posted29/05/09
Two big announcements today from the two big tech giants.
MS came out with their new search engine - Bing
Google with their new communication and collaboration platform - Wave
Both are exciting products but I think you’ll see a fundamental difference in the philosophy of these companies by better understanding the nature of the products.
Bing - The Decision Engine?
From the video of Bing, it seems that they are aggregating services, and trying to build something that is the be all and end all of search. Its power comes from the orderly aggregation and presentation of information sources from across the net. Reminds me of windows and MS’s suite of applications. Very silo-ed, a lot of effort and maintenance in building out the product. Decision Engine - I don’t know.
The MS approach usually offers less in the way of consumer choice - but you’re promised a nice suite that works together. But as we all know, MS more often than not screws this up. This is normally Apple’s forte. We’ll see how it goes with Bing though. One piece of advice for MS - change the logo for Bing please. ‘Uninspiring’ would be an understatement.
Google’s Wave
Google on the other hand is opening up the platform and wants the rest of the Internet to join in on the ‘platform’ to help finish the product.A very Google approach for solving this really big problem. Google’s core premise is that it is a search engine company, it’s way of looking at things is that the Internet has a lot of good things out there, we will help you bring order to all that chaos to make money. Same with Wave, which is targeted squarely at the developer community. The Internet is home many cool applications, we’ll open-source the core, let others add it to our platform, index it all, and make a buck. You win, we win. You can check out the video on TC or read a short preview on RWW, if you dont have the patience.
Google’s approach casts a wider net, a simple solution with more generic applications. The user would typically get a wider choice but it can end up getting a little complicated. It all comes down to how good the defaults and quick-start features are in the app. Google’s done a decent job of it so far so I’m thinking they’ll pull off Wave pretty well.
What’s DNA got to do with it.
Interesting to note how these two companies ‘think’ from today’s announcements. I think a company’s first product defines what their DNA is.
It’s basically the difference between how a Operating System company solves a problem and a Search Engine Company solves a problem.
MS’s solution seems to be - Try to cover all the bases so the end user can easily get stuff done within the confines of its paradigm. An OS company.
Google’s is - Reuse whats out there to create value for the user. A classic Internet paradigm, perfect for a Search Engine company.
Both companies have these recurring themes across their products and services. IMO, MS is going to lose the game on the Internet unless they adopt Google’s thinking of ‘open’, reuse and contribute.
No matter how much resources you have inside your company, the rest of the world is going to have more of it. Might as well figure out a way to use it for your advantage rather than let them be your competitors.
@chandika
posted13/05/09
Today we received some great coverage on the tech blog Read Write Web. This has generated some support emails and feedback from people who are excited to be trying Creately and have questions. I was just answering a question and I realized providing support gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
Here at Creately, we have discussed this a few times and we have always been of the opinion that superb Support is the only option we can provide to our users. Everyone who works on the support and feedback email has this view and it is what motivates us to answer peoples questions as soon as we receive them and go on to research and solve the problem.
We have set ourselves the goal of trying to resolve every user’s questions while he is still on his current Creately session. With this ambition in mind, we have started to look at the people, processes and software we use to engage with our customers - so we can deliver the best support experience available from an online software.
I would also just like to provide a little insight into the joy of support for me. I know in my heart that we have made and are continuing to create a fantastic diagramming application. We have often spoken about the problem that we are solving and discussed what our users would like to do. However when we have diagrams shared with us and we see them as attachments to support requests, it always brings a smile to my face to see how creatively people are using Creately.
Keep those suggestions, questions, ideas and diagrams coming 
@nick_foster
PS. Remember to visit our Community Support Site to share your ideas or vote for other users’ ideas.
posted11/05/09
History
URL shortening has been around for ages. For example tinyurl.com has been around since 2002, which while not that long is ages on Internet. With the recent popularity of Twitter and its artificial limit of 140 characters for the tweets has really moved URL shortening from a specialty to a mainstream activity with a very useful purpose.
