Category: Technology

Gmail Upgrade Causing Pain?

Google appears to be upgrading its Gmail version behind the scenes. You will notice a link at the top for New Version/Older Version. Unlike Yahoo! which gives you a choice right upfront about whether you would like to upgrade to its new email or not, Google chooses to upgrade users behind the scenes without any prior notice. The good news is that the new version is not dramatically different. The bad news is that the end users automatically becomes a QA head for Google! I recently had to struggle with recovering an email that was in Draft mode. No matter how many times I clicked on the Draft email it simply wouldn’t come up. Then it struck me that this might have something to do with new version. I promptly switched back to the older version and I didn’t have any issues from then on. Moral of the story, when in trouble with Gmail, switch back to older version.

Microsoft Home Server

It is amazing how things have changed over the years in the world of home computing. Computers have become ever more powerful. Dell (and other PC vendors) today sells a desktop for about $600 inclusive of a flat panel monitor, 160GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM. Microsoft Vista requires a minimum of 1GB RAM (this means you better make sure you have at least 2GB!). There was a time when you could not buy a monitor for the same price! 

Well, if you thought this was a big change. Enter the next phase — the home sever. Over 10% of the US population has over 4 PCs at home. If both husband and wife are working regular jobs, that usually means two laptops, plus a home computer for general use. One additional computer is not a stretch. This means you have shared internet access, hence a router, plus four computers, all in one home! It is not in the least bit surprising that Microsoft and its hardware partners are launching a home server to handle common tasks like backup, virus protection etc.

While this vision of a home network is a clear extension of the expanding home computing market, it does come at a time when the “Google vision” is one that is based on the concept of remote hosting. All vendors including Microsoft, Google, AOL, Dell and others offer remote storage and other similar services.

This does raise the question about what the best recommended approach might be for home networks. Years after the failed concept of the NetPC, the jury is still out on the best approach, except that it is now being applied to the home PC market. For now, it still looks like the Microsoft vision has the edge/lead until the dust settles on all the Web 2.0 technologies that promise to deliver a host of remote applications all available over the internet.

Perhaps its time for a new breed of independent “home networking consultants or sys admins for the home!” (if they don’t already exist).

Facebook Social Ads: First Impression

Facebook introduced a widely publicized platform for advertisers and businesses the other day. Despite a number of naysayers, I think the Facebook approach to advertising has both merit and novelty. The basic principle that my friends are likely to have an interest in something that appeals to me (and that they wouldn’t mind knowing about it when they login to Facebook) is sound in my opinion. Some of the privacy fears expressed are very similar to the early days of gmail and will phase out over time. However, the ads creation and management process is not without flaws. Here are a few pain points that I came across right away.

1. Facebook Flyers have been phased out for the most part with no prior notice whatsoever. You can’t create new flyers or re-start “paused” flyers.

2. There is no recommendation per se from Facebook about Flyers. Should advertisers continue keeping their flyers? Or is it better to switch to social ads?

3. Editing the text of a Social Ad after it has been created is not possible. Likewise you can’t change the parameters like the target audience once the ad has been created. You have to delete the ad and create it all over again.

4. Facebook Insights (the part that shows you the cool graphs) uses Adobe Flash. This is really painful (in Firefox). Never works no matter how many times you install Flash.

5. The much hyped Facebook pages seem to be well hidden for some reason! I could never find the NY Times page or any other pages setup by businesses for that matter.

6. Once you create a Facebook page there seems to be no way to invite your friends to becomes fans! So you are left with a page that you can’t notify others about and others can’t find it either!

Many of the issues I had with Facebook Flyers exist with social ads as well. In general, the UI takes some “getting used to” unlike Google Adwords or Yahoo (who did a nice job of adapting the Adwords flow for the most part)

Top 10 Improvments Needed in Facebook Ads

Facebook with its 50M+ user base is now uniquely positioned to give advertisers the ability to target potential customers based on a host of information that even the mighty Google Adwords does not provide (if you are wondering what all this fuss was about Open Social, this is it!) today.

