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SocialBrowse

This is a long-overdue post about SocialBrowse. My way of describing SB is that it’s a cross between Twitter and Deli.cio.us. Since that’s probably only understandable to me, look at the screeshot below, and I’ll explain.

The sidebar on the left is SocialBrowse’s domain. I follow some people on SocialBrowse, and some people follow me. If you’re not familiar with that concept, it simply means that I’ve decided that there are a bunch of people who like to share things that I like to read. And some fools (just joking) think I share good stories, so they watch what I share.

Everytime somebody in this chain shares an article, it pops up in the SB sidebar. I check out the headline and decide whether or not it’s something I want to see. And to filter things a little further, SB allows me to set up categories I want to see – so I don’t have to see sports shares.

Recently, the SB developers, Zack Garbow and Dave Fowler, have added some really neat discussion capabilities. When I see a share where I think I have something brilliant to say – an analysis, an affirmation, a criticism or a witticism – I can add that to the share. Some of these comments have started pretty lively debates, since anybody else who sees my shares or the shares of somebody who comments on the article, can leave their own comments.

Inevitably, some of these comments have been political, and I have to remind myself that whatever you write on the Internet stays there forever. But in general, most people, including me, are pretty open in these comments.

SB allows you to send the shares and comments to your Twitter account if you choose. I don’t, but then I just don’t get Twitter. (I’m trying, really, I’m just not there yet.) Or you can email a link to the article to anybody from SB. I’ve started to use that a lot.

What exactly does this do for me or you?

I’m following some really smart people. Some of them spend a LOT of time reading articles and blogs on the Internet. I get to see the things they found valuable enough to share. If they read 10 articles and share one, I’ve just cut out a lot of reading – provided I trust their judgment.

In fact, I’ve found a lot this way. Sites I never would have found on my own and news stories I might have missed. Robert Scoble writes about how he broke the news of the recent Chinese earthquake after getting Twittered about it. SB can do the same thing – if I’m deeply immersed in something else, and I leave the SB sidebar open, I’ll quickly see any breaking news or technology stories as they come out.

SB has another important advantage – the founders like to talk to their users. I’ve had many conversations with Zach Garbow over the past few weeks. He’s anxious to get feedback from users, and he and Dave listen and implement fast.

Getting social even if you’re not social

SB is very different. I’m glad to share stuff I’m reading. I spend hours every day reading so I can stay current. I tried sharing some of my great finds with people in FriendFeed, but nobody showed up. With SB, I did the same, and some people started watching. So I’m providing value to some SB subscribers, and deriving value from others. That feels good.

I typically find people to share because they’ve started following me. When that happens, I get an email from SB, and I naturally check out the kind of sites or articles they tend to share. If I like their shares, I follow them. As more people follow me, I look at more people, and very selectively add to the people I follow.

That was an entirely natural, non-threatening process, because the first followers everyone gets are Zack and Dave – who spend entirely too much time sharing good stuff with their subscribers <g>. I got started by checking out who was following them, and selecting a few people to follow.

For me, SB works, where FriendFeed and Twitter didn’t.

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By Walter Feigenson – September 7, 2008

More on Zoho

After last night’s post, I wrote to the support group at Zoho about a problem running the spelling checker with Chrome, and a second support question about using Zoho Writer to post directly to my blog.

Good people and good companies should be rewarded. So tonight’s post is about the wonderful support at Zoho. Both my questions were answered promptly and fully – and intelligently. What a blast! Try doing that with Microsoft or Google.

This is the second time I’ve had to email Zoho, and I had a good experience both times. And this is free software. Microsoft software prices are outrageous, and you still can’t get support. Want to tell them how they could do something better? Fuggedaboutit. In contrast, here’s part of the Zoho reply to my last post (they actually took the time to come to my blog and read what I wrote – I’m sure Steve Ballmer is also a regular reader here…).

Hi Walt,

Thanks for your excellent review on Zoho!

Much appreciated!

We will be addressing your feature requests – auto-correct, numbering etc for Zoho Writer one by one in our next series of updates. Stay tuned!

