Looks like Lee Sykes beat me to the DotNetNuke lens on Squidoo. Interestingly enough, the ASPnet lens was available for the taking. I also picked up WebDAV, Tagging and Logos.

Umair could not have made a more timely post about Yahoo’s lack of innovation. He discusses Yahoo’s “hyperimitation” and how it never really improves anything in any meaningful way.

I say timely because I have now spent some time engineering a better “forums” application because I have given up on forum software available today. Many of us use web-based discussion forums everyday, and they are all the same. From the common seed of BBS many years ago, there evolved a design for web discussions — forum groups, forums, threads and posts. It all worked quite well until everybody had a computer, a browser, an Internet connection and an opinion. This has resulted in three major problems:

– It’s hard to keep up with the volume of information. With hundreds and sometimes thousands of posts in different forums, across different sites, how does one track information of interest and more importantly relevance. Email digests and email subscriptions don’t cut it. They just move the information to different client software. If you track even 3–5 busy forums, you will be innundated with information.

– It’s hard to find relevant information. Forums are notoriously hard to search because there is no meaningful way to perform contextual searches. Users freely post anything (even in moderated forums) and there is no guarantee that threads will stay focused on a topic. Keyword searches yield tons of results and out of frustration, users will often just post a question which has already been answered umpteen times.

– It’s hard to tell which user’s posts are worth reading. Just because a particular user has a high post count does not make them interesting, relevant or for that matter, credible. For instance, there are many users on the ASP.Net forums with huge post counts that have very little substance in their posts.

As some of you may have noticed, I have not been very active blogging or on the forums lately. And yes, I am also behind on releasing updates to some of Speerio products. This is because I have been hard at work doing a fair amount of re-architechting of existing products, while also working on a Speerio product suite called “Community Studio” (more on that next week). One of the apps in the suite is a discussion application. In working out the design for this app, I was tempted to take the interaction metaphor used by most most forums today and implement it, perhaps with some U.I. goodies to make things interesting. But the more I thought about it, the more I disliked this idea. There is no point in replicating a bad concept with a good U.I. — all it does is give you more of the same problems, albeit with better user interaction. A good example of this is the recent upgrades made to the ASP.net forums. Many client-side U.I. enhancements, but none that substantially help with usability and easily finding relevant information.

I decided that I would take a fresh approach to designing a web-based discussion application (I’m not going to call it a forum any more). Starting with a clean slate, I prioritized some key requirements —

1) The application should enable a user to instantly know what topics are discussed the most.

2) The application should enable a user to instantly find all discussions on a topic, prioritized by relevance, chronology or amount of participation for all time or a user-specified period of time.

3) The application should enable the user to be notified when more discussions about topics of interest to her/him emerge.

4) The application should provide the user with hints about contextually relevant topics that have been discussed when he/she searches for a topic.

5) The application should be incredibly easy to use, very responsive and should be optimized to take advantage of the one trait that is common to all web-based discussions — 99.99% of the time all content is write-once/read-many.

Looking at those requirements, it should be obvious that the group – forum – thread metaphor isn’t going to cut it. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that web-discussion applications have been over-engineered and the solution is not to add, but to subtract. Doing just that, I arrived at a design that is quite different from today’s discussion software, but which I think meets all the above requirements. I’ll go into detail in a later blog post, but let me share some high-level ideas here:

1) Information navigation is done using a folksonomy-generated tag cloud.

2) There are no groups or sub-groups or forums…only a flat collection of discussions (100 or 1,000,000…doesn’t matter)

3) Each discussion is natively stored as an RSS feed. A discussion is the originating post and all responses to that post. There is no hierarchical thread, just a linear series of responses.

4) Each user who posts a response, must tag her/his response with tags that are relevant to the content of her/his post. This is key because contextual relevancy is best determined by humans and not computers (at least given today’s technology).

5) Tag clusters are automatically created for contextual relevancy.

This, in a nutshell, is a design that meets all the requirements. Of course, there is a lot of detail in the implementation and the U.I., but from a 20,000–foot perspective, the design is very, very simple. While technical gurus are busy arguing the merits of a folksonomy over structured taxonomies, ordinary people are enjoying their ease of use, both for content creation and retrieval. This makes me confident that even though my folksonomy-based discussion app will take some getting used to, once users see how it makes web-based discussions easier to track, digest and retrieve, they will love it.

More design details and information on Community Studio to follow.

Great to know that Ray Ozzie is blogging again.

Google is now providing what looks to be a pretty cool service for anaylzing web traffic. Google Analytics is free upto 5M page views for most sites and unlimited for sites using AdWords. Nice.

This week, FedEx lost me as a customer for life. In the big scheme of things, I don’t think it makes any difference to FedEx since my usage of their service is minimal. However, I believe that the reason they have alienated me as a customer are symptomatic of a corporate culture that no longer cares about the customer.

