ninetyninezeros

new post over on my new blog ;)

2005-03-29T17:35:00.000-08:00

for those still checking this page or subscribed to this feed, check out my latest post on my new blog. i've posted up a draft of plaxo's public communication policy and i'd love to get feedback from the community :)

also, update your aggregators to hit my new feed. thanks!

Goodbye Blogger

2005-03-28T00:09:00.000-08:00

Sorry if anyone tried to hit my blog today and got some weird formatting. I was trying to transfer my old posts and comments so I was messing with my template.

Here are my new URLs:

http://blog.plaxoed.com (main blog site)
http://blog.plaxoed.com/index.php?feed=rss2 (RSS feed)

I'll keep this site up, but all new content will be posted over there. Update your aggregators!

P.S. Since so many people requested it (including Scoble, Zawodny and other blogging veterans), I started capitalizing correctly too ;)

blog and adsense stats

2005-03-22T21:42:00.000-08:00

blog stats 2, originally uploaded by 99zeros.

well, here's the updated traffic info from my blog. you can see a very slight traffic spike a few weeks ago when news that i joined plaxo hit the press. in general, things are settling down - which is quite nice! now, i can use this blog for its original purpose: keeping friends and family up to date on what i'm up to and my thoughts and feelings in general. looks like there might be a few thousand extra readers, but i'll just count you guys as a few thousand extra friends ;)

in related news, since google has done some revision of their adsense rules, i can finally increase transparency of the advertising i've been running on this site.

i put adsense up on my blog on 2/9 and for the month of february, i made $194.21. at the time, the ads were only running on the right hand side so it was getting really crappy exposure.

for the month of march, so far i've made $133.22. sometime a few weeks ago, i added a second ad unit at the top of the page as an experiment. i figured that clearly the more prominent placement would net me better results; however, click through rates stayed approximately the same though. numerous people have told me how they've optimized their sites for adsense. i find it quite interesting that people spend so much time fiddling with the system - the way they describe it, it sounds like a full time job! fortunately, iâve already got a full time job, so i'm not too interested in optimizing my ads.

so in total, that's $327.43 plus another $60 some odd bucks from amazon going towards celiac disease research :)

i'm blogging from flickr again; i hope this time the connection between flickr and blogger doesn't get messed up, resulting in duplicate posts. with the performance of blogger lately, i'm keeping my fingers crossed!

update: well, it got messed up again and double posted. they need to make posting blog entries transacted! (props to my old co-workers at microsoft working on indigo)

two weekends ago @ mt. si

2005-03-21T21:12:00.000-08:00

oops this is really belated, but two weekends ago i went up to visit rose in seattle. while i was up there, we hiked up mt. si with jon, one of my childhood friends. here's a picture from the top of mt. si:

truly breathtaking, eh? (and scary too if you're afraid of heights)

here's the rock face at the top of the trail you have to scale to get up there :O

anyways, if you're the outdoorsy type and are in seattle, i highly recommend you check out mt. si. it's a great day hike; it's 8 miles round trip and it only took us 2.5 hours to get to the top of the trail. if you want to get to the summit, figure in another half hour for scrambling up the rock face. and of course, if you're more of "enjoy nature from the comfort of your couch" person, you can check out the rest of my mt. si photos on flickr.

i wonder if lenovo will do better...

2005-03-21T19:48:00.000-08:00

i finally got my shiny new work laptop today, an ibm t42p. it's got all the fixin's including a 15" 1600x1200 screen, 1GB of RAM, 128MB of graphics memory attached to an ATI mobility fire gl t2 chip, and a 60GB 7200RPM hard drive. so far, i'm really liking this machine but i'm pretty annoyed with my purchasing experience.

the first problem (though minor) was that ibm's website sucks. if i hadn't been set on this laptop, i would've just said forget it and went to dell.com. not only is the website unnecessarily slow, but there's an extremely limited selection available online and the product information is scattered everywhere. i literally had to open up 4 or 5 browser tabs just to compare the specs for two laptops. since i'm a big thinkpad fan, i'm able to gruel through this, but you'd think they'd make the purchasing process as smooth as possible. after all, they want people to buy their products don't they?

the next problem was that it took forever to get the laptop. the only customization i put on it was to upgrade the wifi to 802.11b/g (the default config only had 802.11b). seemed like a pretty vanilla order to me, but it took them a full 10 business days to ship the thing out. maybe i've just been spoiled by dell, but what's up with ibm's supply chain? the worst part was that when i called up to check the status of my order, the reps had no idea when my laptop would be ready. one rep would tell me that my laptop would ship in a week and then another would say that there were hundreds in queue and it would be until next month.

<side rant>speaking of slowness, anyone notice how laggy blogger is nowadays? *sigh* all the more reason to host my own blog i suppose...</side rant>

the last - and by far the worst - problem was that they shipped me the laptop without installing the 802.11b/g card. at first i figured this wasn't going to be a big deal; on my t30, it's extremely easy to access the miniPCI slot. however, after much head scratching, i finally looked online and found out that i would have to pretty much take the entire thing apart to install my wifi card. i had to slide out the battery, take out 20 screws, pop out the keyboard and remove the palm rest bezel just to get to the slot. it took a good 45 minutes, but after much tinkering, i finally got the 802.11b/g in there and put everything back together. i mean, if you're going to take 2 weeks to ship a laptop, at least put the wifi card in there!

so all in all, i'm really liking the laptop, but lenovo really has its work cut out for them. if they manage to improve the purchasing experience while maintaining thinkpad's legendary quality bar, they should do quite well - but i'm sure that's easier said than done :D

best buy sucks

2005-03-14T23:39:00.000-08:00

in deciding to work at plaxo, i also signed on for a 45 minute commute, twice a day. i don't mind too much, i just use the time to listen to music, talk radio or the news. for the past two months, i've had the same cd in my stereo: a david crowder album rose gave me (btw, it's quite good but you can only listen to the same songs so many times before you start to get delirious). so after work today, i decided to swing by best buy to look for some new music.

i didn't do any research on what cds to buy; instead, i figured i'd just browse the selection and pick a few cds that looked promising. this proved to be a huge mistake.

i guess i just haven't bought anything at a brick & mortar store for quite some time now (except for groceries, i still go to safeway for those). i expected it to be easy, but i had forgotten that best buy wouldn't have any customer testimonials, nor would i be able to sample any of the tracks. this realization didn't faze me at first, so i started perusing anyways.

a few minutes later, i realized i was in trouble. best buy has strategically placed all the best sellers in one place, thus people are always able to find the hottest music in the same place. however, i hadn't listened to new music in so long that i didn't recognize most of the artists - even worse, i didn't even know what genre some of the artists were!

well, 15 minutes later, i finally just randomly picked the newest jack johnson cd. then, i walked around the store, waiting for something to jump out and demand an impulse buy. believe it or not, none of the gadgets were too enticing - which makes it seem that either they are stocking the wrong toys or whoever plans the floor displays is failing miserably.

as i rounded the corner on my way to checkout, i encountered a huge line. to make matters worse, only one register was open and the employee working it didn't seem to have a clue. a single transaction took almost 10 minutes! since there were 4 or 5 people ahead of me and i didn't feel like wasting more than 30 minutes to overpay for a cd that might be terrible, i left frustrated and empty-handed.

needless to say, i'm not going back to best buy anytime soon. from now on, i'm just buying my music online.

