The Higher Google Stock Price

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.

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Technorati tags: Google, stock price, data privacy

GoToBilling - A Case Study

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.

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Technorati tags: product review, gotobilling, features

Q & A Session on Google Analytics

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)

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Technorati tags: Google Analytics, web browsers, visitors, bookmarking, troubleshooting, syndication

Having Paying Customers

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.

Technorati tags: customers, products, Zoho, Google Blogsearch, Technorati

Google Analytics Rebooted

There is a great new release of Google Analytics out there. Website visitor statistics are displayed in an array of beautiful, interactive graphs. Apparently, this was the result of Google's acquisition of MeasureMap. It is really wonderful.

This reminds me of the second major release of Google Reader. The first release, like the old Google Analytics, was competent, but there was nothing really special about it. The competition had some talking points. But then they came up with the next release and wiped out everybody else. I see this in my FeedBurner statistics - 2/3^rds of the subscribers of this blog use Google Reader.

Back in January, I had done a quick review of Google product offerings. Here is what has happened since:

• Google Search remains No. 1 and, in my experience, they actually seem to be breaking away significantly from the other search engines. For now, except for research on search engines, I would not waste a single search on any other search engine.
• Huge fan of Google Reader. I like the latest feature which allows you to email the blog post to someone, graphics, formatting and all.
• Since this week, huge fan of Google Analytics.
• Uninstalled Google Desktop because of various instability issues. I still think it is a good product, but I am not sure I need the functionality in Windows Vista. Time will tell.
• I quit Google Docs & Spreadsheets and moved to Zoho Writer. For now, Zoho seems to have a better interface both with regard to functionality and looks. Good for Zoho. Until Google does a reboot of Docs, that is.
• The new iGoogle (previously Google Personalized Home) is pretty cool. The most useful gadgets for me are Weather and Google Bookmarks. I use the latter to quickly launch commonly visited websites.
• I have been using the Search History, but I don't find it very useful yet. Once in a while, I go back and find some search result I used, but it is more of a convenience than anything critical. The "Interesting Items" section is not that interesting at all. I am sure Google has something revolutionary up its sleeve - we will just have to wait some more time.

Most of the new things coming out of Google have been reasonably good, but nothing dramatic. The exciting things have been relatively fewer, but when they come, they come with a bang, as happened with Analytics.

Technorati tags: Google Analytics, Google products, review

A Few Irritants

Here are a few things that have been bugging me recently - some solved, others not.

1. That irritating clicking sound in Internet Explorer 7.0. Particularly frustrating when you use sites like Google Analytics. Anyway, there seems to be a very simple solution to the problem: http://www.joedolson.com/articles/2006/09/internet-explorer-7-irritation-of-the-day/. And it does work!
   
   
2. Here is an usability problem with Internet Explorer-related web pages that only occurs in their own browser. Any website that has a title starting with "Internet Explorer" has it appearing in the IE title bar, tab header and on the task bar. The same behavior is exhibited when you visit a page that doesn't exist, because IE shows the "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" page. For a casual observer, both look the same. Firefox says "Problem loading page." It wouldn't have a similar problem, I am guessing.
   
   
3. I seem to be having a memory leak problem in IE 7.0. It seems to be related to iGoogle or Google Reader being open for long periods in a day, but could be a IE bug. Solution for now: Close and open the browser again. I could not find a permanent solution. Apparently, there are many different memory leak problems in IE. Talking about IE, there is a nice utility called IE7Pro that allows for configuring some options better. You can get it at http://www.ie7pro.com/.
   
   
4. How do you get Yahoo! Mail to realize that your own mail to yourself is NOT spam? Take a few seconds out to put a good subject title, greet yourself ("Hi Krishna"), remove all the email ids (if you are forwarding a message) - in short, make it look like a valid email message. If you do that, Yahoo! Mail just might get that you really exist as a person instead of being a spambot!
   
   
5. On the right hand side of this blog, you can see links to various blog categories and months of the year. On clicking them, you can see the posts in that category or posted in that month or year. There are also links to the blog posts themselves. The problem is that Google seems to be treating the former as actual pages and the latter as Supplemental results. In simple words, if you do a search, you don't get the blog posts - you only get the consolidated pages and you have to click "Additional Results" to see the other pages. Not good.
   
   The problem is related to something called "Duplicate Content". There are ways to fix this such as linking and submitting a sitemap, but considering that the archive and category structures are essential parts of a blog and also that Blogger is part of Google, this really shouldn't require additional work. I am thinking of sending a mail to Matt Cutts - probably will wait a day or two after he gets back from vacation.

Technorati tags: Internet Explorer 7.0, Matt Cutts, Yahoo! Mail, IE7Pro, memory leak

ReviewBasics

Recently, I was invited to review ReviewBasics, a feedback gathering platform for documents, images and other types of content. I had a quick trial of it today. My first impression: It is a very powerful, but intuitive tool that fills a critical need for professionals everywhere.

