Recently I got stuck trying to fix a problem in Heroku, a slick cloud-based Ruby hosting service. The problem involved gems that I had added to my app’s private gem repository. I had to check the versions of the gems in the repository, but Heroku’s documentation on gem management didn’t provide any suggestions.

Turns out, the trick is to use Heroku’s console command, and then use the Ruby Gem command. To open a new console session, fire up a terminal and enter:

heroku console

Then list the versions of the gems in your private repo, by enclosing the gem list command in backticks. (On Macs, the backtick key is in the upper left corner of the keyboard. I know, it took me a few seconds to find it as well.)

`gem list`

Since Heroku has many built-in gems, you’ll probably want to pipe through grep to find what you want:

`gem list | grep foo`

And you’re off to the races!

I just started using a new Verizon RIM Blackberry Curve 8830 and thought I’d post some quick thoughts on it.

Pros:
- Hardware itself is almost perfect: same great physical keyboard, nice screen, removeable battery (easy to carry extras), Micro SD card slot, GPS, trackball, camera with flash, USB charger/data cable.
- Much faster than my 2007-vintage Blackberry 8703.
- Small overall form factor.
- Two “convenience buttons” to quickly launch apps.
- The Google apps are pretty good, especially Google’s Search by Voice and the ever-reliable Gmail.
- GPS is super-accurate, even when I’m not outside.
- The camera is very easy to use and takes decent shots, and has an easy-to-use zoom and auto-flash.

Cons:
- Software is somewhat improved over my 2007-vintage Blackberry 8703, but not as much as you’d expect given the competition from the iPhone. For instance, the email client, which might have been cool in 2002, now looks very updated.
- Lots of the same little annoyances persist. For instance the Phone Book app can’t handle more than three email addresses. No way to delete phone profiles that you never use, like “Phone Only” or “Vibrate”. The calculator only goes to 10 digits like some 1970s five-and-dime calculator. There’s no easy-to-remember way to reboot the device. The Search app still has a klunky interface. And so on.
- The Mute button is too recessed — this is the one hardware-related issue. This button was perfect on the 8703 — easy to press. Now’s it’s small and harder to press. Ugh!
- No WiFi — okay, so maybe that’s one more hardware-related issue.
- Voice Dialing doesn’t work for me — could be because I have 4000 contacts.
- Google Maps don’t seem to work with the GPS for some reason. Bummer.
- Blackberry Messenger doesn’t appear to support Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, or AOL. I don’t know why the folks at RIM include such a multi-network client — after all, these are communications devices!
- Blackberry App World is so-so. It’s nice since it enables over-the-air downloads. But it doesn’t come pre-installed, surprisingly. And its selection, while okay, isn’t all it could be.

Downloaded third-party applications I’m currently running:
- Google Mobile Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Sync
- Qik (need a micro SD card to actually use)
- Twitterberry

Failed applications — those that I installed, tried, and bailed on:
- Vlingo (speak commands into Blackberry — to slow)
- Viigo (a twitter client that updates only once every 30 minutes — not exactly realtime)
- Google Talk doesn’t seem to work, unfortunately.

Hope you found this helpful!

I love the idea of a digital pen that lets me jot down notes at a meeting using an unobtrusive pen and notepad, then uploads the notes, adds metadata (time, location, attendees) and indexes them for easy searching. And yes, I’m willing to pay for the special Anoto paper with the dots, if the digital pen is up to par.

But sadly, a quick scan of digital pens on the market shows that we’re not at the point of note-taking nirvana. What I’m looking for is the following:

• Upload notes via WiFi. Continuously. In the background. Over 802.11 b/g/n. For my home and office networks. If those are not available, find an open network to use.
• Upload securely, using firewall-friendly HTTPs posts.
• Upload to Evernote, which has great handwriting recognition and search, and is very reasonably priced.
• Inductive charging of the pen, a la Palm Pre. Don’t make me plug in, even to charge.
• Use the pen several hours without recharging. (Maybe the current pens can do this; I don’t know.)
• Isn’t oversized. (In a moment of weakness I once bought a Logitech io, and the pen was so big it distracted from the meeting at hand.)
• Can connect to my Outlook Exchange calendar and Google calendar, and use them to figure out where I was and who I was talking to when I was taking notes, and the meeting topic, and add this to the metadata for the note.
• Let me view notes by meeting attendee (“all notes from meetings with John Doe”) or date or subject (“weekly design review”).

The digital pens on the market don’t come close to this spec. You have to plug them in to a computer to upload and charge. Integrations, when they exist, are often to pricey Microsoft OneNote. There’s no intelligent use of calendars to add context.

Oh, and the voice recording feature in the LiveScribe? Creepy. And has legal ramifications, I think, here in California, where I’m pretty sure you have to inform someone that you’re recording them. But, legal issues aside, when people know you’re recording them, it kind of gets your meetings off to a bad start.

Maybe someday, someone will build a digital pen with the right feature set. Till then…

I need to register ~200 domain names. What service would you recommend to do this?

Here are my requirements:

• All of these would be .com names — no need for international domains.
• Bonus points for having an API-level integration to register domain names.
• While I don’t want to overpay, I’m not super price-sensitive.
• The domain names are very “rare terms” not found in a dictionary. No need for a suggested name feature.

There are many such services to choose from, and I’d greatly appreciate your help in narrowing this down. Thanks!

Here’s a question that’s been bugging me, that I’d like to put out there: what tool(s) would you recommend for Agile Product Management — as opposed to Agile Project Management. Here’s the challenges that I’d like to address:

1. There are many project management tools out there, but as far as I can tell, they are “market ignorant” — they don’t help a product manager (as opposed to project manager) define the scope of a release/iteration, or prioritization of a backlog, based on various market factors. They take scope and prioritization as a given and don’t help the inbound product manager. They don’t help a product manager synthesize all the market inputs to make informed decisions about feature prioritization. In this group I’d include Jira, Bugzilla, TargetProcess, Rally, and VersionOne.
2. As far as I can tell, agile project management tools are “sales ignorant”: they don’t enable a sales engineer to understand which features have been built, and what sales tools are available to enable a SE to sell that feature, and don’t automate outbound product management activities. There is no simple “Roadmap View” that an SE can look at, which cuts out all the developer-oriented functionality but still shows dates and descriptions and related sales collateral. Nor is there a notion of an Internal Roadmap versus External Roadmap that has less detail, and leaves out the more embarrassing bug fixes.
3. There are Agile Product Management tools out there, like those from Accept Software and Ryma, but (as far as I can tell) they don’t sync with some of the popular project management / bug tracking tools, such as Bugzilla, TargetProcess, and Jira. By “sync” I mean bi-directional data sync.

Given these challenges, what Agile Product Management tool would you recommend?

I just finished playing with UnHub, a social profile aggregator.

Here’s the problem that UnHub solves: If you’ve got more than a couple of online profiles on social media sites, there’s no easy way to provide a centralized place that showcases all your profiles.

Sure, there’s FriendFeed, but the “lifestream” model doesn’t really work for sites like Facebook or LinkedIn that some of us don’t update that often. Or, you can build a custom widget on your blog, showing your different profiles, as I did. But that’s a good chunk of time writing HTML, definitely not easy.

Enter UnHub. It’s dead-duh-simple: you enter in your social media profiles, and it displays a permanent iframe with those profiles across the top of the browser, with your various social media profiles underneath. Once someone’s found your UnHub, they can look at all the stuff you’ve created online, just by going to your UnHub URL. These are short and simple — mine is http://unhub.com/alsargent/

This probably isn’t making too much sense in words, so take a look at my UnHub page. A demo is worth a thousand words.

What do you think — is UnHub something you’d use?

Playing with a brand-new Blogrollr feature: RSS feeds of recent activity.

What’s Blogrollr? A “live blogroll” powered by your own browsing activity. No need for static blogrolls that get stale over time. More here: http://blogrollr.com/

Cameron at Blogrollr was kind enough to give me access to my Blogrollr RSS feed. (Thanks!) This means that I don’t need to use the Blogrollr widget — which doesn’t work on a WordPress.com site like mine. Check out the Live Blogroll section in the right hand side.

Yes, there is some funkiness around repeated blogs and Google Calendar… but I’m sure the Fictive folks will sort that out soon enough.

Evernote had a big update today. I just now tried out the new goods. Here’s a quick review:

Mac Desktop client:
+ I love, love, love the new “Merge Notes” feature. Great way to clean up a big notebook. Thank you Evernote!
- Unfortunately, there’s no way to export a merged note to anything other than an Evernote Archive. For instance, if you merge a bunch of jpeg images of scanned document, that you’ve brought into evernote, you cannot export them as one big jpeg image. Bummer.
~ I’m undecided whether the Growl notifications are nice or not. Maybe I’ll get used to them.

