Showing posts with label Blogger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogger. Show all posts
Thursday, December 14, 2006
RSS Apologies
Apologies to RSS readers of this blog. I added some tags to a load of previous older posts and in the process, Blogger Beta has updated the publishing date so they appear higher up in the chronology of the feed. It makes for some weird reading - sorry.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Blogger Beta – Rubbish!
I have been using Blogger to manage this blog since Summer 2004, and have been waiting for a new shiny release to pimp up my posts. Until recently, the only major change to the service was the inclusion of AdSense and the ability to post from a mobile. Over the last few weeks, Blogger has been encouraging users to move over to Blogger Beta. So, I duly signed up to the beta version, and have been using it over the last week or so. Here’s my feedback:
Labels – great new feature (that’s been around for years in TypePad and WordPress) that enables you to add labels (tags) to each of your posts. As a relatively ancient user of the product, I’ve got loads of posts that I want to now add tags to in order to make it easier for readers to see related posts. But if I go in to the post and add a “label”, Blogger Beta updates the publishing date in the RSS feed so anyone reading my RSS feed gets regurgitated posts from several months back. This is a stupid oversight.
New Posts – A couple of days ago, you could create a new post in Blogger Beta and add pictures, change font, add hyperlinks etc at the touch of the button. These buttons have mysteriously disappeared today, allowing only plain text posts. Rubbish.
Display Formatting – I have a pretty standard 17” flat screen display on 1024x768 resolution. If I try and edit my blog in IE, the Manage Posts view only shows “edit” and “view “. You have to scroll to the right of the screen to see the post information and “delete” options.
No web stats? - Every person out there who blogs regularly, likes to occasionally (once every hour ;-) check their visitor stats and referral information (like who visited, where they came from and what search request brought them). I would have expected an updated and revised release of Blogger to include basic web stats, but nope, nothing.
In summary, disappointing. The new Blogger Beta does make it much easier and digestable to add and manage external links, scripts, headers and tags, but the service stinks of a product that hasn’t had enough testing and QA. I know it's Beta, and a few bugs are expected, but come on, this is Google!! I’ve seen much better quality product deliverables coming out of three person start-ups. Pull your socks up Google!
Labels – great new feature (that’s been around for years in TypePad and WordPress) that enables you to add labels (tags) to each of your posts. As a relatively ancient user of the product, I’ve got loads of posts that I want to now add tags to in order to make it easier for readers to see related posts. But if I go in to the post and add a “label”, Blogger Beta updates the publishing date in the RSS feed so anyone reading my RSS feed gets regurgitated posts from several months back. This is a stupid oversight.
New Posts – A couple of days ago, you could create a new post in Blogger Beta and add pictures, change font, add hyperlinks etc at the touch of the button. These buttons have mysteriously disappeared today, allowing only plain text posts. Rubbish.
Display Formatting – I have a pretty standard 17” flat screen display on 1024x768 resolution. If I try and edit my blog in IE, the Manage Posts view only shows “edit” and “view “. You have to scroll to the right of the screen to see the post information and “delete” options.
No web stats? - Every person out there who blogs regularly, likes to occasionally (once every hour ;-) check their visitor stats and referral information (like who visited, where they came from and what search request brought them). I would have expected an updated and revised release of Blogger to include basic web stats, but nope, nothing.
In summary, disappointing. The new Blogger Beta does make it much easier and digestable to add and manage external links, scripts, headers and tags, but the service stinks of a product that hasn’t had enough testing and QA. I know it's Beta, and a few bugs are expected, but come on, this is Google!! I’ve seen much better quality product deliverables coming out of three person start-ups. Pull your socks up Google!
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Google Customer Services
A few months back, I wrote a post about a suspected bug in Picasa/Hello (google owned) which enabled me to get hold of the jsalmon.blogspot.com web address. It was previously being used by someone else, but the blog registration process via Hello let me get hold of it. I thought this could be a potentially damaging bug/hole so I wrote to Blogger customer services explaining the problem, and expecting them to get back to me (at some point). Its now 3 months since I wrote to them and I haven't heard a thing.