What does ReviewBasics do? Let us say that I am a website designer and I have created a few templates for a client. Previously, I would emailed the snapshots to him and she would emailed me back her feedback. Which is fine, but I might misunderstand her instructions and spend time doing something she didn't want. More iterations of this keep happening. I could meet my client in person, but that is again time-consuming and expensive.

Another example: I am creating a document or article and I want people to review it and give me feedback. If I use a word processing program like Microsoft Word, I need all my contacts to be using the same program and also have the ability to do "Track Changes". Also I want to be able to send the document to multiple people and get feedback at the same time.

These are just two of the potential possibilities of ReviewBasics. They make it very simple. You register on the website (a very easy process). You upload the documents you want reviewed. You put in the email ids of the reviewers. They get an email message asking them to review the application. They go in, select the document and it appears in a very nice work area, where they can add their comments using graphical callouts. All the feedback appears for you as soon as they complete their review.

The most important thing about the product is that its flow is very seamless. There is hardly any unnecessary step in the process. The reviewers have their accounts automatically setup. The system only requires one's name, email id and password which makes registration very simple.

Any flaws? Well, I didn't quite like the way that the home page menu (Home, Demo, Applications, etc.) remained on the page after I logged in. The tool tips on certain icons take a fraction of a second longer than one would expect. There are underlines on area headings that invite one to click on them, but nothing happens. There are others which have underlines and actually do something on clicking them, so that is inconsistent. Minor things, really.

In conclusion, a very useful tool with great possibilities.

Technorati tags: ReviewBasics, product review

Some Quick Linking

Sorry for the lack of blog posts recently, but I have been really busy for the past few days. To get back on track, here are some quick links and thoughts

• I recently discovered the blog Worse Than Failure which is a collection of incredible (and funny) mistakes made by software developers at the code and user interface levels. Sometimes, the easiest way to learn is to look at other's mistakes before making them ourselves.
  
• Recently, we have been using WordPress at the office for our product blog. As I discover the functionality of WordPress, I seriously regret my decision to use Blogger for hosting this site. If you are planning to start a blog, my advice is to use WordPress, unless Google makes some amazing improvements in Blogger in the next few months. Some key WordPress benefits are: separate non-blog web pages, blog/feed statistics, better control over layout, paid subscriptions, comment spam, etc.
  
• I may yet move my blog to WordPress, but still keep this site intact so that I don't break bookmarks. If you are reading this in a feed reader like Google Reader, Bloglines or Thunderbird, please verify if your feed address is http://feeds.feedburner.com/thoughtclusters so that you continue getting the updates after I make the transition.
  
• Krugle is a good search engine for finding code samples. Please pay close attention to the source code license. Here is a good link on learning about software licenses: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html.
  
• I recently moved my online documents from Google Docs & Spreadsheets to Zoho Writer. Nothing against the former, but the interface at Zoho is more appealing to me. They have a collection of other tools like an online spreadsheet (Zoho Sheet), online presentation software (Zoho Show), etc. For now, I am only using the Zoho Writer and the Zoho Wiki - both of which are really good.
  
• Here is a quick way to create a Google search URL. An example: http://www.google.com/search?q=windows-vista. As you can see, just combine your search terms using "-" (hyphen) and add them at the end of http://www.google.com/search?q=.

Potpourri of Thoughts

Ever since I started blogging in earnest since December, part of my brain is always looking for blog post ideas. The problem is not that there is nothing to blog about - rather there is an abundance of topics to blog about. Some of them require more time for analysis - so I just add them to Windows Live Writer as a new draft and then follow up later.

Other ideas are too short for a full-fledged post and, since I am interested in writing longer posts, I tend to ignore or reject them. But I feel that some of these observations may be useful to someone out there. So here we go with some "thought clusters":

1. I found a link to a useful shortcut in Google Reader. If you press "u", it hides and shows the left frame. This is very convenient if you are using the Expanded View or a smaller monitor. It is not so helpful if the authors of the blogs you read use short sentences and small paragraphs.
   
   
2. Using the Google Webmaster tool, I found that one of the search queries for this blog was "snow googles". That is obviously a misspelling of "snow goggles". Which lead to me to thinking about other commonly misspelled words like "accommodate" (mistake is "accomodate"), "occurrence" (not "occurence" or "ocurrence"), "privilege" (not "privelege") or "pronunciation" (not "pronounciation"), and how much traffic they contribute to a website.
   
   
3. On the same topic, Google Search now provides search results on the right word even when misspelled. It continues to offer suggestions. Since I get some traffic from vanity searches on "krishna kumar", it will be nice to know whether part of it is because of when people type "krshna" or "kirhsna" or something like that.
   