work is crazy and i'm liking it

2005-03-10T22:30:00.000-08:00

with the exception of yesterday, i've been staying quite late at work. there's just so much to do! i've got tons of stuff to ramp up on, we're actively developing new stuff and i'm trying to get to know everyone as soon as possible. between all that, i've been putting in 10-12 hour days - not counting the time i spend checking e-mails before i head to work and when i work remote after i get home. hey, working at a high-intensity start-up isn't for everyone - but it sure fits me just fine :)

why am i so jazzed? first off, everything in the system at plaxo is subject to change. if something's not working, we'll see how we can fix it; if things are working well, we'll try to make it work better. none of this "if it ain't broke don't fix it" crap. think we're crazy? go see what's made toyota a leader in the global auto industry. in a recent interview with fortune magazine, toyota's ceo likened the growth of the company to pushing a cart uphill - he felt that if the company stopped for even a moment, the cart would come flying back down the hill, taking them along with it.

secondly, at plaxo, everyone is in it together. i'm not the only one who's got the drive and motivation to stay late and get stuff done. at microsoft, forget about it. most people pretty much do 9 to 5 nowadays, unless there is a major deadline coming soon. at google, a few people would stay late, but the "campus feel" of pulling late nights and getting stuff done was missing. during the two short weeks i was at google, i'd leave around 8 or 9 and i'd see maybe a few people on my way out. sure, there were a few diehards at the googolplex, but i got the feeling that most people were just staying for the free dinner and checking out.

lastly, we're actually listening to customers and using feedback and metrics to enhance their experiences. we don't hail from a grand vision at the top and plan out features that won't get shipped until 2008. we take real customer feedback and implement it into the system as soon as we can get the bits out the door. we try different things and empirically figure out what works and what doesn't. it's almost like a large scale science experiment, where the outcome is a better product and happy users.

for those who are wondering what's in the works, check out this article on SFGate. for those too lazy to click through, here are the interesting parts:

... "Ten years ago, people were afraid of buying anything on the Internet," said Golub, who knows a thing or two about Internet security from his days at VeriSign. "Largely, Plaxo has a perception problem. Plaxo is far safer than most of what is done online."

So, how you gonna make money? "We've started to introduce ways to make money," said Golub, who added the firm has plenty of seed money left but wouldn't specify how much. "We're creating premium services. Cell-phone synching. Address book optimizers that eliminate all duplicates in your system. And premium support. But there will always be a free service."

anyways, needless to say, some people's wishes will be answered soon. for those who had other requests, give us some time, we're getting to it as fast as we can :)

what is plaxo?

2005-03-08T20:47:00.000-08:00

a lot of people have been wondering what plaxo does. by now, most people have, at some time or another, gotten a request to update their contact information from a friend through plaxo. oftentimes, as plaxo spreads through a social group, those who join plaxo last end up getting sent a large number of these contact info update requests. these people naturally - and unfortunately - mistake plaxo for a spam company :(

what plaxo actually does is harness the power of social networking to keep your contacts up to date. if you and all of your friends are signed up for plaxo, when someone moves, they only need to update their info in plaxo. plaxo then automatically sends the updated info to everyone in the group - to make it even smoother, the people in the group don't need to do anything; their address books are just always up to date. for me, the only contact info i have left for most of my college friends is an e-mail address. fortunately, with just an e-mail address, i can quickly reconnect with all of my friends and keep in touch effortlessly.

the best part is, if you use outlook or outlook express, plaxo has a client plug-in. this plug-in will automatically keep your outlook contacts up to date too. there are also cool features that help you keep your calendar, tasks and notes synced up. if you have multiple computers, you can install plaxo on all of them and your information can be synced automatically.

they also have a really cool web interface and an IE toolbar in the works - it's got integrated yahoo search too, so you don't need a search toolbar anymore (don't worry, they haven't put in an autolink feature... yet ;P).

what about privacy concerns? well, plaxo, unlike other social networks, is very concerned about privacy. first of all, you choose what information other people can see and get updated from you. also, no one ever knows who is in your address book unless you tell them they are. plaxo isn't a spamhouse so they aren't interested in selling your information; plus, even though you only get e-mailed by plaxo when one of your friends requests it, you can still opt-out and you won't receive any more e-mails from plaxo.

hope that answers most questions. if you want to keep in touch with me, just add my e-mail to your plaxo account (it's 99zeros at gmail).

for the doubters out there, don't worry, i haven't drunk too much corporate kool-aid; check out the product and i think you'll see why i am so excited to be working here :)

hello plaxo!

2005-03-07T17:38:00.000-08:00

today is my first day of work at plaxo.

as many people have guessed, i've been interviewing for the past month. when i accepted the job at google, i thought i'd be able to escape the hectic interviewing process for a while - at least 2 or 3 years. but as life would have it, i only escaped for 2 weeks :O

after i was let go, i went around networking with a lot of people. along the way, i met jeremy zawodny, robert scoble, david sifry, joyce park, russell beattieand many others. they were all extremely supportive of helping me find a new job - thanks for all your support. they've also been responsible for helping me find and explore a bunch of awesome opportunities.

additionally, as the news broke of what had happened to me, recruiters started contacting me. this was a very unique experience; while most job seekers have to go to great lengths to get a foot in the door, i was being aggressively pursued. in this regard, i would have to say that i was extremely - and unexpectedly - blessed. God really does provide in difficult times.

then came the interviews! while interviewing these past few weeks, i've learned a lot about different corporate cultures. i used to evaluate the job environment just by gut feel; now i know to ask very specific questions regarding how open the company is, how it likes to communicate and what the corporate dynamics are like. i've always thought of interviewing as a two way street, both the employer and potential employee checking for the optimal fit. now, i realize that interviewing can serve as a deep thin-slice of a company. in other words, checking a company's website gives you a broad overview while going through an interview loop with a company gives you an opportunity to get in-depth knowledge.

anyways, enough commentary and on to the results! as most people expected, i interviewed with the big tech companies: microsoft, yahoo and amazon. i also interviewed or chatted with a ton of start-ups (including places like technorati, filangy, etc.). in the end, i was looking for a very specific mix of attributes that would constitute the perfect job for me. the company had to have:

commitment and transparency to customers
a passion for revolutionizing the end-user experience
an open environment where people are free to be different and fosters creative expression
the ability to be nimble, ship solutions quickly, and adjust to market changes
extremely talented people and cohesive, productive teams
awesome mentorship opportunities

after getting quite a few offers, i sat down to consider my options. in the end, plaxo had everything i was looking for and more. as a bonus, they fully support my blogging activities as well - they recognize the power of keeping the door open to the community through blogs.

i'm super excited to be at plaxo. for those who are wondering, the HR orientation presentation was approximately 5 minutes. now that's efficiency :D

99 zeroes but my job ain't one - hit me!

2005-03-05T09:18:00.000-08:00

a microsoftie was inspired to write a remix of jay-z's song "99 problems" in light of events that have happened to me. not all of the song is completely accurate, but i would say it's definitely entertaining :)

the autolink battle is over

2005-03-01T14:16:00.000-08:00

it looks like google is winning, publishers are losing and users are too ignorant to care. i've read quite a few opinions on this feature in the past few days (since setting up a pubsub for the term - which, by the way, is an awesome service) and it looks like, in general, publishers are up in arms and users don't really know what the problem is. since it has been made quite clear that google doesn't care about what publishers want, it seems that the battle is over. even scoble has resigned on this one. once again, google's mindshare - or rather mindlock - on users will win out and people will just take what's given to them.

of course, as a user, i actually like the feature. but i recognize the danger in giving a tool that kind of control and it just gives me a bad gut feel.

the next logical step? MSN should immediately add smart tags into their toolbar - they wouldn't even have to write it, it's probably sitting around in some old, archived repository. then, when the user navigates to google.com and is about to attempt a search, the MSN icon on the toolbar should begin to blink and animate, begging users to click on it. when they do, it imperceptibly changes google's search page so that queries are actually directed to MSN search. additionally, they could even release a "security update" to IE that prevents google from blocking the smart tags like publishers are blocking autolinks.

those who don't believe in the slippery slope arguments are really blinded by the brand. we're not at the top of that slope, we're already more than halfway down!

