Jobster is unusual (or perhaps not, I really don’t know) in being a company that does extensive development in both Rails and J2EE/Spring/Hibernate, and that has developers who move fluidly between the two worlds. (If your company has experience with both worlds, we’d be interested in sharing learnings.)

Our flagship employer application is built on Spring, and a new consumer application (now in development and soon to be released in a limited beta) is written on Rails. The consumer application was developed rapidly by a small team of developers and is one that we intend to iterate rapidly on.

There is a tendency in most companies, I think, to believe that the whole company needs to standardize on a single technology stack, or at least that specific developers need to specialize.

Given the very different audiences and requirements of the two major applications we are building, I think the “one stack to rule them all” argument is false. For the end user application, rapid iteration and learning is essential, while we have to be more deliberate and careful about how we change the experience for recruiters using the application. Conversely, our employer application plays more to the strength of J2EE through requirements for things like multi-column primary keys, distributed transactions, and so forth.

Our experience has been that a team of strong developers grounded in the MVC model of Spring finds the transition to Ruby and Rails easy and enjoyable, and that they do enjoy greater productivity. We’re very excited about what Rails allows us to do.

Thanks to David Shane for suggesting 5 new Wikipedia related searches to add as plugins to add to Berry 411.
These plugins will help you read wikipedia articles, define words, find the scientific name for tigers (try “wksp: tiger”), or even read Hamlet (”wks: hamlet”)when you’re on the go.

wk: Wikipedia
wkd: Wictionary word search
wkb: Wikipedia textbook search
wks: Wikipedia open source book search
wksp: Wikipedia species search (enter latin or common names)

Charlene Li has an interesting post on Chevrolet’s recent foray into social computing:

I’ve got to applaud Chevy Tahoe’s recent foray into social computing with http://www.chevyapprentice.com/. On the site, users can create their own customized video commercial, complete with text and background music. Chevy’s intent was to tie into a recent appearance of the Tahoe on “The Apprentice” and give users an opportunity to be in the director’s chair.

But then, what could be politely construed as a product manager’s nightmare happened –environmentalists used the opportunity to deliver a very different kind of message than what you would normally expect. You can see the results here and here on YouTube…

While some people point to this campaign as an example of the failure of viral marketing and social computing, I think it points to a great success. Our definition of social computing is when technology results in power shifting from institutions (like Chevy) to communities (like customers). By losing that control over the brand experience, Chevy actually brought more people into it — witness the debate over the campaign itself. The environmental and SUV fuel economy debate has always existed outside of the Chevy experience, but by bringing it into chevyapprentice.com, Chevy has harnessed it into a promotional benefit.

So final take away and then a question. If you’re going to participate as a marketer in the social computing arena, you’ve got to have thick skin and be ready to engage in the messy world of your customer’s opinions. Marketers that have the guts to turn over their brand to the public will in the end win over their customers.

And now my question(s): Put yourself in Ed Peper’s shoes. What would you have done differently, and more importantly, what should marketers eager to tap into social computing techniques take away from this campaign?

The social computing trend, including the growth of blogging, shows that there is hunger for less packaged messages and more authentic conversations between companies and consumers.

Consider now the relationship between employers and prospective employees.  Employers have traditionally controlled the messages about themselves to the extent that there are only positive comments.  Prospective employees know that the universally glowing comments aren’t credible.  Similarly, a resume presents a limited, idealized (if not outright false) picture of an individual.  Every day I hear complaints from jobseekers and hiring managers alike about how poorly this system works.

Why can’t we introduce openness and authenticity in the conversations between employers and prospective employees?  The results may not be as glossy, but I’ll take real and meaningful over glossy any day.

Remote desktop is one of the few parts of Windows that I’m really enthusiastic about.  It works better than X or even VNC over a slow connection, and it can remote sound and printers as well as Windows; there is a good client for the Mac and I believe for Linux as well.

When Microsoft added Remote Desktop to consumer editions of Windows, they crippled it so that only a single remote or local user could be logged into a machine at the same time, to ensure that they didn’t cannibalize the sales of Windows licenses

However, the underlying system has no such limit, and there’s a way to hack Windows to get around it.  Riccardo Ranerio reports in Windows XP Multiuser desktop on how to do this.    I haven’t tried it yet but it looks to be a simple operation. 

XP (and Media Center Edition), differently than the Server versions of Windows, has a limit: a single PC can be controlled by a single “local” user (the “real” person on place), OR a single “remote” user. If someone logs into the computer from remote, the local user is disconnected. The following procedure deactivates this block and allows multiple persons to connect and to use a single computer from remote.

Very useful, for example, if you’ve a very strong PC and you want your wife/friend/brother to use an old computer like a “terminal”
to use applications on the new one, at the same time of you. Other
application of the same technique: you’re at work and you want to
connect to your home PC, without blocking your wife that is using the same computer to check email

Seattle Mind Camp 2.0, a “a self-organizing, digitally minded, entrepreneur-driven, overnight Seattle confab” will be April 29-30th.  I had a lot of fun talking with Andru Edwards, the founder of the event, on the Gear Live podcast.
I’ll be there this year along with Charles Porter who works on search and search  relevance at Jobster.