Safari web clipper:
+ It works with Safari 4 public beta (build 5528.16). What’s nice is that it takes the title of a web page and saves it as the title of the note. A small thing, but saves 15-30 seconds each time you clip, which adds up when you clip many times a day.

Firefox web clipper add-on:
- Does NOT grab the title of a web page, as the Safari web clipper does. Duh. I can’t tell what advantage the web clipper add-on provides over a bookmarklet. Uninstalling for now.

You using any of the new Evernote versions? If so, what do you think?

Trying out P2, a new WordPress theme. Think of P2 as “Twitter meets WordPress”. Short-form blogging is what it’s called. More here: http://tr.im/hfFk

I like this. A lot. Because it addresses shortcomings in both traditional WordPress and Twitter:

My gripe with traditional WordPress themes is that they encourage “long form blogging”. To create a well-formed long-form post takes me 30-60 minutes, including first draft and edits. It’s hard to find that time in the day, especially given other priorities.

But Twitter has its own shortcomings, too. The 140 character is great because it encourages short form posts that one can easily knock out. But crunching down a meaningful thought down to 140 characters is hard. And nuances get lost.

So, there are a number of posts I simply don’t make since they won’t fit into 140 characters, but I don’t have time to express them in the long-form blog comment. That’s the conundrum.

Let’s see if P2 changes that.

Do you have web pages — not blog pages — that you want to encourage visitors to share on social bookmarking sites?

If so, the AddThis widget to be the best choice for non-blog pages. The reason: its menu opens up when the user hovers. No click needed. ShareThis, on the other hand, requires the user to click. Seems like a minor detail, but hovers are about 5x more common than clicks. That means a potentially 500% better view-to-share conversion ratio.

The problem is, AddThis shows a number of bookmarking services that are irrelevant, based on this report, and will only distract users. To keep the user focused and maximize conversions, use the following customization for AddThis. The extra line I added is in red.

<!– AddThis Button BEGIN –>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var addthis_pub=”your_addthis_userid”;
var addthis_options = ‘email, facebook, myspace, digg, twitter, stumbleupon, more’;
</script>

<a href=”http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=20″
onmouseover=”return addthis_open(this, ”, ‘[URL]‘, ‘[TITLE]‘)”
onmouseout=”addthis_close()”
onclick=”return addthis_sendto()”>

<img src=”http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/lg-share-en.gif”
width=”125″ height=”16″ alt=”Bookmark and Share” style=”border:0″/>
</a>

<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://s7.addthis.com/js/200/addthis_widget.js”>
</script>
<!– AddThis Button END –>

This will show only the most relevant services on the main display for the widget: Email, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, and StumbleUpon. A More link lets users access other services.

A further customization would be to display logos with better brand recognition — Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. — similar to what Sociable does for WordPress blog posts. AddThis allows this customization. But that is a tutorial for a later date.

Update: I added to the tutorial. Here goes:

To display an image with better brand recognition, change the src parameter in the img tag code above…

<img src=”http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/lg-share-en.gif“
width=”125″ height=”16″ alt=”Bookmark and Share” style=”border:0″/>

…so that it uses your own custom image. For example:

<img src=“http://alsargent.com/addthis.png”
alt=“Bookmark and Share” style=“vertical-align:middle; border:0″/>

This displays the logos of Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Twitter. You can see this in action on the bottom of my personal web site, alsargent.com. (WordPress.com strips out <script> tags from postings; otherwise I would have just shown the example on this page.) Feel free to use this addthis.png on your own site, if you like.

Another little tweak to help the conversion rates is to add a bit of CSS to the img tag…

<img src=“http://alsargent.com/addthis.png”
alt=“Bookmark and Share” style=“vertical-align:middle; border:0″/>

… so that it vertically aligns with the text prompt, Share this using:, which helps the user understand what the widget does. Summing up, here’s the modified code, with all changes marked in red:

<!– AddThis Button BEGIN –>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var addthis_pub=”alsargent”;
var addthis_options = ‘email, facebook, myspace, digg, twitter, stumbleupon, more’;
</script>

Share this using:
<a href=”http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=20″
style=”border-bottom-style:none;” onmouseover=”return addthis_open(this, ”, ‘[URL]‘, ‘[TITLE]‘)”
onmouseout=”addthis_close()” onclick=”return addthis_sendto()”>

<img src=”http://alsargent.com/addthis.png“
alt=”Bookmark and Share” style=”vertical-align:middle; border:0″/></a>

<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://s7.addthis.com/js/200/addthis_widget.js”></script>
<!– AddThis Button END –>

I know, this is quite a bit to optimize a small widget. But remember, attention to the details is important. This steps can increase the number of people who post your page to social media sites, and in turn can drive more traffic to your site.

Your turn

What do you think? Do you prefer something other than the AddThis widget? What customizations have you found useful?

Social bookmarking widgets have appeared on many blog posts and other web pages. It’s understandable why: they drive traffic to your site, and they increase inbound links and thus PageRank.

But which social media sites should your social bookmarking widget include?

After all, there are dozens of options for sharing. In fact, Sociable supports over 100 social media sites.

It’s a dilemma for online marketers: present too few choices, and you risk missing a popular bookmarking service. Provide too many, and you will confuse your visitors.

ShareThis just shed a bunch of light on this question with this report. The highlight is this breakdown of social media services by popularity:

ShareThis breakdown of social bookmarking popularity

The most popular social media services are:

1. Good ol’ email, with a whopping 57% of usage.
2. Facebook, with 21% share — and the fastest growing service
3. MySpace, with 5% share but declining
4. Digg, with 2% share
5. StumbleUpon, Twitter and Technorati all have <1% share

(Update: turns out that AIM was not in the top five, based on corrected information from ShareThis. So I’ve removed them from the list above.)

This data is surprising. First, where’s LinkedIn? (Perhaps people don’t want to share interesting articles on a site used primarily for professional networking.) Why is Twitter so low in the rankings? (For all Twitter’s press, it’s important to note that its traffic is still well below that of Facebook.) And MySpace is hanging in there quite well.

So, when you set up your social bookmarking widget, focus on the most popular services: Email, Facebook, MySpace, (maybe) AIM, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Technorati. Of course, this breakdown won’t work for all types of visitors. For instance, technical audiences would probably want to post to Slashdot and Reddit.

What do you think? Is the ShareThis data valid in your opinion? Do you track which bookmarking services your visitors use?

I like to practice what I call Lazy SEO. I am “lazy” in that I like to get my blog SEO configuration done quickly so that I can return to what matters: actually writing. I bet others that read this have a similar outlook.

With that in mind, here’s a robots.txt file that I just put together for one of my clients. It’s not the most sophisticated robots.txt out there, but it seems to get the job done for a business that’s has modest SEO needs: ensure that Google’s search results do not contain any irrelevant pages, such as admin pages.

I put this together based on what I learned recently using Google Webmaster Tools and Ask Apache. It assumes a self-hosted WordPress instance with the Google XML sitemaps plugin installed. Hope you find it useful. Here goes…

User-Agent: *
# don’t search for files in these directories
Disallow: /_*
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/backup*
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: */trackback/
# For Google XML sitemaps
Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml.gz

As you can see, this is pretty simple. For instance, it intentionally leaves out specific entries for different kinds of bots (Google image, Adsense, Adwords, etc.) since we don’t see those bots as critical to the needs of my client’s (simple) business.

So what do you think of this approach — good enough or woefully lacking?

I just finished watching a webinar from Hubspot, unlike any I’ve watched before. Here’s why:

All too often, typical webinars drone on and are pretty boring. My typical experience is to listen while perusing blogs or cleaning out my inbox. As a result, listener engagement is very low. I’ve conducted webinars with 500 attendees and got maybe 12 comments — just 2% audience participation.

This webinar was different. At the start, the moderator told everyone to follow #hubspot on Twitter. What happened was amazing: a firehose of realtime commentary on the webinar. Literally hundreds of comments. Which made it much more engaging and useful. I stayed tuned in to the content, and hundreds of others apparently did as well. We’ll probably remember this webinar far longer than others. And that makes it a more effective event.

As a bonus, this firehose of tweets drove #hubspot to be featured on the home page of Twitter Search, as one of the top four trending topics. This was free advertising that lead to even more webinar participation.

So, next time you do a webinar, start off by picking a unique keyword to follow on Twitter (e.g., #yourcompany). Then show a quick demo on how to use Tweetchat to let the audience follow in real time. Only after that demo should you dive into your actual presentation. You’ll get more attendees, higher audience engagement, longer recall, and a slew of good questions to make for compelling Q&A.

Why do I like Tweetchat for webinar audience participation? It automatically inserts the keyword into every post. Unlike Twitter Search, it updates automatically, AJAX-style. It’s better than Tweetdeck (my default Twitter client) since there’s nothing to download.

Have you participated in a webinar that had Twitter audience participation? How well did it work?