Best Regards,

Ahmed

I don’t know about you, but I like doing business with people who want to do business with me. Part of that is caring about problems I have, and a genuine desire to listen to suggestions so they can make their product better. When is the last time you felt that way about your software vendors?

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By Walter Feigenson – September 7, 2008

Zoho Cloud Products

 
Zoho is a very interesting company that I’ve been following for a while – interesting on many different levels. If you haven’t looked at what they offer, you really should.

Some basic business facts

  1. The company is staffed almost entirely in India, with a very small presence in Pleasanton, CA.
  2. The founder of the company, Sridhar Vembu, had a theory that he could hire around the common practices in India, and go directly to high schools for his talent. Apparently, he was right.
  3. Zoho employs hundreds of staff members in India, and yet they still have a relatively small presence in the US.

So what do the Zoho apps do?

Wow. The age of what we once called productivity software has come and gone. I worked on some of the first software packages before many startup entrepreneurs were born! WordStar, SuperCalc, MultiMate, dBASE – all gone now, but products that were once #1 or #2 in their class when there was real competition (i.e. before Windows and the Microsoft juggernaut).
 
Then along came Zoho to upset this entire marketplace. They make online productivity software – word processing, spreadsheet, presentation software, database, and more – at last count, 18 different applications. I’ve been using Zoho CRM for a few months, and I love it (I came to it from SugarCRM, and then vTiger).
 
 
OK, it’s one thing to put together all this great stuff, but surely it can’t compete with Microsoft Office products. And Google has been trying to steal this marketplace from Microsoft. Anybody remember “thin computers”? Remember how hard Larry Ellison (Oracle) tried to push this concept?
 
How about Netscape, one of only two products I’ve ever seen that were overnight successes. The Netscape crew announced a desktop from which you could run applications – in my opinion, this was the proximate cause of their death, because Microsoft immediately recognized this as the threat it was to Office and Windows, and promptly stomped Netscape. I was there, I worked with Netscape, and I heard Mike Homer announce this to Netscape’s partners (1996?).
 
So everyone but Google has failed in this quest, and frankly, Google’s effort is on life support.
 
So why do I get so excited about Zoho? Because these applications are really good. I’ve used a few of them, and while I wouldn’t trade Office for them (yet), I do think about making the change. I also tried Google’s apps, early on, but didn’t like them. In fairness to Zoho, I am a very intense Office user – I’m one of those people who use more than a few of its features. As I type this blog entry in Zoho Writer, I miss the auto-correct in Word. I miss the auto numbering (or bulleting) where I can type “1.” and some text, and it becomes a numbered listing. And I’d much, much prefer to type “i like this” than “I like this.” 
 
There’s stuff missing, to be sure, but Zoho doesn’t move at the glacial pace Microsoft does. They’ve put up 18 applications in just a few years. Microsoft “upgrades” office every 3-4 years so they can keep revenue flowing. And it remains to be seen how Zoho handles this, but it’s clear to me that Microsoft management has gotten so out of touch with their customers that for every good thing they do (many), they do 2 bad things in each release. Oh, and some bugs I’ve been fighting with for 10 years (literally) are still there. Let’s hope that Zoho will be more responsive.

Other benefits

I don’t believe that cloud computing per se makes sense. I think that cloud storage makes sense. I’ve always thought that thin clients were dumb, except for very small, relatively powerless devices. We’ve seen this repeated through the years: people tend to buy the most powerful computer they can, given the form factor. Stripped down desktops still have so much power that putting the processing in the cloud is silly. And although I’m just looking at this from the outside, I’m pretty sure that most of these applications do precisely what I said – Zoho Writer is downloaded to the browser where it’s executed, and the “glue” is on the server – tying all applications together, saving data, managing files, permissions, etc.
 