Earlier this week, on Monday, I sent a FedEx Express letter from McLean, Virginia to Fresno, California using my FedEx account in the bill-to field. The letter was delivered and as expected, I saw a charge for ~$21 on my bank account (since I use my debit card for paying the FedEx account). Imagine my shock when immediately after this charge, I saw another charge from FedEx for $3,198.46. That is one expensive letter delivery!!! Of course, I get on the phone with FedEx right away, but wouldn’t you know it, the company that delivers the “world on-time” is completely clueless when it comes to customer service. Their customer service is open only during business hours.

Strike One! A global shipping and logistics company that does not provide 24/7 customer service.

I call Tuesday morning and after several minutes of touch-tone hell, end up speaking to Andrea Mith. I think Andrea was having just as bad a day as I was about to have. She asked me what was wrong. I politely summarized to her that FedEx had taken a large amount of my money without my permission. She sounded completely non-plussed with this accusation and took down the relevant details I gave her. She then asked me to hold and went away for an etnernity. Came back and told me that the problem was taken care of. I pressed her for details, but she continued to be vague and then ended the call.

Strike Two! A global shipping and logistics company that does not care about its customers. Even when alerted to the fact that I had been wronged, there was no apology…none…nada…nothing in the way of even remotely expressing empathy for my situation. In fact, quite the opposite — sounding bored and uncaring about what was for me, a significant problem. Also, poor communications and not taking responsibility for the situation.

I waited till the afternoon and checked my bank account. No credit from FedEx. I am still out $3,198.46, so I call FedEx again.

This time, I am greeted by Anna Cornado. She has no knowledge of my problem. That’s OK…by now I am expecting that FedEx due to its incompetency, has no way for customer service to track customer calls and issues. (Maybe they need to call SugarCRM and start using their CRM software.) I repeat the drill. Anna puts me on hold and goes away for a while. She comes back and tells me that the problem is resolved and I have been given a credit. I advise her that my online bank statement is real-time and I see no credit. I press her for an authorization number (since we all know that all credit card transactions have a transaction/authorization number). She comes up with an internal tracking number. Completely useless to me. Seeing that I really have no choice in the matter, I decide to wait a few more hours.

I call back in the evening and ask to speak to a manager. The friendly customer service rep takes my information and advises me that her manager is busy and I need to hold. I hold for 1 hour and 15 mins. and then hang up. I call back. Ooops…it’s evening and we are no longer answering the phone at FedEx.

So I log into my FedEx account and notice that it has been updated. It claims I shipped an ~800 lb shipment to somewhere in Sepulveda, California. Well, at least I now know what I was billed for. But what’s this…a button labeled “Dispute” for the charge. Of course I click on it. I am taken to a form which has a drop-down list of possible reasons for disputing the charge. Now I discover that not only are FedEx customer service agents incompetent, but so also are its web designers. None of the options in the list apply, so I pick one that’s close enough. It immediately displays a field for comments. So I start typing away. No way…the field size limit for Comments is 21 characters. I stared at my screen for a full minute. What idiot designed this? How are you going to comment on a dispute in 21 characters or less. I resisted my temptation to use four-letter words and put “Not my shipment” into the field and submitted it.

Another frustrating day and I am still out $3198.46.

Wednesday morning I check both my FedEx and bank accounts. The bank account says there’s no credit from FedEx. Not wanting to start the day with the evil customer service people at FedEx, I decide to wait a couple of hours. Later in the day, I check my bank account and, what do you know, there is now a credit from FedEx.

I am overjoyed. I am going to get my money back. (Note, when FedEx charged my card, the money was immediately removed from my account. However, when the credit was posted, the money was yet unavailable in my account.)

Later on Wednesday, I logged back into my FedEx account to see what had happened about my Dispute. The screen mentioned that my balance was now $7,711.45. This situation just went from bad to worse. FedEx had just billed me for another package that I did not ship.

Strike Three! A global shipping and logistics company that is unable to maintain the transactional integrity and accuracy of its records.

FedEx. You are out!

I am angry, very, very angry. Thankfully, the amount is above the limit of my debit card so all I have to deal with is the payment liability. I call customer service and ask to speak to a manager. I am shortly transferred to Rene Gonzalez. I explain the problem, and tell him in no uncertain terms how much I despise FedEx. Without being rude, I demand that the problem be corrected immediately. Rene acknowledges the problem and although he doesn’t understand the cause, assures me that it is corrected. I request that my account me closed and he says it’s done.

I tell him that I am never doing business with FedEx again and if even one of the customer service agents I had spoken to since the problem began had said “Sorry” and expressed some empathy, I would think very differently of FedEx. Rene says, “I am sorry! I was going to apologize but wanted to understand the cause of the problem first.” You have got to be kidding. After I explain the whole situation, you have to look for the cause of the problem before apologizing to me????

This makes me more angry. This is a FedEx customer service manager? I can now see why the attitude is downhill from there when it comes to the customer service agents.

I checked my FedEx account today, fully expecting to be locked out since I requested that it be closed. No such luck. FedEx incompetency is alive and well. The $7,711.45 charge was gone. But last night, I received a paper invoice for the same amount. I’m not sure what to think.

But, one thing’s for sure…I will never use FedEx services again.