Blogs Eating Blogs

Dennis Forbes with a most excellent rant. Part pro-bloggin, part anti-blogging, part anti-Scoble filled with good stuff like:

"If you look at his adoring community, and follow some of the backlinks, you discover a large, incestuous network of bloggers that are blogging about blogging, and linking to each others blog entries about blog entries about blog entries that talk about blogging about blogging on blogging with blogging."

http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/categories/softwareDevelopment/2005/11/30.html#a203

BTW, he also covers a bunch of great software dev stuff in his other posts so at the risk of being incestuous I'd recommend you subscribe

Ad Supported Business Apps

Jeff Nolan has an interesting post about Salesforce and perhaps Google offering ad supported business apps for small business. This would seem to be more in Googles court than Salesforces, but it's an interesting idea. I suppose if you could ensure security and that the content the companies are searching in order to find relevant ads isn't used in a bad way then this could be a good thing.
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1st HelpSpot Testimonial

Ben Richardson from Switch I.T. the creators of CampaignMonitor wrote up a great testimonial for HelpSpot. They were the 1st official customer, a huge help during the beta, and an important part of the pre-launch marketing for HelpSpot so it really means alot to me that they think so highly of the product.

You can check it out over on the site: Switch I.T. Testimonial

PSP RSS and HelpSpot

The PSP game console now supports RSS so this means you can administer your help desk while playing on the PSP. Pretty cool. I might need to pick one of these up for testing.




via Micro Persuasion
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Help is for Experts

More good stuff by Jensen Harris:

"How can this be? I think my biased assumption was that experts know how to use the software already and eager novices would be poring over the documentation trying to learn how to be more effective using it.

Yet, in usability tests we see it again and again: novices and intermediates click around and experiment, experts try to reason things out and look them up in help."

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/comments/497861.aspx

This is a big reason why I didn't build "integrated" help into HelpSpot. It's basically a waste of time. You're much better of focusing on making your app simpler to use and have an online manual for the power users, administrators, etc.

It's also why HelpSpot has several somewhat hidden features. There's things in there which are hidden in plain sight like reminders. It's a cool feature to be able to setup reminders about a request, but making it too prominent would distract from the learning of the base functionality. It's OK if users discover that feature 6 months into using HelpSpot, in fact it will be better because they'll grasp the power of it more than if it was something they tried to fiddle with on day one.
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Post 1.0

It's been brought to my attention (thanks Mike) that my post HelpSpot 1.0 release postings have been .... um ...... pretty lame (xbox, Jessica Simpson, etc). So I'm turning over a new leaf right here, right now. Back to business on this blog.

In fact this blog has been in many ways a reflection of my life. After getting 1.0 out I just had to step back. No coding at all until about 2 weeks ago when I got things together for a 1.03 release that just went out last night. It's funny because even though there was some significant work in there along with testing and so on, it really felt like nothing. When you go from building every new feature from a blank page adding one more setting or fixing a small bug feels like nothing at all.

The post 1.0 world is very very different. Rather than focusing on getting features added and making changes as the ideas flow I've found myself being forced to hold back. Especially with a product like HelpSpot I simply can't be releasing updates once every 2 weeks. First because I don't want to set that precedent, but also because no IT department in the world is going to install a new upgrade every couple weeks. Instead I've got to hold back and release larger releases less often. They'll still be pretty often in the beginning, but I expect they'll slow down as the bugs get worked through over the next few months.

Working with customers has been fantastic. Overall I've been very happy with HelpSpots performance. Almost all support has been installation support, which is exactly what I had hoped. There's always trouble with installation, some due to HelpSpot other times just getting PHP setup, IIS, and so on. What I was really worried about though was alot of support because administrative pages aren't clear, don't work as expected, etc. Having not gotten many of those type of request gives at least some indication that pages work as the user expects, which is huge to me.