… that’s the guidance from this interview on demand generation:

We’ve been recommending for a while now that marketers think like publishers when it comes to their marketing content. Too often, marketers create new educational content based on internal triggers, such as a new product launch or the adoption of a new marketing strategy. Instead, think like a publisher, who wants to keep their readers (in this case, prospects) engaged on a regular basis with content that’s tailored to their needs and interests. That means keeping close tabs on industry trends and customer and prospect concerns, and creating relevant content that addresses those trends and concerns in a timely manner.

By doing this kind of lead nurturing, marketers enable their companies to become better-trusted advisors in the eyes of their prospects. Eventually, when those prospects have a compelling event that cause them to enter the sales cycle, they’re more likely to buy from the company that they’re familiar with.

I love this idea. It’s very sticky (as defined by this book, which I’m currently reading) in that it’s simple, unexpected, concrete, and credible.  Simple because it’s easy to state. Unexpected because, let’s face it, how many of us enterprise marketing folks every thought of ourselves as being in the publishing business? Concrete, because it leads to some clear follow-up actions: blog editorial themes and calendars; rules of engagement for responding to others’ tweets, blog posts, and forum comments; and so on. Credible, because it makes sense: recommendations from a trusted source count much more than an unfamiliar one.

What do you think of this approach to demand generation?

Product Management tools and techniques are continually evolving. Here are some that I’ve found to be especially useful recently:

Agile Product Management requires that you setup up a backlog to track storycards. While there are more expensive solutions out there, Google Spreadsheets are a surprisingly good way to get started with backlog management. It’s easily viewable by an entire team, and can be edited simultaneously by team members. You probably will outgrow your spreadsheet after it gets to 100-200 storycards and will want to move to something more sophisticated, but for getting started, Google Spreadsheets is hard to beat.

Do “live” note taking during customer calls with Campfire. Other participants on the call, developers and other team members can see notes as they are written, and can write in their own follow-up questions in real time. Plus it’s all searchable for later. I’ve seen development teams that live in Campfire, so putting the notes straight into there means that the customer feedback actually reaches the engineers it’s intended to influence.

You can also use Campfire to enable team members to communicate what they’ve done and what they’re working on. This practice goes a long way towards eliminating the “status updates” part of staff meetings, which are generally not all that productive. Yammer’s another good tool for this purpose, if you are not already using Campfire.

Beta customer recruitment is very much a numbers game, a sales process conducted by the product manager. My rule of thumb, based on experience, is that you need about 30 beta program leads for every one active beta user that provides meaningful feedback. Since even a small beta will want at least several active beta users, there’s a significant lead management issue. To address this, use Highrise for managing beta customer recruitment, if you don’t have access to your company’s CRM system or are not allowed to use it for beta programs. Highrise has a free option which is great for getting started.

I know, I’m started to sound like a shill for 37Signals… on to other tools!

Use Google Video Chat to talk with remote developers. Most communication is nonverbal and you get more of this form of communication conveyed with video chat than with a phone call. Unlike the phone, you never have to worry about reaching out to a developer late at night if they’re online. I found it much easier to get Google video chat working than Skype video and iChat video.

Make it a point to connect with all your active customers over IM. When developers come to you with urgent questions that require customer input, you’ll be able to ping several available customers over IM to make an informed decision. For this reason, IM is a huge enabler of Agile Product Management. It’s also great when scheduling meetings and dealing with conference call logistics. Adium (Mac) and Pidgin (Windows) work across all the major IM networks.

Use Google Alerts, Friendfeed, and Twitter Search to stay on top of your market, find beta program prospects, get feedback on your product, and keep up with competitors, standards and events. Get the corresponding RSS or Atom feeds for each search into Google Reader — not necessarily to read every last post — but so you have large, searchable database of what’s happening in your market.

Before meeting with a customer, do your homework on them: what they care about, what challenges they face, and so on. A number of sites let you do this. Currently lesser-known resources for doing this this include Pipl and Twitter. Better known sites include Google Blog Search, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

If your company doesn’t provide you with conference calling and web conferencing, or if you just want to save some money, use DimDim and Free Conference Call. These services are both free and work great.

What do you think? What product management techniques and tools are you planning to use this year?

Below is a very insightful analysis of Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, from the folks at PowerSpeaking. (Normally I’d simply link to an appropriate blog post, but since PowerSpeaking doesn’t have one, I’m reproducing the content below.)

PowerSpeaking is a firm that conducts clinics on how to enable business people to present more effectively. I’ve attended their “Speaking to the Big Dogs” program in the past, and I highly recommend their service.

With the swearing in of Barack Obama, Tuesday January 20th was a historic day. Here at PowerSpeaking, Inc., we eagerly watched our new President’s inauguration speech. What about you? What were your thoughts as you watched our 44th President address the nation (and the world)? Did it have the impact that you expected it to have?

The reviews have been mixed. New Republic writer John B. Judis called Obama’s speech “unusually abstract” and “a disappointing hodgepodge”. While historian Michael Roth declared the speech “brilliant, deeply felt” and containing “echoes of the great speeches of the past”.

This e-tip is our brief analysis of his speech. As you read it, think about how you can incorporate some of these ideas in your business talks.Here are some strategies that we think worked:

Imagery: The President used imagery six times in his nineteen-minute talk. “… gathering clouds and raging storms”. “…extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” “… brave the icy currents, and endure what storms may come.”

Series of Three: He organized some thoughts in a series of three at least ten times. “… humbled by, … grateful for…, and mindful of…” “Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered.” “… we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

Repetition of Words / Phrases: Three times he used repetition. “For us, they packed up their worldly possessions… For us, they toiled in sweatshops…” For us, they fought and died…” “This is the price… This is the source… This is the meaning…” “… all are equal, all are free and all deserve a chance…” Use of

Pronouns: Obama’s extraordinary use of inclusive pronouns engages and inspires. Obama used the pronoun “I” twice in the speech. In contrast, he used the pronouns “we”, “our” and “us” 142 times.

Here’s what we believe was missing:

A core message: We conducted an informal survey asking people what they remembered most from the talk and what his main message was. Not one person could repeat a phrase. We’re not alone. CNN analysts Jeffrey Toobin says: “I thought that this was a speech with a lot of ideas but no theme and most importantly, this was a speech without a single memorable phrase.”

As you watch the eloquence of our new President, pay attention to the strategies he uses in his speeches. Imagery, organized thoughts, repetition and inclusive language can all increase the chance your business audience will remember your talks. And don’t forget to have a core message that you repeat three times! Let ‘er Rip!

No, that’s not my prediction. And yes, this post is relevant for product marketing types: it illustrates how an idea languished in obscurity for years, only to hitting a tipping point that suddenly thrust it into the limelight.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a prediction by Russian professor Igor Panarin made a prediction that the US will end by June or July of 2010. The primary driver is crushing debt levels. Scary, no doubt, given the current economic environment and recent financial news.

However, a key part of the story wasn’t mentioned by the WSJ: when Professor Panarin made his prediction in 1998, US debt levels were declining not rising. (Ah, the good old days…) The very mechanism that drove Panarin’s forecast was on the wane. This makes me wonder about the validity of his forecast – what kinds of assumptions about US debt growth could he have built into his model about debt levels when the current empirical data showed that debt was shrinking?

To be sure, our current debt levels are at high levels which make Professor Panarin look prescient. We’ve got to reduce our debt over the coming years and decades. Here’s hoping that the new year brings a new plan to do exactly that.

What’s interesting about this story from my marketing perspective is how widely it spread, After all, this is a decade-old prediction that received no US press when it was first published, was only published in Russian, and is built on questionable assumptions.

Until recently, the idea met some of the criteria for “stickiness” as as defined in Ideas that Stick: It is simple and concerete: US splits into several countries. It’s unexpected, to say the least, to hear someone claim that a country like America could simply unravel. It’s emotional, obviously, for anyone to see their country disintegrate.

But why is this idea spreading only now, after a decade? Because only now has the idea become credible — the final stickiness criterion — as the current financial crisis developed and the US government bailed out banks and car companies. When the idea met four out of five stickiness criteria: obscurity. When it met five out of five: bam! — one of the most popular stories on the WSJ. It hit the tipping point.

So the key point for marketing, and product positioning, is this: meeting four out of five stickiness criteria ain’t enough. For a message to succeed, it must meet all the stickiness criteria.

Lately I’ve been working a lot with SlideShare and DimDim to show PowerPoint presentations to customers and prospects. I try avoid “death by bulletpoint“, and instead incorporate a lot of diagrams into my slides in order to complement my speaking points. Unfortunately, a lot what looks great in PowerPoint 2007 (Windows) and 2008 (Mac) look awful in SlideShare and DimDim.

