oceania and Africa.

Question: What browser should I design for?

Ah, that age-old question. Many years ago, I had been asked to design different versions of corporate web sites to cater for Netscape Navigator versions, Internet Explorer, text browsers (Lynx), WAP, etc. Now, the main browsers are definitely Internet Explorer and Firefox, but Safari and Opera also command a significant number of visitors, even if the percentage of visitors may be lower.

All 4 browsers are now available for Windows, so theoretically you should be able to test for all users without switching to a Mac. Designing for mobile devices is a different ball game, though Apple may be changing things there with a regular browser on the iPhone. A good simulation of what your site looks like on a mobile device is available at Mowser. (thanks to Manoj for that last link)

Comments (5)

By Krishna, May 13, 2007

I have started trying more of Zoho products. Zoho Sheet is a good online spreadsheet application. I tried importing one of my existing Excel worksheets which contained statistical data and a graph. It imported everything almost perfectly. The only problem was with the graph – apparently, it doesn’t allow you to select non-contiguous columns. I solved the problem by changing the columns, but one final problem remained: Any calculated numbers appear with decimal places in the graph even when they can be formatted as integers in the sheet.

However, I have to repeat: Zoho has a much better pleasant user interface than Google’s offerings at this point. They have to do a better job of marketing as well as staying ahead on functionality. And while I understand that making Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet free will help marketing, but not having a premium offering is really going to kill them in terms of necessary funding for future development.

Having paying customers also fuels better features. Why? Usually, people have to be motivated enough to give you good or bad feedback. When you have a free product, people will put up with a lot of problems and try to work around them. When they are paying money for a product that frustrates them, angry phone calls and emails result. Although this is not pretty, it does put pressure on the development team to fix the issues that hurt customers more.

Typically, product companies have their prioritized feature set of what they think their customers want. Such lists may be based on heavy market research. But once the product is released, it is as important to keep the existing customers satisfied (within reason) as it is to gain new customers. Getting good feedback is a challenge, but you can increase the chances of that happening by a paid version of your product.

Another problem with free products is that people easily jump from one product to another. A few months back, I used Technorati extensively, particularly its blog search. Nowadays, I use Google Blogsearch 99% of the time and I only use Technorati for specific information about a particular blog. When I use a service for free, I have no emotional investment in that tool. When I pay for a product, I am personally committing to the product in addition to backing it with my money. I am more inclined to work through the problems and be patient a little longer.

And if the company displays responsiveness to my feedback, I feel I am taken care of and become more emotionally attached to that company. That builds a relationship. This is possible with free products, but lack of money will be an obstacle in allocating enough resources to handle this appropriately.

Some options for gaining paying customers are:

• Having a premium version of the product: Many companies go for this option though it feels risky if your competitor offers the same feature for free. However, your competitor probably will not (and usually cannot) be offering support for free. Your competitor will not be able to make the same advances in the product for free.
• Ad-supported strategy: Sometimes, ads can be obtrusive and cheapen the product. But they could be done right. For example, offer ads relevant to the content that is being displayed. Ask customers what type of products (household, sports items, etc.) they want displayed in the ads. Make the ad strategy clear and how privacy concerns are being addressed.
• Donations: Not viable for every product, but it is not an option to be discarded. Customers who donate are more likely to do product evangelization and be its fervent supporters. The only problem is if one or more customers donate a lot of money and demand features that are inconsistent with what most other consumers seem to be wanting.