Want to target an ad at users (male, female or both) living in Cupertino, CA in the age range 25 to 35 with college degrees and conservative political views? Facebook lets you do this, while Google Adwords doesn’t. While Google gangs up with other social networking wannabes, Facebook has the challenge of catching up with Google on a number of fronts while rapidly adding to it 50M+ users. The odds are heavily stacked against Facebook but even marginal improvements could quickly attract and possibly retain advertisers.

Listed below are a few upgrades/fixes that are desperately needed in Facebook’s ad capabilities.

1. Once you create an ad, you can’t edit it. You have to delete the ad and create a new one. This is the most painful aspect of Facebook ads.

2. The text box where you enter the ad description is most annoying. When some text is not acceptable like an email address or a word, the system just gives you a generic message without telling you what the problem word might be.

3. You can’t target ads to difference countries at the same time. For instance, I can’t target an ad to South Africa and the US at the same time.

4. You can’t have ad variations. That is, the same ad with identical parameters but worded differently.

5. The reporting facility at this point is very very minimal. Compared to Adwords it is virtually non-existent. Facebook tells you nothing about who clicked your ads! (you could track this on the ad lading page).

6. Whatever reports are currently available should at least be available for export as Excel.

7. Analytics (maybe its time to buy an analytics company like Google did). There is no analysis available on the ads that you create, goal conversions, metrics etc. Ability to target ads is very powerful and can generate lots of clicks in a very short period of time. But lots of clicks with no idea where these came from is of little use.

8. The Keywords option in Facebook is not properly explained. Since Facebook is not a conventional search engine it doesn’t directly apply, but since its available as an option in the ad creation interface it could be better explained.

9. There is no way to control when your ads appear. i.e., dates and times.

10. Last but not the least, Click fraud. How do you know if there has been any fraudulent clicks unless you have some data on the clicks? Right now it appears that Facebook gives you little data beyond the number of clicks.

Open Social: Google plays catch up!

Nice to see Google desperately trying to play catchup.

Facebook after a long period of being out in the cold, recently opened up its platform. Since then, it seems to have caught fire and today appears to threaten to Google’s (and all other social networks) bread and butter (Adwords) from a new unexpected direction. Google has had Orkut for years but has done little with it. It is slow and clunky and used mostly in Brazil and India.

On the other hand, over 5000 developers made their applications available through Facebook (don’t miss the hot “Techniq eLearning” application) and this list of applications continues to grow. Unlike Google’s conventional search play, Facebook has oodles of information about people, their social networks, like and dislikes etc. Having suddenly attracted a host of developers and end users, Facebook was now uniquely positioned to take on Adwords by selling adveristising. Thus, in a fairly short span of time Facebook stole a march over the one-dimensional social networking LinkedIns, Plaxos and the Nings of the world. However, things really got heated up after big brother Microsoft stepped in and bought a stake and did an advertising deal with Facebook.

Facebook started its advertising foray with simple “flyers”. Its kind of like a black hole. You create your an ad and pay for it, and Facebook displays the ad a pre-determined number of times. If someone clicks on your ad, consider yourself lucky. That was the start. Now Facebook has Flyer pro which follows a pay per click model. Clearly the sophistication (reporting and other bells and whistles are lacking) in Facebook’s ad platform. In fact even simple features like the ability to edit an ad once its created are lacking in Facebook. But its improving by the day. The best part about the newly introduced Flyer pro is that you can target ads based on a host of parameters like city, age group etc. Everytime you select one of these parameters the target number of users updates on the fly! This is very powerful when compared to what you can do with Google’s Adwords of today. Further, by partnering with Microsoft, Facebook has threatened Google where it could really start to hurt.

