Ajax Girl

Rumors of the new startup by former PayPal COO David Sacks to be called Geni started a couple of weeks ago. A few days later, on January 16, Geni launched. It allows people to create quick and beautiful family trees, got a flood of early attention and started to spread virally at a blistering pace. One commenter said “this site could be greater than facebook.” Hyperbole? Yes. But that kind of early enthusiasm is worth, literally, millions.

And then they blew it.

I wrote a post a year ago called Don’t Blow Your Beta where I shared some of the pitfalls that startups often fall into when launching their products. The advice I included was simple: make a great first impression, think about your Firefox and Mac strategies (and have one), don’t ask for too much personal information, etc.

Geni did all of those things right. But it created whole new categories of things to do wrong. They ignored the fact that not everyone is Christian, heterosexual and comes from a 1950’s era unbroken American-style family. They won’t let email addresses go once they have them. Other issues. They failed to anticipate early traffic levels and the site went down repeatedly. And, worst of all, a lot of data that people painstakingly entered into Geni just disappeared. Deleted. All those early adopters, pissed off.

Geni has been diligent about communicating with users on its blog, which is the best way of handling this stuff. But the biggest issue, the deleted data, is being ignored completely so far. I know I won’t be taking the time to re-enter the data. And many others won’t, either.

I still think this will be a wildly successful product. It’s a strong enough offering to overcome even the deleted data issue. But other new startups should take note, and add this to their list of “don’t do.”

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/78654910/

There’s an interesting discussion on this blog and Slashdot over Google’s inconsistent use of the terms “tag” and “label” across its various products when allowing users to add descriptive keywords to pieces of content. Google uses the term “label” for Gmail, Blogger, Bookmarks, and uses the term “tag” for Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Video and Picasa.

The term itself doesn’t matter much, although the rest of the web has pretty much settled on the use of “tag” as the way to describe descriptive keywords on content. Google’s inconsistency in tag v. label is probably a sign of product group autonomy and a big “who cares” at the senior level. They can call it “frogs” for all I care, as long as they keep the feature at Gmail.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/78640593/

I am a fan of NetNewsWire, and since I use multiple computers, I thought it would be nice to use the NewsGator syncing capability. I have used this before, way back when I used the Newsgator Outlook plugin.

I ran into some issues (it had created a bunch of empty folders, which I remember happening a few years ago) and I decided to go to the web-based version to try to clean it up.

Now, this isn’t meant to be “pick on newsgator” day, but the entire experience was painful. First, if I selected more than a couple of folders to delete it would take an eternity to do the deletions, and in fact a few times it just timed out. That made me have to go back and de-select a few until it would go through. Extremely frustrating (especially when you are trying to clean up!).

The interface itself consists of the typical tree view on the left, and content opens up on the right. For me, the app is painfully slow as every click on the tree is a full page reload which has to render the entire tree, as well as getting the content for that node. If I am on a site that has a normal link, I expect a page reload. When I click on a tree node, I am trained to be in “desktop mode” and expect it to happen pretty darn quick. It is this perceived effect that makes everything feel so slow.

I also glanced at my status bar and would see what seemed to be mini requests for each feed from my browser. I have a fair few feeds, so this made things even worse.

This type of design choice will make people think “ajax sucks and is slow”. Compare it to Google Reader and others, that feel a lot faster, and do not do refreshes in places you wouldn’t expect.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/how-perceived-speed-matters-and-can-kill-you