Tickets are sold out already, apparently, but if you’re reading this and planning to go, please leave me a note; I’m looking forward to meeting new folks.

British researchers report more than 60,000 injuries from wrap rage, people who injur themselves taking knives and scissors to adult-proof packaging.

Packaging is a fine example of what once once a helpful thing becomes a negative, even as it continues to become increasingly expensive in terms of wasted resources. Packaging is also a good example of how our economy, while optimizing for scale and consistency, has failed to take note of important shifts like (a) the rise of e-commerce and (b) the increasing scarcity of finite resources like oil, clean water, and arable land.

Excessive packaging often exists to sell a product or to prevent shoplifting. Neither of these arguments apply in the case of e-commerce, yet still we get things wrapped in layers and layers of clam shells, boxes, plastic, and foam– all of that surrounded by bubble wrap and boxes. This contributes not only to wrap rage but higher shipping and storage costs. If resources were infinite maybe this wouldn’t matter, but all that plastic is made of oil which is guaranteed one day to be exhausted. Yet somehow we fail to adapt.

As we grow world-wide to ever increasing resource usage, and we one day reach the end of oil, are we going to have a soft-landing and conversion to alternative resources, or a crash landing of war and chaos?

These thoughts are all spurred in part by my recent reading Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, which describes a number of cases of societal collapse due to environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, reduced help from friendly neighbors, and the inability of societies to adapt their behaviors to the changes around them. In more than case, societies collapsed after reaching the peak of their power, population, and ability to consume. The bigger and more successful the society, the easier it is to overreach the sustaining capacity of the environment.

With globalization we’re able to tap into a much wider variety of environments and mask the problem longer, but when we tap out resources on a global scale, where do we go then?

I’m sure someone must have written on this problem– how do you design a free market to take a long view on finite resources? It seems that markets have short attention spans and short views into the future. If a finite resource is not in imminent danger of being exhausted, it won’t be properly value from a global perspective. A time traveler from a future in which oil was almost exhausted would certainly pay a lot more than our current market rate for oil, to give just one example, and would be surprised by the way we waste oil in ways that don’t even contribute to our happiness.

The AP-AOL-Pew Mobile Lifestyle  Survey is now out.  

Interestingly, the most desired mobile application (even more than text messaging) was maps and driving directions, which 51 percent of respondents said they would like to use.  Only 31% of people indicated interest in mobile search, and only 30% in browsing the web.

In one of those classic gaps in perception, more than half of people reported being annoyed by other’s noisy phone calls, but only 8% knew that they had annoyed anyone.

One of the things I enjoy about working at Jobster is that there are so many interesting problems on our roadmap, far too many in fact for us to accomplish given the current size of our development team. If you’re someone who is passionate about working on interesting problems in areas like search, we’d like to talk.
Two of these interesting problems are job and people search. I’ve written on job search before, so my focus here is people search.

The internet is rapidly becoming a place that holds a vast amount of meaningful information about people (mostly early adopters these days.)

But when it comes to being able to search that information across the entire internet (vs. a walled garden) and return people that are relevant to a particular intention, for example hiring, internet search services have only begun to scratch the surface of what could be accomplished.

Resume search is an interesting and easier subset of the full people search problem. For the relatively small number of people who post resumes online, it’s a useful but far from exhaustive subset of useful information about that person.

The first and easiest step is finding pages that are likely to contain resumes. Rather than simply crawling sites that are known to contain resumes (like thejobspider.com), a fairly simple full-text query suffices to return a set of pages that with pretty good likelihood contain resumes.

I’ve put together an extremely simple resume search demo that shows this approach.

You’ll notice that I used Windows Live Search rather than Google for this simple demo.

[It’s interesting to note that the sophistication of Google’s query language is lagging behind some of the competition; consider for example the prefer: qualifier and MSN Live Search Macros . This is probably because end users, by and large, do not use sophisticated queries and because Google has shown mixed interest in being a search platform that others can build value on top of.
I think the experiments Windows Live is doing to replacing paging with an Ajax scrollbar are pretty interesting– the place I would really love to see this functionality in web email inbox.]

Thanks to services like the Alexa Web Search Platform plus their search API, this first stage can leverage comprehensive full text indexes of the web that have already been constructed.

The next, more interesting step is crawling the hits, extracting and indexing structured or semi-structured data from those pages, and using that data to improve the relevance, presentation, and searchability of the data.

Ziggs extracts names, locations, and companies, but this information alone is not enough to determine with a resume is relevant and a lot of pogo-sticking is required to interpret the result.

Pagebites improves on Ziggs by also extracting education, objective, and skill fields and promoting those in the search results.

In both cases relevance remains a challenge. Neither understands that nursing is a profession and that the search results should favor actual nurses over congressmen who happened to include nursing as a keyword.