some companies are willing to learn new tricks

2005-03-01T01:19:00.000-08:00

as i was going to bed, i noticed that jeremy and others had posted about the launch of Yahoo Search Developer Network (YSDN). note the striking resemblance in name to MSDN - i'm sure that isn't a coincidence. yahoo is really taking the lead here by not just providing web apis (which google has had for a while now), but in really creating a developer community. a good chunk of YSDN is focused on getting the word out about user developed apps, connecting people together through mailing lists and having people share expertise through a community wiki.

it seems that yahoo is clearly imitating microsoft in creating an ecosystem for developers; aside from fueling the creation of new and innovative user experiences, the emergence of a developer community enhances platform stickiness.

after all, if you build it, they will come.

back from a long weekend

2005-02-28T21:17:00.000-08:00

hi everyone, i've been gone for the past few days and i haven't been blogging. i went up to seattle to do some interviews (you can probably guess who) and stayed for the weekend. it was a pretty fun trip and i got to spend some quality time with my girlfriend and other seattle friends - and of course, it's always great to make a visit on the corporate dime :).

i hadn't been keeping up on reading my feeds so right before my return trip this morning, i synced up onfolio. with only 35 feeds, i had a whopping 600+ unread items! granted, i subscribe to a few linkblogs and news feeds, but still, that is quite a backlog for only 5 days. i can only imagine what scoble's aggregator looks like when he goes on vacation (he supposedly subscribes to over 1000 feeds).

i spent the entire plane ride reading through the stuff i've missed the past few days and i recognized a few interesting things:

most events/products/ideas are covered simultaneously by tons of bloggers
at least 75% of posts are just links to other posts, sometimes with a short comment or two
feeds that only send synopses are really annoying

sometimes, as is the case with google's autolink feature controversy, people are actually having conversations through posts (as in, they write posts in response to other peoples' posts and so on). while i recognized the conversational nature of blogging due to the comments feature, i hadn't really seen a conversation happen between blog posts.

this led me to thinking about how the commenting features work. perhaps instead of comments residing on the original blog, what should happen is comments on posts should actually become new entries in the commentor's blog. then there should be an infrastructure where you can move through a blog "hyper-thread", tracking the conversation. in other words, let's turn the blogosphere into a big bulletin board but instead of being centered around threads, it would be centered around individuals. in this system, comments are obsolete and trackbacks can serve as the glue behind the scenes that ties blogs together. in this world, maybe sites like technorati will serve as directories of these "hyper-threads".

sorry if this idea has already been done or is already underway and i'm just not in the know. if that's the case, send me a link so i can check it out!

back to the original topic... being able to catch up on blogs on the plane was a killer experience. client side aggregators really shine through here but there are a lot of cool things about having a web based solution as well. i'm patiently waiting for a hybrid online/offline solution; i hope someone comes through sooner rather than later - and if anyone is working on one of these, let me know, i'll definitely be willing to help out.

apple is at it again

2005-02-23T08:53:00.000-08:00

many news sites are reporting today on apple's update to the ipod. being an industrial design nut, i've wanted to buy one for quite a while. however, there are two things holding me back:

there's no way they are going to get me to use itunes
it only plays mp3s (believe it or not, i have quite a bit of music in wma format)

regardless, the pricing for the shuffle and ipod mini are dangerously approaching impulse buy range for me. i may be a convert soon... although if i end up working for microsoft again, i may need to sneak around with it.

speaking of the shuffle, when i met scoble a few weeks back, he had one. he'd had it for over a week and hadn't loaded any music on it nor had he even plugged it into his computer. the problem was the fact that you have to load software from a CD. his argument was: if the shuffle is a storage device, why doesn't the device contain the software and bootstrap itself when plugged into the usb port?

oh, and he was clearly content using the shuffle for its secondary purpose: a fashion accessory.

update: a company called jens of sweden has a new player called the mp-120. i want one really bad, but they aren't sold in the us yet. argh!

need interview questions?

2005-02-22T20:58:00.000-08:00

ran across this awesome list of in depth .net questions on scoble's link blog. having worked on indigo for over a year, i thought i had pretty deep knowledge of .net, but i must admit, i started having a little trouble on the "senior developers/architects" section - nothing a little msdn couldn't fix though :)

checking out these questions took me back to my interviewing days. after going through round after round of interviews during my senior year in college, i started at microsoft and flipped to the other side - i started running the interviews. personally, i really enjoy interviews; i have a passion for finding good people and building great teams.

anyways, if i'm ever running interviews again and a candidate's resume claims they have .net experience: watch out, i might just fire off a few questions from scott's list. although i suppose if they've read my blog, they'll conveniently have all the answers...

for anyone out there who is nervous about an upcoming microsoft interview: relax, it's not that bad. check out one candidate's recent experience.

the hungry thing

2005-02-21T19:40:00.000-08:00

"feed me"

i've now subscribed to approximately 40 feeds, including a few pubsubs, and the number is growing steadily - needless to say, i'm an rss/atom addict.

a few years ago when i first heard about this technology, i gave a typical response: "so what?" at the time of course, i had no idea what this whole blogging phenomenon was all about and i was happy hitting news.com and slashdot daily through my browser to catch up on tech news. going around hitting a few pages each day isn't too bad, but when you start to explore the blogosphere and want to keep up on tens if not hundreds or thousands of blogs, you really start to appreciate feeds.

then, i discovered pubsub - this service is pure joy to a tech maven. if you need to know the buzz about anything on the blogosphere, this is the tool to use. in a nutshell, you choose a search term and pubsub will aggregate all posts containing that term to a convenient feed you can subscribe to. truly a market researcher's dream come true.

unfortunately, as scoble points out, many are still clueless as to the real power behind these technologies. if you're trying to grok this stuff and would like some help, feel free to e-mail me; i'll try to point you in the right direction!

on a related note, i was happily using bloglines until i realized that it doesn't refresh my feeds as frequently as i'd like. thus, i was in search of a new aggregator and i found onfolio. so far, onfolio has proven itself to be an awesome tool. since it's a client-side tool, i can refresh my feeds as often as i like and it will also work offline. it's got a great "deskbar" interface which gives me a little standalone RSS control center and it links into my browsers as well. i currently only have one workstation, but i wonder if it synchronizes my subscriptions between clients too - that would be hot.

i've also become aware of the fact that i need to set up a link blog. it's been added to my long to do list.

p.s. the title of this post is a reference to this book :)

can blog spam be solved like email spam?

2005-02-21T11:38:00.000-08:00

i saw a great posting on the long tail blog about how we might think about blog spamming. before starting this blog, i had no idea there was such a problem known as blog spamming; after reading through some of the comments here, i'm all too familiar the symptoms.

to help alleviate the problem, i see blogger is already implementing the "nofollow" tag on all links left in comments. i think that's an awesome first step. next, i see blog hosts putting up other defenses, similar to the multiple e-mail spam detection systems in place today. as anderson puts it, this is the low hanging fruit and i'm glad to hear that six apart already has solutions under way.

blog marketing at work...

