My dad is a construction contractor in Florida, and he just broke ground on a new home that will be the first certified energy-efficient home in their county. It’s a big deal, so I set up a blog for him. Take a look at the photo the Groundbreaking page – that’s my dad (third from the left) and my little sister (far left). My little sis even has her own company – the CAHeneise sign is hers.

If you’re interested in green homes and energy efficiency make sure to follow their progress and subscribe to his news feed, since he’s going to pull out all the stops in blogging about the process of building the house. Who knows – you might even learn something that you could use in your own home to reduce your energy bills!

Check out my dad’s website, HKHeneise Custom Homes and his blog.

Since moving into our new home, we’ve gotten somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 calls from some anonymous recorded message. The message goes something like this:

Please call . This is not a sales call. This is an important business matter. Again, please call .

Now, I didn’t know who this was, but as we have never given out our home number to anyone except our immediate family, I knew whoever it was could have no business with us. The home phone is exclusively used for the purpose of maintaining our DSL line, and even our closest friends just use our cell phones. So I tried to ignore the calls, hoping they would go away.

After about 15 or so of these calls I finally decided to call the number and ask them to stop. At this point I still had no idea who could be behind all this.

Ring. Ahhhh… AOL. That explains a lot. I’ve heard horror stories about AOL.

I was already hot under the collar for the number of times that they’ve called. So when I got a “please hold” message, you can imagine how happy that made me. Fortunately they didn’t make me wait too long on hold, and someone came on to “assist” me. She asked for my home phone number, which I provided (apparently they don’t have caller id), and then, in the most thick and unintelligible Indian accent I have ever heard, asked if I was a person whose name I could not understand. I replied that I was not. She then proceeded to ask me for my mailing address. Now, at this point I wasn’t certain who I was talking to. For all I knew, it may have been some scam artist in Nigeria. So at this point not only was I defensive, I had also become suspicious. I replied that she did not need my address, and obviously they already had my phone number, and that because I had no business with AOL, please stop calling me! Click.

Naturally that didn’t work.

The calls stopped for a day or so, and then started up in earnest. It was as if they had flipped the harassment machine into high gear. And they even started mixing in a different message, as if that would fool me into calling again. Altogether we got another 5 or so calls between my first contact with them and when I called the second time.

Second time around I was quite nicer. Someone came on who could speak English, and I sweetly explained that I would like them to stop calling us. She asked for my phone number, which I provided again, and if I was Trevor So-and-so, which I replied that I was not. This time she did not ask for my address. She said that she was sorry and that she had taken our number off the list. Success!

Not. They kept calling. After several more calls, I became very pissed. Repeat step 2. This was the third time I’ve called.

More calls. Fourth time. I have had enough. I’ve decided to stop erasing the messages from the machine and just let them accumulate. Evidence. This morning is my fourth time calling, and I am not in a good mood. I get someone with basic Indian English skills.

“I’ve gotten many calls from AOL and I think there is some mistake.”

“Is your name Trevor So-and-so?”

“No, I do not know who that is. Please stop calling me.”

“Sir, we’ve taken your name off our calling list.”

“Yes, that’s what they said the past three times I’ve called. I don’t believe you. Give me some assurance…”

“Click.” Yes, she hung up on me. On ME! On the person whom they have been harassing for the past month. Bugger.

I called back immediately, and got the same person. She hung up again as soon as I identified myself. I called back again. She hung up again. I was going to keep calling back until they begged for mercy.

Finally on the seventh call I got someone different. I explained the situation again (and nicely enough, I think). She looked up my number, and asked if I was Trevor So-and-so. Sigh. No, I swear to you I am not. (Now obviously, since she was able to pull up my phone number and ask if I was that person, the other lady had lied that my name was off their list.) She promised to take my name off the list. Please, please let that be true.

Harassing former customers (whether a case of mistaken identity or not) is certainly not a way to build genuine loyalty. Sadly, I deal regularly with companies like AOL who see me as an annoyance to be gotten rid of as soon as they’ve taken my money.

This may not be the end of AOL for us. I sincerely hope that someday AOL might come to understand that their customers are their ally, not their enemy.

Carson Workshops’ The Future of Web Apps was such a great experience! I could kick myself for having forgot my camera. Fortunately, some nice folks brought theirs!

(Photo by Jeremiah Owyang Laughing Squid. Some Rights Reserved)

Even if you don’t know Nathan Smith and haven’t heard of Gospelcon, head on over to the Godbit Project and check out Nathan’s Gospelcon 2006 Slides. It’s an awesome presentation, and I hope will really drive home the idea that web professionals need to leave behind the old ways of nested tables and font tags that, sadly, we still see today.

Check it out

Ted Rheingold talks about Dogster.com, Catster.com and “Passion-centric Online Communities”

Amplify passion through enriched community experience.

Moderation is key. A community is a garden that needs sincere, consistent care. Clearly stated ground rules. Make it a safe place – easy opt in and opt out. You can’t fake a community

How to make advertising work

• Keep your ad sales inside. No one will be able to convey your member’s passion better than yourself.
• Advertisers need to have a direct connection to the community’s passion.
• CPM is almost dead. For an advertisers message to be heard deliver it in the site voice and in places where members are receptive to messaging.
• Require advertisers to offer something real to the community. Something that requires them to participate and become trusted.
• Build circle of trust – Advertisers => Dogster => Community => Advertisers => etc

The Future of Passion Centric Communities

• For every passion there will be a dedicated “-ster”, and there can be more than one ster per passion.
• Web is launching point.

