Lessons learned riding the wave

February 3, 2011

This post was originally published @ TechMap

2010 marked the year I felt out of love with Google. I mean… I still love Google, but I’m no longer in love with it. I’ve started seeing other companies.

Google has changed. It is impossible for a company as big as the big G to maintain a “do no evil” policy when evil is subjective. If you grow as much as Google grew then you are bound to rub people the wrong way even if other people think it’s the right way. And last year some things by Google I did not find 100% evil free.

But that is not why I’ve kicked them off the pedestal.

Google produced some serious product flops last year; maybe also as a natural consequence of growth. It’s not always easy to keep the highest standards. Sure, it had produced some crappy stuff before: Google X, Jaiku, Web Accelerator, etc. but these last few crashes were resounding and occurred in products that I believe were aligned with their strategy for the year.

As an obvious for instance Google Buzz. Seriously? That was your best attempt at kicking Twitter and FB in the groin? A poor looking, security fissured, opt in required crap-o-rama with some sharing capabilities?

Another not so obvious seriously bad thing is the Open Social Standard (although it has been around for quite a few years now). Not only Facebook’s single handed defeat of all other social networks put together is the reason this flopped. I fail to see how this might be called a standard when you need to write custom code for every single platform you want to deploy your app into.

But to me, the most resounding one was Google Wave. What happened there? The techiest of my tech friends and acquaintances all say it was by technology standards groundbreaking, a great idea. Tech and idea were cool, what went wrong?

Lesson #01: What’s good for the goose is not always good for synchronous stuff.
By goose I mean gmail and Google’s “You like it? Well you can’t have it!” brilliant marketing approach to beta testing and product distribution. I read my e-mail invite for wave a good three hours after the sender delivered it, got absolutely thrilled and entered the wave playground excited to collaborate with… no one. I was alone. My inviter then told me the same thing had happened to him. So, using an asynchronous invite method for synchronic collaboration might have not been the greatest idea.

Lesson #02: Less is more.
The Wave was a lot to take. It had to live up to the self imposed challenge of being the thing that would kill e-mail (really?) so I guess they packed it with everything they could short of a flame-thrower: it was an open source, real-time, expandable, extensible, embeddable, younameit-able set of collaboration tools including video, chat, drawing, infinite gadgets. When I finally got around to testing with a few buddies we played 5 minutes with something then moved on to the next thing. We did not get enough of a chance to let the WOW factor settle in.

Lesson #03: Don’t target nerds.
I get the feeling that at some level the wave was targeted to a nerdy public. Here’s a piece of news for you: Nerds don’t want to share. Gmail was something for everyone, in spite of nerdy Google tech lovers being the ones that absolutely had to have it, everyone else could gain what at that time was a groundbreaking approach to e-mail in size, organization, presentation, simplicity, you name it. If you target something solely for nerds, they will flock in and close the door behind them.

Lesson #04: Enterprise is not a bad word.
Google wave was clearly a great instrument for enterprise collaboration, and yet the idea of using it in the enterprise was not as apparent to me and most of the people I queried on this. Instead of pitching the “e-mail killer” maybe they should have pitched a “Google Docs on steroids”. We’ll never know.

El Shuje

On my next post I will replace all the a’s with smileys. Just for the heck of it. In the meantime… as always… comment, share, tweet, retweet, and mail me at shuje@holoom.com

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Is Wikipedia making me dumber?

October 25, 2010

Is it just me or the way we use our brains has forever been altered by everyday use online tools, gadgets and gizmos? I know I might be a little late to the party with this reflection, but it has only recently come to my attention. Is it for good? Is it for better?

When I started my development career, Google was a few years away of seeing the light, forums did not exist, Netscape was the geek’s browser of choice and only a few select websites could provide any kind of information on development, and that was if you could get to them. So a lot of what you learned, you learned from a book, or the occasional tutorial CD or a savvy tutor near you. But whatever the source was, you committed it to memory. A few months ago I had to get my hands dirty again with some coding and I found myself searching for the same PHP command I had used two days before, because … well… it was two clicks away so why bother memorizing it?

Looking beyond code, the Google + Wikipedia combo has made me lazy all the while freeing up a considerable amount of my brain cells formerly used to memorize stuff about geography, history, literature, or whatever topic. Now, thru a mixture of my own laziness and the fact that the info is at the tip of my fingers, I don’t make the slightest effort to memorize anything anymore.