2005-02-21T11:01:00.000-08:00

now that i've gotten a jump start into the blogosphere, i've started collecting various feeds that i find particularly interesting (see my bloglines blogroll). perusing these feeds, there's a theme that's making its way out of the woodwork: effective marketing through blogging is a delicate art - if not handled properly, it may very well backfire on you in the worst ways possible.

along the way, i was linked to the following blog via scoble's link blog. i thought the post scoble linked was quite interesting and started reading the rest of the blog. it took me a while to realize that this was actually a blog put together by a group of authors heading up a new o'reilly group called head first books. as i clicked through and definitely wanted to buy their books - despite the fact that none of their currently available books cover new subject areas for me.

breaking this down, i'd say the crucial play here was that the authors created a real blog about their thoughts and experiences, thereby making a connection to me, a potential customer. then they made sure there were easily accessible links to pull me through to amazon for a purchase. brilliant work!

the real kicker of course is that their blog actually contains real content; it isn't just another corporate blog that pretty much serves as a thinly veiled attempt at getting the blogosphere to give a new product free PR. i wonder if other companies will take note and adjust their blogging strategies accordingly...

blink

2005-02-20T09:53:00.000-08:00

i just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink". personally, i liked it even more than tipping point - and tipping point is already on my list of favorite books. i guess i'm just simply fascinated with thinking about human interactions and communication.

over the past few weeks, i've been meeting a ton of people and going through a lot of interviews. i've always had a "gut feel" about people i meet and now that i've read blink, i'm actually conscious of where that feeling comes from. i'm also weary of scenarios where it might go wrong. hopefully, i can fine tune my abilities and become cognizant of all the snap judgments i make everyday. thin slicing... very cool stuff.

it also made me think about the hundreds of thousands (maybe millions :O) of people who have blinked me. hundreds of people's impressions can be found in my blog's comments and even more across the blogosphere. it's really interesting how certain people focus on some things while others pick up something completely different. the real kicker is, people are so used to making snap judgments about others around the internet that it seems to be almost an involuntary reaction. if you're in any sort of profession where you need to interact with a large number of people, i would say this book is a crucial read - if you can't tell, i'm a huge gladwell evangelist now :)

next up is "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. this book has been heavily recommended to me by both colleagues at microsoft and people around the blogosphere. i'm not much of a history nut, but everyone assures me i'll enjoy this book anyways.

someone also recommended "Disciplined Minds", a book about how the corporate system affects its employees. sounds like an interesting read given the events i've gone through, but i'm curious as to whether it really applies in the internet/tech industry. anyone have opinions on this book?

uh oh, is autolink a page from gator's playbook?

2005-02-19T15:29:00.000-08:00

i just realized (and it's been pointed out by various other people around the web) that if you're browsing at barnes and noble and you click the autolink button, it turns the ISBN number into a link to amazon. i'm sure amazon is thrilled by this, but i would have to say that it sounds eerily similar to gator.com's offercompanion program. widely regarded as spyware, offercompanion would sometimes pop up ads for competitors while users were browsing and making purchases at other sites.

while doing this might be legal, i would have to say that when i checked it out it made me a bit uneasy.

search engines, toolbars and more

2005-02-19T11:44:00.000-08:00

i've spent all morning playing with search engines and toolbars. it had been a while since i'd checked out the various major search engines and i figured it was time for the all-powerful "me" search test. for those who don't know, this my term for when you plug your name into a search engine and see what comes up :)

so i went to the big three: google, msn and yahoo. i searched for my name in quotes, took a look at the results and what follows is my analysis on these engines based on their current performance:

yahoo was the only search engine to come up with this blog as the first result; this blog was number two on google and somehow, i'm not anywhere to be found on msn at all. all three engines return a large number of other random sites that have made commentary on the events of the past month, so i consider them equal at delivering the background noise that makes the web so great. jeremy must be pretty popular, since his account of meeting me ranks in the top few entries at each engine, but scoble seems a bit less popular. thus, in my opinion, yahoo beats out google ever so slightly in relevancy. figure in that yahoo also has cool features like links to my RSS feed and guess what? google is no longer my default search engine. hats off to yahoo.

for those of you wondering: no, the fact that google canned me didn't factor into my decision. i still use gmail and google maps; i simply use whatever i think is the best solution for what i'm trying to accomplish. the exception to that rule might be blogger, but i'm doing my research on that as well ;)

although as far as all three search engines are concerned, i have to ask: where are the "wow!" bits? it seems to me that there's a lot of cool functionality that could be delivered but is currently missing today. for example, what about pre-fetching search results? or what about allowing me to tag results? searching is great, but i'd also love the ability to sort - sort by date, sort by author, sort by popular demand, etc. msn's got a great general idea with their search builder feature, but the options currently in there leave a lot to be desired. where are yahoo and google on this front?

i'm not saying these options should all be there by default - after all, we still have to consider people without broadband - but i wish i had these features at my disposal.

switching gears, nowadays you can't really do an analysis of search engines without running into their partners in crime, browser toolbars. so i also downloaded each engine's toolbar as well.

diverging a bit, there's been a lot of controversy in the past few days about the new autolink feature in google toolbar 3 beta. normally as far as i'm concerned, if it makes the user's life easier, it's overall goodness. however, in this case, i see where it sparks up a healthy debate.

although autolink is an optional feature and a user actually has to both enable it and click on it before it does anything to a page, it is very scary that it modifies the page so that the link is almost indistinguishable from other links on the page - aside from a tiny change in the mouse cursor. while i wouldn't go as far as calling this webpage hijacking nor will i get into that argument, i would comment that it is rather convenient that the default mapping service is google maps. although i can change that option, i think it's pretty obvious that a majority of users just live with the default. given the outcry against microsoft setting msn.com as the default homepage, i find it ironic that google would resort to the same strategy. i'm really curious as to whether the public will simply let this one go, much like they turned a blind eye to the privacy concerns brought against gmail.

what i think might be interesting is if google positions autolink much like vibrant media's intellitxt, an advertising service that adds sponsored links onto specific keywords on a page. for intellitxt, the publisher voluntarily signs up and allows their webpage to get hijacked for a cut of the click through revenue. if autolinks were only available when publishers specifically allowed it and the publishers got some sort of kick back for the links, maybe they would shift their opinions on the feature ;).

the whole autolink feature aside, the google toolbar has a few other nifty features such as being able to navigate through search results without returning to the result page and going up a directory level on the current site. i almost thought they had overlooked page translation, but then realized they had slipped it into the context menu - not where i would think to look for it. the only thing that's blatantly missing is a mozilla/firefox version, which i have to assume is in the works.

next up was the yahoo toolbar. the only major toolbar that currently has a mozilla/firefox version, it brings some unique features to the table as well. specifically, the yahoo toolbar has a ton of content tie-in buttons - there are buttons for each major sports league, shopping research sites and even one for "the apprentice." there were so many options, it was almost overkill.

in contrast, msn's toolbar is almost a lesson in understatement. the current version of msn toolbar serves up basic functionality pretty well, but seems to lack most of the bells and whistles other toolbars provide. i also tried the beta, but from what i could tell, it just added a link to msn spaces and packaged desktop search with it (i know you can install just the toolbar, but i wanted to check out the full experience). one thing i thought was nifty was that with the new msn toolbar, you can specify default search settings such as how you want to view results, your location and your default language. in general, i like msn's clean interface and neat integration with their desktop search offering. however, i do wish that using the deskbar's web search wouldn't open up a browser window; i think it should just show results in the little preview pane.

i have to wonder if google and yahoo are also thinking about packaging their tools together like msn has. it seems to be a pretty logical step...

anyways, after a morning of playing with this stuff, i now have way too many toolbars in internet explorer. i use firefox most of the time though, so i'm safe from the toolbar clutter and yahoo toolbar wins by default.

all this exploration got me thinking: are toolbars the future? what happened to the idea of rich functionality through browsers? i wouldn't be surprised if internet explorer 7 had most of the msn toolbar features built-in, which would severely diminish the value of these other toolbars. additionally, although google maps proves that hacking dhtml can produce good results, is that really the way to go? i would happily download a new browser if it meant getting a richer google or yahoo experience, but maybe that's just me. msn seems to be with me here (they provide a full fledged msn explorer), but they are still ramping up on a lot of the cool services google and yahoo already provide. will i fire up a google or yahoo browser one day? i hope so.

let's get wi-fi everywhere

2005-02-18T10:35:00.000-08:00

just saw an interesting essay posted in favor of having governments provide broadband access - check it out at wifinetnews. the author gives a fresh look at the debate by framing it in the dilemma of rolling out electricity to the masses at the turn of the last century.

