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Does Ether’s Service Work?

Posted on August 11, 2006 ·

ether.gifToday was supposed to be The Day: my first pre-arranged Ether call would ring at 9:30am. Exactly one hour before the set time I received a reminder email: so far so good, everything works like clockwork.

9:30 – nothing. 9:40 – nothing. It’s almost 10am, the call has not come through, I cannot call the other party (it’s set up this way by design), and strangest of all, there is no trace of the appintment anywhere on Ether: my appointment list, tracnsaction list, history is all empty, is if this had never happened.

I’m curious… has anyone had positive experience with Ether? Does this thing work?

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Filed Under: Business, Customer Service, Personal Productivity, Technology ·
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Why Plaxo, Why?

Posted on July 14, 2006 ·

Why Plaxo, why do you have to keep on sending pointless, idiotic spam?

I obviously know I am a Plaxo member, I get my data updated ..etc. This email does not require action, does not convey any information. You just can’t rest without bugging me?

Your friends use Plaxo too! Plaxo
Now you’ll always have their latest contact info in your address book. What does this mean?
John

Doe
This means that if their contact info ever changes, your address book will be updated automatically. It also means that when you change your contact info, their address books will be updated automatically too!
View my address book
Update my contact info
No further action is required.
Plaxo has already done the work for you. Since you and all of the above contacts are Plaxo members, your address book will always contain their latest info.

Plaxo, Inc. · 1300 Crittenden Lane · Suite 300 · Mountain View · CA · 94043 · USA


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Filed Under: Customer Service, Software ·
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Frustrating Feed Reader Problems

Posted on July 14, 2006 ·

Bloglines has a huge glitch. Huge yet so basic, I’m surprised it hasn’t been reported and fixed yet. If you keep your feeds organized in folders, you’d expect to be able to click either the folder name or the little plus sign to open up the list of feeds in the folder. Yeah, right. Click the folder name, and without warning ALL your feeds change to “read” status – i.e. disappear entirely, if you – like me- normally look at unread items only. Now what am I supposed to read?

I haven’t been an active Bloglines user for a while, just keeping it as a backup and benchmark against what became my primary reader: Attensa. The very reason I looked at Bloglines today is that despite all the hoopla surrounding Attensa, I am about to quit using it. Two frustrating glitches cause me spend way to much time, when a reader is supposed to save time and make me efficient in the first place:

  • Serving up the same old feeds again and again: Attensa keeps on presenting most of my feeds repeatedly as “undread” – no, they have not changed, and I verified it on Bloglines. I am either forced to fish for truy new entries or set everything to “read”, and miss some good posts. Who has time for this?

  • Not dowloading images: OK, this is an Outlook security setting. But in “normal” Outlook folders I can click and set the sending domain “trusted” after which I will get the images downloaded from this particular sender. Not in the Attensa folders: I have to click every single post every single time to make them readable.

There’s more, but these are the two killers, and after countless emails over 6 weeks, Attensa support still only seems to partially understand what the problem is, let alone any plan to fix it. I lost patience, I am spending way too much time testing and educating support – I am out of here?

Any recommendations for an offline reader?

Update (7/4): Hm.. Feed Reader day, lots of posts on Earthlink’s new reader:

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Filed Under: Blogging, Customer Service ·
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(C)ouchSurfing’s Pathetic Shutdown

Posted on June 30, 2006 ·

“Three year old CouchSurfing, a beloved service used by some 90,000 members, had multiple database crashes, critical parts of the software and data were irretrievably lost, and the backups weren’t performed properly. They are not rebuilding the service. They literally put themselves out of business.” – reports TechCrunch.

Mike says it’s ridiculous – I’ll go a step further: it’s BS.

Of course the negligent approach about backups in itself is a serious issue, and in that respect I encorage everyone to read Dharmesh Shah’s thoughtful piece on why he considers $2K a month for hosting of his pre-launch startup money well spent.

So why am I calling this BS? Dharmesh says:

“What was the issue? Not lack of user interest or running out of cash or strong competition or any of the usual reasons that startups die. It was because of a series of infrastructure problems.”

Yeah, right. I haven’t been a CouchSurf-er, nor do I know the business, but I am calling it a BS, because the infrastructure problems are just an excuse – they may have been the last drop for the entrepreneur already fed up running the business, but definitely not the cause. Everyone knows that the single most difficult part in building any sort of marketplace / community business that relies on network effect is exactly that – reaching critical mass. Heck, anyone can throw together the databases, programs, infrastructure if the hundreds of thousands of users are somehow guaranteed. But of course they are not. My point is: if you do have the loyal crowd and your buiness is otherwise in good shape, you can start from scratch, and rebuild everything, no matter how bad (total?) your data loss is.