The biggest issues so far have been with Windows/IIS installations. Nothing huge, just little quirks. Some of this is my fault as well since my background is more Apache based so I'm not as familiar with the IIS environment, but I'm learning. I have to reiterate that it was a very good move to decide to support it since I now have many customers using it and I think very few of them would have had the option of switching to another web server.

In an effort to keep up the transparency I've tried to have with this blog I'm going to try and get some hard sales numbers up here in a future post. I think it will be useful to future b2b developers. I have to figure out how exactly I want to present things a bit, but I should have something together in a few weeks so stay tuned.

Programming Language Popularity

For those who are interested Tiobe Software has released their list of the most popular programming languages. Note, that I have no idea who these people are but the list is interesting never the less.

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

Java and C have a commanding lead followed by C++ and PHP just barely below C++. VB is 5 followed by Perl then a big drop. Ruby is 21.

I think the PHP number is very interesting. I've had the sense just from my experience since releasing HelpSpot that PHP was really on the rise in the corporate world. I've been amazed at how many companies have been willing to install it to try HelpSpot. This seems to lend some factually backbone to my observations.

Contextual TV Ads

Dave points to TiVo's ad announcement, whereby they'll let viewers find ads they are interested in as well as skip over ads they aren't.

I have to say I was hoping TV ads would go in a different direction. I understand that you'll never get rid of ads on TV and I'm fine with that. What I really want is contextually relevant ads. The best example of this is Extreme Makeover Home Edition. While the trips to Sears on that show are a little over the top, the rest of the product placements are done pretty well. Show me those great Closet Maid shelves actually in a closet or how nice those new Pella windows are.

Make the product fit the show I'm watching rather than ads almost always being totally irrelevant to the show.
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I Could Make Some Big $ if I Had a 360

This blog post is #4 on Google for "xbox 360 availability" and hence I'm getting thousands of visitors on that term. Wish I had a few, heck wish I had one for me :-(

Jessica Simpson

"so heres what i propose. i propose that you move into my hollywood bachelor pad and be my girlfriend. if you wanna buy a dog you can buy a dog. if you wanna call tuna chicken you can call that shit chicken and you know what i'll do, i'll say baby i love you. thats what i'll say."

Tony Pierce

This dude cracks me up.

Service Level Agreements

Version 2 of HelpSpot, is going to have many more features revolving around the management and automation of tasks involved in handling service level agreements. Many of these features will be generic in terms of being functional for both formal SLA's as well as simply automating escalation of requests and so on. I'm still trying to balance in my head the amount of information the system needs to know about a specific SLA vs leaving things tied more loosely. It's a bit tricky because non SLA HelpSpot customers will likely be confused if there's too much service level agreement stuff, while SLA users will want those extra touches.

This is all in pretty early planning. I don't plan on having version 2 out for at least 6-8 months, but I like to start getting these ideas down early so I can iterate over them.

If any of you out there use SLA's in your day job I'd love to hear about how you implement them and where you could see improvements in the process by better integration with your help desk solution (no matter what that is). I'm also looking for good links and books on the subject if you know of any.

PHP 5.1

PHP 5.1 is out and I have to agree with John that it feels rushed. There's alot of new stuff in there and there seems to be alot of issues still, at least from what I hear. My major concern is that many HelpSpot trial users are PHP newbies installing it for the first time.* That's always a challenge to begin with and if 5.1 introduces unknown issues on top of it that will of course only make things harder.

I guess I know what I'll be doing on Sunday while I watch football. (test for HelpSpot capability of course!)

* On a side note, I think this willingness to jump into PHP just to try HelpSpot really shows how poor the help desk alternatives out there are and hopefully how compelling HelpSpot is.

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PHP SDO

The new SDO data object access functions are pretty cool stuff. If you're a PHP guru you should check it out. I must admit I'm intrigued, but I do have some reservations about abstracted abstractions and all that.
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New Podcast

My favorite new podcast is Travel Commons with Mark Peacock. My wife works in travel procurement for one of the big 4 accounting/consulting firms and can really relate to his road warrior stories. I've done a fair amount of travel myself in my past careers as well. I really can't imagine traveling as much as this guy does though, flying in for a few hours then back out over and over. Ugh.