i don't really care if it's government or private companies that provide it; i just want cheap, fast, ubiquitous broadband as soon as possible :)

new products everywhere :D

2005-02-17T01:24:00.000-08:00

since i've had a little more downtime than usual, i've had a chance to check out a few of the really cool products that are floating around on the web. i guess i'd been pretty focused on the projects i was working on while at microsoft and google; somehow, i had missed a bunch of innovative things happening on the web - the blogosphere, for example :O

the first thing i played with today was bloglines. i may be biased since the only other aggregator i'd used was a .net app called sharpreader, but i think bloglines is great. it gives me the exact features i need and has some extra ones too. i can now quickly browse the feeds i'm interested in and "clip" entries that i find interesting for future reference. plus, the entire system is on the web so all of your feeds and clips are available from any terminal. if this weren't cool enough, they also provide firefox plug-ins that are really neat like the bloglines toolkit and livelines. the toolkit has a ton of "nice to have" functionality and integrates very smoothly with the browser. meanwhile, livelines just makes your life easier when browsing and subscribing to feeds.

next, i checked out del.icio.us. again, very cool stuff. basically, del.icio.us allows users to tag websites (kind of like providing your own meta data for a site) and these tags are shared with all other users. together, the community is able to create tag topics which someone can then browse by and retrieve all sites marked with that particular tag. as a bonus, your bookmarks are now portable since they are stored on del.icio.us' servers. there seemed to be a cool feature called the inbox where you could monitor new entries for specific tags, but i couldn't get it to work - maybe it's still in progress. nevertheless, i think this app has potential for a lot of interesting scenarios.

finally, i just finished playing with technorati. searching through blogs is neat, but the real power is that technorati is indexing in realtime. as in, as soon as a post goes up, you can see it in search results. then, they also have a feature called "watchlists." they let you specify a url or keywords that you want to monitor and then they create a rss feed that aggregates and republishes links to entries that match the supplied address or terms - it's like a continuously updated, saved search. i see they also announced a tagging feature, but i don't see it integrated into the main user experience yet; i'm sure they are working on it. a little twist here is that instead of having users tag pages, they seem to be having blog owners tagging their own pages using the tag.

i also spent some time playing with flickr (as i mentioned in a previous post :)), pluck, rojo and filangy. filangy seems to be invite only for now, so if you really want to check it out, leave me a comment or e-mail me.

i'm sure lots of people out there are playing with these products as well. what do you think about these nifty tools?

my blog's stats

2005-02-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

blog stats, originally uploaded by 99zeros.

many people have asked, so here are the stats for my blog. you'll notice the huge spike around feburary 9th; i attribute that to news.com and slashdot. the little traffic bump in january was when i had originally unpublished and republished my blog entries. at the time, i was amazed at getting a few thousand hits - little did i know a few weeks later, i would be getting 100k hits.

surprisingly, i had to go to a third party site, statcounter, to get web metrics; blogger doesn't have any sort of functionality built-in. i had to take a supplied snippet of code and put it my blogger template manually. while this is not a problem for tech savvy users, i'd imagine average users might get frustrated while trying to add a simple counter to her blog.

also, blogger only has built-in support for atom feeds and doesn't give you stats on that either.

i want stats for my blog! i hope the blogger team is reading :)

btw, i'm posting this entry from flickr (and they are hosting the graphic above too). i'd heard a lot of great things about flickr and so far, i've been impressed. cool stuff, props to ludicorp!

adsense works!

2005-02-16T09:58:00.000-08:00

just checked my adsense account today and i've already racked up enough money to get paid. as alekkomar mentions in my blog's comments, my first check goes out to Celiac Disease research. looks like adsense really does work, although i wonder what the revenue share is. i've heard people around the web complaining that they don't make as much as they used to and i wonder if that's because google adjusted the revenue share or if advertisers are bidding less per click.

either way, my google ads are far outshining the amazon associates links i put up. so far, i think i've only made a few bucks on the amazon links.

networking in real life

2005-02-15T00:24:00.000-08:00

soon after news of this blog first broke, it was said that i might become google's scoble or zawodny. of course, at the time, i had no idea what people were talking about. soon, it became apparent to me that while it was neat to be in the same sentence as these blogging legends, i've still got a long way to go before i can truly measure up to them...

last tuesday, i was looking around at stories about other bloggers who had been fired and i ran across troutgirl's story. i read through her blog and thought, wow, this is kinda similar to what happened to me. i saw she had posted about a new community meeting she was in charge of planning and it was happening that night, so i decided to show up and try to chat with her a bit about her experience.

when i arrived, i the scene was pretty chill and i immediately found joyce (troutgirl). we chatted for a bit and she ended up introducing me to a few blogging celebrities.

first, i met niall, who works at technorati as the community manager. we chatted for just a bit and he mentioned all the different blogging/techie community meetings that were happening in the bay area - obviously, niall is a great fit for his job :). he's been a great contact and is really getting me plugged into the different groups in the area. he also records these local events and posts them on his blog; if you're interested in the latest buzz in the bay area, be sure to check it out.

then, the meeting got under way. david sifry, founder and CEO of technorati, was the guest at the meeting and it was run as an informal q&a session (i believe niall is currently working on posting the audio from this session up on his blog). for me, the session was awesome; i was riveted to my chair for 2 hours while dave talked about technorati's vision, his entrepreneurial experiences, and general commentary about building relationships on the internet. it was a great experience - if you get a chance, definitely find an excuse to chat dave up, he's a goldmine.

after dave's talk, i met russ. he apparently had been doing contract work at yahoo and just recently joined there full time. i took the opportunity to chat with him a little bit; mostly, i wanted to know why he chose to join yahoo out of all the other companies in the area. immediately, russ focused in on the culture and working environment. i thought, wow, a place that's working on bringing revolutionary web technologies to the masses and a great atmosphere? sounds like a dream come true.

then, i met jeremy zawodny. since my story had started making rounds with the press, i had been compared to jeremy and scoble, but i had never expected to meet them in person. we got to talking and he shared with me his experience at yahoo, which also sounded great. jeremy told me that yahoo is extremely blog friendly and that posting their personal work experiences was perfectly acceptable - given, of course, that confidential information and NDAs aren't breached. i left with his contact info and an invite to tour the yahoo campus.

to top it all off, two nights later, i met robert scoble at a geek dinner he put together in san jose. my conversation with scoble was quite refreshing; he has a ton of perspective on how to deftly handle blogging in the corporate space. it sounds like scoble has a pretty great gig, running msdn's channel 9. makes me kind of jealous. but then again, i suppose you could say that i'm slightly jealous of all those who are employed ;). either way, i'm really looking forward to reading that book he's putting together, i think it's going to be hot.

also in attendance was dennis cheung, a microsoftie working at the mountain view office. he happened to snap a photo of me at dinner and also got one of my "expired" google business cards. after the geek dinner, i had some time to kill, so i visited the local microsoft office with him. the insides of the microsoft offices here look remarkably like the ones in redmond - in fact, the only difference i really saw was that there were lots of macs around :p

chatting with all these guys was great. they are true blogging veterans and i hope to get chances to talk with them more often. in the meantime, i'll be trying to attend as many of these meetings as i can; hopefully, i'll continue to meet cool new people in the area. if you know of any really interesting get togethers (and by interesting, i mean nerdy), send me an invite please!

tipping what?