Another example of external memory: When I was ten years old I could remember maybe ten to fifteen phone numbers by heart (all landlines mind you). Those were basically all the phone numbers that made up my ten year old universe: family, close friends, and not much more. Now I barely have three or four including my own cell phone and the rest are in my blackberry’s address book. I honestly have trouble remembering my home landline and I’m pretty sure ten years from now I will remember one at most or none at all.

So what are we doing with all these extra brain space?

Although we have more available brain space we are also bombarded with a lot more stuff than before and I for one, blame Twitter for this. Twitter has given us access to whomever we care to watch and those individuals use twitter to share a lot of the stuff (links, articles, thoughts, phrases, quotes, pics, etc.) that they find interesting. By transition we would be inclined to find those things interesting as well. I could make a safe bet that if you were to follow all the links and info published on any given day by the people you follow, you could do nothing else in the day.

I find this information overload plus laziness to remember is slowly killing a part of our passion. Whether it is a movie, a book or a music album, everything is out there so fast that you cannot even build the desire and once you have it, you do not enjoy it quite as much as we did in the old days.

Is our passion dying? Or is it shifting? And if so… where? In my case I have yet to figure that out.

Shuje

On my next post I will make you cry and laugh, and then cry again. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on this. Are we losing our passion? Is Wikipedia making us dumber or is it that I am so dumb I’m missing something?

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Recruiting in the social cloud

January 25, 2010

Not so long ago the story of a job posting by Best Buy created a small buzz in the blogosphere. What was so special about this job posting? It required applicants to hold a minimum of 250 followers on Twitter and at least one year blogging experience.

Recruiting has forever been changed by the social web and the cloudification (not a word yet, but give it time) of everyone’s information. And it has done so for both employers and employees.

“Recruiters have been forced to reinvent themselves” say the founding members of Waragon, an Argentine based recruiting firm.

For recruiters (whether in-company or specialized firms like Waragon) information is no longer their biggest asset. Nowadays a lot of people share their information on LinkedIn, Namyz, Xing or any business social network. Professionals that do not have a seat in resume cloud are at a distinctive disadvantage, so more and more people are joining in.

As a consequence channels are now full duplex. This means the passive player (e.g. someone who is on LinkedIn but is not job hunting at the moment) is now a candidate for a job offer push. Something unthought-of, say, ten years ago except for people targeted by head hunters. Back then, you used to answer job postings from a newspaper. It was a one way channel, no exposure of your persona if you did not want to.

Given this new scenario, recruiting teams had to adapt their craft dramatically and write a whole new rulebook. The information they amass as a result of candidate analysis (e.g. interviews) is still a very valuable element, but the unprocessed information used as an offset is now public and really abundant.

The new elements at play in recruiting 2.0 place the focus on the how (to use the information) as opposed to the previously predominant what (the information in itself). Some of them are:

  1. Using tools for fast search and match of candidates to positions. Companies like Linkedin have pretty cool services for recruiters. They are exploiting the precious information amassed during the years and making a profit out of it.
  2. Getting creative. There is an amazing tilt in the scales when recruiting with Google style campaigns. Although eccentric, they are incredibly effective and more and more companies are starting to copy their methods.
  3. Brand-streaming. Communicating your company values, positive that is (you obviously tend to hide the dirt. Duh!) This often means a candidate already knows your company, even before you pre-select him.
  4. Crowd-sourcing. As a result of the buzz in the Best Buy example presented at the beginning of this post, Best Buy quickly became, by word of mouth, the apple in the eye of many a professional seeking a job with matching characteristics. Money could not have paid for that kind of publicity. That is what crowd-sourcing your recruiting is all about: getting the buzz to do your work.
  5. Taking advantage of the new channels. I’ve seen a lot of recruiters posting on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Besides being directly related to crowd-sourcing, it implies learning how to use these new tools efficiently.
  6. Listening to the social alerts. Whenever I get asked for a recommendation, or see someone getting them; whenever I see someone polishing his online resume beyond the obvious, then I know… this guy is moving from passive to active job hunting. That gets to the HR staff in your company too. I recall a number of times when as a manager I got calls from HR saying: “John Doe is on the move”. This is an advantage for employers because they are allowed pre-emptive damage control. If they are attentive that is.

