Monthly Archives: February 2007

Orientation Week

Student life is socially-validated slumming – be sure to abuse this.

– Steve Nicoll, Salient

It’s orientation week around the country.

This time seven years ago Dave (pictured) and I were tripping around the South Island spreading the word about flathunt.co.nz.

Later the site was acquired by Trade Me and over a number of years morphed into Trade Me Property, but at that stage it had just launched and was desperately in need of some customers.

We stopped at pretty much real estate agency and property manager we could find, and tried to convince them to use the service, but I doubt we got a single listing.

It was a much better reception at the universities where there were lots more internet-literate people in need of a room or a flatmate who were also poor enough to be reluctant to shell out $30 for a newspaper ad and willing to give something new a go.

In case you’re wondering, Lake Tekapo had no role in the marketing strategy – it was just a beautiful place to visit en route. And the sign is looking a little beaten up after an outing the previous night at Carisbrook for the one-day match between NZ and Australia. At the time having the freedom to do things like that was half the attraction.

Can’t believe that was already seven years ago!

Don’t break the back button

One of the golden rules of web development is “Don’t break the back button”.

The back button is one of the first concepts that somebody who is new to the web learns. It gives people the confidence to click on links safe in the knowledge that they can always return to where they were.

Breaking the back button is not a new problem. Jakob Neilsen has been banging on about it for longer than I’ve been using the web.

But, we keep finding new ways to break it.

I wrote recently that this is one of the unsolved problems with applications that use a lot of AJAX. Well, Julien Lecomte from the Yahoo! User Interface team has come up with a possible solution that he’s calling Browser History Manager.

This uses a combination of JavaScript hacks to fool the browser into thinking the page has changed, and so effects what happens when the user clicks the back button. Provided it’s coded smartly it also allows users to bookmark an AJAX page in a specific state, which is nice.

It’s good to see that people are working on this sort of thing, but to me it feels like a very hacky solution.

At what point does the fact we need to fix these sorts of problems cause us to re-consider the whole approach?

The difficult second album

Scott Adams (he’s the guy who created Dilbert) had an interesting post recently about why musicians find it so difficult to continue to have hit albums. He thinks that it’s because they end up competing with themselves. I think he’s probably right.

When Trade Me was sold I got some good advice from somebody who is wiser and older than me along the lines of:

Just because you’ve had one success, don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’re bulletproof.

But, I guess the flip side of that is becoming too scared to try anything new – it’s going to struggle in comparison with Trade Me, surely!

Seth Godin, in his recent post about opportunity cost, is on the money I reckon:

Failure now means never failing.


Bonus link: while I’m talking about Scott Adams, here’s another interesting recent post from him: Happiness Formula. What are your two?

Ferrit bashing

Ferrit is taking a kicking at the moment, from all directions.

Lance has several recent posts:

(remember Lance, three posts in a row is a rant, four is a crusade!)

Over the weekend Sam predicted that the site would be toast within 30 days of the new Telecom CEO being appointed (Dominion Post, Sat 17 Feb).

Even the mainstream media have caught on:

If the numbers that Lance quotes are correct then it must be a pretty depressing place to be working at the moment.

It’s a bit premature to perform a post-mortum on a still-warm corpse, but …

Whenever they talk about their product they always seem to focus on the size of the opportunity and how much money they think they can make:

Ralph Brayham thinks the New Zealand on-line retail market is under developed, saying that in the US 5% of shopping is done over the Internet, with this number reaching 10% in the UK, but only $200 million is spent on-line in New Zealand.

From: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=6549

I’d be much more optimistic about their prospects if they were instead saying something like:

We think that it’s too hard for kiwis to find somewhere to buy the things they want on-line. We believe we can solve this problem by providing a kick-ass search engine and shopping cart all in one place, and making it easy.

That would at least indicate that they were approaching things from a users perspective and trying to solve a problem.

Of course, even if they were saying this sort of thing they’d be wrong.

Here is a quick experiment using three of the products featured on the Ferrit homepage this morning:

How hard is it to find somewhere to buy these products online from a NZ supplier?