XBOX 360 Availability?

Anyone seen sites selling the 360? Amazon basically doesn't even have a way to preorder it which is pretty rare. All the local stores are sold out. I traded in my old xbox, which I rarely played, and got 2 games on the trade. So now I've got 2 games (Madden and Call of Duty 2) with no way to play :-(

del.icio.us for Product Research

It's pretty cool to checkout the main URL for your product on del.icio.us. So far there's 20 links to HelpSpot only a few have comments but those are interesting and I think a nifty way to peak inside what potential customers are thinking about your product.

Here's the one for HelpSpot:

http://del.icio.us/url/ad2c1e68e90e20c46bc8275793237760

My fav comment: "Amazing new IT Help Desk software"

I'm going to dig around on this a bit longer. I think there's probably alot of good market research that can be drawn out of the comments attached to del.icio.us bookmarks along of course with where they're linking to.
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Product Vote

Ben is looking for some help figuring out which direction to take is application. He's looking for input from ISV's, so if you have a chance help him out.

My 2 cents is to try and provide support for all of them. It doesn't have to be all at once but you should have the major guys in there like share-it. Maybe them, Authroize, esellerate and another CC gateway or two. You need to have these because (in my mind) these are just necessary evils. They're aren't why someone like me would buy your product. It's the other features that are the "killer" features. Follow up emails, advanced license management, customer self service. Those are the problem you're solving for me not the gateway. You need to support whatever gateway I want to use so that I can purchase your product to solve my real problems which are excessive customer emails about licenses, manually creating email reminders, etc.

I wouldn't worry about them being a competitor. There's lots of room in that market, plus being a small biz yourself you'll have alot more "street cred" if you market things right than they will. They'll still outsell you 10000 to 1 but that doesn't matter because that's still more money than you need. Hey, HelpSpot competes with Intuit and their CEO owns a stinking Basketball team! There's plenty of money for everyone.
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AJAX Library Suggestions

So I'm going to be making the plunge into AJAX for HelpSpot. Now that I've been using HelpSpot myself for about 4 months I can see some very useful spots for it. I'm really glad I waited BTW and not just threw some in just to say I had it. I've managed to sell plenty of installations without it (can you believe it!) but also I'm going to be adding it where it will really improve the experience based on facts not on speculation. I think it's important to note that before launch I would have added it in different places and in a different way then I plan to now and I would have been wrong, it would have detracted from the experience IMHO.

Now, I'm going to be rolling it into the 1.1 feature release (I think) probably sometime in Jan/Feb. I'm currently researching libraries and am curious what you all have used and if you have any suggestions. HTML_AJAX seems to be making some progress, but it's still early and I know they keep changing some of the API. I'm not a big fan of most of the bigger libraries I've looked at because they seem to do to much. Most of the features they add I will never use. My current thinking is to use the prototype.js library directly. This way it's light weight and it's only JS I have to worry about. No other foreign PHP code is added to "help" me. Plus I can easily layer script.olicio.us on top if I need more fancy effects down the line. I don't really give a hoot about convenience (though prototype does make things pretty convenient), I care about speed and stability only. Thoughts?

Oh, if anyone was looking, there is some OK documentation on prototype here. That's probably my biggest concern with it is that the developer provides no docs at all.

Back to Work!

I've been getting back to work this past week. Since releasing HelpSpot I've been having a blast mostly working on support, talking to customers, and just generally relaxing a bit. The final push to get HelpSpot out nearly killed me, but now after getting into the business side a bit, hearing tons of great feedback and making some money I'm ready to do some coding!

It's going to be fun to get the first bug fix release out next week. Several important bugs in there as well as a few new features. I'd normally like to keep features out of the bug releases, but being very early in the game I'm going to sneak a few in rather than wait for 1.1.
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OSX Website Editor

Interesting new website editor for OSX. In beta now, very very interesting.



They're also trying out something interesting to spur development in the open source web kit.
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