Goodbye Geocities, cu l8tr

Sorry To See You Go, Free Personal Website

All good free things come to an end, and Geocities (part of whatever the hell Yahoo360 was supposed to be) is next on the list. I've had my Geocities site up since 1998 or so. It first held my first website ever, all about my wedding, and had tons of great pictures of guests wearing funny hats.

I used it to learn the basics of HTML and creating beveled, multi-state buttons in Photoshop, as much an exercise in fun and learning as it was about making my wedding viewable by all (can you remember when Flickr and the Kodak Gallery didn't exist?).

Next, I created an 'about me' site and learned advanced table syntax and even some Javascript. That pushed the boundaries of my scripting ability and reconfirmed that I was meant to market and find value in technology, not create technology. How can developers remember where everything is? Anyway, my personal profile site has been up for 9 years or so I think. Not sure what to do now, but I think I'll just copy my bio and published articles into a new blog post, take a few screenshots, and have a sorry and mournful goodbye.

What's Worse than Yahoo360? Well, the new Yahoo Profiles.
But, before I get the tissues, I wanted to heckle (scold?) Yahoo! for what could have been a great transition to get everyone to their 'new' preferred platform. They've failed miserably! Why would anyone commit to a platform that sucks all the way back to 2002?

This is is the hilarity, directly from their blog:

First you shut down Mash, now you shut down 360—why should I give profiles a shot?
We understand you might have doubts—in the past few years, you’ve seen a couple of social sites come and go, and it means a lot to us that you’ve stuck around while we’ve tweaked each experience. Know that we’re committed to having a universal profile across Yahoo!, and we’re committed to working with you to improve and evolve this profile to make sure it’s what YOU want to use. That doesn’t mean we can implement every piece of feedback you provide, but it does mean we’re listening, and we are going to do our best to make sure your interests are incorporated into future releases and versions of your profile.

What about customization and photos? On 360 I can change the look and feel and upload multiple photos—can I do this with profiles?
At this time, your new profile does not have all the features and functionality of your 360 profile. However, we are looking at incorporating new ways of expressing yourself through your profile.

In regards to uploading multiple photos, your profile on Yahoo! allows for only one primary photo for now. This is also something we’re looking at improving/expanding based on your feedback.

OK, you don't have nearly the same featureset, you can't upload multiple pictures, but we're working on it? You can do better than this, Melissa Daniels (and you NEED to do a lot better than this Carol Bartz)



So, after July 13, this blog is the new official freestylin' home of Tom Kuhr...until Google decides blogging shouldn't be free either...

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Good Feedback is a Product Managers Best Friend - UserVoice

I ran across a company called UserVoice today and it looks like they've got their act together. I don't know how long they've been in testing / beta but have done a great job with making their website clear and their customer validations prominent. Apart from website envy, the concept of the company is great and I hope they're able to monetize it and stay in business.

UserVoice makes it easy for companies to collect user feedback in an organized, social way. How many times have you received the same feature request over weeks or months, only to lose it in the feature prioritization shuffle?


UserVoice lets users discuss features and bugs but submit their own, and rate (vote for) features that others have suggested. It's leveraging the power of the crowd to do feature prioritization for the product. Of course, this is still customer feedback and needs to be evaluated alongside product portfolio and market strategy, but its certainly much better than anything else I've seen.

UserVoice started off selling its service to start-ups but has expanded to big clients such as Intuit Inc., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Facebook Inc., Nokia Corp., Nielsen Co., Genetech Inc., Blackbaud Inc. and University of Wisconsin. - WSJ Online

Generally the "developer tools" market isn't sexy or that profitable unless you're catering to large companies, but this seems targeted to organized marketing and products groups rather than small startup software development groups where the technology is the innovation. This is funded by the ubiquitous Dave McClure and the Founders Fund, who see this problem all the time from the boardroom - what do customers really want and how can we really be sure? Credible, first hand data would certainly help VC's call BS on those CEOs hiding behind the curtain of personal bias.

I'll use UserVoice on my next web project and see how we get on.

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Text Search v. Structured Search - The Difference Between Facebook and MySpace?

Talking through the current success of Facebook and the defection of users from MySpace, it occurred to me that the way users search on both sites has a lot to do with the changing of the guard. So here's a functionality view rather than a strategy view.