So, here is a checklist of things to avoid so that your slides look fine whether they are rendered in PowerPoint, SlideShare, or DimDim:

• Don’t use slick color gradations that PowerPoint 2008 uses by default. Use basic, solid colors.
• Don’t use shadows on objects.
• Don’t depend on builds within a single slide. Instead, use multiple slides to create a build. Tedious but worth it for complex diagrams.

What else can you think of?

Hopefully someday these kinds of issues will be taken care of as SlideShare and DimDim mature. And, one would hope that, as Microsoft creates more online offerings around Office, they will provide a way to faithfully render PowerPoint slides online.

Today, I shared the links below with a friend who’s starting a business. In the spirit of helpfulness, I’m republishing them below.

Granted, these won’t be new to anyone reads the major social marketing / Web 2.0 blogs out there. Nonetheless, these are solid resources for online marketing that might not be known to mainstream business folks.

• Presentation design: http://www.presentationzen.com/
• Inspirational presentations often have minimal words and great pictures. Here’s where to find the latter: http://flickr.com/ (tip: sort pictures by “Most Interesting”)
• Social marketing is a very capital efficient way to market. This guy’s a master: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/
• Screencasts on your web site — of you talking about your service, or better yet, one of your customers talking about it — are very effective. Here’s a very easy way to create them: http://www.jingproject.com/ Then upload to YouTube — lots of traffic there, and thus people who could potentially find your service useful.

Here are a couple of interesting things I learned at this month’s Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails meetup, specifically the first presentation by Michael Hartl of InsoshI.

The first is how GitHub leverages the power of decentralization. Let me explain how I understand this work: GitHub encourages people to fork off of existing projects. So, if someone wants to add a fix to an open source project, they make their own, add the fix, and publish it on GitHub. Eventually they ping a core contributor to have their changes added back into the main branch. GitHub’s very good at merging changes back into a branch, so this is fairly painless.

Here’s why this is so significant. Traditionally, it’s taken a long time for fixes to get much distribution. This is because there was only one central repository for any open source project. Before any fix could be checked into the main branch, it would have to get reviewed and approved. This would take time. What GitHub does is remove this bottleneck. So more fixes get published more quickly.

You’d think forking would be a bad thing — a proliferation of nonstandard branches. But it isn’t. GitHub’s merge capabilities mean that these fixes find their way into the main branch.

Seeing this presentation makes me wonder why any open source project would NOT be on GitHub.

—

The second thing I learned was from watching how Michael does test-driven development. It’s all testing, all the time. I believe the tools being used were Rake, Growl, and Textmate. Tests are automatically run every minute or so in the background. Test results summaries are displayed in Growl alerts: a green box displaying how many tests passed, a yellow one with how many tests are undefined, and red with how many failed. The alerts fade from the screen after a few seconds.

It’s not a big production, moonshot-style, let’s-run-the-nightly-test-suite kind of thing. Rather, it’s simple, continual testing that provides a steady drumbeat of feedback to the developer. Ambient is the best word that comes to mind.

Words like these don’t really do it justice — you have to see it for yourself to fully appreciate what’s going on. It’s a subtle change, but one that I think will make a big change over time in terms of the quality and velocity of software development.

Just now read about twitrratr on TechCrunch. How they describe themselves:

Discover what people are really saying on Twitter. With Twitrratr you can distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.

This is a great tool for product managers, marketers and anyone who wants have their finger on the pulse of a market. It lets you quickly determine people’s overall sentiments about any topic being twittered. For instance, here are twitrratr summaries for Obama and McCain and twitrratr itself.

Twitrratr isn’t perfect. It could use some improvement in terms of how it recognizes positive and negative sentiments. But even with these warts, it’s still a useful service with a lot of promise. I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter acquired twitrratr, like they did with Summize.

But, please, twitrratr — get a name that’s easier to remember and type!

… could be the Nike Hindsight, new sunglasses that provide the wearer an extra 25 degrees of peripheral vision. They’re being promoted as cycling gear, but it seems they could have a wide range of applications, including everyday driving. As for myself, these are definitely something that I’d find useful for competitive sailing.

While WordPress works wonderfully overall, I just gotta get these gripes off my chest.

I wish that WordPress supported:

• MyBlogLog, or something similar, perhaps using their Gravatar service.
• ShareThis, a widget for sharing blog posts on social media sites.
• Google Reader’s Shared Items
• Atom feed format, not just RSS

The good thing, WordPress seems to have a good “feature velocity”, and as such, hopefully these things will be addressed in a reasonable time.

…from TypePad to WordPress. I must say, WordPress just feels better. I can’t put my finger on any one single feature that makes me say this. Just lots, and lots, of well-thought-out details.

Meanwhile, TypePad hasn’t really changed since I started using it in 2005 — it feels very web 1.0.

Oh, and WordPress is free. That helps, too.

I recently read this post at Brian Solis’ PR 2.0 blog on Social Media Marketing and wondered — why is PR changing?

I believe PR is changing is because different people are doing the writing.

We’re shifting from a media landscape where stories are written primarily by journalists, to one where a large chunk of stories are written by domain experts who blog and contribute to online forums. (For the sake of brevity, I’ll call them bloggers, even though they’re published online in blogs and online forums, and sometimes offline in books.)

Bloggers are different than the journalists they are replacing. Bloggers are often experts in their field, active practitioners who have built up their knowledge over years. Journalists tend to have a low-level of expertise in the domains they writing about. Their training is in writing and, well, journalism. In the course of writing a story, they cannot even come close to the level of expertise of a blogger writing about their area of specialization.

Journalists in theory have no agenda, and a commitment to objectivity, to report both sides of the story. Bloggers are likely to have an agenda, and have no commitment to objectivity. Online publications, seeing the influence of bloggers, are inviting them to write stories as guest contributors, further reinforcing their influence level. Bloggers are happy to oblige, since this increases their readership, AdSense revenue, and number of lucrative speaking engagements.

So how does this affect PR?

In the past, a public relations firm with little knowledge of a product or market could sling press releases or info packets to publications run by editors and journalists who a) had a low ability to detect vendorspeak (also known as BS); and b) wanted to cover all sides to the story, i.e., all leading vendors. Slinging worked, with a more or less predictable conversion rate.

Today, slinging doesn’t work. Bloggers hate it. I believe this is because bloggers are different than journalists, as described above. They require contact from someone who:

• Understands the domain reasonably well
• Knows the blogger’s personalities, agenda, alliances, and the perspective the blogger is likely to have concerning the product/service being promoted
• Can gracefully enter the conversation in a way that is respectful and provides value to the blogger in exchange for the their time.

In short, PR is shifting from a slinging exercise that’s the domain of someone who’s worked with various publications, to one that’s best conducted by a knowledgable evangelist. Evangelists aren’t new. Nor are they some kind of rare, exotic role. They are simply knowledgeable outbound marketing folks, freed from the obligations of having to manage a product or meet a sales quota. They are able to travel extensively, without any obligations other than getting the word out to as many people as possible. Guy Kawasaki was one of the more prominent evangelists in the 80s. I’ve worked with numerous evangelists in the 90s and this decade. Traditionally, they’ve been the person you rolled out to the speaker circuit and to help clinch your largest deals. In addition to these activities, I see their role evolving to include meetings with top bloggers.

That’s the crux — social media requires an evolution of the role of evangelist. And perhaps as traditional pubs decline in number and importance relative to blogs, our industry needs to shift headcount from traditional PR slingers to social-media-savvy evangelists.

But that’s it. Evolution, not revolution.

So, what steps should an organization take to shift to PR 2.0?

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and VPs of Marketing should ensure their PR staff have deep product, marketing, and domain knowledge. Either ramp up existing PR staff, or bring in new team members who have been successful evangelists, product marketing managers, sales engineers, or consultants.

PR staff should ramp up their product and domain expertise, fast. I believe that a proficient PR team that has done this should be able to produce Social Media Plan to complements their Traditional Media Plan. The SMP should contain a list of all influential bloggers, links to their online presence points, their "influence index" (using data from Technorati, Google, Compete, etc.), their agenda/point of view, their alliances, their actual or expected opinion of your product, and how to contact them. The Social Media Plan should provide a prioritized list of who to contact, and how to gracefully enter their world.

Product (Marketing) Managers with revenue responsibility can no longer safely assume that the PR department has things under control. They should become more involved, because often, they are one of a handful of people with the product and domain expertise required to succeed in the PR 2.0 world. Because PM’s and PMM’s have plenty to do already, they should lobby their CMOs to "upskill" the PR team.

In summary, PR 2.0 = evangelists – PR flacks + Social Media Plans.

I love Yelp. So do a lot of people. It’s the quickest way I know of to find a good local business.

But I also find it kind of amazing that Yelp exists in the first place. After all, Yahoo Local has been around forever. They had a huge lead in this local directories business. They have hundreds of millions of users to write reviews. They should own the local search category just like Google owns web search.