Traditionally URL shortening services have generated a random and unique code which is placed after their own short domain name to create the short URL. Recently they have started to allow users to add their own unique code although this is a little used feature because of the need to maintain a short URL. Take a look at bit.ly to see this in action.
Advantages & Disadvantages
URL shortening has its distinct advantages and disadvantages. For the Internet user, URL shortening provides a mechanism to easily include short yet useful links in a message without using up all the available characters. For the website provider URL shortening can remove or even damage their beautifully laid SEO plans. It removes the easily readable and meaningful URLs that make search better and help users understand what they are going to be viewing.
So we have two forces here pulling in different directions. Well this got me thinking about what we should be providing at Creately to really enable our users to publish their diagrams for the public to view in a manner that makes sense and allows the most flexibility.
Our Solution
It should be stated at this point that basic URL shortening is not technically difficult, a point proven by the explosion of URL shortening services that have sprung up. You can do basic URL shortening - which is really URL redirection using the HTTP header - in about 10 lines of code in PHP (I’m sure it can be done in less if your really smart :-))
After much internal discussion we’ve decided to keep our new short URL service short and sweet with a new short domain
See are some sample URLs we’ve published from Creately:
http://create.ly/fub9l2671
http://create.ly/fuk35unh1
Our URL shortening has been achieved with a mixture of Apache configuration changes and PHP code to enable the URL shortening. The flexibility and function that this provides to our users is huge. Any Creately user can now simply copy and paste this link into their email, IM, or Twitter post to share their diagram or design with the world at large.
In the future we have plans to allow Creately users to specify their own custom URL for published diagrams. This means that each diagram can have an SEO friendly link and it lets the links to be more descriptive.
If you have any ideas for improvements to our published diagram service please head over to our Community Support Site or email support@creately.com
@nick_foster
posted06/05/09
If you have been following us, you’d know by now that we focus a lot on being ‘easy’. And if you’ve tried Creately, seen the video or gone through our list of features, you’ll know Creately is a feature-rich application. We have powerful features that are ahead of most other products in our market.
And yet, we only speak of easy. Not of our endless list of features. Why? because we believe all those features exist for the sole purpose of making the process of diagramming & design ‘easy’.
Easy does not stop at building an intuitive UI. It becomes ‘easy’ is when you consider what the user is trying to do and your application makes it easier for that goal to be achieved.
Lets take an example. Nick wants to redesign his office computer network. So he needs to
- Map out the current network structure
- Plan the future structure
- Get the rest of the IT team involved, gather ideas and feedback
- Get approvals
- Implement the network
- Maintain it over the next year and then again start planning for the next upgrade.
So when we mean easy, we look at the whole process.
Here, the diagram is the central artifact. A diagram is drawn in steps 1 and 2. So we focus on making drawing network diagrams easy. Large number of nodes, typically belong in groups. So collapsible groups - Check.
Also the diagram is about a real situation. A situation rich with data and information that needs to be referred to over and over again. So objects need to have attached data like IP addresses etc. Check.
Involves a team, so collaboration is a must. Check.
Maintaining it over a period of time means frequent updates. Multiple revisions - Check.
Overall, small mistakes in planning cost a lot in hardware. So some simple validation to tell you when you run out of ports on your switches help in the planning stages. - Check.
That’s just a snapshot of how we think about a specific use case. We start at drawing and from there we visit each step and evaluate how we can make that visually driven task easier and more intuitive.
With our KObject technology and a contextual UI, we are able to do this for many types of diagrams in different disciplines.
So now that we are nearing the public release of Creately, are we done? Not at all.
We’ll keep going up the use case ladder to higher order user goals that are centered around diagrams and visuals. And we will find ways to make things easy. That may mean complex functionality that shows only when its required, new KObjects or just a small amendment like a tooltip.
If we’ve learned one thing with Creately, is that ‘easy’ is not easy to do. But when you get it, it wins you die-hard fans. Fingers crossed!
@chandika
PS - Have any suggestions on how we can use KObject technology to help the work you do in your field easier? Write to us or suggestion it on our Community Support Site.