Facebook's structured search, with the ability to find different types of pages based on
1) auto-complete
2) form-field searching is designed to find and identify specific people
3) search results grouped by content type

When you type a name of a friend or a Page, you get an 'auto-complete' which gives you a list to choose from of all your relationships. This is a very structured search, pulling real (and guaranteed) results from the database. Having a real ID in Facebook helps this immensely - first, last and location are required, where on MySpace your real name is quite optional. Structured text search and structured results allows you to search for specific information in specific fields, and see the results in content-groups. Friends, Apps, Pages, Networks are all groupings of results by content type. So if you're looking for a Bob Marley Group, you don't have to look through Apps or Profiles to find it.

MySpace was designed to connect people with bands, and enable people to meet online and new friends. The Search function, for better or worse, leverages Google's free-text search to find people based on name, phone number or alias. I'm not sure the choice of Google was thought out from a product perspective, but it was definitely driven by a 3 year Google ad revenue deal.
Using Google's free-text searching finds results based on an entire page of text, so the search picks up main profile info and URL keywords, but also friends' names on the profile, comments, descriptions, etc. This leaves the user with a large, unstructured list of potential matches, which has to be picked through. There's no way to say "the name field is the most important." All results are weighted using Google weighting parameters - inbound links and keyword relevance, the same stuff that's tweaked in search engine optimization. For example, my name might be Tom Kuhr but if if my hero is James Bond and I write about James Bond all over my profile. When a user searches for James Bond - presumably intending to find a friend of that name - my profile will show up much higher in results than James Bonds just because of this keyword repetition, even though that's not the searcher's intent.

There is a Browse function on MySpace, which enables a structured search based on profile parameters, but you can't look for a specific person this way - it only allows browsing on attributes.

Finding a friend becomes immensely easier and faster on Facebook. When I sign up as a new user, I'm able to quickly identify friends and build my lists. On MySpace, I can hunt around in Search, but the experience is challenging and slow and I need to page through results, constantly refine my search, and my network grows much less quickly. I think the use of Google for search on MySpace has contributed to the company's inability to maintain the leadership position as a social network, and is further driving its move to become an "interactive" entertainment company rather than a network.

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Don't be Dogmative - Be a Great Listener

I've identified a characteristic of managers that has been discussed many times before, but I don't know if it has a name so I'll just make one up: dogmative. A dogmative person that only cares about their black and white view of the world, their dogma. (As an aside, it sure is hard to come up with a good domain name nowadays!).

You know these people. It could be the CEO, a product manager, the VP of marketing or director of engineering. A dogmative person forms opinions very quickly and does not want to discuss, debate or understand different viewpoints. However, they're not confrontational about it. In fact, unless you think about it, you might not even notice that they're so set in their thinking, because they are always asking others what they think!

This ingenious strategy (I think most do it without thinking about it this way, so its more of a personality trait than a strategy) let's them seem like the best team players. They form an opinion, and go around and ask everyone what they think. Rather than looking for consensus or new ideas, they are only looking for someone to validate them. They will hunt far and wide for one other person who agrees, and they'll use that validation to continue to perpetuate their own thinking. It's certainly easy in a company surrounded by Yes Men, but should be a lot harder to get away with it a meritocracy like an early stage tech company. I still see it more that I'd like.

I worked with a CEO once who is the very definition of dogmative. He has no real basis for UI design or functional requirements, and could barely read a spec. But, he wanted to be involved in just about every UI, navigation and screen design. He would pay consultants, contractors, and design firms to come in and do (expensive) work. Experts in their field. But, when they differed in opinion, he'd find a new one. We churned through contractors and burned through money. Smlarly, he listened to new employees for a week, maybe two, and after that started ignoring their input, as if they didn't actually have the expertise they were hired for. Like they just lost it somewhere. It was a very frustrating and pointless work environment, devoid of any delegation. Every decision rested with the CEO; morale was horrible; the company burned through about 3x the money it should have. Most dogmative managers aren't this bad, but in the extreme, this behavior is poisonous like a hemlock shake.

In product management, dogmative behavior wastes time and leads to products that don't solve problems. Thinking that you know what an end user is going to think or want without asking them is a huge mistake. No matter how much you talk to users, the very moment you stepped into a role as a product manager, you separated yourself from a real user. Be humble. Don't pretend you know the answers. Don't let your ego get in the way of gleanng customer insight by listening to real customers.

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