Put it this way, if you were a VC in the early part of this decade, would you have funded Yelp? I wouldn’t have — which goes to show why I stick to enterprise markets that I can grasp.

So, what happened? How did Yelp thrive in the shadow of a web powerhouse?

I don’t work at either Yelp or Yahoo, nor do I follow the local search market, so I can’t know for sure.

What I do know, is that as a user of the two services, Yelp’s functionality just works better. It’s the combination of many little things. Number and quality of ratings is one key factor, but there are many others. Enumerating those is beyond the scope of this post.

That said, I think a key "root cause" of Yahoo’s slip-up is that they weren’t paranoid about losing the lead in local search. They updated their service, but not quickly enough to keep pace with Yelp. In my mind, this is a classic case of losing the "paranoia" that Andy Grove wrote about years ago. A great quote from "Only the Paranoid Survive" describes this dynamic:

"Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive."

What other successful giants are there that have grown complacent and are vulnerable to younger, hungrier competitors?

This one is just too funny not to share: http://veryfunnyads.com/ads/25621.html

(Sent to me from one of my biking friends…)

OS X has been great to work with. But like any piece of software, it can be improved. Here are seven features that would let me work more efficiently.

• Autocorrect typos in any text field, in any application. I use TextExpander to partially solve this problem. But it’s autocorrect algorithms don’t work as well as Microsoft Office, its dictionary is tiny (a few thousand words — sounds like a lot, but not nearly enough), and it has some frustrating bugs.
• Resize windows from any edge or corner, not just the lower right. Especially frustrating since Microsoft Windows has had this ability since at least 1991. Would let me resize windows faster, probably by a factor of five.
• Automatically consolidate duplicate dates. If there are two dates referring to the same event, combine their respective information. There’s an AppleScript to delete iCal duplicates, but since this isn’t the same as merging near-matches, it doesn’t fully solve the problem.
• Automatically consolidate duplicate contacts. Address Book has functionality that partially solves this problem, but still misses out on many contacts.
• Automatically augment contacts with directions to and from my home and office, and along with short URLs to corresponding Google Maps. I use Google Maps dozens of times a week, spending maybe half an hour a week at the site.
• Automatically fix red eyes in photos. (But save the original picture, just in case the red-eye fix didn’t quite work out.) iPhoto can manually fix red eyes, but when you have thousands of pictures, this is very time-consuming.
• Search for text within pictures. I use Evernote to do this for handwritten meeting notes that I’ve scanned in as jpegs. Their OCR works amazingly well, and Evernote is an incredibly useful way to keep track of what’s happened in meetings. But it’s awkward to fire up Evernote just to view a meeting note jpeg. I’d like to be able to do everything in the Finder and Preview.

One can  hope that Apple implements these sometime in the near future. And if they don’t, this provides an opening for Microsoft, Ubuntu, or some other OS.

If Office 2007 has been as frustrating for me as it has been for me, check out a new feature from Microsoft Office Labs called Search Commands.

The problem that Search Commands solved for me is this: even after using Office 2007 for a few months, I still can’t easily find what I’m looking for, and still get frustrated having to look at many toolbar icons that I’ll never use. The way I solve this problem today is by either digging through the Ribbon and cursing, or using Google. Surprisingly, the latter method is often faster.

Search Commands solves that problem, by letting you "google" your Office 2007 commands, and find the right one. It might seem kind of odd to search for commands rather than use a menu, but consider that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint each have at least several hundred commands. It’s a lot faster to type a few keys than it is to browse and scan through a dozen drop-down menus.

If you like QuickSilver, Firefox search keywords, YubNub, the Unix command line, or other keyboard-oriented ways of working, you’ll probably find Search Commands a welcome addition. It’s not perfect, but it’s a big step forward.

One last thing: Search Commands is still considered by Microsoft to be an experimental feature, meaning that it might not be rolled into the Office 2007 code base. This is surprising given the positive feedback this feature has received, and we’ve known for over a decade that the majority of users like to search, not browse. So, if you like Search Commands, express your support here.

Most of my posts are related to the business of software, the web, and IT in general. However, I came across some useful information related to one of my main pastimes, competitive sailing, and thought I’d post it so others can benefit.

I’m in the market to buy a used Vanguard 15, a popular 15 foot sailboat raced here in San Francisco. Here’s the list of some of the less-obvious things to look for when buying a used V15. Some of these come from Nick Adamson, a past V15 national champ who was instrumental in getting the local fleet going here a decade ago, and Morgan Larson, a 505 world champ who’s done a bit of sailing in the Vanguards.

This isn’t a complete list of things to look for — that would be a long, boring post. Rather, these are some of the really big items to look for to quickly size up a boat.

1. Mainsheet block attachment becket – they eventually get loose and have to be reinforced (repairable but you should negotiate on the price).
2. Spider cracking in on hull – usually means the hull has a weak spot in the spider cracked area (stay away if you see this).
3. Excessive wear in the centerboard trunk – primary source of leaks (repairable but you should negotiate on the price).
4. Make sure mast is straight – they sometimes get bent when inexperienced folks stick the mast in mud. (Means the mast needs to be replaced.)
5. Bow dings. These are often repairable, but indicate the boat’s probably had a hard life.
6. Delaminated rails. These are usually repairable if they are caught early. But make sure the rail hasn’t turned mushy.
7. Misaligned/misshaped centerboard trunk. This is not repairable. If you want to be competitive, this could be a show stopper.
8. Corrosion in the rigging. Not a showstopper, but means that you should consider replacing the shrouds, else your mast could come down.

On the other hand, Nick said it wasn’t necessary to weigh a V15 hull, since he’s never her of major weight differences. This is in contrast to Laser hulls 20 years ago — yes, I’m dating myself — which could range in weight from 130 to 145 pounds.

Aside from these visual checks, it’s important to test sail a boat on a windy day and see how it holds up, and check out whether it leaks.

There are some things that are fairly easily addressed, and should not be major sticking points when looking to buy a used boat:

1. Minor rail dings.
2. Mast step depressions. Seems like V15’s get these after just a bit of sailing.
3. Wear on the boom, where it meets the shrouds.
4. Cracked plastic handrails. A number of sailors are simply taking the plastic handrails off.
5. Worn out shock cord and lines.

What do you think? What other kinds of things should one look at when buying a Vanguard 15?

I’ve always wanted a neighborhood newspaper — something that covers what’s going on in my local neighborhood, and filters out what’s going on in San Francisco at large.

Our neighborhood does have a local paper — the Richmond Review — but it comes out only once a month and is pretty sparse in content. There are local news sites like Everyblock, and Outside.in, but these seem to miss a lot of local stories as well.

So, I used Yahoo Pipes to aggregate RSS from a number of sites — Everyblock, Outside.in, Google News and Blogsearch, WordPress, Flickr (for local photos), Craigslist (for events), and Yahoo Groups. (Unfortunately YouTube doesn’t have a way to display search results in RSS, and Upcoming searches can’t be fixed on a particular neighborhood. When these change, I’ll add them.)

Pipes is smart enough to let me filter out news from Richmond, VA, as well as the town of Richmond in the East Bay, as well as to filter out duplicates.

The result is here. While it’s not perfect, it’s more complete than anything offered by Everblock, Outside.in, or even the San Francisco Chronicle.

Which makes me wonder: what if someone did this for every neighborhood and town in the US, or even the world. You could use Craigslist as a starting point for your taxonomy of communities. Doing this manually would be painstaking, but it seems like it would not be rocket science to automate this.

This concept could by refined by grouping entries by date, so that you have a "daily edition" for your neighborhood rag. Then add a Digg-like way for people to promote/demote certain entries so they appear higher/lower, and to flag entries as inappropriate — wrong location, NSFW, etc.

Hyper-local news should be achievable given the information we have available today. Food for thought…

TechCrunch has a great post on how early adopters spend their time on their computers. What’s fascinating about this is the time usage stats are based on actual behavioral data, so it’s very accurate, relatively speaking.

No doubt people are drawing all kinds of conclusions from this. I thought I’d share mine, which revolve around how this data affects market share, revenue, and valuations:

• Gmail is used 3x more than Google.com. Not surprising when one considers their own workday activities. But, assuming clickthroughs are more or less equal for both (valid assumption?) — that means Gmail generates the bulk of Google’s Adwords revenue. Pretty amazing considering that Gmail originally came out of a developers "20% time" project. This supports the notion that sometimes the best projects come out of skunkworks.
• Facebook is accessed 50% more than Google.com. Maybe that $15 Bn valuation is justified after all!
• Outlook is, unsurprisingly, the most used app. Now, think about Xobni. If you got it installed, whenever you use Outlook, you’re using Xobni. That means Xobni could soon become one of the most widely used apps around. That presents some interesting monetization opportunities when you have that many user attention minutes. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for those guys.
• It’s surprising that Yahoo Messenger has such low usage. Last time I’d looked, a few years ago, Yahoo had many instant messenging users. One more thing for Jerry Yang to worry about. I’m also surprised that Meebo is at the bottom of the list.
• OpenOffice and Google Apps have very low usage. For instance, Google Docs has 3% the usage of Word. If even the early adopters aren’t using them, I guess it will be some time before they start to challenge Microsoft in terms of market share. And it will be some time before Microsoft profitability, largely driven by the Office suite, starts to suffer and drag down Microsoft’s valuation.