   
4. A belated thanks to "New Hampshire Blogging" for a review of my blog and "Cow Hampshire" for adding me to their favorites. For those interested in knowing more about New Hampshire and the people here, please do visit those sites.
   
   
5. Yahoo! Mail has a new update integrating Messenger and Mail. It is not available to everyone yet, but from the video I saw, it has many interesting features. You can open a new chat in a tab. There are buttons for "Convert to Email" and "Convert to Chat" depending on what you are doing. You can set the status of Messenger within Yahoo! Mail itself. The poor (IMO) feature release progress on Google Talk and the lack of tabs in Gmail is providing an easy opening for Yahoo! to corner this segment of the Internet audience.
   
   
6. In Yuvi's post on Raymond Chen's blog stats, he shows that 77% of Chen's posts are at 7 am. This is remarkable. One explanation is that Chen does his blogging in the morning and then moves on to other tasks. The other possibility is that he writes his blogs at different times and then posts them at 7 am. Which made me think - why not write more posts when I am free and then post one each day? Also, the 7 am intrigues me. Is that the best time for making a blog post visible? I do my posting during the weekends and nights - which is not exactly a good time for US-based audience.

More in future posts. The spell checker was tough on this post. :-)

Technorati tags: Google Reader, Google Webmaster, Yahoo! Mail, Google Search, Yuvi

RSS Feed Reader in Internet Explorer 7.0

I have been increasingly using the RSS Feed Reader in Internet Explorer 7.0. While IE7 came out, I was very dismissive of its feed capability because Google Reader was miles ahead of it.

But because it is less powerful, I find it becoming more useful for certain types of feeds. Confused? Well, here are my reasons:

I keep a browser window open on the "All Items" screen of Google Reader. The window title (and the taskbar) reads "Google Reader (count)" where count is the number of unread items. When I subscribe to news sites which have a large number of daily posts, this becomes very distracting. Many of the news articles are of little interest to me, which adds to the pain.

With IE 7, I have to manually open the "Feeds" tab to see if a new post has come in. I could have the feed tab open by default, but since it takes away the real estate for viewing other websites, I don't do that. So, I can now view those feeds at own leisure. Also, as far as I know, IE doesn't show all the posts from different blogs in the same page.

Google Reader allows one to mark feeds as unread. IE doesn't allow that. So I only look at the feeds when I am sure that I will either read or discard them. I don't have the ability to archive or star them either. So IE prevents me from hanging onto posts long after I really need them.

IE has a feature of creating a custom schedule for the retrieval of posts. So if you are only interested in reading feeds in the early morning, you can set IE to just fetch the posts then instead of every few minutes,

This does not mean that I am abandoning Google Reader. I am only moving some feeds, mostly the ones with higher frequency of postings like news feeds, into Internet Explorer. Previously, I had consolidated my infrequently updated feeds using Yahoo! Pipes. Being able to assimilate the content I read within Google Reader has become much easier now.

Now, I could easily close the Google Reader window and achieve a similar effect. But some blogs are different than others and hence it makes sense to keep the window open for them. For example, it makes sense to always read one technology blog in Google Reader - most of the others will be repetitions and they should be kept away. Certain blogs have a smaller ratio of interesting content and they should be kept hidden until you want to see a longer list of unread items and read the ones you want.

I guess this is an example of where a feature-poor product takes share away from a powerful one because its limitations match up with the needs of its users.

Technorati tags: Google Reader, Internet Explorer 7.0, RSS, Yahoo! Pipes

More Yahoo! Pipes Thoughts

I really don't want this blog to turn into a Yahoo! Pipes site, but I have been blogging so much about Google's products - why not give Yahoo! some buzz while I am at it. Probably, this will be my last post on them until I get time to explore the product another weekend (provided something else more interesting doesn't hit the market in between).

I still think the documentation could have been better, but there is a much easier way to learn about the product. Go to "Browse Pipes" and take a look at the pipes that others have created. There are a lot of interesting ones out there. It seems like thousands of people have been visiting and running them.

That being said, I didn't see any pipe that was really, really outstanding. This may have to do with the fact that the product has been made to be very simple. However, I feel that scripting or programming capability should have been added. In fact, there are many things I would have liked to do by parsing the content of a feed. I didn't figure out how and the documentation (here I go again!) didn't explain much.

Anyway, Yahoo! provides you the ability to view the internals of an existing pipe and then "clone" it which means saving it as your feed and then making the necessary changes. I created two useful feeds this way:

1. One feed contains only the feeds from Google blogs that I want to read. When I started reading blogs, I started subscribing to each one of them. Later, I found a link "All Google Blogs" that allows you to subscribe to all of the Google blogs. This was more convenient, but it also had more posts that had little meaning to me. Now, I can pick and choose only what I want.
   
2. The other feed contains all the feeds from my friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Many of these blogs are not maintained or updated very frequently. Keeping them in one pipe is much more convenient when subscribing to them using Google Reader.

