Yahoo! Purchases del.icio.us

Internet

The ever popular social bookingmarking site del.icio.us has been purchased by Yahoo!.

Del.icio.us allows its users to create bookmarks, however since it is web based, they follow you everywhere. That in itself isn’t what makes del.icio.us powerful though, it’s the community driven aspect of it. People bookmark a site because it is useful to them in some way, so in short del.icio.us is providing a huge shortlist of excellent bookmarks cultivated by other internet users.

The site also allows its users to categorise their bookmarks and tag them. A tag is generally a very specific category, so while you might categorise something as programming – you might tag it as JavaScript, XML, CSS, and AJAX. The user specifies the categories and tags, so they are naturally grown – not specified by the del.icio.us team. As such, the categories and tags should make more sense to more people, as its the community that is powering the growth of the categories and tags. The more people link to a particular resource in their bookmark list, it increases the popularity of that link – in essence making it important in that group or collection of tags.

The acquisition of del.icio.us is the second such purchase for Yahoo! this year, after acquiring Flickr toward the end of March 2005. Flickr is a social image sharing website, where they allow their users to categorise and tag photos. Clearly Yahoo! can see an incredible market in the community or has a use for the tagging type nature of these sites as they supposedly paid between US$30-40 million for each of them.

Congratulations to the founders of both of these sites, it just goes to show what a good idea and some leg work can get for you.

Queensland Department Of Transport

General

In the first half of the year, I had the pleasure of visiting a Queensland Department Of Transport office. I turned up in my lunch break, with the expectation that I’d be in and out in a jiffy. What I was confronted with was an automatic ticketing system which seemed to be at a stand still and an ever growing number of people. The swift expectation was shot down when 20, 40, 60 and 80 minute markers lapsed while waiting to get served.

With the previous experience under my belt, I arrived at the Department Of Transport on Friday morning at about 7.40am. As expected, the office wasn’t open yet and it didn’t open until about 8.30am. What I couldn’t believe was that there was someone there before me! In the next hour, another fifteen people turned up to get in the door when it opened. Once the doors opened, the stream of people was unrelenting and by about 8.45am, there would have been close to 50 people waiting to get served.

When waiting for the office to open, I chatted to a man who works near by. He informed me that it was normal to have lines of people at that hour and that it got worst. Apparently in the 9am to 10am window, there are close to 100 people waiting in their office. To help with processing, there were two people in the public area of the office, trying to shuffle fast service queries through. The last time I was there, it was very busy but this was unbelievable. I wonder what it must be like in the lunch hour period now?

I think this experience has become common in many service industries. Companies and employers are trying to decrease costs but at the same time, they are frustrating their customers. You can turn up to nearly any bank, any time of the day to find the same scenario – 15 tellers and only 3 of them are active. Meanwhile, the queues continue to grow and customers become more and more frustrated.

It surprises me that more companies aren’t turning to technology to ease the pressure. A vast portion of queries that people go to an office can be done online or voice prompted over the phone. To me, it’s about working smart, putting resources where you get the best return. Having a good quality, clear and functional website would reduce load on these offices by significant percentages. A normal website can service hundreds, even thousands of requests per second – no matter what sized offices you had, it’d be impossible to match those figures. The numbers are compelling, so what’s stopping them?

Instant Messaging

Internet, Software

The other day, I saw a comment somewhere stating “instant messaging is the devil”. That got me thinking about how I use instant messaging and what it’s good and bad for. What follows is a short list of the key features I think are good and bad:

The Good

  • The instant nature of it
  • Cheaper than making STD phone calls
  • Convenient
 The Bad

  • The instant nature of it
  • Impersonal
  • Convenient

What is interesting to me, is that two points show up as both a good and a bad feature.

Instant Delivery

The instant nature of instant messaging is amazing, as soon as you click send – its delivered. There is no lag or delay of any significance and you can undertake an instant message conversation at great pace; it really makes email seem slow and antiquated by comparison. When using my computer, I tend to leave things open. So, in the case of an instant message client – I sign in first thing in the morning and I sign out when I go home. The problem is, people can contact you at all times and the nature of the instant message demands your immediate attention. When at work, this can be a distraction for obvious reasons but more importantly, it leads to breaking concentration.

Convenient

Instant messaging is convenient, amazingly convenient. If you work with a computer regularly, you can no doubt type at a good pace. At which point, having the ability to instant message someone and hopefully get an immediate response is excellent. The problem, which is related to the instant nature as well, is that often you end up spending more time using it than you need to. You ask someone a direct question, you get an answer and what often follows is another minute or more of quick messages. The time adds up very quickly until your work time is just slipping away from you.

The Real World

At work, it was decided we shouldn’t be using instant messaging or IRC. I initially thought it was a poor decision, as we often gather a lot of fast response, good quality information through it. For instance, the fantastic support in the #postgresql channel on irc.freenode.net is invaluable at times, so is being able to contact other developers. However at work, you end up being messaged by non-work related contacts – which leads to spending a minute or two talking about something. Across the course of a day or week, all the minutes soon add up and you’re losing hours.