A note on accuracy: I’m sure some will quibble about the accuracy of the numbers given that
the sample was self-selected, But market research is an inexact science.
Not to go all Rumsfeld, but you need to use the data you have, not the
data you wish you had. This, as far as I know, is the best data we have on what people actually do on their computers. (If you know of a better data source, please let me know.)

I recently learned about Evernote for the Mac on the Lifehacker blog, and that I’d give it a try. Here’s my review of what I learned.

First, here’s why I thought of Evernote in the first place.

My main reason for trying Evernote is to archive meeting notes that I’ve written by hand onto a notepad. While I prefer to take notes directly into my laptop, this isn’t always possible — sometimes I don’t have my laptop, sometimes my laptop is tied up displaying a PowerPoint presentation, sometimes I can’t type in my laptop without the keyobard clicks annoying others on the conference call.

I’ve tried special pens that have a camera built in and require special paper. The problem is that this pens ar huge and basically make you look like a dork. Not the best thing when you’re trying to establish credibility during a customer presentation.

Given the challenges above, I’ve stuck with good old pen and paper. The problem is that retrieving information in notes from more than a couple of days in the past is a time-consuming, page turning exercise.

Evernote is a nice complement to pen and paper, handwritten notes. It archives them on both my laptop and the web, and most impressively, makes most of the actual handwritten text searchable. This is really amazing. My handwriting is not that great, yet Evernote indexes it, and makes it instantly searchable, a la Spotlight or Gmail.

So, Evernote is off to a good start, especially considering that they’re only on version one of their Mac client.

Here are some additional things I’d love to see in the product in future versions:

1. For the web version, support Firefox keyword searching. This way, I could type in the following into my FF address bar: "evernote <text to find>", and the Evernote Web site would return search results.

2. Better integration with HP scanners. (Mine is an OfficeJet 5780.) I’d love to be able to scan directly from the scanner to the Evernote OS X client. Should be technically feasible, since the HP scanner can today scan to Preview, iPhoto, Finder, etc.

3. Reduce the size of JPEGs of notebook pages that I’ve scanned in. The HP scanner by default makes them around 2.5 MB for an 8.5 x 11 page. This is overkill. Would be ideal if Evernote automatically crunched these down to a JPEG that’s around 300 MB. That provides enough information to be readable on a screen.

4. Let me use Evernote to quickly concatenate multiple scanned in images into a single image. This way I don’t need to have a bunch of separate JPEG files in Evernote, as in "Acme Corp meeting notes 1", "Acme Corp meeting notes 2", etc.

5. It would ideal if Evernote let me take pictures from the iSight camera built into the monitor. This means I would not have to open up Photo Booth, and would be a time saver.

6. Better still if Evernote provided a hook into QuickSilver, which let me take pictures from the iSight camera just using a keyboard command. Perhaps this could be implemented via a special utility app (or droplet) that Evernote provided, sort of a "gui-less" app that quickly starts up, takes a picture, and puts it into the Evernote database.

7. Spotlight integration. Right now, items in Evernote don’t seem to appear in Spotlight.

So, if you can live with the above shortcomings, Evernote is definitely worth a look.

I’ve been playing with 10.5 Leopard. Here are some tips that I’ve found useful, along with links to where they’re posted. Hope you find these useful!

Normally the arrows next to artists and albums in your iTunes library
search the iTunes store when you click them. This Terminal command changes them
so that clicking will search your iTunes library instead. Put NO at the
end to reverse.

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/terminal-commands-for-hidden-mac-os-x-settings.html

To show the full path in the Finder, enter this into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

http://macbook.tumblr.com/post/28805638

This command creates a Recent Applications stack in your Dock, that you can change to display other recent items. To remove it, use the command defaults delete com.apple.dock persistent-others but be warned, this will remove all your stacks.

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }’
killall Dock

http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/terminal-commands-for-hidden-settings-in-leopard.html

Get rid of Leopard’s default glassy reflection:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

Removing the dotMac Menu
dotMac Menu is easy to remove – hold down the Apple (Command) key and drag the dotMac Menu’s icon off of your menu bar and it will disappear in a poof. To fully remove dotMac Menu from your system locate where you installed it via the installer and move it to the Trash.
http://www.infinitenexus.com/support/dmm/remove.html

Six months after buying a MacBook Pro, and switching from a Wintel notebook, everything is working pretty well. The biggest single challenge, however, is this.

Office 2007 has not been the easiest transition for me. Don’t get me wrong — I love learning new software products and services. I’ve used Office nearly every work day since the early 90s, too, so I’m familiar with a lot of its functionality.

The biggest issue is that I’m seeing a *decrease* in my productivity versus Office 2003, and by far the biggest single contributor to this is Office 2007’s "Ribbon".

It’s not the changes that Microsoft made to the layout of the commands. Change is a form of experimentation, which is a great way to learn what works best. I’m happy to invest the time to learn new functionality if it will save me time later on.

The problem is the fact that I can’t customize the ribbon. Because of this, commands that I always use are buried and require multiple mouse clicks to get to. Conversely, commands I never use first-class citizens with single button access.

Now, one of Microsoft’s goals for the ribbon as a way to expose to users the vast range of functionality within Office, so they could more fully utilize the suite, and be more productive. This is a laudable goal.

So, I have no problem with the ribbon per se. (In fact, I find the Style section of the Word 2007 ribbon to be very helpful.) What I have a problem with is that Microsoft made the ribbon not customizable, and there are dozens of commands on the ribbon that I will never use.

For example: I’m never going to use the Word Art, Research, and Translate buttons. Word Art is unprofessional, Wikipedia and Google are way better research tools, and for at least the next ten years, I’ll use a human for translation of important documents. I don’t need translation tooltips to display Saudi Arabian Arabic.

I could go on and on, but the point is: why can’t I hide these commands, and show commands for Insert Table Column, Remove Column, Insert Row, and Remove Row, which I use dozens of times daily?

I could do exactly this kind of customization in Office 2003, and it made me much more productive by saving me literally thousands of mouse clicks per month.

But it gets worse…

In an effort to learn more about how to work around these Ribbon issues, I viewed an article on Microsoft’s website, "How I learned to stop worrying and love the ribbon". (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102553291033.aspx)

The tone of the article is amazingly arrogant. Here are some quotes:

This Ribbon replaced the menus and toolbars — yes, the self-same menus and toolbars that you constantly griped about and yet were suddenly so attached to. You cannot imagine how much whiny feedback I received about the change

(Actually, as someone who remembers the rollout of the toolbars in the early 90s, I can attest that there was no griping about toolbars when they were introduced.)

Expand your mind, dude

(This from one of the most respected companies in America, if not one of the most loved.)

…you certainly cannot switch to toolbars and menus from a previous version of Office (as if).

(Actually, past versions of Microsoft products have carried over older user interfaces. Windows 95 included the Windows 3.1 File Manager, which was a smart insurance policy in case users hated the (then new) Windows Explorer. Windows XP allowed users to display the Start menu a la Windows 2000, another, similar smart insurance policy.)

It’s just that there are so many of you unique snowflakes out there that we can’t possibly anticipate what everyone is going to need all the time.

(Um, isn’t this precisely why one should allow the Ribbon to be customizable?)

Now, granted, the article is intended to be funny. But, to me anyway, it doesn’t come off as entertaining, and instead sounds condescending and arrogant. You have to wonder how this piece of writing was allowed to be posted on Microsoft’s website.

If you deliver an application over the web, downtime is inevitable. Much as we try to prevent downtime — through redundancy, bug fixing, monitoring — it still happens. The recent — okay, a couple of weeks ago, this isn’t a real-time blog — fiasco at 365 Main shows that even the "world’s finest datacenter" can still have its problems.

It’s been interesting to see how companies with web apps are using Twitter (and Jaiku, etc.) to provide status reports when their sites crash.

And talking about disasters in the physical world, people are starting to hear about them first on Twitter, etc. Here’s a story about how the Los Angeles Fire Department uses Twitter. Here’s one about the Minneapolis bridge collapse and Twitter.

People can debate Twitter’s usefulness for everyday events. But no one can deny that Twitter’s becoming the killer app for disaster management.

Which brings me to my main point: how long will it take companies that drive revenue through web apps to setup alternate communications channels using Twitter and other microblogging services?