That leaves us with the other single most critical part (yeah, I am cheating, there are two “single” most critical/difficult parts…): monetization. This is where I suspect CouchSurfing may have had trouble, which turned it into OuchSurfing – after all, who throws away an entirely profitable good business after a technical fiasco?

Interestingly enough, although Dharmesh devotes his article to the importance of proper infrastructure, if you read between the lines, there is a second message there: eyeballs are not enough, you need to convert them to revenue.

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Filed Under: Business, Customer Service, SaaS, Software, Startups, Technology ·
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Thanks, Comcast … for Everything

Posted on June 22, 2006 ·

This video made it to MSNBC yesterday night:

Watch the vid here should the embedded player not work.

Filed Under: Customer Service ·
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Technorati is Dying Again (Still?). White Knight Needed.

Posted on June 1, 2006 ·

(Updated)
I’ve complained so much about Technorati‘s non-performance, it’s getting boring.  But I can’t help it, this idiotic message is just plain frustrating:

I guess the message itself is a sad indicator: they know they can’t fix the performance problems,  so they innovate where they can: with the error message.   Talk about innovation, there is a strange parallel to my previous Vonage post here: I recognized Vonage as the innovator who created the market, now that the job is done and the Big Boys have arrived, it’s time for them to go.

Isn’t the same true for Technorati?  They definitely have been (still are) innovators of the Blogosphere, but simply could never scale up the handle the ever-growing traffic.  I wish the Yahoo /  Microsoft / whoever rumors a few months ago were true: they badly need a White Knight with enough mu$cle to build out the robust infrastructure the ever-growing Blogosphere needs.

Update (6/4):  Now my blog is not indexed by Technorati at all.  Makes me wonder if I am in the “penalty box” or is it just “Technorati as usual” …

Update (6/4):  I guess I am not in the penalty box, just part of a bigger problem, and, unlike Stefan, I haven’t written 3 emails (just 1), and haven’t been ignored for 17 days.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Customer Service, Startups ·
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Gold Medal for Listening to Customers

Posted on May 1, 2006 ·

(Updated)
And the Gold goes to: Vyew.  

Dennis and I both posted about this free “browser-based conferencing and always-on collaboration platform that provides instant visual communication without the need for client downloads or installations.”  I also had a follow-on post, this time about product names and branding.  Perhaps that’s the reason that the lively comment-conversation these posts triggered focused more on Marketing on my blog, and product features chez Dennis.

Commenters on Dennis’s blog quickly noted that Vyew does not allow full desktop sharing, so while it’s a handy collaboration tool, it cannot be used for software demos. Oops, it was a bit  premature of me calling Vyew a “Free Webex-killer” – well, it’s not quite that … just yet.  But not for long! 

While I was exchanging emails with a very responsive Fred on the Marketing team, Tim, a member of Vyew’s development team came to Dennis’s blog and announced: “As a direct result of various conversations with some of you and on other blogs, I met with our team and we decided to push out a LIVE DESKTOP SHARING feature this week. This may not be as snappy as webex, we’ll be looking at about 3 seconds between each screen refresh. But keep in mind this is a quick fix until our real release in 2 months.”   Wow!  Talk about responsiveness!

I don’t know how well the new feature will work, but these guys are definitely market-driven, if anyone, they definitely know how to “turn customers into evangelists“. Customer goodwill can go a long way – some companies are good in earning it, others manage to lose it fast…  it’s good to be in the first camp.

Update (5/2):  Vyew just got Naked: “Talk about listening to your customers. This has to set a new record

for responsiveness for user-requested refinements. My congratulations

to vyew. My advice for next steps: start your own blog, vyew, so that

you can have more direct exchanges with customers.” – says Shel Israel.

Update (5/2):  Dennis sums up the story under A Naked Conversation with a vyew.  His conclusions in the second half of the blog are really interesting, go way beyond the Vyew story.  (Btw., I don’t get this naked thing… just got back from swimming and everyone was in swimwear  )

Update (5/2):  Vyew got TechCrunched – well, almost, on the French edition.  Here’s the Google-translated English version of the originally French article.

