A few weeks ago I got a Gmail invitation and have been using it on-and-off since then. I have to say that I am quite impressed by the look and feel of Gmail since it steps out of the ordinary web mail applications and becomes a bit like a standalone application.
The fact is that it is obvious that Google wants to extend this to a desktop type application instead of a web based application. We will soon witness the 'downloadable Gmail' which will simply act as a browser front to accessing the Gmail mail repository.
The 'whole' of Gmail at the moment is client side and is done in javascript (I am talking about what the presentation and not the actual storage and handling of mails). This has serious problems with accessibilty as many people have mentioned since it does not follow the standard HTMl rule.
Apart from all that, it certainly is a fast web application and it gives the impression that everything is done locally just like you would with your Outlook. I haven't had much chances into checking the 'powerful Google search' in the mails but it seems as if it is also very fast and very accurate - not that we thought otherwise.
Apart from all the privacy issues that have been raised my initial opinion is that Gmail has the potential of becoming the worlds most popular adware. Does this spell higher expenses for advertisers? You bet...
I often find I have to explain to my customers something I consider self –evident: It is not enough to get your website listed high in search engines or to get prominence through thousand dollar worth marketing campaigns or even to get hundreds of visitors. Your website, the centerpiece of your business, should be able to engage your visitors in a set of processes that will guide them to your ‘goal’ (like the purchase of your products, or the download of your software).
Creating a website and letting all else go to chance is definitely not the right approach on this problem. A website should be considered like a dynamic entity, an organism, that has the power to manipulate your visitors, to guide them from one place to the other to achieve small or large ‘goals’.
However, the difficulty in this is the fact that the website does not have the autonomy to act on its own based on the visitor behavior in order to ‘optimize’ itself and and turn the visitor to where it wants. (Such a self-organization is lacking from the web as a whole and is a matter worth discussing in the future.) It falls in the hands – and analyisis – of the site owner to get and understand the visitor feedback and modify the website appropriately in order to get the most out of his/her visitors.
Do not under any circumstances assume that the visitor is free to move in any way he wants in a website. Visitors are as free in websites as they are in super markets… Website zoology and visitor behavior falls somewhere between the realms of art and rocket science at the moment but there are some definite and well structured rules in this.
The most common action on the web these days is the pressing of the ‘Back’ button in the browser, a matter indicating the immense power of this behavior and the lack of understanding of this effect by web owners (I once had to give up on trying to reason this with a well educated web owner / customer since he did not even want to believe in the data, but was trying to find clever possible biases for the ‘back’ button effect. Sometimes prejudice lies in incredible places…)
Getting your visitor to act the minute he lands on your website requires special analysis and understanding of various matters (like where the visitor actually came in from) but is usually assigned to usability optimization of the website. In brief one must watch things like (there is A LOT more to this, we are just being telegraphically brief):
Again I must stress that it is stupid to fight so much to get visitors on your website only to lose them after they land on it. It is unfortunate that sometimes usability is harder to reconcile than search engine optimization. Do not trust yourself for any of the usability matters that were mentioned here. Ask a friend, a colleague (who hasn’t been involved in the project) or a professional for assistance.
I must apologize to our readers for our sparse postings recently which are caused by a very hectic month. I am afraid at the moment our customers take a priority in front of this weblog, but I hope we will be able to bring you news and view sfrom the world of software promotion shortly.
This is such a fantastic post by Seth Godin on bechmarking that I will copy it all here:
I can benchmark everything now.
I can benchmark my morning workout. The rowing machine tells me if today’s workout was a personal best. Even better, I can go online and compare my workout to the efforts of thousands of other people.
On my way to work, I can track my mileage. (My record is 89 mpg). Once there, I can watch the status of my books on Amazon, comparing their sales to every other book published in the English language… and then go check out JungleScan.com, where I can track the book’s performance over the last 90 days.
The problem with benchmarking is that nothing but continuous improvement (except maybe spectacular results) satisfies very much. Who wants to know that they will never again be able to beat their personal best rowing time? What entrepreneur wants to embrace the fact that the wait time at her new restaurant franchise is 20% behind the leader—and there’s no obvious way to improve it?
Our interconnected, 500-channel world lets us be picky. We can want a husband who is as tall as that guy, as rich as this guy and as loyal as my brother-in-law. We can ask for an apartment that is in just the right location, with just the right view and just the right rent—and then reject it because the carpeting in the hallway isn’t as nice as the one in the building next door. Monster lets us see 5,000 resumes for every job opening… and imagine that we can find someone with this guy’s education and that woman’s professional experience—who works as cheap as this person and is as local as that one.
In the old days, data was a lot harder to come by. You didn’t know everything about everyone. All the options weren’t right there, laid out in Froogle and compared by epinions.com. We didn’t have reality TV shows where each and every component of a singer’s presentation or a bridal prospect’s shtick were painstakingly compared.
Yes, benchmarking is terrific. Benchmarking is the reason that cars got so much better over the last twenty years. Benchmarking has the inexorable ability to make the mediocre better than average, and it pushes us to always outperform.
But it stresses us out. A benchmarked service business or product (or even a benchmarked relationship) is always under pressure. It’s hard to be number one, and even harder when the universe we choose to compare our options against is, in fact, the entire universe.
Of course, the boomers have this problem even worse (and we’re all boomers, aren’t we? Even if you’re not, we don’t care—it’s all about us). Boomers are getting older. We can benchmark our eyesight, our rowing speed, our memory or even our ability to come up with great ideas at a moment’s notice. As a result, we benchmark ourselves into a funk. We get stressed because we have to acknowledge that nothing is as good as it was.
In addition to the stress, benchmarking against the universe actually encourages us to be mediocre, to be average, to just do what everyone else is doing. The folks who invented the Mini (or the Hummer, for that matter) didn’t benchmark their way to the edges. Comparing themselves to other cars would never have created these fashionable exceptions. What really works is not having everything being up to spec… what works is everything being good enough, and one or two elements of a product or service being AMAZING.
So, I’m officially letting go. I’m going to stop comparing everything to my all time best, to your all time best, to everyone’s all time best. Instead of benchmarking everything, perhaps we win when we accept that the best we can do is the best we can do—and then try to find the guts to do one thing that’s remarkable.
Was this my best blog entry ever, or what?