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March 04, 2004
Advice to Social Network Designers
Christopher Allen gives advice to designers of social networks.
03:47 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Product Operations Engineers Take the Customer Perspective
There's a recent article in Computerworld by Robert Wenig entitled How to avoid Web application pitfalls. Robert takes on the issue of customer experience in Web site performance. He says:
Questions such as "Is the network up?" and "Are the pages loading quickly?" provide only limited visibility into the success or failure of an application. No one assumes the customer perspective. Does the application deliver the right information? Which users are affected by application failures, who are they, and how much is it costing the business? With so much invested in the success of mission-critical Web applications, why are we still relying on outdated success metrics such as page download speed and system uptime? Are these measurements really telling us how technology is enabling business?From How to avoid Web application pitfalls - Computerworld
Referenced Thu Mar 04 2004 13:54:29 GMT-0700
Too often the NOC will say "well, I can ping the machine and the database is up...I don't understand what the problem is." That's OK, that's what they're supposed to do and that's what they're tools tell them. They don't have the perspective to look at the product. When I was a CTO, we struggled to get a handle on this. I think in the end we figured it out and the answer was a position we called the Product Operations Engineer. The job of the product operations engineer is to work in the operations side of the house and look at the performance and operation of products and services from the customer's standpoint.
The product operations engineer is usually a senior system administrator who's responsible for making sure the product works. As such, they're caught in the middle. They must work with Engineering and are the chief interface between Engineering and the operations group. In addition, they also serve as a primary point of reference for the NOC and Technical support. They must also work closely with product managers. Until they get the product working right and the technical support and NOC team trained, they lose a lot of sleep.
I took some time a while back and wrote all this up in a paper on Tiered Support. The section on performance metrics is still weak and needs to be fleshed out.
02:15 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Web Services Adoption Patterns
I listened to Brent Sleeper's interview on IT Conversations. Brent talks about a recent study he did at the Stencil Group (link--its broken right now argh!) on Web Services adoption patterns. Interesting stuff.
As an aside I bought an iPod recently, mostly so I could listen to IT Conversations and other recorded talks while I'm driving and its working great.
01:15 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Grid Computing and WS Resource Framework
WebServices.org had a conversation with Ian Foster on the recent announcement of WS-ResourceFramework and how new specifications linked into Web services will affect the Grid community.
09:59 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Amazon Support for RSS
In other RSS news today, Amazon has started publishing RSS feeds for selected categories, subcategories and search results in Amazon.com stores. Jeremy Zawodny is ecstatic about it but would like to see RSS feeds for wishlists. Amen.
Also, Danah Boyd is talking about what she wants in an RSS tool. I think it can be summarized as "more choice about granularity."
09:55 AM | Recommend This | Print This
RSS vs. Email Newsletters
Doug Kaye has a recent IT conversation with Chris Pirillo who has been on a campaign to push the adoption of RSS instead of email for newsletters. If you're not familiar with Chris, he runs the popular LockerGnome web site which supports dozens of email newsletters on a variety of subjects. Chris, who must fight with email problems all the time, given the large number of email newsletters he supports, would like to move more of his readers from email to newsletters.
To that end, Lockergnome publishes a channel on RSS that contains postings on interesting feeds, analysis, news, and tips on software. There's also a tutorial and reference section.
My own experience, although smaller in scale, is that there are still a lot of people who would rather receive email. My own small newsletter, which is essentially a formatted and filtered version of my RSS feed, has about 250 subscribers. My RSS feed gets downloaded by about 650 unique IP addresses per day. It would be nice to not do the newsletter, but not everyone uses aggregators.
As a means of delivering syndicated information, RSS has some significant advantages over email:
- RSS is much simpler to maintain for the syndicator
- RSS is explicitly opt-in
- Unsubscribing from an RSS feed is simple and foolproof
- RSS processing can be easily automated
- RSS is more anonymous (no need to give out email address)
There are also some disadvantages at present:
- Not enough people use aggregators
- There's a lot of FUD surrounding different RSS standards (hint: just ignore it unless you write aggregator software)
- Email is push and some people use the event of an email showing up as a reminder
When I talk to people about aggregators, I feel like I did in 1993 telling people about Mosaic, except its worse. "Aggregator" doesn't have the same ring to it that "browser" did. People think of "browsing" as a pleasant experience. I'm not sure many people have positive feelings about "aggregating." Another problem is the overwhelming array of aggregators available and the perception that RSS is just about blogs.
Even so, with more and more web sites, including mainstream media, offering RSS feeds now, I think there's plenty of interesting information to entice people to download, install, and fire-up an aggregator. In 1993, I started having lunchtime tutorials at BYU for people who wanted to understand what the World Wide Web was. The main goal was to teach them how to use a browser. Maybe its time to do that again.