I used the "Fetch" module which allows one to add many feeds in the same module. This is connected to a "Sort" module that sorts the posts by the updated date. Maybe this is just me, but I couldn't find a way to resize the modules which made it difficult to read the URLs within the Fetch module.

As a less-than-power user with limited time, I was able to create pipes which provided some useful benefit to me personally. It is a good beginning. I hope the Yahoo! Pipes team can now cater to advanced and power audiences by providing the capability to develop more sophisticated and useful pipes. I think the concept of "without ever having to write a line of code" is commendable, but it will quickly drive away many interested programmers. I am also very interested in knowing what use cases the development team were thinking of when they started developing the tool.

Related:

• First Impression of Yahoo! Pipes
• Message Board for Pipes

First Impression of Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is up again after its downtime and I just created my first Yahoo! pipe. Here is what I did:

1. Created a Fetch module that connected to the feed for this blog: http://krishami.blogspot.com/atom.xml.
2. Connected that to a Filter module which removes any item that contains the word "Blog" in the title.
3. I created a User Text input that asks for the number of posts that the user wishes to see.
4. The Filter module is connected to a Truncate module that truncates the feed after the number of posts as specified by the user.
5. This is finally sent to a Sort module that arranges the post by the Updated Date in descending order. (This is not the same as first posted date as some posts could be updated several days after they are posted.)

Nothing particularly unique or special - I just wanted to try the product out.

You can run the pipe at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/jId3urW42xGXnNT8JhOy0Q/.

My first impressions and experiences:

1. The documentation is really poor. They should have more details about how to use the various modules. On the plus side, the modules are fairly easy to understand.
2. To repeat that, yes, the application is really intuitive. Of course, you need to know something about RSS feeds and some elementary computing concepts. But even allowing for that, it is really easy to create a pipe, and publish and run it.
3. The documentation only displays properly in Firefox 2.0, but I can only edit the Pipes properly in Internet Explorer 7.0. Was the documentation team different from the development team?
4. The description of the modules when you click them is not properly visible.
5. The current list of Pipe modules looks like it can handle most of the aggregation, filtering and sorting capabilities. I want to explore more of the text processing and statistical capability, but at a first glance, that aspect does not seem to be very advanced.
6. I wonder if there is a way to combine the actual content of different feeds and can introduce a delay in publishing the results. Sort of like the Search Engine Land daily feed I am subscribing too.
7. Little slow at times, but on average, responsive. The user interface behaved very well without crashing a single time.
8. Some of the functionality could also be done through Google Custom Search, but Yahoo! Pipes makes it much more glamorous.

I would give it a rating of 7/10. The learning curve is reasonably short. It is easy to create a pipe that does something useful within a matter of time. Documentation is the worst part of the product so far. Made me more interested in exploring the tool further. Hope that Yahoo! can maintain the momentum.

Search Engine Land Feeds

The biggest problem with reading news using a blog reader is that you see the same news over and over again from different sources. One can skip over them, but it gets tiring after a while. A site like Techmeme serves dozens of news articles a day. And if you subscribe to many news feeds, a kind thing would be saying "deja vu". I don't want to say the unkind word.

That is why I love the fact that Search Engine Land offers daily feeds. The idea is similar to the email newsletters I used to get and browse through before I started reading blogs. The important thing is that I can look at the links of the articles and if I find interesting, I can click it and go to their website.

Of course, I wouldn't do this if the articles were not good. But Search Engine Land offers good commentary and perspective on the technology news. They usually have around 10 daily articles that explore current issues

Other sections within their daily feed include news headlines from other sources which include

• Business Issues
• Local Search
• Podcasts
• SEO
• Social Media

I wish all the other news engines offered this service. One of my To-Do items for the weekend is to explore Yahoo! Pipes to see if it can help aggregate the feeds from the various sources I subscribe to and just send one post at the end of the day. Thinking about it, once they start thinking of monetization, will Yahoo! finally pipe your output through their ad engine so that the head or tail is now an ad? Anyway, right now, the site seems to be down because of "overwhelming demand".

Worry about Free Web Applications

This blog is hosted on Blogger. It is a great platform and I love many of its features. It is also free, as in "totally free". No monthly fees. No advertisements. Nothing.

That scares me.

Sooner or later, someone at Google is going to point out the tremendous expense that Blogger is incurring with its infrastructure without producing any tangible revenue. Maybe it is a loss leader for Google's other features like AdSense, but how many bloggers are using AdSense? Many people I know blog because of interest or for fun, not for money. What happens if a blogger gains a large audience in the thousands, but does not want to monetize it?

What happens then? Will Blogger automatically start showing AdWords in the screen? Will they start charging for the account based on data transfer?

