I’ve got a new post over on the SwellPath blog that takes a look at multivariate and a/b testing. Check it out.
Archive for the 'applications' category
Competitious Keeps Tabs on Your Competition
Here’s how it works. First you create an account and then create a project. You add your URL and name as “My Company” and then you add your competitors’ URLs and names as your competitors. You can see the project I set up using my old friends at Tactics.com as My Company, and then adding some of their competitors.
You also can add “Clippings” you find on yourself and competitors. This is a good way to track everyones PR and press. It would be cool if there were some type of Google Alert integration, or something similar, that you could set up to suggest new clippings. For now, the onus is on you to find them and add them, but they have a bookmarklet you can use to quickly add one, via a popup or redirection to the Competitious project. Here’s a shot of me adding a great article about Tactics to the Clippings, via the bookmarklet popup window in Firefox:
Flickr Tag Error: Call to display photo '3029381963' failed.
Error state follows:
- type: 8
- message: Undefined index: photo_limit
- file: /home/wheresitworking/wheresitworking.com/wp-content/plugins/flickr-tag/FlickrTagCommon.php
- line: 70
They also have a traffic comparison section, that pulls in the Alexa graph for the sites in your project. This section is a bit janky, mostly because of Alexa. But they claim to have a more robust setup for the full product release.
Overall, lots of room for improvement with Competitious, but they are still in beta, and I really like the idea. It has some great potential, if you have someone to spend 30 minutes or so every day pushing data into the project, then it really can streamline the monitoring part of keeping up with the Joneses.
Meebo is the Future of Instant Messaging
I’ve been using Meebo for about 6 months religiously. I had tried it out a couple years ago, and I wasn’t entirely impressed. It was slow, there were some issues with bugs, and it just wasn’t the same experience as a desktop instant messaging app.
Now, I definitely feel like it is btter than any IM app. It consolidates all of your accounts into a single place, and that is your browser. It allows you login into Google Talk, MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, Flixster, and Yahoo Messenger. No need to launch, or login to, multiple apps. Additionally, you don’t have to worry about proxys or network restrictions if your inside a strict firewall, or you can’t install applications on your machine. Give Meebo a try if you haven’t, I’d bet you’re going to like it.
So why does any of this mean that Meebo is the future of IMing? Because of the addition of Meebo Me and Meebo Mobile, and the Meebo Platform. Meebo Me is a new service Meebo is providing that allows websites to put Facebook-like chat windows on their site. Meebo Mobile gives you the abilty to utilize your Meebo account from your iPhone or Android based phone. No Blackberry app though. Finally, the Meebo Platform allows developers do quickly create enhancements and add-ons for Meebo, further pushing the uses of IM.
In general, I’m impressed the Meebo crew and their constant effort to improve the experience and add value to IMing. Check out their blog to see how passonate these folks are about what their doing.
LiquidPlanner Impresses with Customer Service
I recently started trying out LiquidPlanner. I haven’t had a chance to really use it, but from what I have played around with so far, I’m pretty impressed. I’m not going to review the application until I’ve spent some significant time working with it, but I’ve got to mention the service I received.
This is a free application; it becomes a paid application only if you need to have more than 3 users; users are not “virtutal members” but actual users logging in and working with the plan, you can add as many “owners” or “resources” as want. You pay $35/month or $300/year for each user over 3 (you start paying with the fourth user). I had chosen the free option, played around a bit, and put it aside to work on later this week.
I was impressed when I got a call from Noah, a sales and biz dev rep at LiquidPlanner. He asked me about my experience with the app, what I thought about it, and what I was doing that warranted it’s use. It was a sales call, but it was also a market research, customer service, and customer feedback call. Obviously there is potential for a lot of revenue if I start using the application for a bigger organization or project, so there is financial incentive for Noah to call, even though I selected the free option. But how many applications have you signed up for, who had a premium paid option that you didn’t opt into, that never gave you a call to see how you felt about the product?
I’m really looking forward to exploring LiquidPlanner and making it my main PM tool. The call I had from Noah gives me confidence that this app is going to keep improving and adapting to its user needs. If you need any detailed info, ping me and I’ll give you Noah’s info.