Enter Open Social. Its now all about democracy, a level playing field, mother of all APIs and what not as far as Google and other social network sites are concerned. As the NY times rightly put it Google and Friends are ganging up against Facebook before it becomes too powerful. For now, Facebook has a clear headstart. The Open Social idea does make sense in theory, however. As a developer I don’t need to port my application to each social network that comes along. But as an end user do I want every single social network out there to have access to all my private data?

Finally, there is a tiny window of opportunity to challenge Google’s virtual internet advertising monopoly (and GOOG topped $700+). The bad news is that a the monopoly from Redmond is the force behind this new challenge!

Adobe Share is Just a Document Dump!

Adobe’s Share service is just a dumping ground for documents. It is still got a long way to go before challenging either MS Office Live or Google Docs and spreadsheets. I tried using it in Firefox and it ended up in a loop where the site was always trying to install Flash 9. I finally switched to IE and managed to use it. The UI is all clunky and flash. At this point, Share sounds more like an announcement of Adobe’s intent to play in this space more than anything else.

Adobe has so many different products it is so hard to identify which product does what: Live Cycle Policy, CorpShare are a couple that come to mind in the document sharing realm. Buzzword sounded very interesting, but before it could go mainstream Adobe acquired them. It will be interesting to see how Adobe puts all the various pieces together or simply adds one more product to its already long list!

Google’s PPT Equivalent Closer to Release?

This morning I received a powerpoint file via email to my gmail address and I was pleasantly surprised to see a “View as Slide Show link” next to the attachment, much like Google’s ability to view docs and spreadsheets.

On clicking the link I noticed that the slide show view converts the slides to flash and on the far right corner of the browser window there is pull down that lets you jump to different slides.

It will interesting to see what the powerpoint equivalent looks like.

Apple’s iPhone Price Drop: A Big Goof-Up

Apple announced a $200 price cut on the iPhone. Ok, I didn’t buy one at the outrageous $599 price point and I don’t intend to buy one at the reduced price either. If you did purchase one at the high end for $599, you are probably pissed! My sympathies.

Steve Jobs’ open letter to early buyers seems to say, “You have reason to be pissed, but hey that’s life! We’ll meet you half way by giving you a $100 store credit!” I think this is the master marketer, Steve Jobs’ biggest goof up ever. Next time Apple announces a product many of the early buyers are going to think twice and many are probably going to wait around for the big price drop.

There are rumors about performance issues with the iPhone. Moreover, if the product was doing well in the market, why drop the price? In short, it appears as though Apple grossly overestimated the market. They perhaps thought that the hype will turn into sales and when it didn’t, Apple decided to drop the price in a hurry, in the process antagonizing many early enthusiasts. The only good news for Apple is that there were probably very few early buyers. So if you factor the financial hit of the store credit and a temporary PR crisis, it perhaps can be easily outweighed by an increase in sales triggered by the price drop.

Earlier, one of the Research firms predicted that Apple will sell 7 million iPhones in 2007 and 15 million in 2008. At a minimum of $499 each, that’s $3.4 billion to $7.5 billion in annual iPhone revenue for Apple. Obviously, they got it all horribly wrong!

Apple reported that it sold 270,000 iPhones during its fiscal third quarter and told analysts in July that it expected to sell 1 million phones by the end of September. Jobs said Wednesday that the company is on track to meet that goal.

Google Apps: The Good, The Bad and The Evil

Google Apps is by far the best product/service that Google has delivered after its universally accepted search service (plus Adwords and Adsense). Google Apps is a blessing for any small business for sure and possibly for medium sized enterprises, schools and other organizations as well. At a high-level it is Google’s attempt at replacing the conventional intranet/shared server and email with a consolidated hosted alternative. It gives you access to group calendars, Docs & Spreadsheets, a customizable login page, URL etc. In case you are considering Google Apps or are an existing customer, here are a few tips based on my experiences.