I don't want to single out Blogger or Google. As I said, I use Blogger because I love it. But I don't know what will happen when they finally decide to cash in on the community of people who are using Blogger. The uncertainty is very worrying. I can imagine many reasons why they would not want to say when it will stop being free, but that does not lessen the confusion.

Every free application on the Internet will face this problem. An application may be offered for free to attract a lot of new users. It could also be used to attract an audience to another application sold by the company. Regardless of the reason, the application is losing money. All the time, the company incurs costs of development and infrastructure.

As the application becomes more popular, these costs go up tremendously. For example, scaling the application may need a lot of time from specialized development and administration teams, not to mention expensive hardware and networking equipment. Once the application crosses a certain threshold of popularity, the floodgates can potentially open to thousands or tens of thousands of users. Since the application is free, there is hardly any barrier for a new person to start using the application.

Somebody has to pay these costs. When the application is free, that "somebody" can be the VC or other private and public investors. They may keep eating the cost until they can sell the company to somebody bigger like Yahoo! or Microsoft. But this is just shifting the burden: Now the bigger company starts emptying its pockets. Eventually, the pyramid scheme has to break - somebody has to stay "stop" because the application is just hemorrhaging bucketloads of money without bringing in anything.

There are many ways of bringing revenue such as paid user accounts or serving up ads. For blog hosting software, I am in favor of paying money, because I think having paid advertisements on the site can sometimes conflict with the content on some blogs. Also with advertising systems like AdWords and Panama, the blog author has no control over what advertisements are displayed. Sometimes, there may appear advertisements of companies that the blogger disapproves of or disagrees with.

In an application like Yahoo! Mail where the content is private, advertisements are not a huge problem as I can easily ignore them. But on a blog, the site author doesn't even get to know the ads that site visitors see. However, many bloggers may have the opposite opinion - they may very well prefer AdWords or even join AdSense instead of having to pay money for an account. 

In a capitalistic society, one should do exactly that. If you have an audience benefiting from your blog's content, it makes sense to use an ad (pun intended) system to gain some reward for the efforts you are putting in. After all, that is what this whole post is about, isn't it? I would suggest that someone should do a study about people's preferences if they haven't already. I remember Yahoo! asking me long time back about how much I would pay to use one of their applications.

With a cash-rich company like Google, it will be some time before they wake up to all the money-losing applications they have. On the other hand, Yahoo! is always all about getting hold of your wallet or advertiser's dollars from Day One of the application. Beware of the other free applications out there who have no clear strategy on how they are going to pay their expenses. And if you are developing a web-based application and plan to give free access, start thinking today of how you will be making money to pay for the product.

A final link on the topic: Google to charge businesses for Google Apps: Seems that they are slowly embracing reality.

Technorati tags: Yahoo!, Google, Blogger, Monetization, AdWords, AdSense, Panama

A Few Problems with Google Services

In the past few weeks, using the various Google services, I have encountered the following issues:

1. Orkut seems to be repeatedly failing. I keep getting the "Bad, bad server. No donut for you" message. At first, the message was rather funny. Now I just want the links to work. Important operations like saving a scrap and adding a friend are blowing up. Is Google really serious about Orkut?
   
   
2. Google Analytics was down for several hours last week. Many people experienced the problem. It seems that the product was still capturing web visits data, but was not tabulating it for Analytics users. It started working again by the next day, so no problems. The delay in Analytics is a bit irritating as it is typically a few hours behind which prevents real-time analysis of data.
   
   I get the same feeling when I see my cached page in Google showing content from weeks ago. I don't have a problem with the spider or crawl engine slowly marking its way to my updated site. The problem is that Google Blog Search has indexed the latest blog content and it doesn't show up in regular Google Search. Maybe this is supposed to be all beyond me, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
   
   
3. Google Webmaster released a new Links tab for viewing the external and internal links to a website. It was gone the next day. Apparently, there was a security violation that allowed people to see the data for other sites. It is back now that they have fixed the bug.
   
   I am not sure that it can even be classified as a bug, because links to another website are public to begin with. The link: operator in Google is actually supposed to be retrieving this information. I guess the negative publicity got to the Webmaster team.
   
   
4. I didn't realize this until I checked my diagnostic feed in FeedBurner. Apparently, the Atom feed from my blog hosted at Blogger was failing and FeedBurner was not able to serve up new posts. Apparently, this has been happening once every few days. Don't know if anybody else had this problem.
   
   
5. In Google Reader, there was a post for SuperBowl-like ads from Techcrunch that had embedded videos. Only 2 of the 5 videos played in Reader. And the message remained as an unread item. I had to wait until I read all the posts and then hit the "Mark all as read" to get rid of the post. The embedded video players are a new feature in Reader.

