Retreading a path already trodden (even by myself)

Rules for a web form:

- allow a User to experience the functionality and then present them with the quid pro quo (i.e. the form)
- never ask for data you won't use for the User's direct benefit
- never provide optional inputs

Very simple. But what happens? You look at your form and you think "what can it hurt it I add..." and before you know it you are collecting data "because it will allow us to make our demographic data rich" which is rubbish.

I promise I will never do it again until next time.

BView new business owners

I thought I'd shamelessly promote some of the business owners that have controlled their profile on BView:

• Anson McCade
• X & Y Communications
• Xbridge

My thanks to these business owners.

Tracking inbound links and monitoring Google

We have just seen the Google bot start to crawl around the BView domain for the first time. It's path appears to be this blog and the "find me on" links I have added to the RHS nav. It is debatable whether we should have no cache, no crawls against User profiles but that will emerge over time. From my profile the bot moved to another User's profile and a couple of reviewed businesses. 14 pages picked from the domain as of now.

I have been recommended SEOMoz tools that track inbound links and allow monitoring and impact of off line efforts (press etc.) on the inbound concentration.

I think we'll track the domain using this tool rather than the old skool manual process I used to have to employ back in the day.

Going for dinner

Going to Haxted Mill for dinner with friends. I've reviewed them on BView from my last visit. Keen to get the business owner to manage their profile and tell me if the data is accurate.

4 searches where Google is 2nd best

Google is a brilliant search engine and it’s now very infrequent I have to go outside the top 3 links when I am searching for a specific topic or product. There are notable exceptions:

Forum Search
I found BoardReader a few days ago and I have been very impressed by the results. Chat forum search is something I’ve been looking at for ages and wishing for a better way to search them.

Blog Search
OK, Google’s own blog search is useful (principally because the spam is minimised which Technorati is shocking for) but Technorati is still my first choice when searching for blogs due to tag & authority scores. Unfortunately I feel time may soon be up for Technorati.

Business Search
Yahoo and Google have local engines but Yelp have built a great platform. My business, BView, has taken business search in a different direction by i)going for results across the entire spectrum of businesses (not just the 40% that service consumers) and layering in proprietary & public access data.

Google has reviews but BView and Yelp actually allow personal relevance by layering in your personal social fabric while BView has also added the businesses themselves to the social graph.

People Search
A search on Linkedin & Facebook produce results for “normal” people and allow me to get a feel for their friend set. 192.com searches across the electoral register producing a match for me and my wife (indeed, I used this to research the owners of my house prior to buying it). I have seen some nice aggregators emerging and I expect some big things in this area.

I guess these are niche areas which Google may eventually get round to but it highlights some niche areas where I would ignore Google. The same applies to auctions/classifieds where Ebay can get killed in niche areas because of it’s structure and lack of flexibility.

Mashup Events - Techcrunch coverage

I attended the Mashup event on Widgets in London a couple of weeks ago and then read the reviews of the event. New Media Age managed to cover the panel discussion by focusing on the first silly texted question - not sure I am surprised by this.

Anyway, I was more annoyed by the Techcrunch UK coverage where we, the audience, were accused of not understanding widgets. Most of the people in the audience actually wanted a better discussion on APIs and better ways to open these up as offering even wider scope for widgets.

Still annoys me.

On another note, having had a look on Techcrunch to get the link (and having been emailed it by a friend) I see that Adjug has just received another round of capital. I worked with Satish when he was @ Espotting and it was clear then that he had a bigger plan...

Technorati problems

I am trying to add this blog to Technorati and add a tag widget. Sadly I've just gotten a series of 404s. I'll keep trying.

Startup working hours

Jason Calacanis wrote a post about saving money as a startup which had the great and the good squawking.

Having just spent the weekend with a development team and a business team I'd like to offer this contribution on his point #11 (now edited):

1. Business and development are different skills and tasks. Guys on the business side can do around 4 tasks at the one time (UAT, reading blogs, listening to the football and updating a paper) while a developer must focus.

2. The quality of work from different people suffers over time to the point where a front end developer may introduce more bugs than productive work i.e. beyond a certain point you are doing negative work.

3. The younger the business guy the more likely he is to do silly hours. The older he gets the more productive he gets. With appropriate focus & efficiency and under normal working situations, you should need to have to do such long hours. (There are obvious exceptions such as launch and pushing bigger projects out the door.)

Aside from this I agree with all of the advice apart from walking to Starbucks. Some of my most productive discussions involve walking to Neros (Starbucks doesn't sell real coffee, it sells coffee flavored milk).

Front end design

I just spent the weekend with the BView team ironing out bugs for the launch of the site. Startups are startups and this is only the 3rd weekend of working on the project so I am reasonably happy to do the time.

As ever, the things that are left to last are front end as:

• everyone has an opinion
• you see something in HTML form, play with it, and you don't like it
• you completely underestimate how long it takes to code the front end
• the front end is always full of regression errors
• Microsoft browsers always screw you somehow

Some stats around one week to launch:

functional bugs: ~30
front end bugs: ~250

My advice to anyone still thinking on the front end:

• keep it simple
• always UAT the front end for the lowest common denominator (of browser/OS not User intelligence)
• keep it simple

You can always over elaborate once you are live!