The Good

Email Management: The biggest value of Google Apps is its complete handling of email. Of late managing email for small to medium sized businesses has become a major effort. With increasing amount of spam, and endless viruses, maintaining and managing a mail server is a significant ongoing undertaking. Google Apps does a terrific job of handling these tasks and automating its management.

Ideal for Gmail lovers: If you like the GMAIL interface, then Google Apps becomes all the more easier. However, if you don’t like the gmail interface you could easily POP the email to your mail program.

Powerful Filtering: There are useful email filtering capabilities that lets you sort and automatically move incoming mail to appropriate labels. The best part is that these are easy to setup (assuming you like the Gmail interface with labels etc.).

Simplified, UI driven: Common email management tasks (which requires most people to be extra nice to their often temperamental IT support staff) such as creating and deleting aliases, accounts, forwarding emails, setting up vacation notices etc are extremely easy through a fairly easy to use UI.

The Bad

Overly Aggressive Spam: The Spam filtering in Google Apps tends to get overly aggressive with the result that emails that don’t belong in spam often end up there. It is a good idea to search through spam before deleting it.

Elusive Support Email: The worst and most frustrating part about the free Google Apps is that it incredibly hard to send Google a support request! It takes you quite a while to find a page where you can send them a support email. As for a support phone number, don’t even think about it. At every instance you are pointed to some annoying discussion page or some online FAQ where you can never really find what you want.

Paid vs. Free: Google Apps has both a paid service (Premium) and a free service. The paid service comes with support and other features (you can turn off ads, archive old emails etc), while with the free service your on your own (or at the mercy of Google as I realized later). I was using the free service for several months and was perfectly happy with it until one fine day Google decided to turn off access to one of our mail boxes! On login the following message was displayed:

Sorry… account maintenance underway

We’re currently performing some unexpected maintenance on your account. While we can’t predict exactly how long it will take, we’re working as quickly as we can to restore access to your email–apologies for the inconvenience.

If you have questions, please contact us at gmail-maintenance@google.com.

We sent several emails and received no response whatsoever. All other email boxes worked just fine except this particular one. I suspect that we were receiving too much spam on this account for reasons unknown to us and beyond our control. To make matter worse emails sent to the mailbox received a warning message as follows:

Technical details of temporary failure:
DISABLED_USER: Account temporarily disabled

It would have been more appropriate and less alarming to recipients if the message said something to the effect that the account was undergoing maintenance, we apologize etc.

Thankfully, switching back to our original mail server configuration (by passing Google Apps) to start receiving email helped us ride the crisis until Google re-started access to the mailbox after 6+ days.

The Evil

Reality: We have used Google Apps for close to year now and believe that Google Apps is a terrific service that I would highly recommend to anyone, especially those who are frustrated by perennial email problems. However, the reality though is that you run the risk of Google arbitrarily changing the rules of engagement, turning off access, not responding to your email and leaving you completely in the dark (among other things!), especially if you are using the free service. Email is an essential, mission-critical service and one can’t afford to run a business or an organization without a fail safe arrangement. So here are some tips in case you are considering a switch to Google Apps.

  • Have a Plan B: If you chose to switch to Google Apps be sure you have a Plan B. i.e., have your email server setup and ready to temporarily switch back in the event of a crisis.
  • Reduce spam: Once you sign up for Google Apps there is a setting to accept all emails that come to your domain and then move the ones that don’t belong, to spam. The other option is to reject/delete emails right away those that don’t match any addresses on your domain. Choosing the later option dramatically reduces spam.
  • Sign-up for the Paid Service: You get what you pay for. There is no free lunch. Both of these are apt descriptions when it comes to Google Apps. Sign up for the paid service (so you get support via email, phone and chat).

Google offers you a great service for free and then enslaves you to the service and then makes life hard for you until you subscribe! Google critics could easily argue that with Google Apps, Google gets evil, contrary to its “Do no evil” philosophy. Nevertheless, a great product/service.