When your files are on the Internet, you can access them from anywhere. And we would hope that Zoho is doing your backups for you so you’ll never lose data (but you’d be dumb to assume this, or even trust it if you know it to be true). Zoho’s thoughtful implementation can even allow you to collaborate on your docs, so others you invite and/or allow can view or edit all or portions of your documents. This is very important for teams, and although very few people actually use this kind of collaborative power today, everybody will eventually.
 
Finally, I’d like to give kudos to Zoho. I’m so happy to see somebody providing this kind of software. While I don’t think Microsoft is evil, it’s clear that they are subject to the same temptations as everyone else, and that competition will benefit us all. Back when I competed with Lotus 1-2-3, the pace of spreadsheet advances was incredible (we tried for a major update every nine months!). The good features of SuperCalc inevitably showed up in the next release of 1-2-3, and vice versa. It was good for everyone, and frankly, in this pre-litigious era, we were happy to share, because it was good for the end users.
 
So thank you, Sridhar and crew. Job well done, and appreciated.

Postscript

I thought I’d list some of the features I’d need to really consider switching from Word. This is highly subjective, of course:
  1. Auto correct – my typing has degraded over the years, and Word has made this worse, and frankly, I need the help. Auto-correct simple spelling errors, transpositions, etc.
  2. Format painter – that little paint brush in Word – can’t live without it.
  3. Auto numbering and bulleting.
  4. More to come, but I do have a real request – please make a utility to take emails and format them as a proper document (cut, paste, and format). I’ve wasted so much time over the years doing this, since most emails, when cut and pasted, have hard returns at the end of each line (so they don’t word wrap).

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By Walter Feigenson – September 6, 2008

Printers, printers, printers

I wrote recently about the mis-wired HP plotter cable that help me gain major insights into marketing. But I just remembered another funny story.

HP’s first ink-jet printer was called the ThinkJet. It was radical for its day; really small, just a little larger than about 2 full-size books stacked together. Alas, my prototype didn’t work that well, but it sure was the harbinger of things to come.

The prototype I was testing was housed in a wooden box! But after the clunking printers I was used to, the ThinkJet was great. I remember dragging people into my office to listen to how quiet it was (that’s an odd way of saying that you could barely hear it).

The printer is described here on the HP Virtual Museum site. Wow, check out the specs: they claim 150 characters per second (I don’t remember it being that fast, but who knows?). And the resolution was a whopping 96 x 96 dots per inch – about what you now get on a monitor. Oh, and the ink clogged the nozzles with alarming frequency.

But it sure beat the first laser printer I used. That was a giant Xerox 9700, which was almost as big as a car – but considerably more expensive!

Picture is from the Digibarn site.

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By Walter Feigenson – September 1, 2008

A search engine you should try

Hakia.com – just read about it today on ZDNet. This site is worth a look!

They claim to be a semantic search site – I’m a little leery about semantic claims, which I’ve been listening to for about 20 years. But let’s not get into that…

From what I can see, they have created a sophisticated form of directory, like DMOZ, but much nicer – in addition to the normal search. If you look up “wine” or “recipe,” you’ll see what I mean. For this kind of “known” search, hakia brings back a tabbed result page – they call it a gallery. For example, “wine” yields:

  • Profile on wine
  • Wine varieties
  • Ratings and reviews
  • and more

Here’s something I really liked: I was looking for a recipe for acorn squash. Hakia really liked that search string: Great question. Wow, I never had a search engine compliment me before!

There’s much more here. It’s interesting to contrast this site with cuil.com, which was absolutely awful on launch, and will probably die as a result of severe over-hype and under-delivery. From the few minutes I’ve spent on the site, I can see this as a great search tool for the average user. It remains to be seen how good it is for deeper or more arcane searches. And I still use the USENET search on Google, so they’ve got me at least part time.

I participated in a short discussion on socialbrowse.com today about a blogger who said he found Yahoo to be better on some searches. This has also been my observation. Too many people have tricked Google – there are just too many intermediate search sites and patent sites, and other garbage that come back. This has gotten steadily worse over the years.

So, the discussion ended up with a comment about Google’s dominance, and how hard it will be to change the “verb” Google. Hooey. If something definitively better than Google comes around, how long will it take you to switch? Anybody here still use VisiCalc?