Technorati tags: Google Search, Blogger, Google Analytics, Google Reader, FeedBurner, Orkut

Link Rich get Richer

The Hawthorne effect is the principle that "when people are observed in a study, their behavior or performance temporarily changes." As Google Search has become the de facto search engine, webmasters and web designers have changed their activities to meet the requirements of obtaining higher ranks in Google search results. Mostly, strategies have revolved around getting as many incoming links as possible.

One of the key components of the Google search engine is the PageRank algorithm. In Google's words,

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important.""

In day-to-day life, this concept will be familiar to most people. Say, there was no Internet and everyone that we know were equally accessible (without constraints of time, money, distance and social status). If we were in college and we needed accurate information about the rings of Saturn, we would first contact the head of the Physics department. If he was not available, we would contact a lesser professor, followed by a teaching assistant, high-grade student, medium-grade student, etc. Why? Because each person in this pecking order would point to the higher authority as the first line of authority.

Now, if the Physics head had designated a student, John Smith, as an authority on Saturn. Then more queries would be directed to John. If a person below the Head had recommended John, he would still get more attention than when not recommended, but less than if the Head had recommended him.

So far, so good.

At this point, let us muddy the waters a little bit. Let us say that another student Mary Jones joins the school and is more knowledgeable on Saturn than John. The problem here is that her incremental knowledge on the subject is not of interest to most students. Hence the Head has no reason to change his recommendation of John. Other students also continue to recommend John, although they may benefit from Mary's extra knowledge, because the main authority, the Physics Head, has not changed his mind.

Applying this to the web link structure,

1. A better, newer authority (say "A") on a subject has fewer incoming links compared to the older authority (say "Z") because it has just started. Pretty obvious.
2. "A" will get fewer new incoming links compared to "Z" because the incremental gain is not important to the majority of users.
3. If a person wants to link to an authority on the subject, "Z" will get the new link because "Z" appears first on the search results. So Z starts hoarding more links, making it more difficult for A to displace Z.
4. "Z" has a significant headstart over "A" in terms of web pages and web links. The only way that "A" can overtake "Z" is if "A" can consistently outperform "Z" in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) activities. This is not guaranteed. For all we know, "Z" may be more web and SEO-savvy than "A".
5. "A" is very likely to abandon or pay less attention to the subject matter as it continues to sport lower search rankings and attract less visitors than "Z".
6. As competition from "A" & others becomes less, "Z" is also likely to reduce efforts to maintain the lead. Practically, this means producing just the necessary level of content to keep up the reputation.
7. This does NOT mean that "Z" will sit idle while someone slowly builds up momentum. With tools like Google Alerts, it is very easy to stay on top of keyword searches to be aware of competition.

This is a phenomenon, not necessarily a problem. The first reasonable authority on a subject has a first-mover advantage that is very difficult to shake off. As that authority tops the ranking, more and more people link to it, making it a de facto "top" authority. Yes, there will be people who break the trend and link to other authorities (who are lower on the search results), but statistically speaking, they can be discounted. Very soon, the first authority has amassed a fortune of incoming links and can rest on that.

The other aspect of link fortunes is the issue of "sub-authority". If I am the authority on the solar system, it doesn't mean that I am the authority on Pluto. But with my first-mover advantage, I have enough links to make myself the first result on Pluto and then gather more links. You might say, "That is fine, but there will be Pluto experts who can produce more content than you do. And soon they will rise to the top." So let me explain with an example.

Let us take Wikipedia. In most simple searches, the Wikipedia article will be the first result or at least on the first page of results. I have great trust in Wikipedia pages and hence my initial reaction (which I usually follow) will be to link to the Wikipedia article. Unless I myself am an expert in that topic, I cannot differentiate between a Wikipedia page and another web page on the same subject or issue. Because of my trust in Wikipedia (coming from other sources) and the fact that Wikipedia is high on the results already because of PageRank, I throw another link at Wikipedia. Suddenly, Wikipedia has one more recommendation for its page which reinforces its position in the search results.

As I mentioned before, this need not be entirely a bad thing. The greater authority's benefit comes from the incremental knowledge that it brings. By recognizing the de facto authority on the Web, this website or page can concentrate on more specialized information that will benefit expert audiences. The current authority can link back to the niche or expert sites. Essentially, this will reduce duplication of content.

The point I was trying to make is that a first-mover advantage on a subject on the Internet coupled with a good understanding of SEO techniques is very difficult to trounce. The first mover quickly gathers links which in turn fuels additional links to the site. One suggestion is to perhaps have a "Random Results" box in the Google search results that are based on text content and have no relation to incoming links.

Technorati tags: Google Search, Wikipedia, PageRank, Google Alerts

How to Make Live Search Better

Since Google Search has a better reputation than Live Search, it attracts far more users. That is no surprise - probably as redundant as it gets. Apparently, even Microsoft's developers are using Google instead of Live. The problem for Live Search here is that unless it attracts more users, it is very difficult to improve the capability of its search through user feedback. At the same time, Google continues to get all sorts of positive and negative comments about its search from users, partners, bloggers, politicians, etc.

