1000 Flowers Bloom

Who's looked at you on Linked In?

I was just reading on TechCrunch that Linked In has released a feature that allows you to see who has viewed your profile.

When I first read this I thought that it would be disastrous for them. We had done extensive focus groups and surveys around this feature at Tribe. The responses were very interesting. Everyone wanted to see the details of who had viewed their page but did NOT want their profiles shown. In fact there was a very strong negative association with this. Ultimately we decided it wasn't worth the risk of doing this.

Linked In has done something smart which is that you only see the title and company name. If you're in a large organization you still get a large degree of anonymity. The fact that someone in product management from Yahoo looked at my resume is largely meaningless. There are hundreds if not thousands of them.

But then I think of Aggregate Knowledge. If it says that someone from the Product Management team looked at your profile its coming from a very small set of people.

Luckily they have an option to do invisible surfing. I think I'll turn that on.

Microsoft Gears of War Commercial

Wow I have to admit that I was impressed by this commercial for a Microsoft Video Game. The way they used a different kind of soundtrack other than the firing of guns and rock music really worked for me.

Here's the commercial:

 

Here's a more "standard" version of what video game companies do with soundtracks for their games:

I also think it's interesting that it's been remixed a bunch by folks on YouTube. Found through Newsweek of all places (yes I read Newsweek)

 

Flirty Search with Ms. Dewey

Flirty Search with Ms. Dewey. Um... ok I'm not convinced that this is really the direction that search should be moving in but I guess it's better than Microsoft Bob...

Found from Batelle.

Startup Tools - Google Calendar

I wish wish wish that I could recommend Google Calendar as a startup tool with no reservations. I can't though and I we are going to have to switch away from it.

I think that it's great when you're two guys (or gals) in a garage but it really breaks down as your organization grows.

ADVANTAGES

• Free
• Great UI - easy to create new events
• Great UI - easy to move events
• Great UI - easy to change how long an event will be
• Web based so you can see it anywhere

DISADVANTAGES

Doesn't handle personal vs.work accounts
It's a really big pain to use if you have multiple email accounts. Say an account for work and a personal account. If your Google account is hooked up to your personal account (like mine) and then you start getting calendar invites to your work account the integration is unworkable

Sharing model doesn't scale with your organization
The way you share things in Google Calendar (if you don't want to share it with whole the world) is you have add people individually to give them permission to see your calendar. This is fine when you have two people, you go in and you give the other person permission to see it. When you have 10 people the model really begins to break down.

Each new person who joins the company needs to share their calendar to every other person in the company AND every existing person needs to share their calendar with the new person. This is non-trivial and people balk.

Lack of Outlook integration
This one is truly killer. Sales people love love love their Outlook client. You have to pry it away from their cold dead fingers. They complain constantly about how the integration doesn't work. Ultimately this is the tree that broke the camel's back.

CONCLUSION
If Google can fix these problems (which seem relatively solvable) they'd have a killer tool that I'd certainly be willing to pay money for.

In the mean time I think we're going to look at a hosted solution for Exchange.

Connecting Entrepreneurs Online

I stumbled across Buildv1 through my friend Kareem's blog.

It aspires to be a place where entrepreneurs can connect online and maybe find a great co-founder to start a company with.

At first blush it really looks like just like a job board though. Granted it's probably a more focused job board since it has startup relevant fields etc. but it's really sort of a job board.

I think if it got critical mass it could be useful to find opportunities. There really isn't a great place to do that now.

My biggest request for the Buildv1 team would be that I'd want to learn more about the founders and their backgrounds before I decided to make a connection.

You can read more about what the founders think on (ofcourse) their blog.

Startup Tools - Glance.net

I can't say enough good things about Glance.net. It enables you to do demos and presentations over the web to people quickly and easily. I've used it for the last few years off and on with great success.

It's basically like Web Ex but it's got a few great advantages:

1. The download to your machine is small and fast
2. No download required by the people on the other end. They just use a browser to see what is on your screen.
3. It's really really simple. What you see on your screen is what they see.
4. It's cheap cheap cheap. It's free to try and you can basically keep doing free trials for a while until say you get funded or something. $50/month for the personal edition which should be more than you need.

A couple of minor downsides that didn't bother me but that you should be aware of:

• No Mac support for presenters. People who are on Macs can still view your presentations and demos though.
• You need to make sure you don't move your cursor too fast or have lots of fancy animations in your powerpoint or scroll quickly on a website demo or it won't transmit that well.

Cooqy Review - interesting interface into EBay

The founder of Cooqy dropped me an email asking me to check out his site. To be honest I don't normally do this kind of thing because there are lots of other sites out there that handle reviewing new sites and products better than I ever could.

However, I am interested in how people are using APIs that are being provided and I think that this is a really full featured example of taking APIs and running with it to create something cool. On top of that I am looking for a new laptop bag so I thought I'd give it a spin and see what it was like.

I think the interface for Cooqy is interesting. It's a Flash UI that provides all sorts of goodness like better search capabilities to find what you want better. I suspect that if you're an EBay fanatic (and there are lots of them out there) that you will really enjoy that. Things like automatically showing a zoomed element of a picture is cool as well.

In the end I did end up putting in a bid on Cooqy for a laptop bag so we'll see if I win!

My tactical suggestions for Cooqy:

• searched for roomba and couldn't find anything but found it on the Ebay site
• that teeny tiny scroll box you leave for descriptions needs to be bigger, much too small right now.

On a big picture level:
I'm not sure I understand clearly why I want to use Cooqy versus going direct to EBay. Is it that the UI is so much better that I would use it over EBay? Are there other benefits I'm missing?

Gmail is broken broken broken

Did I mention that it was broken? Here are my list of complaints

• Earlier in the week I couldn't get access to it at all.
• For some reason mail from certain other providers would be delayed by hours.
• Over the last month I've had constant problems as I've been forwarding the gmail mail to my other account. Things sometimes don't forward for no reason at all.

I love the idea of Gmail and the flexibility that it provides. The promise of Gmail is enormous. However the most important feature of email or almost any other product is that it works. Gmail is failing at this.

Anyone else having problems? I was poking around and wasn't sure if I was an isolated case?

Update: Ok I'm note the only one having problems.

Reviewing Fooky

Well after the furor that was caused by Ed Dunn calling Michael Arrington from TechCrunch a racist I thought I'd see what all the fuss was about. For the record, I've met Michael several times and I've never seen any indication that he's in anyway racist. Michael defends himself here.

After looking at Fooky I think that the reason that people may have been "snubbing" it is because they followed the rule if you don't have anything nice to say - Don't say it.

I've decided to break this rule.

Fundamentally I think that Fooky is a broken product. Here are just a few of the issues I ran into in my first 10 minutes of using the site.

1. I can't hit enter to submit my search.
2. Having a link called command aid is confusing. After clicking on it a series of pictures pops up. Even more confusing. You need to click on a picture for it to do something.
3. I shouldn't need to have a link for how to use this text box. The commands need to be self explanatory.
4. I need to type in a weird set of commands to get the results I want. For example I have to type - get stock quote for msft. On google I just need to type msft.
5. Things don't work on the site - if I type get weather for 94110 I get a message that there's not any data there. Don't put things up on your site that don't work. At least warn me that it's beta or that its not going to work.
6. Search results have no descriptions. After typing something in and clicking enter none of the sites I found had descriptions.

I think that Fooky at one point may have been an interesting idea but the big search engines have certainly not stood still.

Ed, maybe you were better off when people weren't reviewing Fooky?