Here’s a couple of ways companies lose potential customers very quickly online:
- Refuse to give quotes online — require that people call a salesperson to get more information, thereby negating the convenience of researching online.
- Even better — ask a person all the information about a system or service, and after they’ve filled out two or three forms to give the info, ask for an email address to send a quote to, which basically means “we’re going to spam you if you want a quote or more information.”
- All-Flash sites.
- Browser identification. “We’re sorry, you’re using an unsupported browser.” Screw you, support my browser or I’ll do business with the companies that will.
I’ve been using Google Notebook off and on since last year, and it’s been extremely handy. I logged in yesterday to write up a to-do list, and noticed that something seemed… different.
And then I started reading all over the place that Google Notebook has been upgraded and made multi-lingual to boot. If you haven’t checked it out recently, you really ought to. I use it for story notes and to keep track of information — like phone numbers — that I need from location to location, or that I just know I’ll have to spend 20 minutes looking for three weeks later if I save it as a regular file on my desktop.
Now I just wish Google would open up its API for working with services like Google Notebook and Gmail (as Yahoo! is doing) and allow desktop applications to take advantage of it. What would be truly hot is if I could use Tomboy or basKet to create / manage notes on the desktop on my main machine, and store them using Google Notebook.
The new Notebook interface is pretty slick, though. Combined with the Fullerscreen extension I’ve been using lately, it basically makes Google Notebook hard to distinguish from a desktop application. (It still lacks the drag and drop features, storing pictures from the desktop, and other niceties you get from standard desktop apps, though.) One thing I really like is the ability to export from Notebook to Google Documents.
I do a lot of reviewing products, hardware and software, and I try as best I can to put the products through the paces thoroughly before writing up a review.
But. Still.
There’s only so much a few days or weeks of testing will really tell you. Readers want reviews of products more or less as they’re released so they’re depending on reviewers to have early access or do quick testing shortly after release to get the review in time to have something to go by right before they make a decision.
I think, though, that there’s a need for long-term or follow-up reviews. Would readers actually spend time on a follow-up review of software or hardware if it offered a good look at how a product performs over the long term? For example, a laptop might perform beautifully the first month — only to have a component fail or break after five months.
A program might run just fine the first few weeks, but start to have issues after six months of use when you generate a substantial amount of data or it might have issues after a small update from the vendor/project. Or, it might turn out that you discover problems or spiffy features that were missed during the initial review.
I wonder if this is something that readers would be interested in? I can’t see many publications making it a high priority unless there was a fair amount of demand, considering it’s hard enough to generate all the first-run reviews…
So, 2007 has been “the year of travel” for me. Usually, I spend 99.999% of my work time at home, with my “main” computer handy.
When I travel, I used to just rsync my home directory to my laptop, and go. Lately, though, I’ve been relying on online services like Gmail, del.icio.us, and whatnot to make me more portable.
I’m curious what other folks use for portability — what services/tools do you use to operate more effectively when you travel? Particularly when you’ll be at another location long enough that you actually have to get “real work” done.
A YouTube clip of Kermit the Frog performing Hurt by Nine Inch Nails. How much more wrong could this be? None more wrong, that’s how much… 
Gmail has been behaving exceptionally well the last few weeks, until today — I’ve been getting “operation cannot be completed” errors for about 20 minutes. Anyone else seeing this?
I wonder if I’m the only person who does this: I collect background images for my computer like crazy. If I see a post on Lifehacker about computer backgrounds, I must click on it to see what sort of spiffy backgrounds there are, and I’ve downloaded zillions of them. I even pay for a subscription to Digital Blasphemy to get the subscriber-only backgrounds because I think they’re cool and I like the idea of someone being able to make a living doing backgrounds and graphics.
But I almost never see my computer’s desktop. Every square inch of screen real estate is consumed with application windows.
So why do I bother with backgrounds at all? Anybody have a theory? (”You’re an idiot,” may be the best theory, but let’s avoid that one for now.)