So here is a suggestion for Microsoft: Shut down all access to Google search and force your employees to use Live Search. You can probably imagine the outcry that would result in - internally and externally. But that will force the Live Search team to quickly address the needs of your development teams.

And if Microsoft cannot do that because that would affect the work of their developers, then it probably proves that Live Search is not as good as Google or will not be getting there soon. And if they cannot stake their business on Live Search, why should the rest of the world do that?

Ditto for Yahoo Search.

Ditto for Ask.

Technorati tags: search, Live Search, Yahoo, Ask, Google Search

What the Gmail Calendar!

This was a very surprising feature, but wrongly implemented. In addition to putting an event in Outlook, I usually tend to email myself details about an important meeting. I accidentally sent this to Gmail (instead of Yahoo Mail Beta that I normally use). As you can see on the right hand side, a box appears asking if I want to add the event to my Google Calendar. View image below:

I will explain the problem, but I don't not sure how Gmail or Google Calendar can deal with it. The event is actually a call with a person in India to take place at 9:45 am Indian Standard Time which is equal to 11:15 pm Eastern Standard Time. So there are two time zones involved.

When adding to Google Calendar, it recognizes the date correctly, but it actually pulls up the first time. Now Google Account does have the information that I am on Eastern Time, but it doesn't seem to be picking that up.

The reason why I have two times in the subject is to introduce a redundancy so that I can easily verify if I haven't put down a wrong time. This happens sometimes when arranging meetings with some people in the United States itself, when we are not sure how many hours they are behind and if they have daylight savings.

Not that any of this would really matter, because the user can manually edit the entry when adding it to the Calendar. But still if someone on the Gmail team is looking for bugs to fix, here you go! :-)

January 2007 in Review

The first month of 2007 ends today which means only 11 more months to complete all the New Year Resolutions. Here is what happened on the technology front.

1. I started writing my novel on Zoho Wiki. I hope to publish it sometime during this summer. Semi-autobiographical, it is a collection of stories and anecdotes. I planned to use JotSpot for this purpose, but I am tired of waiting this long. How many businesses have shut down their doors for months not serving their customers? What can I say - Google blew it with JotSpot.
   
   
2. My target of one post per day will be achieved for January with this post. I did cheat by making up for the days I didn't do anything by posting several on some days. But I may have to continue like that because it is easier to keep track when I try to match the days in a month. Many thanks to Microsoft Live Writer which has made it easy for me to write in fits and starts. Technorati has been great in knowing about incoming links and visiting those websites. It provides the information faster than Google Alerts.
   
   
3. I like the new Skype add-in (Unyte) which allows desktop and application sharing. So far, I have been using Goto Meeting and, previously, Raindance. Goto Meeting has the advantage of not requiring users to install a separate application. But Skype is really convenient if both sides communicating are in fact Skype users. Today, I saw something in Yahoo! Messenger that smelled like a desktop sharing add-in, but I didn't have the time to explore that.
   
   
4. Technology addicts like me hardly get any exercise because we are so glued to the screen pressing "j" on Google Reader. My friend Babu Sathish told me about an Yoga exercise that involves coordinated stretching and breathing. After a few days, I feel really refreshed and full of energy. Of course, I have to warn you - the first couple of days will really be painful if you have been out of practice. Babu also explained to me that it is easier to do these simple exercises and have them as part of one's daily routine for years than it is to go to the gym a fixed number of times a week. I agree with him.
   
   
5. Most people seem to dismiss Orkut as something only popular in Brazil. But I am amazed at how many friends from India I have re-discovered in the past month using Orkut. My feeling is that Orkut is slowly growing and it will hit critical mass soon among the Indian community - which could mean a huge impact considering the large Indian population and Indian Diaspora.
   
   
6. Learning to use wireless in new ways: Bring the laptop to the kitchen and run through the reading to-do list while cutting cucumbers or peeling potatoes. Reply to emails in between commercials. Google a new word or phrase heard on TV and learn to stay away from urban legends and hoaxes.

January was really cold in NH - a bitter change from the unexpectedly warm December. But staying indoors helped in getting some work (electronic & paper) done. February is a short month. Hope to do something different and interesting!

Technorati tags: January review, Zoho Wiki, JotSpot, Google reader, Live Writer, Unyte, Skype, Yoga

Quick Review of Google Products

As most people would have, I switched over to using Google Search the first time I tried it after a recommendation from a friend. Over the years, Google has added many products to their portfolio and I have tried to use many of them. Here is a quick review of my experiences with each product. The order of the products is according to a combination of my satisfaction as well as my usage level.

