Today when I was driving back from lunch I saw the weekly BlueDot email telling me my friends have added new dots. It made me realize that my friends never get these emails with my name on it because I never add anything to my BlueDot account. Nor I add anything to my del.icio.us account... But wait, I also don't add anything to my own browser's bookmark.
I have a set of bookmarks on my browser that I've been carrying them for ages. There is the first group, which I call "News" and it contains 6 links (Bloglines, a brazilian newspaper, MSNBC, News.com and Technorati). Then I have a group called "My" which are links to all the sites that I've built to family and for myself; and finally a group called "Banking" where I have a link to AmEx, Bank of America and Citibank.
That is it. Those are the bookmarks that I have at work and at home.
The reality is that I've been using bookmarks as shortcuts to things that I use a lot. It is way faster for me to click once to get to my bank's website than to type the URL. I don't use them to remember interesting things that I've seen in the past.
I read a lot of stuff out of the Internet. Most of the time, I digest things right there and then. If I don't have the time, I'll either email myself with the link or keep a tab open on my browser waiting to be read.
I wonder how many people go back to their bookmark to visit things they've added years ago. This is like your email inbox. If it wasn't important enough to be dealt in a few weeks you're unlikely to go back to it.
Sure, you can keep an email or save a bookmark for future reference, but I have the browser History, and, more importantly, search engines. If something is of enough interest to me, I just remember the key terms and I'll be able to find that content for on the Internet.
The other reason to use BlueDot or del.icio.us is to share bookmarks with others. But I've been using the ol' email so long that it is hard to change a habit. I also don't want my friends to have to subscribe to my bookmarks and have to do all the filtering. I'm the filter, so when I see an interesting video on YouTube that might interest Joe, but not Jane, I will send it to Joe only and Jane gets the benefit of having less uninteresting stuff to deal with.
The final aspect of social bookmarking is discoverability of new stuff. That is useful and from time to time I do use that.
Now, I can see why so many people are different than me, hence the success of del.icio.us.
One of the biggest problems of consolidating reports from multiple sources in synchronizing the timestamps. When you talk about a Web-based business that is quite relevant.
If each report is on a different timezone, it will be pretty hard to define what is "Saturday", or "Tuesday", or 5 other terms.
Very early on Sampa, I decided that everything that we log or store would be in Universal Time Coordinates (UTC), sometimes also known as GMT*. We knew that our users would be world-wide, and we didn't want to have to deal with timezone and daylight saving time when dealing with logs and reports.
Now, not everything that we do at Sampa is managed by us. Like many other web businesses we use Google Adsense, Amazon Affiliates, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, etc. All Google Services (and Amazon as well) use GMT-8 (Pacific Standard Time) and that is a pain.
We can't really aligned what Google tell us about clicks, impressions and revenue with our other data.
Now, don't get me wrong, Sampa is too small of a company to cause Google to change is timestamp to UTC, however, I'm sure that are hundreds of thousands of companies world-wide that would very much appreciate that change. Just go to the Google Groups talking about Adsense, Adwords and Analytics to how many people are asking to be able to change timezones.
It is interesting to compare what you think happened and what actually happened on the presentation. In other words, the video doesn't feel as good as I thought the presentation had been. Maybe is my voice that sounds so different when I'm talking versus when I'm watching myself talk.
All notifications emails coming out of a Sampa registration process use the "sampa" alias. So if somebody uses a bad email address like "DontExist @yahoo.com" and it bounces, it goes directly into my inbox.
We always had our share of bad emails. Usually 5-10% of people that signup for Sampa use a bad email address. But on the last 4 weeks or so, the number had grown to 10-15% per day of bad email addresses.
I always keep an close eye on it because we had problems with AOL and Rediff blocking all our emails (they thought we were a spam server).
So I went to do a close analysis of one week of bad emails.
