Even to this day, these things exist. What gives?

1. Browser inconsistencies - please, don’t get me started
2. Non-secure login - there is NO GOOD REASON as to why I should need to log into your website without SSL. Most of you have it, why isn’t it the default? By you not redirecting me to the SSL version by default, you are telling me, “Our system resources are more important that your security.”. Thanks.
3. State of Wireless - tell me again, why isn’t it fast, secure and absolutely everywhere?
4. Network hopping - although this has gotten better it is still not idea. My computer/software needs to figure out which network I’m on and not on. And while I’m at it, if I have multiple available and credentials for all, then use them!

Argh!

I’ve been sitting on this for about a year and now that it has come up yet again, I just have to comment.

This got started when I got caught up in reading the recent thread on the NYPHP mailing list about interviewing developers and its reference to Joel Spolsky’s, “The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing” (v. 3.0 10/2006). I discovered that he actually wrote a book on the topic as well (don’t click the link, please).

I don’t know how to say this any other way: All these people got it wrong.

If you read through the threads I’ve linked to, you see that this quickly becomes “me too” party where everyone interjects their criteria/question as to not feel inadequate. So, whats the best answer? There is none, but here are my thoughts on the issue:

I won’t get long winded, but rather than fun algorithm tests that only prove if the user has seen the latest parlor tricks, you need to assess their experience, skill level, and THEIR goals. All of this fun should be done at the phone screen level, so when they are here in person, you should seriously be considering them. So, do this:

The last one is pretty important. You really don’t care if they can solve the carnival game you gave them at the interview, you really care if they can handle whatever may come at them in the future. I think this is the part that people don’t get. Language, platform, etc, don’t really matter at that point. If you are looking for a true expert, you need to look for the traits that one displays:

So, make a pot of coffee and sit and have a chat with the person. You’ll never know what you don’t know without it.

I think the impression everyone has of Facebook is way too misguided. Yes, college students use it - lots of them. And they love it. But, most of us graduate college and move on with our lives. Facebook has not done a good job of recruiting the “non-college crowd” (why would they, that’s not their niche) and I predict this will be their ultimate demise. It may even be sooner than that as we might see someone like MySpace use the Facebook API to transfer the FB’s profile data to their own site (I’m not sure if this actually can be done, or maybe it is done already?) upon a user’s request. Why would a user request this? Because ALL of their friends (family, college, work) are on MySpace, not FB.

“So what?”, you say, “Facebook has the attention of a key demographic! College students like toys and gadgets and they (or their parents) have lots of money so FB will get lots of advertising $$$.”. Yeah, maybe for the next year or two. For the long term, it’s not quite that simple.

Monitizing a “profile” is going to prove more and more difficult as the excitment of online advertising dwindles, just as it did in the late 90’s. It’s great that Best Buy has another mechanism to reach people who are likely to buy their headphones but I’d argue it’s all noise to the people actually using Facebook.

So, what’s the saving grace of internet advertising? Data mining. Get me exactly what I want for my particular need. Showing me headphones isn’t enough - I need headphones that are going to fit my oddly-shaped ear. How are you going to do that? Either find out about my oddly-shaped ear or find out that I want to know about headphones for oddly-shaped ears and show me information on others with oddly-shaped ears who purchased headphones. (I don’t have oddly-shaped ears, do I?)

The requirement to accomplish the above? Longevity. The true allure of internet advertising is the ability to focus on someone’s true interests and place things in front of them that they would actually want. That’s what Best Buy really wants because it then becomes an easy sell. You just need to be around for a while and be collecting and crunching data to do this. Facebook isn’t collecting any real, usable data to help push product. Right now, Facebook is the equivalent of putting a billboard right in the center of campus: Everyone is there, everyone sees it, everyone congregates around it. Then everyone graduates and everyone forgets it.

