Friday, December 21, 2007

Too many blogs? Let your friends do the work.

If you read your blogs using Google Reader, they have a great feature that can help you A) get more out of the blogosphere, and B) filter your reading to only the best posts out there as selected by your friends.

Reading your friends or co-workers shared feeds is like having a big filter on the blogosphere. Assuming your friends "share" only interesting or useful posts that they find, your aggregated "shared items" feed will be a best-of all the blogs that your friends read. This is a great way to keep up on blogs that you might not read very often or subject areas where you don't need to keep up with day-to-day postings.

Here at Palo Alto Software we have been doing this for quite some time but through the more cumbersome method of aggregating our shared feeds through a 3rd party service called xFruits. While this works, it's difficult to add new shared feeds.

Adding your friends' shared item feeds to Google Reader is unfortunately not easy. You have to go to Gmail or Google Talk to invite people. There is not mechanism in Google Reader to invite friends directly. Hopefully Google will add this feature soon.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Amazon Search Sucks (or how to make millions with a simple change)

Why is it that the search function at Amazon.com is so bad? I can't count the number of times I have mistyped or misspelled when searching at Amazon and had them deliver ZERO results. That's right. None. Nothing. This is a huge revenue opportunity just sitting there and to be honest I'm shocked that Amazon hasn't taken care of this issue long ago.

The kicker is that Amazon actually owns a search engine! All they would have to do is point failed searches at their own search engine and actually give users some results. I guarantee that this will increase Amazon revenue.

Current Amazon.com failed search with links to products that are not relevant at all to my search:

A9.com search results for the same search:


The second option gives me relevant products that I can actually buy (from Amazon.com, no less)

Are you leaving money on the table with your own site search?

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Focus on yourself, not your competition

Techcrunch has an interesting profile of some new services that can help you track your competition (assuming you and your competition operate mostly online.)

What strikes me about these services is that while they might seem very tempting to use, they will actually just distract you from making your business better. I find that it is very difficult to innovate on your products and services if you spend all your time focusing on your competitors. If you focus on your competition, it blinds you from innovating in your own business. Focusing on your competition will push you quickly into second, third or fourth place since all you will end up doing is copying what they do - all you will be doing is chasing the true innovators.

At Palo Alto Software, whenever anyone asks us how we compare to our competition, we have a simple answer: We don't know. What we do tell our potential customers is what we know - why we think our products are great, what features and benefits our products have, and how our products will help our customers succeed in business.

Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame has a similar response when people ask him to compare his FogBugz product to the open source alternative Bugzilla: "I don't know. I don't use Bugzilla but I can tell you what's great about FogBugz." (I'm paraphrasing since I can't remember exactly where Joel published this.)

The point is that truly great products, services and companies are built by focusing on how to better serve customers and how to innovate. Good companies are not built by chasing the competition.