2005-02-14T01:26:00.000-08:00

ever since i got to san francisco, i've decided that i should take up reading again. a very smart co-worker of mine at microsoft once told me that reading keeps the mind sharp - now that i've started, i wholeheartedly agree! i'm not really sure when it happened, but sometime after i no longer had to attend high school english class, reading slowly dropped further and further down on my priorities list until it was nowhere to be found. i could probably come up with a ton of excuses for this, but in the interest of keeping this entry semi-short, i'll save that for another time :)

what's been on my reading list? well, i started by picking up fortune magazine. in my youth i'd never really cared too much for business magazines, but now i find it absolutely fascinating. i think i've at least skimmed the past few months worth of the magazine cover to cover.

next, i read "Touch the Top of the World" by Erik Weihenmayer. i actually didn't pick this one out, they gave away copies for free at google's sales conference. anyways, it's a great story about overcoming obstacles, rising up to challenges and learning to break through the barriers that other people shy away from. if that weren't reason enough, Erik gave an excellent speech at the sales conference which i got to see live.

then, i read "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser. this was a terribly frightening read. if you like eating at mcdonald's or any other franchised fast food chain, don't read this book. if you want to see a new perspective of how this vertical operates, prepare to be shocked. ignorance might be bliss, but i definitely wanted to know this information. from now on, the only place i'll eat a fast food burger is in-n-out. yeeks!

while i was finishing up "Fast Food Nation," someone recommended "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. as much as i enjoyed my previous reads, this book had by far the most enlightening content i've read in a long, long time. if you're into marketing, social networks, viral epidemics, communications, psychology or just human nature in general, pick up this book. you won't be disappointed and you won't want to put it down. basically, Gladwell explores an exciting phenomenon where due to the right mix of people, message and circumstance, something - anything at all - explodes with an exponential uptake. he explores case studies where these principles apply to a wide range of scenarios including viruses, fads, human behaviors, children's television and more.

now, i'm reading Gladwell's next book, "Blink." it's about how people make snap judgments. it's about first impressions, how people sense danger, why art experts can just know a piece is fake and more. i've only just started the book and it's as gripping and eye-opening as "Tipping Point." i think Gladwell is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers - great ideas and great writing, what an awesome combination.

internet savvy readers will notice that i'm using amazon's associate links for all the stuff i've mentioned. just like my adsense search box and ads, i'll be donating all proceeds to charity. as a bonus, i'm getting to check out these technologies which have started an epidemic of their own across content providers' websites.

which reminds me, in case any of you out there were wondering, i took out those google adwords ads promoting this blog. i did it so i could get a jump start on getting to know the google ads system. it was one of those start-up assignments you get at a new job where you are supposed to familiarize yourself with the product.

it's getting late so i'm off to bed. ah, there's so much to post about the past few weeks but so little time. oh, and also, believe it or not, i do read all those comments so if you have a question specifically for me, please leave an e-mail address or contact me directly. otherwise, i won't be able to get back to you with an answer ;)

good night, blogosphere!

the official story, straight from the source

2005-02-11T09:35:00.000-08:00

i know it's been quite a while since anything substantial was posted on my blog, but thanks for bearing with me. as i said in my previous post, it's been a hectic two weeks. i've finally finished thinking through a few things so here it is...

on january 28th, 2005, i was terminated from google. either directly or indirectly, my blog was the reason. this came as a great shock to me because two days ago we had looked at my blog and removed all inappropriate content - the comments on financial performance and future products. for my next entries, i was very cognizant of my blogging content, making sure to stay away from these topics. i mean, as much as i like to be open and honest about communicating to users and customers, i'm not insubordinate. if i was told to shut down this blog, i would have.

as scoble says, i should've waited a little longer and felt the company out a bit more before i started blogging at length. in retrospect, that is good advice and a lesson learned. i was just too excited. i felt like i was joining a small start-up family; i thought i was going to start new initiatives and improve existing ones; i thought i could jump in the deep end and immerse myself in the revolutionary development environment; i thought i could make connections to real people in the outside world and get first hand feedback; i thought google would love it. i thought wrong.

i've actually viewed this as a great learning experience. obviously, i've gotten a first-hand chance to learn about the power of blogging. i've also learned to be a little more analytical about situations, a lot more cautious and a lot less assuming. however, i've also confirmed that i'm willing to take a stand for what i believe in. i've confirmed what i'm looking for in a career and i know what i love to do - by the way, it's not blogging, it's creating revolutionary solutions :). some people live a lifetime without getting a chance to learn these things about themselves; i'm grateful i've gotten that chance.

people ask me if i'm bitter. funny thing is, despite all this, at the end of the day, i can see where google is coming from - but i don't agree with their stances and i wish they had executed a little differently. i think blogging is the next big thing on the internet. the web gave people revolutionary access to information; email and instant messaging disrupted the way people communicate with each other; blogging empowers everyone to create new information and connect in a community. it’s the culmination of lots of the progress that has happened on the internet rolled into one huge, powerful, killer app. corporations should embrace this technology just like the ones before it. companies that are confident in their offerings should let employees spread the word. in today's age of information overload, blogging is quickly emerging as the fastest and most cost-effective method of marketing.

finally, for all those in the evil/not evil argument, realize that google is a public, for-profit company. i do not believe google is either evil or good. companies take what they feel are logical steps in doing business, and business isn't always fair.

thanks for reading! oh, and if you’re looking for a talented technical project/product/program manager, i guess i’m on the market now. if you have a corporate blogging policy, i promise i’ll follow it. i’ll use proper capitalization in my specs too :).

what's going on?

2005-02-09T16:07:00.000-08:00

hi everyone. it's been a hectic two weeks but i'll have some new posts ready soon. if you want up to the minute updates, just subscribe to my RSS feed. in the meantime, to take advantage of the traffic, i've added adsense to my website on the sidebar. don't worry, all proceeds will be going to charity :).

also, i want to thank those in the community that have been so supportive. for those who are leaving disparaging comments: if you want to have a real conversation, i'm open. don't be an anonymous troll - stand behind what you say and put your email address on it.

thanks and stay tuned...

wow it's raining hard out here

2005-01-27T22:00:00.000-08:00

i guess living in seattle gets you accustomed to gloomy skies and light drizzle 9 months out of the year. on the way home tonight, it was raining really hard and it was kind of refreshing to see contrasting weather once again - reminds me of michigan.

also on my way home tonight, i stopped by ikea to pick up some new furniture. the thing is, i drive a small compact car and i needed to buy a new bed and some dressers. for some reason, i had convinced myself that i could fit the pieces for a queen size bed frame, 2 dressers and a nightstand all in the back of my poor little toyota celica. being from the online generation, i had already scoured ikea.com and knew exactly what i wanted to get. i tried to quickly run through the showroom and find the items so i could jot down where to find the flat packed boxes in the self-serve warehouse. of course, i got lost somewhere in between living rooms and kitchens; i probably spent a good 20 minutes circling around taking "shortcuts" through the store.

after the showroom adventure, i finally found my way to the warehouse and realized how big the pieces for a queen size bed are. undeterred, i decided that i would try to fit it in my car anyways. so i loaded up my cart and went to checkout where i chose the slowest checkout line in the history of checkout lines. this gave me a lot of time to mentally visualize fitting all these huge boxes in my trunk. in my mind, i still saw it working out. after what felt like forever, it was finally my turn and i checked out, wheeled my furniture to the loading area and pulled my car up.

when i got out of my car, i looked at my cart and then at my trunk and thought: oh no. a queen size headboard is definitely not meant to fit in my hatchback. defeated, i went to find an ikea worker to inquire about shipping options. he took a look and said, "hey man, shipping is going to cost you at least $59. this stuff will fit, you want me to try?"

i figured this would be a fun exercise in frustration so i agreed to give it a go. i folded down the back seats, jammed my front seats as far forward as i could and we started loading stuff in. remarkably, the guy was able to get everything to fit in there on the first try. i was pretty impressed. the only problem was, i had slid my seat so close to the wheel that i physically wasn't able to drive anymore.

remarkably, the ikea guy was nice enough to help me unpack my car and repack it a couple more times until it finally all fit in there with my seat at a normal position. i must admit, this was the most fun i'd ever had at ikea.

so now my car is packed full of ikea boxes to be unloaded at my new apartment tomorrow :) many thanks to the ikea worker who helped me load my stuff, it definitely was the best customer service i've had in a while.

what.. what would you say... ya do here?

