Looking for cars online and ruminations on wasted opportunities
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lancerrevolution/3710832872/
My mom is looking to buy a car, so I was asked to use my superpowers of search and to find her a few candidates online. My only instructions: it must not be too small, it must not be to slow, it must cost less than R100k, it must not be ugly, it must not be chinese, it must be reliable, it must not be too old, and it musn't rust, ever. Right.
So off I went to my familiar port of call, namely autotrader.co.za and much to my surprise there was almost nothing of interest listed on there, useless. What now?! So I do a quick Google exercise and land up on Carfind.co.za.
Yuck! What an ugly site, this is like sooo old-school-not-web-two, don't think your rounded promo boxes with shaded backgrounds will fool me buddies! But you know what? There where real cars on there, I mean lots!
So off I went and added brazillions of cars to my shortlist. I was super stoked. Now what? So I visit my shortlist and lo and behold, I find that I can contact ALL of these dealers with a single form. Brilliant! Fantastic! Killer Feature!
Now to be honest, it was not all moonshine and roses. Nope, there was a field to enter my mobile number. Oh dear. You see, I have this irrational fear when it comes to handing out my mobile number to car dealers, weird huh? Happily it seemed that it was an optional field. But wait what's this? It's refusing to post the form, so in went my "mobile number" as 000000000. Right, disaster averted.
So at this point I was pretty happy, and was even more surprised to find that not only did I get sent a useful list of contact details for all the dealers via emails, my showroom request was also stored under my profile on the site. Quite clever this site, hey?
Anyhoo, that being done I refreshed my Inbox for the swift responses I was expected .. and there where none. But 10 minutes later there where. Imagine that.
I must say that this is probably a triumph for what we do in this (web) industry, I mean its really basic, there is nothing cutting edge or amazing here, it just works. It saved me a ton of phonecalls and I have had real results.
Now why the title of this piece? You see it's now 8 hours later and there are still some dealers that have not contacted me, why? I mean here is a solid sales lead, I did all the hard work for you, why can you not respond to me in a reasonable time frame? No, 24 hours is not reasonable, in fact I have already cancelled some viewings as other guys got there quicker. I get frustrated when we build these tools for people, they spend lots of money and then they drop the ball so heavily. Your tool which you pay for is only going to help you if you use it properly!
Now on another note, car sales guys listen up, learn to craft better emails, did you forget your job is to sell? Half the respondents forgot to tell me which company they are from and did not have a standard footer. Nearly ALL did not expand details on the vehicle, why? Do you realise there is only one crappy photo on carfind?
Kudos to David Carr from Barloworld Amstrong N1 City, he sent me a great email I was very impressed. He included a nice little sales pitch with the history of the vehicles (they are ex rentals in this case) and sent me 6 hi-res images from different angles, and had a complete mail footer with his name, title and contact details as well as the name of the dealership. That's what I expected from the others.
Remember, use it or lose it!
A bit on RESTful webservices
Today I was put on the spot and asked to explain REST as it pertains to Web Services, unfortunately I found that I could not articulate that which I know and ended up basically flubbing the opportunity. Uggh, I was so angry at myself.
The truth is that REST is not easy to use and/or explain. Yeah, its simple but its not easy, in fact its hard. So I thought to avoid that particularly uncomfortable situation recurring that I should come up with some basic points to explain it, I shall call them Conrad's 4 basic cornerstones of RESTful Web Services. Those reading here should also see it as an opportunity to chime in and help by providing feedback as I think there are a lot of people that THINK they understand REST but don't really grok and I am certainly not excluded in that statement. I am not going to go into the benefits and what not, read wikipedia for that. This is purely some notes on the very basic principles.
Conrad's 4 Cornerstones of RESTful Web Services (HTTP)
REST = Representational State Transfer
- The service exposes application state and interaction as resources that can be represented (sic) as a unique URI over HTTP
- Resources are manipulated (maybe not the right word) through a uniform interface, these are POST, GET, PUT and DELETE verbs
- The service is stateless.
- The service is strictly client-server
Right I believe that is enough for my purposes, there are some other bits around Caching and Layering, mime types and response codes that my points don't cover but IMHO we are ok as HTTP takes care of that for us to some extend and the rest are less crucial to grokking the concept and thus removed for simplicity. (opinions?)
What does the URI address for the resource look like?
A simple example:
http://mysite.com/api/user/1
Here we are addressing a specific resource in the user collection .. though we are not expressing any intent as we are not providing a verb.Throw a verb in the mix:
GET http://mysite.com/api/user/1
Ah, now we are getting somewhere we want to retrieve the data for that specific resource.OR
DELETE http://mysite.com/api/user/1
I would like to delete the addressed resource..Similarly POST would create a new user (drop the resource identifier "1" here) and PUT would alter and replace the resource.