To date, Google hasn't had to provide much in the way of customer services - a significant expenditure for other service related companies. I'm sure they have a few teams looking after cash-cow adword/adsense clients, but most of their other services don't need much currently in the way of support. However I think this may begin to change and Google is going to have to do something about both its support levels and response times. As our internet usage and destination preference increasingly goes Googles way, we become more reliant on the effectiveness of their product experiences, and product integration points. You can address a lot of potential hiccups with good engineering, rigorous testing and thorough beta phases, but there will inevitably be problems and users will complain. Complaints cost money, both in employing people to deal with them and the negative PR that can generated as a result of a serious hiccup. So Google will need to think how it addresses this, firstly to maintain its brand preference and image and secondly to control and minimise its costs. I hope that it addresses this with its traditional levels of innovation and re-engineers the way that Customer Service Centres are rolled out and operate. Maybe it could create an army of Google "Bees", home workers who are connected to Google customers with Google Talk and Gmail, who are geographically distributed across the globe and able to converse in multiple languages. They could be rated by the customer on their response effectiveness and therefore create a customer-managed workforce. I would also hope that they could respond to a request in less than 3 months!
To date, Google hasn't had to provide much in the way of customer services - a significant expenditure for other service related companies. I'm sure they have a few teams looking after cash-cow adword/adsense clients, but most of their other services don't need much currently in the way of support. However I think this may begin to change and Google is going to have to do something about both its support levels and response times. As our internet usage and destination preference increasingly goes Googles way, we become more reliant on the effectiveness of their product experiences, and product integration points. You can address a lot of potential hiccups with good engineering, rigorous testing and thorough beta phases, but there will inevitably be problems and users will complain. Complaints cost money, both in employing people to deal with them and the negative PR that can generated as a result of a serious hiccup. So Google will need to think how it addresses this, firstly to maintain its brand preference and image and secondly to control and minimise its costs. I hope that it addresses this with its traditional levels of innovation and re-engineers the way that Customer Service Centres are rolled out and operate. Maybe it could create an army of Google "Bees", home workers who are connected to Google customers with Google Talk and Gmail, who are geographically distributed across the globe and able to converse in multiple languages. They could be rated by the customer on their response effectiveness and therefore create a customer-managed workforce. I would also hope that they could respond to a request in less than 3 months!
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Blogger Mobile
Yesterday the blogging population saw the announcement of Blogger Mobile - for US based mobile users, they can start blogging with minimal effort and set-up hassle. Just send a picture/text to go@blogger.com and you're up and running. The service sends the user a web link and a code which can be used to view/edit the blog. Bloggers who already maintain a blogspot can register existing blogs against their registration code.
This is an interesting development for a number of reasons:
1) It demonstrates how important the mobile phone is for the future of blogging. The mobile is the perfect tool for adding pictures/text to your blog. Most of us (!) spend a lot of time away from our PC's/laptops but the mobile stays with us.
2) It could mark the change from blogging being a niche activity to a mass market phenomenon. Simplicity is absolutely critical to running up the adoption curve and so many products remain niche because they havent managed to overcome provisioning complexity. This is the brilliance of what Four11 and Hotmail did with email. They turned email from a product that needed an ISP, modem, PC, pop3 address, smtp config etc into something that required 2 minutes of registration time in an interenet cafe or a friends PC. Blogger has reduced the provisioning complexity down to a couple of steps.
3) It suggests that Blogger has done some form of deal with US operators (not all of them). This is interesting for me because I think European operators might have a different attitude given their commitment to the upkeep and maintenance of their walled gardens.
Despite all the positive press, I still think there's room for improvement, because fundamentally the average mobile user is not familiar with sending with pictures or text to an email address. We send stuff to numbers.
This is an interesting development for a number of reasons:
1) It demonstrates how important the mobile phone is for the future of blogging. The mobile is the perfect tool for adding pictures/text to your blog. Most of us (!) spend a lot of time away from our PC's/laptops but the mobile stays with us.
2) It could mark the change from blogging being a niche activity to a mass market phenomenon. Simplicity is absolutely critical to running up the adoption curve and so many products remain niche because they havent managed to overcome provisioning complexity. This is the brilliance of what Four11 and Hotmail did with email. They turned email from a product that needed an ISP, modem, PC, pop3 address, smtp config etc into something that required 2 minutes of registration time in an interenet cafe or a friends PC. Blogger has reduced the provisioning complexity down to a couple of steps.
3) It suggests that Blogger has done some form of deal with US operators (not all of them). This is interesting for me because I think European operators might have a different attitude given their commitment to the upkeep and maintenance of their walled gardens.
Despite all the positive press, I still think there's room for improvement, because fundamentally the average mobile user is not familiar with sending with pictures or text to an email address. We send stuff to numbers.
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