At home, I find it nearly impossible to get any work done when I’m signed in. You’re contact list assumes, since you’re signed in you must be available to chat. The same thing happens, a little chat here and a little chat there – soon enough you’re work hours are running out and your work isn’t getting done.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve found my use of instant messaging has been slowly declining, until now I often don’t sign in at work at all. It isn’t because work colleagues take up too much time, its the distraction and cumulative minutes here and there. A nice solution would involve grouping your contacts (like you can in MSN) and then allow a group to see you during the day. Using a mechanism like that, you’d at least be limiting your distraction to work related contacts – whom generally contact you about work related things.

When I’m using my computer, it is mostly about getting things done. I am fast building the view that free for all instant messaging isn’t conducive to that outcome at all. A similar opinion is close to being drawn about having your mail client open and auto-receiving mail for you; though the final judgment on that is still undecided.

Australian Idol Winner: Kate DeAraugo Vs Emily Williams

General

A new article about Australian Idol 2006 finalists Damien Leith & Jessica Mauboy is now available.

Tonight saw the culmination of the third Australian Idol. For the last three months, contestants have been battling and belting out their biggest and brightest notes, in an attempt progress through the aggressive selection progress to make it to the grand final at the Sydney Opera House. What happened tonight, is sure to have gob smacked a vast portion of the Australian public. In some strange twist, Kate DeAraugo managed to out vote Emily Williams to win the grand final.

Kate’s performance throughout Australian Idol has been quite good, however compared to other singers – her overall package and skills were lacking. She has progressed through the weeks, by giving good performances and relying on other singers delivering an ok performance. As the competition crept towards the business end, her weaknesses were starting to show. Week after week, Mark would criticise her for not letting go of her voice, not connecting with the music, not transcending. Yet through all the criticism, the public continued to vote for her.

In stark contrast, Emily Williams has been delivering high grade performances week after week. She has received the ultimate ‘good job’ stamp (read: Touchdown!) from Mark no less than three times in the last few weeks. They suggest that she do something, next week she comes out and delivers it bigger and better than they could have imagined. Kyle went as far to say, that he hasn’t heard someone sing Whitney Huston, that isn’t Whitney Huston and make it worth listening too – yet he gives complements like that to Emily.

I have to believe that Kate DeAraugo has won Australian Idol, not through her ability to sing, nor her ability to perform – but in her Barbie Doll like appearance. No sane person could honestly believe that Kate was a superior singer to Emily, yet Kate stands in utter disbelief that she has won. The organisers of Australian Idol, need to some how factor in who is voting – not just the raw number of votes. Assigning the same importance to a 12 year olds vote as to an adults isn’t fair to the performers, they are just being cheated.

One can only hope that Emily Williams soars to the top, just like her amazing voice.

Google Analytics Released

Internet, Software

In March, Google agreed it would aquire the California based web analytics company Urchin. Urchin have been in the web statistics business since 1995 and are an established player claiming statistics that over 20% of Fortune 500 companies use their package.

Since finalising the deal on the 3rd of March, the Google developers have been hard at work. That work is now available to the general public in the form of Google Analytics. Google Analytics works by embedding a small piece of JavaScript into each page of your site and when a page is viewed, it is reported back to their central server. This is akin to how Google tracks conversion and clicks through AdSense.

Using JavaScript and/or cookies to track statistics isn’t a new thing, its been done before. What I think is different this time, is the scale its being executed on. Traditionally, client side tracking systems provided very limited information about your site. Now that Google have the ability to parse your traffic logs through a server side application like Urchin, the rules and boundaries of client side tracking are changing. Some of the key features Google list include:

  • Keyword Campaign Comparison
  • Executive Summaries
  • AdWords Integration
  • Trend Reporting
  • E-Commerce
  • Funnel Visualization
  • Site Overlay
  • Advanced Visitor Segmentation
  • GeoTargeting
  • Analysis Options

The majority of those features are available in server side log analysis applications. The two features that I think are note worthy, are keyword campaign comparisons and integration with Google AdWords. You can now advertise on Google through AdWords and see the effect that it is having on your site, without having to filter through volumes of information. Don’t think it is limited to tracking Google advertising systems though -you can track (but not necessarily integrate) all other advertising systems as well. The other point of interest with Google Analytics is that since it is client side, you are tracking real people on your site. The single biggest problem with server side packages is that there is no accurate way of filtering out non-human hits (ie, from the Google Bot). The issue of course, is that you are getting false positives which could ultimately change your decision making process in your site design or structure.

Google Analytics is a free service to the public allowing up to 5 million page views per month per account. If you have an active AdWords account, it is provided without the page view limitation. What isn’t outlined on the terms of service is if there is a cost after 5 million page views per account per month, when you don’t have an active AdWords account. If there is, there aren’t going to be a lot of people that take that level of traffic that don’t already have their own statistical package in use.

With the massive audience that Google has and what is on offer with this new product, I would expect there to be a massive update of Google Analytics in the future.