Both Ziggs and Pagebites rely primarily on resumes. An alternative approach is seen in ZoomInfo which crawls sources like SEC filings and press releases and uses natural language parsing to attempt to extract and collate a virtual bio of the person involved from multiple sources. (See for instance this automatically constructed bio of Guy Kawasaki.) The limitations of this approach are currently accuracy– the natural language technology is not perfect– and comprehensiveness– many people do not appear in press releases or SEC filings. The open ZoomInfo service only allows searching by name, so it’s difficult to evaluate relevance, but in principle they should be able to good things with relevance.

As I was saying, all of these sites just begin to scratch the surface of constructing a complete, accurate, and easily searchable picture of someone based on their online presence. If this is the sort of problem that attracts you, please get in touch with me at the email address listed on this blog, or check out labs.jobster.com/jobs.html.

Google moves into Adsense for Busses - Take note Jobdango!

What do Proctor and Gamble, Microsoft, and Google Adwords have in common? They’re all market leaders, and they all engage in similar practices to reduce the ability of consumers to choose their competition.

David Bau has an good post called Microsoft Brownie Mix which is informative for understanding the Google contextual advertising exclusivity strategy. Starting with a possibly apocryphal story about Ballmer’s experience marketing brownies at Proctor and Gamble, it explains Microsoft current Vista woes as part of a conscious strategy of bundling and complexity.

After graduating from Harvard but before dropping out of Stanford Business School to help Bill start Microsoft, Steve Ballmer worked at Procter and Gamble where he was the assistant product manager for Duncan Hines Brownie Mix. At the time, mix was sold in narrow boxes with the pretty product name splashed across every side of the box.

Steve noticed that corner grocery stores liked to stock his leading-brand mixes next to competitive brands. Grocers would line up the brownie mix choices side-to-side like books in a library. And shoppers could easily see the variety and pick what they wanted. Usually shoppers picked the leading brand, but they might sample a less well-known competitor once in a while.

But for the market leader, choice is a problem. Even if your product is vastly superior, you can lose a whole chunk of brownie mix market share based on the fact that consumers have only pennies to lose by sampling your neighbor.

The solution is classical marketing. Swim upstream. Require the store owners, who have more than pennies on the line, to make the choice instead.

So Steve (the apocryphal story goes) did a very simple thing: he changed the brownie mix packaging so that the narrow side couldn’t be pointed outward. Maybe he printed the ingredient list on that side, I don’t know. From a customer’s piont of view it doesn’t make much of a difference one way or the other. But for the little corner grocer, it has ramifications.

If you have 6 inches of shelf space for mixes, you see, you can fit several nice rows of narrow 2-inch boxes side-by-side, one for each competitive brand. But if the leading brand has to be placed sideways in a 6-inch-wide package? Well then you only have room for one brand. The storeowner has to choose.

So by the time the shopper comes into the store, the choice has already been made. That’s why sitting on the shelf, facing outward all by itself, is your one and only choice - the leading brand.

Interesting story, and we all know pretty well how Microsoft applied those ideas to Windows. What is perhaps less well known is that Google uses exactly the same strategy to limit the ability of publishers to choose competitors to Adsense in addition to adsense. The following is taken directly from the Adsense Program Policies; it says in essence that if you are using Google Adsense, you can’t use any other contextual advertising system on your pages.

The equivalent in Microsoft terms would be if Microsoft said “if you sell a system with Windows, you can’t sell systems with Linux or any other operating system.” In fact, Microsoft tried pretty much exactly that, and got in hot water for it, but Google has not (yet) been held to similar standards.

David Bau goes on to discuss how the strategy of bulking up Windows, when overapplied, did grevious harm to the Windows ecosystem and ultimately to Microsoft itself, causing them to forget their customers and their original mission of making home computers possible. The equivalent in Google-speak is that Google could focus on leveraging their search and advertising dominance to prevent competitors from gaining market share, the extent that they forget their core values like “don’t be evil”.

…bulking up Windows is done on purpose, because it is a shelf-space and bundling strategy. The job of shoving every technology into Windows is sometimes called the “Allchin Tax” because he has been the biggest advocate of the bulk-up-Windows strategy. For years, Jim Allchin has been working mightily to replicate Chris Peters’s master stroke of unifying Office back in the early 90’s.

The reorgs that slam together SQL and MSN and Windows and so on are done for a reason. They are done because Microsoft believes that Windows has got to include so much good stuff that the shopkeepers - ahem - the OEMs - have no reason - and no shelf space - to provide anything else.

You can’t leave room for Flash-Java-Adobe-Google neighbors. You have to put the product in a wide box that sits sideways on the shelf, leaving no extra space.

But imagine, if you will, your brownie mix brand already has 95% market share. What do you gain by expanding the package from 6 to 12 inches? 24 inches?

You will have to start to convince the world to change their diet so all they eat is brownies. Chocolate, Vanilla, Cheese-flavored Antivirus brownies. Consumer brownies, Enterprise brownies, Advanced Server brownies. What happens when you increase the box to 48 inches?

To succeed at selling brownies in a big 48-inch Vista-sized box, you have to suck all the oxygen out of the whole idea of a grocery store in the first place. Eventually, your huge display-case brownies are so difficult to stock, and grocers have so little wiggle room, that you end up driving the poor shopkeepers out of business. That’s what happens with brownie mix at market saturation.