Google is smart enough to see the need for data mining as we can see by their key products and acquistions. Some examples:

• Mail - figure out what people are talking about.
• Maps - one of the first applications of the web and useful to everyone. Plus, they can figure out where people are going
• Doubleclick - nearly everyone’s computer has a Doubleclick cookie on it
• Feedburner - what are people reading and how is content being aggregated and passed around
• Docs and Spreadsheets - Office is the killer app of the desktop. Unleash the user from those shackles and they can become all-G, all the time.

The problem is that Google is scaring alot of the low-key (yet 800-pound) gorillas in the media industry as well as the content providers and producers with their hype, practices and market cap.. Not to mention those in the tech sector. These companies aren’t going to just roll over as Google tries to take over. Ever watch Survivor? The person who is so wonderful in the beginning is generally voted off early on. We’re still in the cheerleading phase with Google and they’ve already made some enemies. The truth is, although they produce alot of “good”, other than search, they got nothing. Don’t get me wrong, search is big, but we’ve all been through this before in the late 90’s. This kind of reminds me of the band Kajagoogoo - they had a really big hit, a couple of smaller hits and a catchy name that we all laugh about now.

Only time will tell.

Much debate has arisen over Google Print, and I would like to weight in on the matter: It’s much ado about nothing. Why? Because it is almost completely useless in today’s form.

I did a search in Google today for “how to write a business letter”, and the first listing came up as “Book Results”. Ok, I thought, this will be great, and I click on the first link. I come to a non-intuitive interface that hides the fact that all I’m going to see is the table of contents. Now, I’m not “just off the boat”, I had a feeling something like this would happen. But, actually being in a position of a web-user, I must say that this really sucks. If you can’t read what you need/want to, what good is it? After determining that the last 1 minute of my life was wasted, I hit back button and moved on to web results.

I would hate to call what many consider the “world’s coolest geeks” dumb, and I’m fortunate in that I don’t have to. I bet that they know the product is useless right now, and so do the publishers fighting with them. So, what’s the problem? The problem is that Google has the technology and the motivation to index all of the print material they can, and the publishers know that they are living in a dying medium. When their medium finally does die, who will be there to save the day? Google. The book companies will be held captive by the number one search engine, and will be forced give their content away, or it will be rolled up into some aggregator a la “Walmart” style, and sold for nothing (Walmart has been criticized for strongarming smaller businesses in the past, and I have personally seem them in action in years past). Modeling the techniques of what is probably the greatest business in world history? No, these geeks certainly aren’t dumb.

However, the current state of all of this stinks. It reminds me of a system that we had in the library called “Infotrac”. How annoying it was to have to shlep to the library to use this system, and half of the results that you would get you didn’t access to because the library didn’t subscribe to that content (or perhaps, you would only get an abstract).

This brings me to another pet-peeve, along the same lines of this information-restriction. When searching for technical things, I often get results from experts-exchange. This is particularly annoying, because you have to at least be a member, and perhaps even pay to see the results. Now, to be fair, I am a long-time member, but I don’t remember my account info (another problem with the web…), and I’m not about to sit there and try to figure it out.

So, it would be nice if Google put something in their preferences to turn off the “features” that we don’t want. Don’t include book results until I actually get the results, and don’t include information that is not free for me to at least read. I’m as much a capitalist as the next guy, but if I can’t have it, there’s no sense in teasing me about it. Besides, I personally think you would have BETTER luck in getting book publishers to provide license to the content by NOT providing it. The “legitimacy” of the web is becoming stronger daily, and someone (most likely a capitalist) will publish their own version of the info for free in the hopes of making advertising revenue anyway, so the World will just use that. Sooner than becoming completely obsolete, the book publishers will cave and provide some form of useable license to Google.

Even if everyone held on to the idea of being able to “buy and sell” the info, there was no way for me to do that there. I was given links to Amazon, BN, etc., but the fact that I’m using the web to search for information pretty much means that I want it NOW. Not an “‘estimated shipping time 1-2 days’ + priority overnight” from Now.

It will come at some point, and it will be useful. Someone CC me on the announcement when it does.