Some surprises, some not. We had 4 categories of mistakes:
People using fake email address, like "fake @fake.com" or "test @test.com"
People misspelling the domain, like "joe @ yhoo.com"
People misspelling their alias, like "jeo @ yahoo.com" (intended joe @yahoo.com)
People using a Sampa address, like "joe @sampa.com" or "joe @sampasite.com".
For #1, there is not much we can do except clarify that the email must exist. So we changed our language on the website. Before it said you must enter a "valid email address", now it says "an existing email address".
For #2, we do a DNS lookup now for every email address. If the guy types xyz@yhoo.com we will flag it, unless, of course, the domain was registered by somebody (at that happens a lot for misspellings of Yahoo, Hotmail, GMail, AOL, etc.)
For #3, there is not much we can do. Yahoo never tells if an email exists during an SMTP session. Nor does AOL. Hotmail does tell you that. Don't know about GMail. Doing that test is hard because I need to find out the MX record for that domain, then do a "special" SMTP conversation to figure it out. It is quite a bit of code and I don't have the time now.
For #4, we just flat out prohibit the use of our own domains, like "@sampa.com", "@sampasite.com", "@brainuse.com", "@inthesphere.com", etc. That is a problem because we cannot use our own work emails to sign up for Sampa (but we have an easy workaround).
What have the results been? We don't know yet because I only have two days of data. I want to compare a full week to see the number of people that registered end up confirming their addresses or not.
There are a lot of sites on the Internet running Google Adsense, you know, the Google Ads that appear on sites that are not from Google.
Google always has a message on those ads saying "Ads by Google". If you go to my previous blog post (When a user misspell his email address) on the top Google Ad you'll see "Ads by Gooooooogle".
Today I went to LinkedIn and I was looking for somebody when I saw an ad for Google's GMail. The first thing I noticed was the ad was a video. Never seen that before. Then I realized it was an Ad for GMail (it was not clear).
This is a screenshot of a regular Text Ad on LinkedIn:
Notice that it clear starts with "Ads by Google".
Here is another Ad from Google, but this time an Image:
Not as clear as before, but the "Ads by Google" disclaimer is there at the bottom (it would be better to be consistent at the top of the ad)
Finally, here is a Google video ad for GMail:
Nope, it doesn't say it is an Ad.
When I worked on MSN Search, there was an FCC probe into search engines and their paid-links (a.k.a. sponsored links) practices in the sense of not misleading users into clicking on ads without them knowing it was ads.
Afraid of some FCC regulation, the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and AOL) decided to clearly label the Ads links. Most of them already did that, but reinforcing it helped the FCC leave us alone.
Now, Google sometimes does things that either are evil or stupid. Since they claim to "do no evil", this is an obvious case of a stupid decision on not disclaiming on their on Google Adsense program that this video is an ad.
I just thought it would be interesting to list what I've been using on my browser. I'm very careful with not installing too much stuff because it can slow down the perf, but these are the tools that I can't live without:
On Internet Explorer:
Alexa Toolbar: I just love to know the rank of sites that I visit.
Compete Toolbar: Just like Alexa, but they give me a 1-click to my own sites information and they have this "Trust" level for sites (a bit of anti-phishing help)
Fiddler: A neat HTTP tracer. This is for developers only.
DevToolbar: An easy way to check and manipulate your page's HTML. (for web developers only)
On Firefox I use:
Compete Toolbar: Same as IE's compete (I wish there was Alexa for FF)
MeasureIt: An extension that let's me measure the distance between two pixels.
Web Developer: This is a must have tool for any... well... web developer! Like the DevToolbar for IE, it let's you see and do a lot of interesting things with your HTML.
Console 2: A great extension to filter JavaScript errors.
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email telling me my friends have added new dots. It made me realize that my friends never get these emails with my name on it because I never add anything to my BlueDot account. Nor I add anything to my del.icio.us account... But wait, I also don't add anything to my own browser's bookmark.
November, 2007