Now, if I can only remember their name…

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By Walter Feigenson – August 18, 2008

Manage your online presence

Think you’re anonymous on the Internet? Are you careful to never leave any traces of yourself anywhere?

Check it out. Google yourself (“first last” using quotes). See if you’re there. Then go to www.pipl.com and try the search again. Even if you’ve never been on the Internet before, there’s a frightening amount of data available to virtually everyone – things like these:

  • Your address, phone number, and possibly your property tax information
  • A history of the places you’ve lived
  • Tax liens
  • Bankruptcies
  • Small Claims judgments
  • Criminal records
  • Marriage and divorce records
  • Your Amazon wish list!

Public records are, it seems public…

So what does this mean to you? What should you do? Can you mold your online presence, and what will that do for you?

You need to get used to the idea that you are not anonymous. Ain’t gonna happen in the US (European laws are very different). So, now that you’ve accepted this idea – even if it makes you uncomfortable – here are some things you can do to make your Internet presence work for you.

  1. Work with the sources of information that search engines and “people finders” use. Go to sites like www.ZoomInfo.com and claim your identity. Then provide as much information about yourself as you feel comfortable doing. As you take this journey, you will find that there are many other sites where you can register. Don’t waste your time trying to get yourself removed from these databases – it’s generally impossible. Notable exception: you can ask Google to remove your address and phone number when somebody searches for your name. (Did you know you can look this information up by just doing a Google search like: Chris Doe, Anytown, Anystate? Unless your phone number is unlisted, this search will return your address and phone number.)
  2. Force your name to the top of the Google (or Yahoo, or Live Search). If you follow the suggestions in this article, that will happen automatically.
  3. Join social networking sites like www.LinkedIn.com – and be sure to complete your profile there, because you want people to find you for the right things. LinkedIn results always show up on your Google searches, unless you make them private.
  4. Use online branding sites (www.Ziggs.com, www.Ziki.com). Ziggs and Ziki have an added benefit: for a small monthly fee, you can have them place paid search results on the major search engines (it’s way less money than you’d pay for AdWords). This is a great thing to do if your name is common. Even if you don’t score well on the organic search, you can be right at the top of the paid search listings. Check out the results for my name: “Walter Feigenson”. On Google, look at the
    results on the right side of the screen.
  5. Claim and manage your identity at reputation management sites (www.Naymz.com, www.RapLeaf.com). The goal of these sites is to verify your claim that you are actually who you claim to be.
  6. Build a website. Doesn’t have to be complicated or have very much on it. I built mine with wix.com. Their technology is designed to make you look like a web development professional, and it’s free. Look at my website: www.feigenson.us.
  7. Write articles. Like this one – they will get indexed by the search engines and they’ll show up  when somebody Googles your name. If your article appears on several sites, link to them all on our home page – that will increase your Google rank. There are man yplaces you can post articles, including:
    1. Your own blog
    2. Any relevant blog to which you can contribute (guest articles are often welcome)
    3. Your own website
    4. Base.google.com
  8. Blog. Blogs have become the de facto source of information on the Internet. There are blogs on almost every conceivable subject. Search for them on Google or www.Technorati.com. But before you start spouting your wisdom, spend some time listening! I don’t recommend running your own blog unless you think you will have the discipline (and time) to update it frequently. There are lots of blogs with great entries for the first month or two, which are empty after that.
  9. Work with the press. Press articles (and press releases) have a very long life. They are often picked up by many sites (especially releases). The more sites your name is on, the higher the good stuff will be on a search of your name. (And while you’re at it, try to get quoted on .gov sites – Google really likes them.) If you’re in a business or a local organization, you too can do press releases, and there are even free press release sites you can use.
  10. Update everything frequently. Google cares about the freshness of sites. So update your LinkedIn profile, change your personal website – make sensible changes wherever you can at least once a month.

So how much time does all this take, and what does it get you?