Thus the verbs loosly map as follows for out purposes:
POST = CREATE
GET = READ
PUT = UPDATE
DELETE = DELETEResponses on these actions will return status codes, another handy HTTP freeby that REST can use e.g. 200 OK's and 404 Not Found etc..
To state or not to state?
Um REST is stateless and the so-called gray area of using cookies for auth purposes is not gray, its broken. Just deal with the fact that your are not 100% compliant and leave that there. Alternatively look at Amazons Rest Auth implementation which operates via headers sent to and fro. Also adding the session identifier to every URL is not valid as this breaks the uniqueness of the resources' address as each user will utilise a different URI to address THE SAME resource!
Ok I am tired now, I still want to talk about using RESTlike URL's in your web application/site (as opposed to API's for webservices) as I have done in the past which raises issues such as the difficulties of using PUT and DELETE via browser forms often addressed by repurposing the POST method somewhat .. maybe subject matter for a next time.
PS whats up with Facebooks so-called RESTlike API?
Methods like admin.getAllocation etc??? Looks more like RPCLike what with method names getting sent in the requests? Use of HTTP and XML does not a REST service make!
The power of community.
As some of my friends know I am a badge wearing supporter/member of the SA 4x4 Community Forum. This is a very active niche forum of 4x4 enthusiasts, 4,648 of them. (I was once told that as much as 2/3's are active). That amounts to a fair amount of passionate people. People with a combined voice.
Recently these people got together and raised R10000 for the desert lion project with a quick collection.
In recent times however a portion of the estimated 130 Members that own Toyota Fortuners have been fighting their own little war with regards to suspected handling problems on their vehicles after individuals realised that their complaints where getting met with the cold shoulder/ag shame response.
They rallyed together and hotly debated the subject on the forum generating 10 pages and near 200 posts.
Once the dangers and photos of Fortuners rolled at speeds as low as 60kph became evident the ball rolled quickly. DriveOut/WegRy magazine and the Argus and Mercury newspapers came to aid printing letters and an article containing a response from Toyota SA respectively.
Right now Toyota's has put measures in place to replace new models and existing vehicles with better tyres which they claim solve the problem, note that they claim that they came to this conclusion by their own accord and claim no formal complaints are lodged. ??
However the Forum does not intend to stop there, they want a total recall as they believe its more than the tyres to blame and they are arranging a mass testdrive in the following week with a DriveOut correspondent where they will test various configs and setups on eachothers Fortuners to arrive at some conclusion.
Don't underestimate the voice the web can give your little social network group. The power is at your fingertips.
Who needs emails anyway, rise of Egommunication
It was with much amusement that I read the post by SaulK on "the outlet" on 6 things you did not know of rafiq.
Two interesting things stand out for me, 1) This post is less malicious then tickling a puddycat and is clearly a clever ploy to attract some attention, which is by no means a bad thing (or are their some thinly veiled frustrations hidden Saul? 
) , 2) It presents a very interesting experiment as to whether the one provoked will respond quickly.
And yes .. he did. In fact he muti'd it himself within a couple hours.
This had me thinking .. let's say you wanted to get hold of some lofty techy type celeb, fairly ensconced in the web, can this be a more effective means of communication than email? Email is so nasty nowadays, what with spam and the amount of it, that it has become a fairly ineffective medium through witch to get hold of the cognoscenti (eliciting that *damned spammer* response is easier than one might think) whereas a post on a blog or twitter referencing one name seems to not carry that same problem (perhaps the cognitive filters are differently applied, reading a blog post at ones one accord is different from having an email shoved upon oneself afterall).
As I'm writing this though I release that I have read these exact same thoughts somewhere else before, and I have found it. In July Doc Searls responded on a similar call via a blog by Rohit Bhargava.
Rohit has also seen and acknowledged this trend and his even coined it, "Egommunication".
Ego Searches, also called Vanity Searches. Shallow or Human Nature? We like to know what people are saying, good or bad (we hope more good). We don't like to feel people are talking behind our backs, but we don't like getting sold to. Is this an opportunity for gold diggers and spammers employing clever tricks to have us view their wares? Perhaps.
To tack onto this idea I would like to add another observation, take a look at the number of comments at the end of Saul's piece, normally he garners somewhere between null and two comments on a piece, this one had 9 comments at the time of writing this. What does this tell us? Link baiting works, lol. No but more importantly, people track themselves and those that they feel close, or involved with. Basically Rafiq's groupies and enemies where also checking in. Thus sending out a certain proposition to a certain person might get you in contact with others with a similar interest around there, perhaps even a competitor in the space you never may have known about.