Using Google (a well known and trusted brand, no?) …

Search for “Shuttle SN25P”, and the fourth result is The Computer Lounge (based in Auckland with an online store). The third result is PriceSpy.co.nz, a competitor to Ferrit that has been around for a while.

Search for “Bvlgari – Blv Eau De Parfum Spray 40ml/1.3oz”, and there are options on the first page of results from both Zillion and FragranceDirect.co.nz.

Search for “The Memory Keepers Daughter”, and Dymocks.co.nz is the third result (after a couple of reviews).

Of course, you can also find all three of these products currently for sale on Trade Me:

So, it doesn’t seem like this is very broken to me.

MySpace Application Architecture

http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2082921,00.asp

This is an interesting article about the underlying application architecture of MySpace.

There are quite a few parallels with Trade Me. I recognise a few of the problems that are described in the first few pages (up to 3 million customers):

  • Managing session data across multiple web servers;
  • Using caching to ease the load on the database;
  • Partitioning the database when it’s too big/busy to live on a single server, with the corresponding issues around data replication;
  • Implementing a storage area network (SAN);
  • Bumping into I/O constraints in the database;
  • The impossibility of realistic load testing

Like us, they have also recently migrated to .NET (in their case from ColdFusion). I previously wrote about our migration experience, if you’re interested.

Clearly, they’ve also had to deal with lots of problems we haven’t run into yet. I was talking to Scott Guthrie from Microsoft at TechEd in Auckland last year and was bragging (just a little!) about how we’d just clocked up 1 billion page impressions the previous month. He’d recently spent some time with the MySpace guys as part of their migration to .NET and told me that at that stage they were serving out 1 billion impressions per day! Ouch! :-)

So, there are probably some pointers here to the sorts of changes we’ll need to consider as Trade Me continues to grow – for example, moving to more of a distributed approach to the database design

Is marketing broken?

Rod posted a quote I made recently about Trade Me. The emphasis is his:

Trade Me wasn’t about technology. Sam’s insight was that marketing was broken. Rather than wasting lots of money on big billboards and TV ads (’it’s shopping on the internet’!) he instead decided to focus on building a really great product, which people like to use and tell their friends about.

Andy Lark disagrees. At least, Alex from Base4 thinks he did.

To start, you need to understand the context. It was a light-hearted breakfast debate put on by Synergy Fronde to launch their new brand. The topic was: “We’d all be better off if IT people ran NZ business”. I was on the negative team. The affirmative team, lead by Tom Scott, had painted Trade Me as an IT success story. So, we were running the “inmates are running the asylum” line.

Perhaps I got a bit distracted in talking about marketing as part of this. But Ferrit, with their flashy conventional marketing and crappy product, are just such an easy target. I couldn’t help myself.

That aside, I don’t actually think that this is a disagreement. Here’s the quote again, this time with my emphasis:

Trade Me wasn’t about technology. Sam’s insight was that marketing was broken. Rather than wasting lots of money on big billboards and TV ads (’it’s shopping on the internet’!) he instead decided to focus on building a really great product, which people like to use and tell their friends about.

So, Alex, aren’t both Andy and I saying the same thing?

Water Whirler

Every now and then Wellington turns on a stunning day, and we all forget about how much the weather bothers us. There have been a couple like that this week.

I took this photo on Wednesday from Frank Kitts park looking out across the harbour, which was like a sheet of glass. In the foreground is the Len Lye Water Whirler (this press release has more details, and more photos showing how it moves). This is one of a growing number of wicked pieces of sculpture and public art around town – mostly the work of the the Wellington Sculpture Trust.

:-)

Americas Cup

Last weekend I finally managed to get out on an Americas Cup boat. I’ve been wanting to do this ever since we came back to NZ, right about the time of the last Cup event in Auckland.

The boats are run by Sail NZ. They are old Americas Cup boats from previous regattas, so it’s pretty authentic. I was in NZL-41 which in a former life was the Japanese entry in the Cup in San Diego in 1995.

During summer they do a 2 hr sail in the mornings and a 3 hr match-race, with two boats, in the afternoon. If you are at all competitive I recommend the match-race! You can either get stuck in and help with the grinding and hauling sails etc or you can sit back and enjoy the ride – whatever works for you. Although, as we discovered, these boats were never designed for comfort and can get a little wet. I was right into it, and had pretty sore arms and shoulders the next day for my troubles. At times the two boats got pretty close, and these are big powerful yachts, so it was quite exciting.