2005-01-27T18:24:00.000-08:00

so lots of people have been asking me what my job actually is. contrary to some people's beliefs, my job is not to blog about google; that's what i do in my free time. i'm actually an associate product manager on adsense. that means i'm sandwiched in between being the customer advocate and harnessing all the cool stuff happening through engineers' 20% time. in my opinion, this is the best job in the industry, especially given that i'm a google customer too. so basically, i spend the bulk of my time thinking of new features or products that customers would want (read: stuff that i want) and then i organize people to build it. it's great!

anyways, one peculiarity in the population of associate product managers (apms) here is the mix of alma maters. there are only 3 non-stanford/non-m.i.t. apms, including myself. the other apms are split between the two schools, with stanford taking a slight lead i think. i don't really think it was planned like that, but i'll definitely be doing my part to mix it up a little :)

to be honest, when i first got here, i was kind of disappointed that i was put on adsense. i wanted to work on consumer products, where i could focus on coming up with new offerings that would revolutionize the way people use computers and the internet. but now that i've settled in a bit, i'm actually beginning to like what i work on. i can spend my 20% time exploring new ideas to my heart's content and there are tons of possible improvements in the system - more work than our current team can handle. every improvement we make has the potential to help out tons of customers and the people here are focused on getting these solutions out to customers as soon as possible.

which leads me to one of google's most valuable competitive advantages: the ability to get features out the door extremely quickly. this is by far one of the most striking contrasts between google and microsoft.

before i left microsoft, i chatted with a lot of people and there was one theme that they always touched on: microsoft knows how to ship software, we know how to turn the crank. at the time i thought, yup you're right, microsoft has shipped many versions of windows, office, visual studio... the list goes on and on. for the past 15 years, microsoft has been a software shipping machine and it has become very good at it. my friends at microsoft argued for me to stay so i could absorb this knowledge and learn the "the microsoft way".

but i figured something didn't seem right. in the past few years, everyone's seen microsoft's software shipping machine start to break down - schedules have been slipping, features are getting scaled back and there's the need for a huge patching infrastructure. the system isn't working as well anymore and despite the billg's internet memo years ago, the microsoft machine hasn't reinvented itself at all.

for as much as google is confident, microsoft is stubborn in its ways. they know one way to ship software and it doesn't work as well as it used to. the microsoft way, with its huge milestones and bi-annual releases (if you're lucky), just doesn't jive with the unlimited bandwidth, unlimited memory, unlimited computing power world that is quickly becoming a reality. the future of computing isn't on the desktop, it's on the network.

i remember when i was at microsoft, i'd propose trying new engineering practices: pair programming, unit-test driven development, iterative development. these ideas were shot down quickly and the response was always, "we've been developing software like this for 20 years and look at where we are. $50 billion in the bank, dominance in multiple markets... we're one of the most successful businesses in all of history. why would we change the way we make our bread and butter?"

contrast that to google, where reinvention is almost in its blood. there's no remorse about throwing away dead code; people work however they feel makes them most productive; and now, another critical part is here: there's a product management core that can help harness that creativity and productivity into products the world loves to use.

anyways... enough commentary for today, but i'll leave you with this: while microsoft focuses much of its resources and struggles to meet its deadline for longhorn, google can easily add, enhance, reinvent and distribute products seamlessly through this new computing landscape. in a nutshell, it's the dream of the dot-commers, finally come true.

end of an exciting day

2005-01-26T20:07:00.000-08:00

wow, the past day has been pretty interesting. lots of activity and some lessons learned as well.

i suppose the biggest lesson was how fast information travels nowadays. my old blog was pretty technically focused and as such, attracted a very specific audience. i guess i just figured that's how it would work for this new blog; it could serve as a place for me to put up my stories about working at google so my friends could all read it and i wouldn't have to repeat the same thing 20 times a day.

the second lesson was that in today's blogosphere, speculation runs rampant. i suppose i should've anticipated this one as well, but i hadn't learned the previous lesson yet, so i didn't really think too many people other than my friends would be reading this thing. oops!

anyways, here we are after the flurry of activity, and i wanted to address the most common criticism people have been posting around: i must be crazy/stupid/irrational/etc. becuase since i knew what i was getting myself into when i joined google, i shouldn't be complaining. while i do admit that i am a little of all of the above, i would encourage people to realize that life is all about compromises and trade-offs. in this particular scenario, before i made my decision to leave microsoft and come to google, i very carefully weighed many things, including (but not limited to):

overall compensation, including the benefits packages
mission and values of the companies
career growth potential and opportunities
scope of work i would be doing
working environment and atmosphere
location

in the end, i decided that google was a better choice; however, by no means was google the clear winner in all categories. different people have different ways to weight different factors and in the end, the equation i set up had google coming out on top. i trust you are all very intelligent people and you know exactly what i'm talking about here.

as far as voicing my opinion on different matters, well, it just depends on the person. some people are more open about issues that bother them, others keep thoughts internally. i think part of the beauty of the blogging movement is that for the first time, people worldwide are empowered to voice their opinion. i choose to exercise that privilege :)

anyways, if you don't give feedback, how will things ever get better?

p.s. for all you conspiracy theorists out there, this is not a PR/HR stunt and yes i am a real person :p

oops!

2005-01-26T11:56:00.000-08:00

hi everyone, sorry my site has been down for the past day or so. i goofed and put some stuff up on my blog that's not supposed to be there. nothing serious and they didn't ask me to take anything down (even the stuff where i'm critical about the company). i'm learning that google is understandably careful about disclosing sensitive information, even vague financial-related things. the quickest way for me to fix the situation at the time was to take it all down. now i'm back up. just so you know, google was pretty cool about all this. thanks for and sorry for the frenzy of speculation.

yikes, it takes a while to commute around here

2005-01-25T14:13:00.000-08:00

for those of you who don't know, google provides a pretty cool service for employees who want to live in san francisco: a free shuttle. not only is the shuttle free, but during your commute, you can connect onto the internet and do work. somehow, they have a high speed wireless internet uplink on the bus which is shared to the passengers via a wireless router. as you can imagine, this is pretty nice because you can actually get work done while you're commuting; thus, further increasing your productivity. this shuttle is so popular that they actually use full size charter buses which seat about 50 people and they run 6 times to google in the morning and 6 times back to san francisco in the evening.

since the south bay is pretty boring, i'm living in downtown san francisco. yesterday, i tried this shuttle for the first time and it was pretty cool, except:

the internet connection was broken
the bus was at capacity, so i was kinda squished in a window seat at the back of the bus
and it took a full hour to make the drive and then i had to take the muni from the drop-off point

all told, my total commute time was an hour and 20 minutes. i suppose that's not too bad, but in seattle, my commute time was about 20 minutes (35 minutes if i took public transit). oh well, i guess i can live with the extended commute times; living in san francisco is definitely worth it!

uh oh, what happened to my bank account?