Setup can be time-consuming. Probably the hardest thing is creating your own website, but if you use the phenomenal power of a site like www.wix.com, you’ll find the process isn’t that much more difficult than writing a document. Be careful about managing your presence on the major sites like LinkedIn; you have to assume that everything you put on the Internet will always be available, even if you remove it. So think before you act.

Once everything is set up, maintenance is easy – just go to the sites and do periodic updates, if you want. Be sure to update as you change jobs or locations. And contrary to what I said earlier, there are ways to make your phone number and email anonymous. Check out www.jaxter.com for some neat tools that let you include a neat “Call Me” icon on your website or in your email. When somebody clicks on the icon, you’ll get a call on your cell phone, but the caller will never know your phone number unless you give it to them. (You have to pay for this service, but it’s not very expensive.)

And here’s the bottom line: whatever your motivation for managing the way you present yourself in the public world, you will help to achieve your objectives with these easy steps. For example:

  • Job seekers – make sure to get found by people doing the hiring
  • People who want to advance their careers – same thing: get found for the right things! Claim your due for subject matter expertise.
  • Genealogy lovers – make it easy to find and be found by your family members.
  • Networkers – after you meet somebody, the natural thing for them to do is look you up in Google. Make that event work for you!
  • People who want to connect with old friends – you’re probably already on www.ClassMates.com, but you should expand your presence – it’s what you’d want your friends to do so you can find them…

Copyright (c) 2008 Walter Feigenson

I’ve also posted this article article on Google Base.

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By Walter Feigenson – August 17, 2008

Don’t believe everything you hear

Back in 1983, VisiCalc was unceremoniously defeated by Lotus 1-2-3 in about 15 minutes. There were many reasons for this. To be sure, VisiCalc was a seminal product (and so was 1-2-3), but development had been slow for a while, and the users VisiCalc had enabled needed much more power.

As Product Manager of SuperCalc, it was my job to keep abreast of market trends. It was clear that 1-2-3’s early success was driven by users with jobs in finance. They needed larger spreadsheets (VisiCalc’s spreadsheet was tiny), and they needed financial functions. Oh, and everyone said these finance types really needed graphics.

VisiCalc and SuperCalc were missing these capabilities. Adding them to SC didn’t look like it would be too difficult – well let me correct that: making a bigger spreadsheet wasn’t too bad now that the IBM PC could have lots of memory (not by today’s standards!). Internal Rate of Return (IRR) was more difficult, and in part it led to us adding iterative calculations.

Graphics – well that was an entirely different story. We simply couldn’t believe all the hoopla about 1-2-3’s graphics, because they were really primitive. I called their pie chart a lemon chart because it was oblong. And the user had to effectively run a separate program to produce graphics, which involved swapping floppy disks.

At Sorcim, we had been working on SuperChart for a while, and we decided to kill that as a separate project and use its graphics engine in SuperCalc. That wasn’t easy, since SC was written in a non-relocatable assembler and the graphics package was written in C. Martin Herbach came to our rescue again – he figured out a way to load the C program into the assembler space, which everyone thought was impossible. And our graphics were really beautiful (and didn’t require a disk swap). In fact, in one major competition, we came in third among all dedicated graphics programs.

While we were working on this project, one of the developers came to me and said there was something wrong with the cable HP supplied with their new low-cost pen plotter (HP7475?). Just for background, laser printers didn’t yet exist for PCs, and HP had just introduced its first ink jet, the ThinkJet, which did low-resolution character printing at a startling 30 characters per second. You either did graphics on a pen plotter or you used a daisy wheel printer (anybody remember them?) and printed a gazillion periods, moving the print head a little each time. We wore out a lot of print heads testing that…

It turned out the cable HP sold would only work in BASIC – if you booted your computer into MS-DOS, you simply couldn’t print to the plotter. He showed me how the cable should have been wired, and I contacted the product manager for the pen plotter and sent a cabling diagram. His response was “I wondered why we were getting all those support calls.”

