Castro's Blog

MySpace Deletes User Accounts

MySpace scared the hell out of users today by displaying a message that a given user's account way deleted. This was first reported by Drew Olanoff on his blog. Drew is one of the hosts from the Best Damn Tech Show, Period. One of my favorite podcasts/videocasts.

This also made the front page of Digg.

Updates from MySpace claim they weren't really deleted user accounts despite what the error message was, they were only moving servers around. What they hell are those guys doing? We had a power outage? We spilled coffee in our data center. Tom forgot to pay the electric bill. Are you kidding me?

They have 96m users (even though 50% of those are spammers, child molesters, etc.), but don't have data center redundancy? They don't know how to do data replication so maintenance tasks don't result in the service not being available. What a joke.

Excellent Clickstream Study

This is pretty interesting study of user's clickstream behavior. There is a good deal of useful data across topics like:

• How do users navigate to a site? How does this change depending of the time elapsed between visits?
• How often to users click on links below the 'fold'?
• Do users scroll horizontally on web pages

Below is a screenshot of some user eye tracking that was part of the overall study.

Meebo on Netvibes

Netvibes has integrated Meebo into their Ajax homepage service.  The Meebo widget lets you chat on all the major IM systems (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) from your Netvibes homepage. The widget is displayed under a tab that notifies the user when a new IM message is received.

Meebo has enjoyed strong user adoption, partially due to schools blocking client side IM applications, among the Gen Y crowd. I also know several former co-workers at Amazon who use it because Amazon, like many corporations, prevents users from downloading and installing client IM applications.

This is a smart move on the part of Netvibes. It helps them tap into Meebo's much larger userbase. For Meebo, this gives them exposure to people outside their core Gen Y audience (e.g. tech savvy early adopters). Although the Dead 2.0 site correctly points out that most browsers (with the launch of IE7) support tabbed browsing and questioned the need for this.

 

Win an iPod

We're giving away a free iPod nano as part of our "You Don't Need One, But You Know You Want One" contest.

The idea is simple. Help spread the word that an iPod (or any device) is not required to listen to or watch podcasts. You can watch them online from a web site. The more friends you tell, the greater your chance of winning.

Enter Here - http://www.pluggd.com/user/invitations/

ImageKind Launches

My good friend, Kelly Smith, has launched ImageKind today. ImageKind is a service for creating, buying, and selling wall art. If you are looking for something nice to frame and put on your wall and you can't afford expensive original art, then I'd suggest you check out ImageKind. If you are an artist, or think you can be, you may want to look at ImageKind as an outlet for your work.

ImageKind is the first company incubated by Curious Office Partners. I've gotten to know Kelly Smith over the last few months and he is one of my favorite people in the Seattle tech community. He and the rest of the ImageKind team has done a wonderful job with this site.

Google Reality Check - Part 2

The Google reality check continues to gain steam. The New York Times recently published an article  title, "In the Race With Google, It's Consistency vs. 'Wow'," comparing Google's product development approach with Yahoo's product development approach. The article points out that Google's approach is to throw out something with some sizzle and watch most of it fizzle hoping every once it a while they will get luckly and repeat their initial search engine success.

Here are some highlights form the article:

• Google is 3rd behind Yahoo and MapQuest in Maps
• After 2 years, Gmail is a distint 4th behind AOL, Yahoo, and MSN Hotmail. (it's 'OK' cause it is only a b-e-t-a')
• Google Talk had 44,000 users in June (less than the total UU for Pluggd this month)
• Orkut has 280K users compared to MySpace's 90m+, Friendster's 20m+, even piczo is kicking Google's ass here

Even Segey admitted that their helter skelter approach to product development isn't working, admitting that, “It’s getting hard to follow all the different products.”

Click on chart below for the gory details:

This story is beginning to get traction with some of the blogosphere's heavy hitters. Mike Arrington on TechCrunch recently posted on this topic, and suggested, "they roll some heads and figure out a real product strategy."

GigaOm has received some clarification from ComScore that indicates only 44,000 people out of the 1,000,000 who have downloaded GTalk use it. I think it is fair to point out that Gtalk also has an Ajax web client built into Gmail. Of course, Gmail doesn't have that many users either, so it probably doesn't matter much.

Google Reality Check

Back in October of 2005, in a post titled "Why isn't anyone calling out the press' misplaced Google worship?" I questioned the why the press did not seem to call out Google's numerous misteps. In particular, I pointed out numerous flaws in the Google RSS reader that made is completely unusable.

It appears the tide has begun to change and a backlash against Google's numerous inept product offerings has begun. The first mainstream article that really focused on Google's failure to deliver on anything beyond their core search/advertising service was a July 10th article in BusinessWeek called "So Much Fanfare, So Few Hits."

"An analysis of some two dozen new ventures launched over the past four years shows that Google has yet to establish a single market leader outside its core search business, where it continues to chew up Microsoft and Yahoo."

The article then continues on to detail one failed product offering after another ranging from GTalk, to blog search, to Google Finance, to Gmail, etc. They even included a really nifty chart that I've included below: