stargeek
Right on to Ross!Right on to Ross!Right on to Ross! 05/19/2004 01:22 AM Is it a coincidence that as soon as Ross Rader starts accusing me of "whacky charts and diagrams" - he starts to do them himself? :-) Here's Ross' response to some 'sceptic'. I inserted comments in maroon. An Open Letter to Blog Sceptic.
You raise some great points and they haven't gone unnoticed over here. I wanted to respond with something sooner, but last week was nuts and I'm just digging out now... To recap, you recommend that we;
Let me peg these off in semi-reverse order... 6. Designers. Tucows has always needed some of that oomph. Point well taken. We will improve as time passes. I would say that we are more interested in function than form right now. Not to the point of creating an insuffereable user experience but rather that the function of the application needs to be driven by useful features and not pretty widgets. Pretty widgets can be built over time as we iterate on the UI. You think this looks like it was designed by a bunch of geeks? Boy do I wish that I had screen caps of our first alpha ;) I actually think of all the 'anti-design, Kottke school or thought, bow down to Jakob Nielsen lo-fi UI's out there - Blogware is the best. But I'm a broadband sort fo guy and believe in color, shape and form. Maybe one day we'll get away from straw sipping, dial-up mentality. 4. Social networking stuff. We recently implemented the start of this. Its not fully baked, nor am I happy with it fully yet. But the start is there. Now it just needs some care, feeding and weeding to make it really sing. You can sign up and check it out at http://www.blogware.com/users I'd love to get your feedback and suggestions for improvements. This is my greatest area of concern. Wer'e dealing with similar situations with Drupal, Word Press and Typepad - how much social network is 'enough' for Blog tools. Many people ask me this question. Blogware supports a formal concept of a friend, while TypePad has turned blogroll associations into friends. Anil tells me Typepad is going through some changes here - so we'll have to see what comes out. Not sure what Matt Mullenweg is doing for friends, but I know he's putting in FOAF. So what do I think is the right level fo 'friendship' to put into blogging tools? Well first of all - all blog tools and all software in general should adopt basic FOAF 'About me' pages, which not only display basic profile info to viewers, but also enable simple export of that profile. The real issue is whether or not teh blogging tool supports importing FOAF and friends - at all. I say What software ISN'T about people? Why WOULDN'T you want a built-in, on-line comunity to support themselves, to help you promote your tool, to keep your customers happy? Just so we're clear on my view. :-) 5/3/2/1. Ditch the resellers/launch a hosted version/offer to specific verticals/promote it... Never gonna happen. I knew he was gonna say this - and he's brilliant in his explanation fo it - read on.....
To get a better sense of this, take a look at our track record with domain names. In 1997, we were (according to the most liberal definitions) #85 in the domain name registration market. Today we are solidly #2 and we've been there for a couple of years. How did we get here? We dealt exclusively with internet services providers to the exclusion of all other market opportunities and we nailed their service requirements. By choosing and sticking to our distribution model very early in the game (some would argue that it chose us) we were able to focus on very specific attributes of our products and processes and build some truly excellent structures around everything. In other words, because we weren't trying to be all things to all customers, we were able to do some very amazing things with some very specific customer segments. And they responded in spades.
The downside to this approach is that it lacks the glitz and glam that retail oriented services employ. You will never see a full out PR blitz from Tucows and Blogware will never be a household name. All wasted money. Remember, we're not the marketing brains in this relationship. We're the technical muscle. I actually slightly disagree here - but only in scope and target audience. It's important to build the Tucows brand with the insider crowd - so when someone says "gee I'd love to private label and brand my own blogging tool" - they go to Tucows. Does that mean that our resellers are idly sitting by doing nothing? Nope. Right now, they are working on developing the right messages to direct at very specific markets - some are doing the institutional angle, some are going after telecommunications firms, others are targetting specific home-user verticals and others still looking to make quick wins at the expense of those with existing market share... And what I've seen so far looks great. Think of this as true "end-to-end marketing" Marketing at the edges. Clue-train compatible distribution. Teamwork. Focus. Whatever you call it, it works.
What Ross isn't saying is that Tucows has been and will continue to support open standards and help make new ones happen. There's also some other exciting news about Tucows - which we'll be disclosing within a month or so. These guys are major players in our world - be nice to them! *Blogware is a hosted application, not a standalone tool. "Branded", well that's another matter entirely. We chose the name "Blogware" because it is the most generic expression that could be used to describe "weblog management tool". Is that our brand? Nah. It's just a convenient label we use to refer to the product. The first thing our resellers do is rip this tag off and replace it with their own.... **(For the sake of this entry, ISPs should be read as "ISPs/Web hosting companies". I use the term "internet services providers" in its truest sense - those companies that provide internet services...) [Random Bytes]This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Right on to Ross!Grok Headline matches for Right on to Ross!Is Ross Unzipped?Is Ross Unzipped? 05/19/2004 04:23 PM Higher costs and inventory problems plague the off-price retailer. Congrats to Ross et al - keep going!Congrats to Ross et al - keep going! 04/24/2004 03:25 AM And as if (on cue) Ross was waiting for the official battles to commence, here comes Blogware with.... It has been an extremely busy week on Blogwareland. The project is really firing on all cyclinders and I'm starting to get pretty excited about the upcoming release. Most of my time has been devoted to staff training. We took 30 or so staffers through hands-on with the service in a lab environment and the feedback has been great. I really enjoyed taking everyone through the in's and out's of Blogware and the weblog market and it is great to see the rest of the team over here finally starting to understand why I'm so excited by Blogware and the weblog opportunity. The blogosphere can be a tough thing to grok for one person - getting 150 people on the same page is even harder ;)
The dev team is also totally in the zone. A bunch of new features coming out this week and a few bug fixes as well. I can see v1.0 just over the horizon... Something old, something new, something boring and nothing blue... Something Old... Comment Notifications v2.0! Weblog publishers getting comment notifications is old hat. Now, authenticated readers can also choose to receive comment notifications on a per article, per category or on a site-wide basis. Publishers also get to choose whether or not this feature is even available to their readers. Something New... Import/Export. Publishers can now get the important content out of their old weblogs and into their shiny new Blogware weblog. Also, the Export feature makes your Blogware content just that much more portable - great peace of mind. Import initially supports only MT imports with support for the Blogger, Radio and other formats shortly. Something Boring... Bug fixes. Yawn. ;) Publishers will notice that the webstats are much snappier now - we realized a ton of performance increases with some of these new fixes. Nothing Blue... No, I meant it - there was nothing blue. Well, just this. Literally. So what's the big take away? It has been impossible for me to keep up with my email this week. If you've sent me a message and I haven't gotten back to you, rest assured, I still love you - its just that I'm currently 300 messages behind where I should be - and that's after 4 hours of catch up. Problem is, I'm not going to get through it all today - marketing needs sign-off on virtually everything that they've been working on for Blogware this afternoon and unless I wade into it, they are going to hunt me down and kill me - probably with a bad PowerPoint presentation or something ;) [Random Bytes]Congrats to Ross and Elliot!Congrats to Ross and Elliot! 04/09/2004 10:30 PM  Random Bytes
Where facts are few and experts are many. New Features: Friends & Addressbook Blogware users got a small preview of version 1.0 this week with the release of our new Address Book and Friends functionality. The Ad dress Book is a pretty cool mechanism that provides Blogware Publishers with some pretty nifty tools for managing the relationships between users and content. The other new function, Friend s, is a simple tool that allows users to connect with one another and will act as the basis for a bunch of cool new services as we move forward. Play around with them and let me know what you think (keeping in mind that this is "pre-release preview beta not-finished yet" stuff....) [Random Bytes] I got to be friend #1. Ah the joys of being an 'outside friend'. One more win for the FOAFnet. Dell'olio set for Ross interviewDell'olio set for Ross interview 06/04/2004 05:45 AM Ananova Jun 4 2004 9:46AM GMT Ross is at Red Herring ConferenceRoss is at Red Herring Conference 12/10/2003 04:35 AM Ross Mayfield is blogging from the Red Herring Conference. Sounds like VCs are coming back. Not sure yet that's a good thing. There's a paradigm shift coming (heck, even if you don't believe in Microsoft's vision, look at Sun's or Apple's -- all computing platforms are going to see rapid innovation over the next few years. Yet the VCs don't seem to care and don't seem to be building companies to take advantage of the coming shifts. Here, ask yourself, do you see anything about RSS in his notes? Anything about the Tablet PC? Anything about new 3D OS's (how about new kinds of video games, new kinds of business apps? Is PowerPoint and Excel really going to be how business is done 20 years from now? Those are three things that are seeing huge changes right now. Today. Not five years from now. Yet the VCs are off funding Friendster. Any wonder why there's tons of empty buildings in downtown Palo Alto? MoviePod: Geoff Ross Is HighMoviePod: Geoff Ross Is High 05/13/2004 07:55 AM http://www.geoffrossisfamous.com/infodump/index.php">Ah, youth. It's big thinking, like the meandering, centerless kind NYU film student Geoff Ross has done about a method for digital music distribution called MoviePod MovieBox, that makes a great case for why college kids should stop smoking pot. Geoff wants to build a digital film distribution system... Ross and Rachel Together in 'Friends'
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Here's why: Internet services
providers represent the most powerful distribution channel on the
internet. No single company can compete with the marketing muscle of
Our resellers kick serious ass in the
market place. This because the Tucows way of doing things gives
them the luxury of being able to focus on very specific and
important things. Think of every other blogging company out there.
They each have to a) be technical experts, b) be sales experts and c)
be marketing experts just to one unit to a customer. Now take a look
at the symbiotic nature of the relationship between Tucows and its
direct customers. Our resellers have to be sales & marketing
experts and develop strong customer service skills and Tucows has to
focus on maintaining world-class technical services. Who would you bet
on, the jack-of-all-trades or the team of specialists?
For us, this isn't a question of strategy. We're
fully committed to our wholesale distribution model and we're fully
committed to the blogging market. More importantly, Tucows is fully
committed to winning in this market and we are doing what we need to
do to make it happen. Heads-down, block-and-tackle,
stick-on-the-ice, wholly tactical execution. Execution of our plan to
give our resellers what they need to continue to kick ass in
their chosen commercial pursuits. When they win, we've won.
I finally got the nerve up to steal a
page out of 