On the employee side of things, aside from the obvious new jobs created by the cloud and the web 2.0, things are also significantly changed. A few things that caught my attention:

  1. New skills. As the Best Buy experience suggests, job requirements have additional social skill-sets in demand: Blogging, tweeting, etc. These are a plus in certain job descriptions, even if not related to social marketing positions per se. For instance: If you have a big network, you are a potential recruiter of your friends and colleagues once you are in.
  2. Everyone is a networker. In the old days networking was reserved for sales people, hr people, high management types and public relations professionals. The new model increases your chances to find new jobs by word of mouth or, as mentioned before, be targeted by companies seeking to fill a position.
  3. Decisions are made in a much more informed manner. You can find opinions of your potential new employer in blogs, forums, comments, or other formats. Here is where an appropriate brand-streaming is important on behalf of employers. If your brand is shot down in the blogosphere, then you will be hard pressed to get candidates to hop on board.
  4. Personal brand-streaming. You can build a pretty decent online persona even if you are not one in actuality. The right amount of bullshitting in the right places can get you a long way these days. Before your true self catches up with you, you can be comfortably seated in your new office.
  5. Odd situations. People in my teams were sometimes called by HR people in our very company to offer them the same position they held, with a higher pay! It was hardly an isolated incident, as this story suggests.

Waragon dixit: “What hasn’t changed is that if you are good, you will have options”

Maybe nowadays you will have a lot more options without looking for them. Deciding what to do with them is a test of character.

Welcome to Recruiting 2.0

Shuje

On my next post I will tell you who dah man is. I can anticipate this much: It’s not you. In the meantime, tell me your experiences in the new recruiting era. Post them below or mail me at shuje@holoom.com

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Music in cloud city

December 9, 2009

There are as many definitions of cloud computing as people who venture them. Some include software as a service in the mix; others describe it strictly as the infrastructure portion of things. I subscribe to the one that is simplest as an end user and consumer: Cloud computing is any processing provided to me by a third party over the net. Period.

Why can I be so bold as to disregard all other definitions? Because cloud computing is neither a discipline nor a science, there is no regulation for it, no union for cloud workers, no nothing. Cloud computing is a concept and a buzzword in the full extent of its definition. Companies are already using it to show how fashionable and up to date they are and I’m sure soon men will use it in pick up lines to dazzle girls: “You know baby… I cloud a lot.”

I love the possibilities of the cloud and understand the skeptics that find issue with the security of their critical data. I would not confide in any web cloud service to handle my sensitive info just yet. For now I keep my skeletons in the closet and my dollars under the mattress, but these fears are part cultural barrier part sensible lack of faith in a new model that still needs adjustment: Did you ever read the terms and conditions for any of these services?

Some stuff I do in cloud city:

  1. My blog is hosted at WordPress.com.
  2. My blog’s e-mail is hosted at Google via Google Apps.
  3. I use Google spreadsheets, documents and sites to collaborate with co-workers.
  4. I backup non sensitive information in my online backup service (yes, in case you are wondering, there is porn among that)

Those are just a few. I do a lot more. I cloud baby.

I would like to play the divination game for a while and venture some changes I believe will happen in one of my favorite areas: Music.

Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the best selling album of all times. It sold more than one hundred million copies worldwide. I’m sure those sales came in an array of formats: vinyl records, compact discs, cassette tapes and possibly more, but let’s just say, for the sake of argument that all those were CDs. That assumption results in 100M plastic cases, 100M booklets, 100M CDs, etc.

Think of all the effort, environmental strains and elevated costs for such a distribution model when all you need is a single copy in a server (purists are welcome to add all the mirroring they want, the overall idea remains) to be accessed by 100M people instead. Would Mohammad go to the mountain if the mountain had wheels?

Nowadays you pay for downloading the song and basically for the right to listen to the song as many times as you want. The important thing, however, is the latter, because coupling that with a song stored in the cloud, you will be able to listen to that song wherever you want: your home computer, your office computer, your car stereo with wireless connection, etc. The present model is online shopping; my bet is the next model will be online shopping plus cloud storage.

I admit I like buying a CD in a brick and mortar shop, but I believe it’s purely a cultural thing. If recording music was invented today surely the distribution model would not be imprinting it in a piece of material, packaging it and delivering it, would it?

There is a very powerful piece by Nicholas Carr describing the dumbness produced by having all music in the universe available at whim. I seriously recommend you read it. I happen to agree with Nicholas, but I’m afraid the music industry is re-shaping to be something radically different and there is nothing we can do about that.