Make your service reflect your community

boompa faniq feelingbullish.com socialpicks MyBlogLog Famster TheFamilyPost ClubMom TeachAde Craftster.org YourClimbing.com YourMTB.com EveryTrail.net Cuteoverload.com CatsInSinks StuffOnMyCat Cats that look like hitler MeetMoi Dodgeball

Mike Arington talks about TechCrunch

What’s next for web applications?

Ones to watch

• Jobster
• Riya
• Zillow.com
• Flock
• Sharpcast
• Rocketboom
• oDesk
• 1-800-Free-411
• Second Life
• WordPress

What were they thinking? (i.e. Not doing well)

• Inform
• Gather
• PubSub
• Browzar
• Jigsaw
• Squidoo

Shared attributes of winners

• Passion for what they are doing
• Doing something extraordinary (Purple Cow)
• Removes serious friction Ex: Free411 – removing payment friction
• Great founder dynamics (and initial team)
• Never raised big money, or raised it after they won
• Perfect revenue model is not required Ex: YouTube
• And… launched their company with a post on TechCrunch :)

Shared attributes of losers

• Poor founder/Team Choices
• Lifestyle/Ego Entrepreneurs
• Raised too much money
• Over-business-planned
• Forgot about scaling
• Launched on TechCrunch :(

Things to avoid (the market is saturated):

• Social Network
• Social Bookmarks
• Video
• Photos
• Blogging/podcasting
• Portals/homepages
• Feedreaders

Ideas with big potential:

• Platforms (help other companies do things)
• Desktop Apps
• Office Efficiency
• Cloud Storage
• Identity
• Developer Tools
• Market Destruction (free411)
• ENTERPRISE

The best entrepreneurs ignore this type of advice. Invent a new market.

Mike Davidson of Newsvine talks about User Generated Content

You must provide tangible benefit to users for their participation.

What’s not working:

• Services that require user participation to get started. Get people to square 3… etc before requiring to register. (Carl Sjorgreen Said almost exactly the same thing.)
• Buying users.
• Social networks for the sake of social networks.

What IS working:

• Letting users do as they please – The user is in control.
• Be open to people using your site in other ways than you intended.
• Let people contribute when they want to contribute.

The Dunbar Number (Robert Dunbar) suggests that the ideal size for healthy groups is 150 people or under. Too big can be too daunting. Provide ways to cultivate small groups.

Mike Davidson of Newsvine talks about User Generated Content

You must provide tangible benefit to users for their participation.

What’s not working:

• Services that require user participation to get started. Get people to square 3… etc before requiring to register. (Carl Sjorgreen Said almost exactly the same thing.)
• Buying users.
• Social networks for the sake of social networks.

What IS working:

• Letting users do as they please – The user is in control.
• Be open to people using your site in other ways than you intended.
• Let people contribute when they want to contribute.

The Dunbar Number (Robert Dunbar) suggests that the ideal size for healthy groups is 150 people or under. Too big can be too daunting. Provide ways to cultivate small groups.

Carl Sjogreen and “How we built Google Calendar”

6 insights for your next web app

1. Easy is the most important feature “Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible” Alex Kay, Disney Fellow and VP of R&D, Walt Disney Company

2. Know your real competition Know what your competition does well. The Google Calendar team sees their main competition as… the paper calendar. Yep, Google is actually taking aim at eliminating the need for paper calendars.

3. Visual Design Matters Visual Design = Usability + Visual Joy “Great design is that ineffable quality that certain incredibly successful products have that makes people fall in love with them despite their flaws.” Joel on Software

4. Build products for people who don’t want to use them Make it painless for people to start using your product without fully switching to a new way of doing things.

5. Time Your Launch Properly “Launch early and often, but not too early (the first time)”

6. Driving Usage Touchpoints that extend beyond your app * “Add stuff” from my site * “Publish stuff” to my site * “Tell a friend” invitations and sharing Social reinformcement is key for validation

7. Relentlessly remove account signups This is a good one – make it brainlessly easy to get started using your web app. Don’t ask for account signup until it’s ABSOLUTELY necessary.

Hmm… That seemed like more than 6.

Well, I’ve decided that I’m a hopelessly bad blogger. No doubt you’ve already read a dozen or so other blog posts about The Future of Web Apps 2006. But I thought I’d post my notes anyway, tardy as they are. So what follows are my notes and takeaways, just for you.

Here I am at the second day of Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps. Looking up and down the rows of other geeks, I see nothing but faces focused on PowerBooks and MacBooks, mine among them. The Carsons sure know how to put on a good show. I should know all these people, but I don’t see as many familiar faces as SXSW.

I’m also finding that, as much as I love blogging, I’m a pretty terrible blogger. About ten people around me are posting to their blogs like every five minutes.

I figure there’s no sense duplicating the play-by-play, so I’m just going to post my take-awayws. So stay tuned.

“Run PHP and Ruby on Rails at the same time? Why would you want to do that!?” I can hear you die-hard Ruby developers exclaim.

Lots of reasons actually. There is an enormous amount of good PHP code out there, and you might like to use some of it someday. For example, I’m integrating the wonderful TinyMCE editor into Moral Metric using the TinyMCE plugin (read John Wulff’s how-to). TinyMCE runs flawlessly with Rails, and it’s very easy to set up. But I needed to use the spellchecker extension, which is written in PHP. Having no desire to port a PHP script to Ruby when it works just fine in PHP, I decided that there must be some way to make these PHP scripts work from within my Rails application.

As it turns out, it’s sublimely easy to set up.

There's more! Read the rest of this entry

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