For example: suppose customers can’t place an order via your website. The sooner you can tell customers that you’re aware of the problem and trying to get back online better. The sooner you can post an estimate of when you’ll be back online, the better. The sooner you can inform that you are back online, the better.

I’m no expert on disaster management, but it seems like one of the things that separates good disaster handling from bad is the quantity and timeliness of communications.

It seems natural that companies will eventually post their Twitter URL on their "Contact Us" page. And perhaps a Jaiku URL, too, in case Twitter goes down! This seems to be one of those standard requirements that product managers should prescribe for any Internet web app.

If companies adopt Twitter for disaster management, this essentially makes it a mission-critical application. Could Twitter charge companies for this service? Perhaps. Every company wants to look as competent as possible during a service outage — fumbling a disaster could cost a CEO or CIO their job — and Twitter would help here.

It will be interesting to see whether Twitter starts to offer something to address this market need.

Note I’m talking about the possibility of Twitter charging companies, not individual users. I can’t see any reason for Twitter to charge individual users. What I’m talking about is Twitter possibly going with a freemium pricing model.

Online surveys are, in theory, a great way to gauge software release readiness. One would think it would be easy to send a survey link to all of one’s beta customers, asking them to rate the overall stability and individual new features in a release.

Unfortunately, it’s not so easy.

Not because online surveys are hard to create or expensive. Sites like Surveymonkey make it easy to create online surveys for a very reasonable fee.

The problem is getting users to actually fill out the surveys.

My own experience is that only about five percent of beta users fill out online surveys.

Why does this matter? Practically speaking, statistical significance kicks in around 27 responses. (That’s the rule of thumb taught in market research classes. Feel free to dig into the math if you want.) Dividing 27 by 5 percent means you need 540 beta users if you’re going to get a reasonable amount of certainty around release readiness.

Getting a few hundred beta users is not easy, given the fact that beta timeframes are often crunched down to the bare minimum time, caught between engineering’s inevitable release slips and sale’s understandable desire to start selling the new product as soon as possible. (I’m not complaining about engineering here — software development is a hard activity to do, and even harder one to forecast.)

Even if you have 500 or more beta users, it make take a couple of weeks to get to 27 responses. 15 might come the first week, 10 the next, and so on.

This slow accumulation of responses makes life hard for a software product manager. Every day that goes by is lost revenue, but you don’t want to pull the trigger and go GA without having met your release criteria.

How does a product manager address this?

The easiest way is to improve survey response rates. If you can get response rates to 10%, you only 270 beta users to get 27 responses. If you can get response rates to 30%, you only need 90 beta users.

One way to do this is with a contest — for instance, raffle the hot gadget of the day (iPod, iPhone), or give away a free license of your product.

Another, cheaper way is to use "inline surveys" that appear  right on your company’s home page or blog or some other highly-visited web page.

If beta users see a blog entry with a short, five question survey, they’re fairly likely to complete that survey because they know it won’t take up much of their day. If they see a Surveymonkey link, they have no idea how many questions are involved, and they bail.

This is why I’m excited about a new inline survey from a company called Vizu. They let you embed a polling widget into a web page with a bit of JavaScript. Their widget is technically the same as other kinds of web widgets that people put on their blogs and Facebook pages, and fairly easy to setup. Pricing starts at free.

[Disclosure: I'm friends with Dan Beltramo, Vizu's founder.]

One of the toughest problems every software product manager faces is how to prioritize all the feature requests submitted by customers, salespeople, executives, and other stakeholders.

It’s a hard one to address. A software product can easily have hundreds, if not thousands, of feature requests. Companies often use bug tracking software, or support incident software, to track feature requests. Unfortunately, these don’t provide any way to "connect" requests. That is, to state that request A is the same as request B, and start tracking which requests are the most popular.

There are requirements management applications from FeaturePlan and Accept that let you connect feature requests. However, a product manager (PM) still has to manually make these connections.

A dirty secret in the product management world is that product managers (PM’s) rarely, if ever, comb through these feature request repositories when formulating a product roadmap. It simply takes too much time and there are too many other demands on one’s time.

The upshot is that when a new release comes out, it’s very easy for people to second-guess the product manager. Sales will ask, "why is feature X not in the release?" A big customer will ask, "why is my requested feature not implemented?"  Executives will ask, "is the PM really on top of customer needs?"

These kinds of questions, especially from executives, can hurt a product manager at review time. This is unfortunate, since PM’s typically do everything they can to provide a fair product roadmap.

This is why I’m very excited to learn about a new software application that lets stakeholders vote on product features. This is similar to how Digg lets users vote on stories, and how Dell Ideastorm lets users vote on feature ideas.

The application is called Pligg. It’s available for free download, and is hosted by several companies.

If usage of Pligg takes off among software companies, it could help our industry build much better products — and enable product managers to do much better jobs in less time.

I haven’t played with it yet, but am looking forward to doing so.

Have you used Pligg? Do you know of any other similar applications? Please let me know via the comments.

I’ve been thinking about if and how Twitter can be used by businesses to streamline their operations. Specifically, for software businesses, which is where my experience lies.

It seems to me that it can. Here’s one way:

Product development teams can use Twitter as an an "accelerator for Agile Development". Let me explain. One best practice of Agile Development is to a have a daily meeting, called a scrum. The meeting typically lasts ten or 15 minutes. It’s very informal. Every member of the development team briefly explains what they’re working on that day, and any blockers they face.

For instance, a developer might be waiting for product management to clarify a requirement. Or a tester might be waiting for a developer to check in a software component.

It sounds simple, but daily scrums are very effective in making problems known to the entire team, and consequently, getting problems fixed faster. With scrums, a blocking problem is unknown for only 24 hours max.

Now, what if a product team used Twitter to maintain a "continuous scrum status stream" — or scrum stream for short? Update your Twitter status once a day to declare what you’re working on. Update your Twitter status whenever a blocking issue comes up.

You would still need a daily scrum meeting, of course, to give everyone a live forum for raising issues. To be clear, I’m proposing Twitter to be used as a way to complement, not replace, existing Agile practices.

I think there would be at least two benefits to this use of Twitter.

Product team members would know about blocking issues even quicker. Problem resolution time would drop.

And, scrum meetings would be shorter, since they’d focus on exceptions, not day-to-day reporting of status.

In terms of security, Twitter already lets you restrict you can see your updates. So, if an engineering adopted Twitter to provide scrum streams, they would not have to worry about everyone on the web seeing those messages.

What do you think? Are there other ways you think Twitter can be used to make businesses work better?

I’ve been digesting the recent news out of Apple’s WWDC, in particular the news about Safari on Windows.

First, the positive: there’s some good stuff in Safari, in particular faster JavaScript execution. I applaud Apple for highlighting JavaScript execution times, as this should spur Mozilla and Microsoft to improve their browsers in this area, which in turn will make for a better Web app user experience.

But there’s a lot not to like. From my perspective, Safari on Windows just doesn’t seem to be the right business strategy move. Here’s why:

1. Firefox has great market momentum. Overall share is around 15%. I’ve talked to some corporate customers where Firefox is used by 80% of the employees. This is an incredible inversion of IE’s dominance that I was seeing at customers just three years ago, when Firefox barely registered in people’s mind.
2. Firefox has a huge, innovative developer community. Just look at all the third
   party add-ons on Mozilla.org. There’s a lot of useful stuff — toolbars
   (especially Google toolbar), bookmark sync/suggestion add-ons,
   debuggers, file sharing, chat, etc. Early adopters aren’t going to want
   to give those up, even if Safari is a bit faster. And there’s no way Apple is going to match the development efforts of the Mozilla community, even though webkit is open source.
3. Safari is still a niche browser. It’s market share most likely isn’t the 5% that Steve Jobs claims it is. Take a look at this roundup of browser market share. The consensus market share number is closer to 2%, meaning that Safari is still a niche browser. Perhaps Jobs is basing his claim on the most favorable market share number, 4.7% from NetApplications, and rounding up to 5%. That’s misleading.
4. Safari compatibility will be a low priority for websites and apps. Niche market share means that software vendors will still have IE and Firefox as their primary web app platforms. Few of them will get around to testing and supporting Safari.
5. Safari has newfound security issues. That’s going to hurt adoption.
6. It’s divisive to the anti-Microsoft effort. This last one is especially frustrating, because it’s an example of history repeating itself. Steve should know better. Let me explain: 15-20 years ago — damn, that makes me sound old — server vendors like Sun, HP, DEC, Silicon Graphics, and yes, NeXT — each came out with their own versions of Unix. This fractured development efforts and led to lower rates of innovation as well as buyer hesitance. The lack of a unified front benefited Microsoft, who went on to grow Windows NT in an enterprise force in the 1990s. Fast-forward to 2007: Firefox is finally become a legitimate competitor to Internet Explorer, and along comes Apple to disrupt its momentum.

So what should Apple have done? Join the Firefox effort: become a Mozilla contributor; bundle a special, Mac-ified version of Firefox with OS X; and port Firefox to the iPhone.

Think of the benefits: All those Javascript speed improvements in Safari would have done into Firefox. iPhone would have a proven, familiar, industry-standard browser for running web apps. The entire Firefox development community would be co-opted into the iPhone development community. No compatibility issues. A large community to fix security problems. A full range of extensions. And a stronger anti-IE movement.

What’s surprising here is that this is a deviation from Apple’s successful technology strategy of leveraging popular open source software and popular open standards. Here are some examples: the iPod supported the open MP3 standard, allowing it to plug into the large user base that grew out of Napster. OS X itself is based on Mach, a variant of Unix, allowing Apple to appeal to influential technical users. iChat is based in part on Gaim, open source instant messaging software. iPhoto and now the Finder are fluent in the the JPEG, GIF, PNG, and Postscript image standards. Quicktime favors the open MPEG-4 standard. Airport leverages 802.11b/g/n. And so on.

This isn’t just open-standard chest thumping. It’s allowed Apple to get the most bang for it’s R&D buck by tapping into developer communities, influential early adopters, and innovative code bases. Apple’s done a great job of "finding a parade and getting in front of it".

It stands in contrast to Microsoft’s tendency to propose alternative, often proprietary standards has been hurting them of late. Look at their attempts to impose alternative standards for music, DRM, video, and Acrobat. None have gained market acceptance. All have sapped R&D resources from other projects that are more core to Microsoft, like web search, web apps, Vista, and IE, all of which are now considered subpar to their competitors.

Safari on Windows feels a lot like Appletalk — an Apple-developed networking protocol that, while innovative and easy to use, ultimately was not able to match the pace of innovation of the tcp/ip protocol that became the foundation of the Internet.

I know might seem like I’m making a big deal about Apple porting their browser to Windows.

The reason I am is that I’m concerned that Apple’s hit a tipping point of hubris that will lead them to make dumb strategy moves, and stop doing what’s made them successful. I hope I’m proven wrong.

I actually posted to a blog for the first time this year — yep, it’s been pretty busy. My friend Tess asked me to do a comparison of Flex versus AJAX as a comment for her blog. Since the content here is pretty dang stale, I figured I’d repurpose the material below.

Here goes.

IMO, AJAX isn’t getting tired. However, it seems like the new trend is for AJAX and Flex to be used together so that developers can take advantage of the strengths of each one. Look at Google Map’s new “street view” functionality. The street map is built in AJAX, but the actual picture is Flex. Google Finance is similar: mostly AJAX but the charts are Flex.

AJAX works well for user input, and for making text “selectable” so it can be copied and pasted into another application. As a counterpoint, look at Yahoo’s new Maps, built in Flex — you can’t paste in an address using the keyboard, and you can’t copy the directions into Outlook. And forget spell-checking, which AJAX gives you for free when you use the Google toolbar.

Flex works well for non-text visualization, such as charts and maps. For these, user input is typically limited to mouseovers and mouse clicks. And refreshing a Flex chart or map is often easier than doing the same in AJAX.

Which will win in the future? It’s hard to say. The barriers for each are as follows: AJAX needs to continue to become a more productive development environment if it’s to win out. Flex needs to work more like a native desktop app, with seamless text input and output, if it’s going to become dominant.

That’s my two cents…what do you think, dear readers? (That’s right, I’m asking both of you.)

After years of Treo usage, I just got my first Blackberry, a 7250 from Verizon. It’s been interesting to immerse myself in the whole Blackberry user experience. I can now see how the Blackberry’s excellent data retrieval capabilities have won it adherents.

One downside of the 7250 is that its built-in RSS feed reader, News Clip, requires a licensing fee of $40. Another popular RSS reader, FreeNews, isn’t free at all but costs $20/year. After poking around a bit, I finally found a good, free Blackberry RSS news feed reader: Piconews. You can install it over the air by entering this link into your Blackberry browser: http://piconews.com/piconews.jad. Many thanks to BlackTouch, the producers of this software. 

It’s nice to see when a marketing message you’ve repeated many times in presentations, webinars, meetings and tradeshows finds its way into a respected blog. Here’s one such message my team and I evangelized many times at Mercury, as stated in this post on the Tyner Blain blog:

Improved Automation of Functional Tests

We can reduce the maintenance cost of keeping automated scripts current with the user interface by abstracting the script-coding from the script-definition. This is referred to as keyword and table scripting. A set of objects are coded by the tester and given keywords. Each object represents an element in the user interface. Script behavior (sequence of interaction) is defined in terms of these keywords. Now, when a UI element is changed, the keyword-object is updated and all of the scripts that reference it are repaired.

… described here. Could YouTube emerge as a place where companies upload their product demos? Why not? It’s free, taggable for easy search, and there’s tons of traffic.

Here’s one reason why, from my perspective, Google search is still better than Yahoo’s or Microsoft’s:

I’m hiring a product manager to work on my team. I’ve put together a fairly long query to find resumes of product managers with enterprise software experience, who live in the Bay Area. The query string is:

resume mrd product requirements oracle OR sun OR hp OR borland OR siebel OR peoplesoft OR bea OR adobe OR macromedia OR symantec OR veritas OR emc OR bmc OR sap OR “san francisco” OR “palo alto” OR “mountain view” OR “santa clara” OR sunnyvale

The query string could be longer, for instance there could be more cities and companies, but Google Alerts only allow 256 characters.

When I run the query in Google, I get about 10,000 results. Looking at the summaries, the results seem high quality: the first few pages contain mostly resumes of individuals that appear to have the qualifications I am looking for. Maybe after a few dozen pages or so the results will degrade, but we have some good material to work with.

When I try to run the query in Yahoo, I’m told I need to cut it down to something shorter, such as “resume mrd product requirements oracle OR sun OR hp OR borland OR siebel OR peoplesoft OR bea”. That’s unfortunate, because I cannot cast as wide a net for good candidates.

Nonetheless, when I shorten the search string, Yahoo gives me 600 million results. This number seems way off — I have a hard time believing there are 600 thousand enterprise software product manager resumes out on the Internet, let alone 600 million. Furthermore, many of the search results are of job boards and company websites. Yahoo didn’t pick up on the fact that because I listed “resume” first, what I intend to find are resumes. Not job listings.

Most embarassing is Microsoft’s new Search.Live.com website. When I run the query, I get zero results. Whoops.

This search query performance is something to consider when trying to determine a fair valuation of Google’s stock, currently at $404/share with a P/E ratio of 81. No one else can do what they can do in their core business, it’s unlikely anyone will be able to replicate their search capabilities, and the amount of searchable information is growing at an increasingly rapid rate.

Plaxo now has automatic map generation. See this posting.

While this is a nice start, unfortunately it requires that you are a) online; b) using the Plaxo toolbar; and c) using a device that is able to run Yahoo Maps and Flash. This means you probably can’t use this with a PDA or phone when traveling, even if you have a fast EVDO wireless Internet connection. Most mobile devices won’t run Flash, and probably don’t have the screen size to properly display a Yahoo map.

If only Plaxo could put the directions to and from each of my contacts, in plain text, into the notes for each Outlook contact. And update the directions as contacts are added, modified, and as I move. That would be a killer service that I would be willing to pay for.

From Cnet:

Palm announced Thursday that later this month it will make Microsoft’s new push e-mail software available for Treo 700w smart phones.

This a big deal. Push email is one of the biggest advantages that Blackberrys have over Treos. It will be interesting to see how this development affects handheld market share a year from now.

I’ve been thinking more about the quality of blogging tools and the slow rate of innovation at SixApart. From my perspective, it seems like they should consider doing some acquisitions to augment their tool set and enable their users to increase their blogs’ range of content and functionality. Here’s the list, in my personal prioritized order:

• An AJAX editor with Autosave, just like Gmail.
• Feedburner. Why? They are the market standard for generating RSS feeds and chicklets.
• A blog search engine such as FreeFind.
• An RSS remixer such as FeedMixer or FeedJumbler. Why? Let users combine multiple feeds into one, and post these feeds in the sidebar of one’s blog.
• Zoomclouds, to provide feed summaries in a compact "cloud" format.
• Gabbly, to enable bloggers to chat live with their readers.

Here are some arguments in favor of doing these acquisitions. Many of these companies are "feature" companies, not standalone businesses. As such, they would likely welcome an acquisition. Also, product integration would be attainable at minimal cost, since these services all produce JavaScript, RSS, or HTML output that can easily be incorporated into TypePad, Movable Type, or LiveJournal. Finally, with Google owning Blogger, you can assume that over time they’ll incorporate additional functionality from their product portfolio, such as Writely for blog editing and Google Blog Search.