For the record: we won the start and lead the whole way, but in the end only won by a few seconds. The biggest drama was after the race finished, when we had some problems getting the sail down. I was down the hatch and had to quickly jump out of the way when the sail decided it didn’t want to be put away.

Good times! :-)

More photos on Flickr

Are we done?

I always take it as a good sign when people start complaining about the colours in a site design. If that’s all they can find to comment on, then more-or-less everything else must be pretty much ready to go.

You can never please everybody. Although, as Kathy Sierra points out, you can easily please nobody (actually she’s been talking about this for a while now). Sometimes you just have to go with what you think is right. And, when you do get opinions from others make sure you’re watching what they do rather than listening to what they say.

:-)

Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo have just announced a new service called Yahoo Pipes. At first glance it looks really interesting.

Jeremy Zawodny has some more details, including this description of the problem they’re trying to solve:

On the web … there are data sources and feeds, but until now we’ve had no pipes! Pulling together and integrating data sources using JavaScript isn’t on the client for the faint of heart. The browser isn’t the same as a Unix command-line, so building mashups has been more frustrating and time consuming that it needs to be–especially for Unix people like me.

Tim O’Reilly also adds his take, including this succinct summary:

[Pipes is] a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.

The thing is, Unix pipes were never this easy or pretty. The drag-and-drop UI is totally intuitive – I get it without having to read a manual. I especially like the way that the pipes themselves, connecting the different controls, are displayed – no clunky straight lines.

In about 2 minutes I threw together this pipe (is that what they will be called?) which provides an RSS feed of the latest Trade Me site announcements in French!

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/EiPH51S32xGA_mfNqu5lkA/

:-)

Have a play – let me know if you come up with anything interesting.

UPDATE (9-Feb): All I’m getting this morning is an error message saying “Our pipes are clogged. We’ve called the plumber!”. That’s cute, but a real missed opportunity at the same time. It would seem they didn’t anticipate how popular this would be. Start small, but think big and scale quickly!

Foo Baa La La La

Kiwi Foo Camp (a.k.a. Baa Camp, or as Wayne notes in the comments on this Flickr group photo, Man Camp)

I’m finally back in Wellington after spending a great weekend at the idyllic setting of Mahurangi College at Warkworth, north of Auckland.

I didn’t really know what to expect. And, as it turned out, I was right!

The attendees were a crazy mixture of famous bloggers, media personalities, a former Shortland St star/ turned rock star/ turned web entrepreneur, lots of open source people (actually, lots of open source geeks) + one brave Microsoftie, government ministers, designers, legends of Mozilla/Google, hardware, software and content people, journalists, not to mention a couple of shameless fashion victims.

The schedule was created on the fly on Friday night and was all over the spectrum, from serious discussion of the state of broadband in NZ (well covered by Russell), to body modification, wok-fi (proving the spirit of #8 fencing wire is alive and well!) and performance art. Some warewolf. Plus some exciting software demos (Xero and Firefox 3 + Gecko).

I especially enjoyed Tim’s session on raising cash and Justine’s session on faceted navigation (we already use this idea a bit on Trade Me, specifically within Property, but I hadn’t come across this name for it before).

I get the feeling that it would have been a lot of fun even without the sessions. The place was just so full of interesting people. Everywhere you turned there was an interesting conversation just waiting to be started. I even found myself getting a bit angry at myself towards the end when I realised that there were going to be lots of attendees left over that I didn’t get a chance to talk to.

I got totally hooked by a Wii. Those who know me will tell you I’m the last person to get excited by games, so cheers to Glen from NetRatings for bringing that along … I might have to get me one of those!

And, I wasn’t the only one mesmerised by the growl of Rod’s Maserati.

Nat (or, more kindly, Nat) opened the conference by suggesting that we each try to put in more than we take out. I got the impression most people did. I hope I at least did enough to be invited back next year.

Extra: there is (an apparently controversial) Wikipedia entry here.