Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Yelp allows businesses to "fight back"

Techcrunch are cover Yelp's new suite of features that allow businesses to join the conversation which happens around their business. I think this is a great feature and something BView has done since launch.

Allowing the business to join the discussion:

  • businesses can respond to reviews
  • reviewers and businesses can engage in a conversation around a review
  • businesses and reviewers can subscribe to each other to track activity
It seemed like the fair thing to do in order to allow a balanced view where both parties can present their case and allow the reader to decide.

It's not a fight - it's a conversation.

Backpack is great

We've been using Backpack to manage the workflow of design tasks. It's far from the perfect solution but when it's a small team it doesn't need to be as talking makes up for the short fall in task management.

I guess the appeal of backpack is how basic it is. I know two people (inc. myself) who have used it to find, select & buy a house for example.

The RSS feed of changes is useless due to its over granularity but aside from that it gets my vote.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Calacanis is a brilliant marketeer

Jason Calacanis chutzpa generates some awesome marketing. Is it strangely coincidental that Mahalo results don't get good Google exposure?

What the hell...Calacanis & Andresen make their blogs work for them.

Is Yahoo's recent innovation result of Microsoft threat or change in leadership?

For the last few months (seems like ever since Microsoft began to seriously make noies) the innovation has started. Is this a result of i) the threat of an acquisition attempt or ii) fruits of the change in leadership i.e. the move from publisher to real tech company?

A lot of the products are very early stage and would appear not to be quite the finished article while also quite obvious and "cool" without much practical application.

I lean towards the former forcing the pace of the latter.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Sometimes Google rankings still confuse me

Can anyone telle me why for the term "business insurance" Direct Line is #1? Here's an example ofan inbound link. So if you advertise with Google then all the affiliate links count towards your inbound link score. If it wasn't a Googlead then I think Google would treat it as spam.

The above Google result desperately needs reviews against each service. Watch that skew click thru...We'll gere there slowly but surely (insurance on BView).

Friday, April 25, 2008

Facebook definitely slow

Having poled a statistically significant group of 3 people in a pub last night it was agreed that Facebook is a lot slower and we are all suspicious that instant chat is killing speed. One of the 3 was a systems guy and his theory goes as follows:

- Systems will block Gmail (and every other mail client)
- Systems will block IM clients
- Facebook has both of the above
- Systems do not block Facebook
- That's because they use it themselves too much

Another attendee is working on the BBBC/ITV/C4 web VoD platform called Kangaroo. Sounds interesting but of course he couldn't talk about it on the record...

Thursday, April 24, 2008

BView comments are cool

My old company Simply Business have been replying to their reviews on BView (well, the bad ones) and have done a great job.

I love this feature.

Facebook instant messenger

I played with Facebook IM for the first time yesterday and I was pretty impressed with the front end display and the way it has been incorporated into the UI of the existing site. A few issues though:

- it told me people were online who clearly were not
- new messages took an age to "load" (or so I was being told) so not very instant

I might actually use it once it works. It got me wondering though how much this will antagonise corp IT departments who block IM clients already. Will it cause FB to be blocked by more businesses or can the functionality be separated from the rest of the site? Is it any different to playing scrabble? Will anyone care.

I also tried to pull in some Yelp news from my profile there. Oh dear - started getting someone else's activity (and yes I checked the email address).

EDIT: and FB is getting very, very, very low just now. I had to stop using it for a while as it just ground to a halt.