2005-01-23T23:06:00.000-08:00

so i happened to look over my finances this past weekend and i realized something: i'm broke. which is odd, because i had a bunch of liquid capital in my checking account last time i checked, and now all of a sudden i have nothing.

i realized the root problem was that google's relocation process requires the employee to pay all the expenses up front and then get reimbursed for them later. that means you have to cover an apartment hunting trip, your final relocation, lease termination fees and temporary housing expenses all in advance. not to mention that they don't pay out your signing bonus and relocation money until your first paycheck (which i haven't received yet). finally, add in the fact that i had to put down two months rent as a deposit for my new lease, and i'm flat broke.

on the plus side, this first paycheck is going to be huge... (which unfortunately means i'll probably end up getting taxed huge on it. doh!)

which led me to thinking about the "benefits" package at google. as i thought about it, i realized that most of the "benefits" actually seem to be thinly veiled timesavers to keep you at work. take for example: free lunch and dinner. now this one is an awesome value proposition for google; i'm not exactly sure why other companies don't also recognize the value and join in. consider this: it probably costs google a maximum of $3 per employee for lunch and $5 per employee for dinner. so that's only $8 per day, but if you think about the fact that the employee now probably only takes a half hour lunch break and also stays late working, the company actually realizes far more than an $8 gain in employee output. not to mention that most people think this is a great "benefit" and google gets a ton of positive press on it. in short, this "benefit" is designed benefit the company, not the employee.

then look at all these other fringe "benefits": on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes... the list goes on and on with one similarity: every "benefit" is on-site so you never leave work. i'm not going to say this isn't convenient for us employees, but between all these devices designed to make us stay at work, they might as well just have dorms on campus that all employees are required to live in.

next, let's look at the health care benefit provided. arguably, this is the biggest benefit companies pay out for their employees. google definitely has a program that is on par with other companies in the industry; but since when does a company like google settle for being on par? microsoft's health care benefits shame google's relatively meager offering. for those of you who don't know, microsoft pays 100% of employees' premiums for a world-class PPO. everything you can possibly imagine is covered. the program has no co-pays on anything (including prescription drugs); you can self-refer to any doctor in the blue cross blue shield network, which pretty much means any licensed professional; and you can even get up to 24 hour-long massage sessions per year.

lastly, google demands employees that are 90th percentile material, so what's with the 50th percentile compensation? the packages would've been decent when the company was pre-IPO, but let's be honest here... a stock option with a strike price of $188 just doesn't have the same value as the ones of yesteryear. even microsoft adjusted their base salaries to 66th percentile years ago when it was clear that their stock options weren't as much a part of the total compensation package as it used to be. for a post-IPO company like google, it only seems fair that they adjust things accordingly.

all in all, despite these rants, i still chose to come to google. the work environment, projects and risk/reward equation were all more enticing than up in redmond. but just like when you look for apartments in SF, no option is ever perfect.

larry and sergey sure know how to throw a party!

2005-01-21T23:01:00.000-08:00

before we get to the party the title refers to, thursday was the second day of the google global sales conference and as much as i liked the first day, the second day was even better!

they started off the day with a financials presentation, then the products team gave presentations reviewing product performance in 2004.

the coolest part of the sales conference came next: a city-wide adventure race. the group of 1500+ people split off into 250 teams of 4 or 5 and were given packets with detailed course instructions. the event was so big, they actually had to coordinate with the san francisco police department since there were all these crazy teams of people running around the city. my team decided to take it easy and we went through the course at a leisurely pace - quite fitting as our team name was "turtle" (and needless to say, we definitely didn't win). along the course, we walked up this huge hill and ended up at coit tower. although i had been in san francisco many times, i had never gone to this place and i must say, there are some amazing views from that vantage point.

after the adventure race, they had a fancy dinner and a party with an open bar. i must say, 1500+ sales people getting drunk at a company sponsored party feels remarkably like a frat party. i'd had my fill of frat parties sometime around freshman year of college, so i had a drink and left promptly.

that was the end of the sales conference; but the very next day, a new and exciting activity started: the google annual ski trip! they bused everyone to squaw valley and we skied all day. then they had a huge party set up for us that night. apparently, last year they fit everyone at the resort hotel but this year, there are twice as many people so the party was out in the squaw parking lot. they actually set up five outdoor event tents, four medium sized ones and one huge one. each medium sized tent had a theme with coordinating food and music; there was a caribbean theme, texas theme, pop theme and a jazz theme. then, in the main tent was food from all the different themes, a few sushi platters and desert trays.

while walking around, i tried to meet new people at each tent i visited. eventually, i met a bunch of people who work in the product management group - basically, the people i'll be working with. it was kind of a strange setting to meet co-workers who you'll be on projects with, but everyone was cool and we had a good time chatting over the loud music. everyone i met seemed to be pretty young and energetic... i think i'm going to have a fun time working on the team :).

around 10 o'clock, larry and sergey got up and introduced the band for the evening: tainted love. they played some of their classic hits and also covered a lot of other 80s tunes. there was a huge dance floor and people were really getting down (the stiff drinks and high altitude probably greased the wheels on that one). i was feeling kinda sick and i'm a terrible dancer, so i just turned in early.

this morning, i got up and was feeling a bit better so i hit the slopes again. i'm not exactly sure why, but i got really tired while snowboarding these past few days. uh oh, maybe i'm getting old. i'll just blame it on the high altitude and blazing sun. around 3, i finally got off the mountain and headed for the buses back to san francisco.

well, that just about covers my first week at google. now i'll have to spend the weekend looking for a new bed and other matching bedroom furniture. oh boy, lucky me :/

global sales conference - google style

2005-01-18T19:45:00.000-08:00

well, it's day two and i'm attending google's global sales conference to learn about the message being pushed in the field and to try to get up to speed about as many products as fast as possible.

all in all, the conference is done really well. the logistics are coordinated well, the equipment is top notch, and of course, there's tons of food and drink to be had. the content is quite interesting, but i'm not allowed to share most of it (sorry :p)

while at the conference, i've gotten some new perspective and had some time to reflect upon the factors driving my decision to leave microsoft for google. here's what i came up with:

i wanted to work at a company that focuses on disruptive technologies.
i wanted work to be fun.
i wanted to work on stuff i thought was interesting.

they addressed each of these three things during presentations at the conference. google is not afraid to - in fact, they are committed to - creating new technologies that transform the way people use the internet. the sales conference, the people and the atmosphere of googolplex screams one theme: work == play, play == work. finally, as most of you know, google allows employees to dedicate 20% of their time towards their own ideas and inventions. additionally, you can easily shift around in the company to projects that most accurately match your interests.

not to mention that the company has some cool perks and definitely knows how to party. free food, open bars, lots of swag, company ski trip... they sure pile on the goodies :)

first day on the job, first post on the blog

2005-01-17T22:25:00.000-08:00

in the ever increasing chaos known as the blogosphere, i've decided to add yet another random stream. if nothing else, this blog will serve as a personal journal of my life at google. maybe one day, a collection of these postings and comments will compile into a book...

in the meantime, i'll introduce myself and my new blog. my name is mark jen and i began my life as a googler (or noogler for those of you in the know) today: janurary 17th, 2005. in previous chapters of my life, i'd interned at ibm and worked full time for 18 months at microsoft. so i guess you could say i'm getting first hand experience at three companies who embody the tech company lifecycle - ibm at the tailend of their era; microsoft at the inflection point leading to maturity; and google at the beginning of what would become a new empire.

so what happened today? nothing too exciting. i think new employee orientation is about the same at any company: you show up early, get a security badge, sit through hours of boring presentations and fill out the required paperwork.

cool things about the process at google:

almost everything is electronic. only four forms need to be printed (two were required by the government; one was the electronic signature authorization form; and of course, the NDA we've all come to know and love)
my login, badge and workstation were completely ready to go on the first day. you'd think this wouldn't be so hard, but it actually proves to be quite difficult at most companies. to top it all off, my laptop was given to me all setup and in its carrying case with a full complement of goodies :)

now the bad:

same old 3 hour HR presentation about nothing important in particular

the rest of my day was spent surfing the corporate intranet. this was quite an experience. you'd think that an intranet would typically be oragnized and very cohesive - after all, it's the internal network for a single company. however, google has managed to recreate the chaos of the internet on its internal network. fortunately, they've applied their search engine to help sort through everything. which begs the question - did the intranet become messy becuase google had a great search engine to find things anyways? or would intranets naturally become a mess if not for the fear of creating a huge tangled mess with no search tool to help users?

closing thought: the ibm t41p is truly a laptop done right. i'm not entirely sure why any company would issue anything less to their employees (*ahem* microsoft :p)