How long until you can do a jam session online with you playing the guitar in Argentina and the drummer and bass player in Australia?

How long until a wave widget for collaborative songwriting is created?

Let’s cloud baby, let’s cloud like vapor.

Shuje

On my next post I will uncover Michael Bay’s secret alchemy technique for turning everything into crap. While you wait, post your comments below or mail them to shuje@holoom.com

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Search stuff

November 17, 2009

Dave Matthews wrote a fantastic song for his first album for which he did not have a name. Since his sister liked the song a lot, he entitled it “The song that Jane likes”. I did not know how to express that this post was about a lot of stuff happening in the search business, hence the illuminated title. Although I’m not as bright as Mr. Matthews I am better looking, or so my girlfriend says. Take that DM!

Wolfram’s Computational Knowledge Engine

Ok, it’s old news, I know. A while ago Wolfram, one of the brightest and kwaziest people I know of, presented us with his Alpha search engine. It holds a poop-load of pre-processed information and it presents it in very slick ways, as opposed to Google that just indexes whatever is out there to index, not caring if some of the information is completely bogus. For instance, someone could write an article stating that 1 + 1 = 5. You would find that in Google, but not in Wolfram.

The existence of Alpha will not modify my search habits a lot. At best, I can slowly introduce it in my searching on the rare occasions in which I need historical, statistical or mathematical facts as an extra, but I’m too lazy and my usage of Google is too rooted to make that shift immediately. That’s the beauty of Google, if Wolfram is, say, a Library, then Google is that same Library + all the other libraries + all the newsstands + all the personal diaries + all the sex shops + etc, etc, etc.

The curious thing about Alpha is that the search results are copyrighted because Mr. Wolfram feels that although the facts are well… facts, the way the information is presented was previously nonexistent, so, Mr. Wacko is basically copyrighting the presentation. That is something we need to watch closely since it could introduce some serious changes to copyright laws.

The Bing Experience

Ay Microsoft. Eventually I will comment on my profound dislike of their creativity (or lack thereof). To me MSFT is looking more and more like a rich kid that envies other kids’ toys. I have yet to say “Wow, Microsoft did that? What a creative bunch!”

Anyway, a few months ago we were blessed (?) with Bing, Redmond’s attempt at robbing Google of a portion of the search market. Google positioned itself at the top of the search industry by re-inventing search and later started making humongous profit off search advertising. Greedy MSFT cannot let that one slide so they have been struggling to eat some of that cake for over ten years now. These are the highlights of Microsoft’s search extravaganza:

  1. First there was MSN Search (circa 1998) powered by Inktomi (later purchased by Yahoo) and Altavista and later by their own search technology.
  2. In 2006 they dropped the MSN Search in favor of a search feature within the Windows Live toolkit which was powered at one point by the Yahoo engine but later by their very own technology.
  3. In 2007, they separated the search feature of the rest of the Live products and launched Windows Live Search.
  4. On June 2009 Bing replaced the Live brand while a deal with Yahoo is in the making to give Microsoft Yahoo’s share of the search market (about 20%)

So far, Bing on its own has not managed to harm Google significantly, so they are trying everything: UI improvements, deals with Facebook and Twitter, adding delicacies provided by Wolfram Alpha, etc. It’s building up to look more like a bad soap opera than a well thought out business strategy.

I know we users stand to benefit from decent competition in any market, even one as clearly dominated as the search market, but nonetheless I find myself very tempted to say: “Get your own toys Microsoft! Leave the other kids alone.”

Google Caffeine

Be it the inevitable result of the competition with Microsoft or their very own will to constantly out-do themselves, Google is ready to launch in at least one data center in the very near future (late 2009 or early 2010) their Caffeine project.

Caffeine is Google’s promise of a faster, more accurate, more temporarily relevant search. It was opened as a beta for a while and rapidly closed due to an apparent very positive outcome which indicated all systems go. You can find a test drive review here.

This could very well be the spin-off of that competition I was referring to before, but call it what you want I will call it a very welcome effort that will undoubtedly benefit me as an end user.

That in my book is a lot of potatoes.

Shuje

On my next post I will show you how to survive a month with only 10 dollars … and a shotgun. In the meantime, if you feel I left out any interesting stuff regarding search, please comment below or e-mail me at shuje@holoom.com

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