• Search: Still the leader with the more relevant search results. Others like Ask, Yahoo! and Live lag behind in number of sites indexed, frequency of indexes and search results returned. Sites like Clusty and Krugle offer variations and search niches, but not general search to topple Google. Google has other search features like Calculator and Weather that come in handy. I typically use the search across Images (my second choice: Altavista), Maps (second and third choice: Yahoo! Maps & MapQuest), News (I also like Techmeme), Groups (I use Yahoo! Groups, but search on Google Groups) and, less frequently, Video (YouTube is better for content, but Google Video should be better for "searching" videos in future). Search is pretty much a Google monopoly.
  
• Google Reader: Since its latest incarnation, it has become the must-use blog reader. Some notes on that here. I actually favor feeds coming to an online email client, but neither Gmail nor Yahoo! Mail does a good job of this.
  
• Google Analytics: It is easy to incorporate the functionality in your website or blog and the reports are really great. There is still room for improvement as some of the reports could have greater drill-down capability. Basically, the problem is that as you gain a greater knowledge of the functionality in Google Analytics, you start wanting to slice and dice the data in different ways and the tool starts showing its limitations. Still, it is the best accessible tool around.
  
• Google Desktop: While I think of myself as pretty organized in terms of files and emails, Google Desktop search increases productivity and effectiveness several times by locating old documents and communication easily. The sidebar allows me to see important information at a glance, launch searches and keep track of To-Do items. However, searching is not integrated into Windows Explorer and the existing gadget inventory probably needs to be improved. I haven't really tried other tools because Google Desktop does most of what it needs to do really well.
  
• Google Calendar: Very user-friendly application. Since I am using Microsoft Outlook professionally, it is a challenge to use it regularly. I suppose they should build in some synching feature. Better than Yahoo! Calendar, which like many other of their products, has been dead for years.
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets: The product does a good job of allowing users to create online documents and spreadsheets and there is no competition from Yahoo or Microsoft. It is still a bit clunky and since it is not really anywhere near the desktop Microsoft Office product, it has limited use at this moment. Frankly, I would like to see this product integrated with Google Page Creator and JotSpot.
• Google Alerts: Not something unique that cannot be copied, but it is very useful and does its job perfectly.
• Gmail: Gmail turned the email market upside down when it launched with gigabytes of storage. But other email clients (especially Yahoo! Mail) have caught up with newer features and Gmail doesn't seem to be innovating much these days. I still use it sometimes because it allows me to store Google Talk chat sessions automatically. It is still much better than Hotmail (or Live Mail) which has no clue about spam filtering or even basic user navigation.
• Picasa: I am using it to manage and edit all my photos. I haven't used the online sharing service - still using Yahoo! Photos. Probably should give Picasa Web Albums or Flickr a try.
• Google Talk: Skype and Yahoo! Messenger are way ahead in features and looks. But Google Talk has the advantage of being integrated with Google Desktop Sidebar and easily saving chat sessions into Gmail. In recent times, I have experienced performance problems with Google Talk when talking with people in India.
• Google Book Search: I think the functionality is good, but I haven't really used it all that much. There are too many books to read and too little time.
• Google Earth: Again, a great fun tool, but not much time to play around with it. Google Maps serves most day-to-day purposes.
• Froogle: Useful to know the price ranges of goods. I have not bought a single item from Froogle yet, but probably I am a more cautious and research-oriented online shopper.
• Toolbar: This was something nice to have when it came out. When IE came out, the search box allowed integration with Google Search, which removed a lot of the rationale behind the Google toolbar. The new IE interface also made it less attractive to reduce the viewing area by installing a toolbar. So I got rid of it. However, Yahoo! Bookmarks Beta has convinced me to install me to get the Yahoo! Beta toolbar, but as you can read from my previous post, I am questioning whether moving to that product was such a good idea.
• Google Co-op: Creating a custom search engine was a great touch by Google and I duly installed one for my website and blog. The only problem, I realized, was that it does not index the website in real-time and so it takes a few hours/days to get the content made searchable. Technorati Search is much better in this regard, but right now, it only works for blogs.
• Google Catalogs, Checkout, Directory, SketchUp, Translate, etc: Rarely used these and other products not named explicitly. This is primarily because I don't use the functionality itself rather than there being a competing product.

The above is not a comprehensive list of all Google products just because I don't have the need to use some of the products, including stuff like Google Suggest in Japanese. Google seems to be building a portfolio of products just like Yahoo! has done. Their key strength will continue to be in search and I think by leveraging that capability of being able to locate relevant information in any data in any format, their products will grow.

Integration between various products has been taking place, though very slowly in my opinion and in some cases, not effectively done (like Google Reader and Gmail). Providing users with the ability to access all the products they are using is also done in a rather clumsy way - a vertical list of big icons under My Account - instead of the Home Page. I am not sure why this is - possibly the lack (I am just guessing here) of a Google Product Integration team is partly responsible here.

Technorati tags: Google, Search, Google reader, Google analytics