The common belief was that you just had to support graphics if you wanted to sell a spreadsheet. But we knew the nasty little secret: all those finance types weren’t printing those graphs, and they probably weren’t even using them.

What’s the moral of the story? “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

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By Walter Feigenson – August 15, 2008

Cut and Paste

I started my professional career before we all had computers. “Back in the day” there were people called secretaries, and they were the only people authorized to commit content to paper. In some companies, that content could actually be done on prehistoric word processors, such as Videk.

Before micros, some of us accessed mainframes or timesharing machines using terminals. We would do “serious” stuff on these terminals, not secretarial tasks like writing letters or memos. But there were some text processors available. I used something called Script, which was from the University of Waterloo. Funny thing is that Script used commands that weren’t too different from HTML…

Getting back to cut and paste: I wrote some documentation when I was at Coopers & Lybrand. I used Script, which I had learned while in grad school. One day, the partner I worked for found out I was actually doing this document myself, and he threatened to fire me on the spot if I didn’t stop. I protested: “I need to cut and paste – move sections around until the document is right…”

“That’s what secretaries are for” he replied. To him, cut and paste meant just that: cut the replacement section out with scissors, and paste it where goes with glue.

I found out a few months ago that young people don’t know the origins of this phrase. When I recounted this story to a 20-something employee, he was dumbstruck.

Ah, how the world has changed.

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By Walter Feigenson – August 15, 2008

How spreadsheets came to have iterative calculations

Visicalc-vs-Supercalc PC Mag Cover

Visicalc-vs-Supercalc PC Mag Cover

I was the Product Manager for SuperCalc, which was (probably) the second spreadsheet (VisiCalc was the first). SuperCalc was commissioned by Adam Osborn for his first computer and because the Osborn was a CP/M computer, SuperCalc would run on any CP/M computer (and about 120 different monitors).

SuperCalc was designed for tremendous arithmetic precision, which seemed like the right thing to do at the time (those accountant-types were pretty picky). So, SC was written with a binary coded decimal (BCD) math package.

A couple of years later, some upstart we all came to know as Mitch Kapor decided that he could vastly increase the speed of his nascent spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3. He chose to use a binary math package. Since VisiCalc was now the #3 spreadsheet – within about a month of shipping, 1-2-3 was #1, and SC stayed #2 – Mitch’s decision caused us some serious discomfort back at the Sorcim ranch.

So we set out to make SuperCalc3, with all the bells and whistles that 1-2-3 had. We knew we had to replace our math package, but we had some interesting surprises along the way.

When our crazy Russian programmer finished the new math package, and we installed it, we found that some IF statements no longer resolved to their previous TRUE or FALSE states. (This was back when developers still tested software.) We quickly realized that the inherent rounding of BCD vs Binary math was causing the problems.

Martin Herbach, our resident genius and the primary develper of SC, came up with two solutions: a) fuzzy calculations for IF statements (patterned after my thinking, no doubt), and b) iterative calculations. It turned out that some spreadsheets would calculate properly if you just calculated everything more than once.

This gave SC an interesting edge over 1-2-3. Consider this simple model:

Sales                  $100
Cost of Sales      60% of sales
Gross Profit        Sales – Cost of Sales
Profit Sharing     10% of net profits
Net Profit            Gross Profit – Profit Sharing

Now, before anybody reports me to the SEC, FASB, AICPA, or the CIA, I know that this is a bogus financial model – but it made a great demo. If you did this calculation in 1-2-3, you’d get Profit Sharing of zero. But if you did the same calculation in SC, you’d get Profit Sharing of almost 4% of sales.

Whenever I could do this demo, I sold SC over 1-2-3. Everyone wanted their Profit Sharing calculated on SuperCalc.

Even though this example is a little far-fetched, iterative calculations can be very useful when you have formulas that don’t converge mathematically. I created an iterative goal seeking spreadsheet we included with SC for years that usually worked. Dozens of people worked on that model until they figured out how to make it work every time.

But hey, I’m just a marketeer. I’m no damn programmer.

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By Walter Feigenson – August 14, 2008