What's your take on this? As a developer I have to ask, is there a place for a tool here? I reckon so, I wouldn't mind a tool where I can slot in my name and have it feed me an RSS feed of new items found out there on the web, Facebook, Flicker, Twitter, Blogs, Web Searches wherever. Call it a vanity aggregator, perhaps one already exists? The idea of the Vanity Folder is not a new one.
Microblogging, laziness and peace
Stii Pm'ed me a good article on ReadWriteWeb, a fairly long post about the shift from blogging to microblogging and some such. Not a bad read a lot of what they say is true, and could be interpreted as the end of blogging etc.
Stii then wrote on his that perhaps we (bloggers) are getting lazy and that perhaps Twitter is working for us cause we have short attention spans.
Here's my 2 cents.
Yes, traffic is moving from blogs to twitter. Thank god for that. Now, let me tell you why I am relieved before you people have a heart attack.
Reason 1: Most blogs have become rubbish. We are all guilty of this, but if I'm honest then when I come to your blog or open your feed then don't want to know what you had for dinner, or how your mug of coffee kicks ar*e, or how you have a toothache. I certainly don't want to see every bloody braindump you have throughout the day or have to click on 17 "this is so cool" links. Seriously.
Reason 2: Tweets can and should be short. I can take 140 chars no more.
Reason 3: Blogs are forever, put stuff there you want to perserve, the really important stuff.
Reason 4: Twitter is transient, if it gets to noisy I just ignore it, I don't really care. I hope I am not missing anything important, rather put that on your blog!
I hope what this means is that the noise will shift away from the blogs and onto the micro-b's (*cute shortening of microblogs) and that the blogosphere will reclaim some of the shining beauty it once had, that place where I did not want to miss a single post on YOUR feed.
Laconica is so the new Twitter.
Twitter's cool right? Yeah, when its up. The general consensus is that its reaching the end of the road as far as the cognitive dissonance rope left to the users of the servers.
What's next? A suggestion? Make the "microblog-o-sphere" open, get a solid PHP based platform down and use the strength of the community to ensure a reliable code base.
Enters Laconica .. ta-da!
Laconica (wiki) is a tidy little opensource alternative to Twitter and a number is installations have cropped up including identi.ca which seems to be the current flavor of the moment.
What about scalability I hear you ask? One word answer. Federation, Laconica aims to distribute the microblogging experience by federating across any number of installs, this would allow one to say create an fairly focused community on one service but allow the ability to track friends using other similar installs, thus removing the immediate load on any one server and having the conversation continue in some form if one of the points do go down. (Caveat: I have not seen this in action myself, so I hope that it works as well in practice as it sounds in theory)
I have created an account, now just waiting for some people to talk too. Add me plz: http://identi.ca/conradstrydom
FM Tech, Iphone announcement, huh?!
This little article on FMTech seems a little odd? The writer (Duncan McCleod) seems to be knowing a lot of facts saying that this and that WILL be released and that Jobs WILL be giving a tech spec on the new phone, and that Vodacom is going to be selling it here etc. Yes, this may all become true, but until that time I suggest he sticks to the news and stops tossing a log on the rumor mill. Masquerading speculation as fact is just wrong sorry ... leave that to engadget.
Knocka.tv knocks one out
If its not community or social net based its not cool. Period.
In a world where the power of the collective is becoming increasingly popular TV is still pretty much left behind. OK OK, we all know about YouTube and all its spinoff's but YouTube is more like a massive media library and you search and drill through content. However when it comes to solid 24 hour streaming blocks of content not much has been done online.
Enters Knocka.tv, but with a twist. How would you like to be able to chat live while watching a clip (similar to uStream), how would you like to vote for a piece and thus make it appear less often or make it appear more often depending on the vote.
These are just one of the many features present on Knocka. Users will also be able to record and upload content, which others could then eventually vote onto the streams.
I have registered for a Beta account, but in the meantime you can have a look at a demo showreel on the site that shows content seperated by typical flash fillers ala MTV. Could this become what MTV should have been, the ultimate in shortform entertainment formats? Possibly this is what could make it work, at the end of the day even if a 3 minute piece is horrendously terrible you will keep watching because you know something new is around the corner.
Good lock to Knocka for throwing one of the first punches in this segment, and lets keep an eye on it.
About me
Web Engineer, lover of technology, tearer down of walls.
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