Update (5/4):  The Vyew team really listens: following Shel’s advice, they’ve just started their own blog.  Congrat’s .

Update (5/7):  The story reverberates:  Shel Israel talked about Vyew at MeshForum 2006 – not the product features, but their  customer responsiveness.  (souce: Christopher  Carfi and Howard  Greenstein).  Being customer-focused has already paid off for Vyew: they’ve become a “showcase”, enjoying increased brand-awareness.

Update (5/13):  Guy Kawasaki just profiled Vyew.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Collaboration, Customer Service, Marketing / PR, Startups ·
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37Signals Lost the Signal (for a Moment)

Posted on April 12, 2006 ·

(Updated)
Signal vs. Noise is all noise today, as the good 37Signal folks decided to make fun of their customers, posting  their email inquiries they disliked.  “Useless, absurd, appalled, infuriating”  are words from actual customer emails but apparently this is what 37Signals think of those inquiries – or the customers themselves?

They may be onto something… after all, as long as you have great products, who needs customers?  This must be the new way, I’m just too “old school” to understand.  Time for me to read Getting Real – perhaps that will help me catch up with this great new world. (how funny that their PR agency just asked me to review it…)

Thanks Espen for finding this “gem”.

Update (4/12):  I guess the best defense is offense, just check out Matt’s response to a reader comment: “And while you call it whining, others might call it offering the other side of things in order to give some perspective. Perhaps you need to stop looking for occasions to be offended?”  

Hint to Matt:  you may want to read this post by Robert.

This will not hurt either:  The Art of Customer Service, Part II

Update (4/12):  I don’t even know what’s worse, the original post or the rather defiant attitude they show defending their stance against 140+ comments (on a blog where the average is 8–10 comments per post).  I certainly hope Jason and Matt will have a good night’s sleep, wake up fresh, and make amends.  Like Scoble did (see above).

Update (4/13):  So much for hoping for some humility.  They woke up, but they did not wake up.  This response to comments from Jason shows he simply does not get it:   “I don’t believe quoting someone directly is mocking them. And I never called these comments stupid.”

Related posts:

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Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Customer Service, Misc ·
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Online Backup and Desktop Search

Posted on April 12, 2006 ·

Friends Don’t Let Friends Lose Data says Chris, and I agree, so I followed his recommendation and signed up for the Mozy online backup service – now I can sleep at night.  Previously I used FolderShare to sync data between my multiple PC’s, but now I am left with one laptop, so the free 2G storage and automated backup is now a real(data) life-saver.

However, I noticed it makes  full backup every day, instead of doing it incrementally, as it’s supposed to, after the initial backup.  Other users don’t seem to have this problem, which makes me look for the culprit elsewhere.  I could not imagine (digital) life without Desktop Search anymore, and I tend to believe Copernic is by far better than any of the GoogleYahooMicrosoft products.  

I wonder if Copernic Desktop Search causes files look “changed” during the reindex process – that would explain while they get backed up again.  I am an early beta tester of their 2.0 release, so end up reindexing quite often.

This post is also an experiment in effectively using the “edge” – sure, I could go to Mozy’s site, register, describe the problem there, then go to Copernic and do the same, and probably play messenger-boy for a few rounds between the two companies – let’s see if they pick this up and find a resolution.

In the meantime I am patiently impatiently waiting for Box.net to add their long-awaited synchronization feature. 

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Filed Under: Blogging, Customer Service, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·
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Pay Or Get Ejected

Posted on March 14, 2006 ·

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking. We are currently 30,000 feet over Los Angeles. Fuel prices have risen 2.7% during this trip down from Seattle.  Please insert your credit card into the seatback in front of you in the next twenty seconds if you want to avoid being ejected before San Diego. Thanks.”

Relax, dear reader, it’s not real life (yet), just Paul Kedrosky   extrapolating the trend shown by Northwest’s announcement that they will charge extra for certain prime seats in coach — exit-row seats or aisle seats near the front of the cabin.  
As much as I hate the degradation of air travel (for someone having flown a lot in Europe and Asia, our domestic air travel is like taking a Greyhound bus), and being nickel-and-dimed, in this case I happen to agree with some of Paul’s commenters: if there are seats that passengers “fight for”, that means those seats represent premium value, why not use a market-mechanism to assign them, vs. random luck.   I still love the post, one has to appreciate Paul’s humor.

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Filed Under: Business, Customer Service, Humor, Misc ·
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