Not So Relevant

Great Customer Service for a Foolish Guy

October 29, 2009 in General by Carsten Pötter

VeriSign

This blog post is a little bit different from the not so relevant open web centric stuff you usually find here. However I think it’s a good story about great customer service. So why not share it with you, although I play the stupid part in this story?

On Sunday I checked my credit card bill and discovered that I was charged a few Euros from VeriSign, more specifically from GWS VeriSign as it was stated on the credit card slip. That charge didn’t make sense to me because I didn’t purchase anything from VeriSign recently. Though the credit card slip also stated the three letters VIP. In February I bought a VeriSign Identity Protection credential but that was a one-time charge. So I wondered why I was charged again. Also my credit card company couldn’t provide more details about the transaction.

So without much further thought and research I emailed support at VeriSign Labs. VeriSign Labs is responsible for some of VeriSign’s identity programs like the OpenID Provider. Don’t ask me why I emailed VeriSign Labs, just have a look at the first few words at the beginning of this paragraph. But I got a quick reply from them on Monday and much to my surprise it was from Gary Krall, the technical director for the PIP. Gary and I were in contact in the past already, talking about VeriSign’s OpenID Provider.

As you can guess from Gary’s title, his job has nothing to do with credit card transactions of his company or customer service. However he offered to find out what was going on at VeriSign and track down the responsible department and people. No easy task, considering the size of the company. But Gary made me feel taken seriously, sending daily updates about the progress of his research. I think that’s awesome!

The results of Gary’s research made me look stupid, though. It turned out that a company called Global Warehouse Solutions was distributing VeriSign’s VIP credentials in Europe but didn’t charge customers right after the purchase. I checked my credit card bills since February and realized this was true. I was never charged for the credential so far.

I feel so bad and totally stupid about this. I should have checked the bills right away. Rather I opted for emailing VeriSign’s support, harassing Gary and causing trouble at different departments at the company.

Nevertheless I am grateful for experiencing the support Gary – and all other people involved – provided. I think it is a remarkable example of customer service. Thanks a lot!

Tags: Gary Krall, Support, VeriSign

Microformateers: Quick Microformats Support

October 25, 2009 in Microformats by Carsten Pötter

Microformats are really cool. Small snippets of code that semantically describe various information included in any published text on the web. It’s not visible information for end-users but rather metadata that can be crawled and parsed by search engines or extracted by other means, like browser add-ons.

While microformats are rather simple – even I understand most of them – there might be use cases where coders unfamiliar with them run into problems, have questions about proper implementation or need some other information they can’t find elsewhere on the web. They need help. Quickly. Microformateers come to the rescue.

Microformateers is simply a Twitter account run by people who know microformats inside out. Some are even authors of various microformats. Among them are usual suspects like Kevin Marks and Tantek Çelik but also fellow German Matthias Pfefferle. They provide quick support for those who need it.

I think Micoformateers is a great concept. It provides a low-threshold service, is quick and doesn’t need any resources other than the people’s time involved with it. Probably not all problems can be solved by Twitter but it’s good enough for small hints or a link for further reading that make life of coders easier. Well done!

Tags: Kevin Marks, Matthias Pfefferle, Microformateers, Microformats, Tantek Celik, Twitter

Ma.gnolia Is Back

September 26, 2009 in Open Web by Carsten Pötter | View Comments

Some of the best things in life happen when you least expect them. Suddenly they are right here and you’re happy. That is especially true to things you loved dearly in the past but disappeared months before without warning. Like Ma.gnolia, the small but beautiful and elegant bookmarking service. Needless to say, the tweet by Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff got me really excited.

I don’t want to recap the reasons why Ma.gnolia went offline earlier this year. Instead head over to CrunchGear and read the interview with Larry Halff or do some research yourself. You know, there are those really useful sites out there called search engines.

It’s Social

Those of you who never heard about Ma.gnolia before may ask what’s so special about it. It’s only a social bookmarking service, right? And there’s Delicious, the grand daddy of social bookmarking.

Well, Ma.gnolia isn’t just storing all of your bookmarks. The real value of the service are its social features. There are groups dealing with all kinds of topics (well, currently there aren’t many as Ma.gnolia’s user base is still small after the relaunch but in the past there were countless), so you can see what other users think is relevant and interesting about the topics and issues you care or want to know more about.

Also I’m glad that one feature has survived: Giving thanks to other users for adding a bookmark to Ma.gnolia. They found an interesting link on the web, donated some time to add tags and maybe a description to it, so you can easily add it to your bookmark collection. Just show some appreciation for a great link. It’s the small things that make life great.

Open Standards

Since I’m a supporter of open standards, it’s great to know that Ma.gnolia is still relying on them. It supported many of them before its demise already.

You want to sign in to Ma.gnolia? Better have an OpenID. There is no way to sign in with a username and password. Also no Twitter logins, no Facebook Connect. Well, those login methods might be options to think about but I guess Larry Halff rather stays with more open methods like OpenID.

Also all important information is marked up with microformats, from user profiles, to contacts, to bookmarks, to tags,… Ma.gnolia has them all. Also users can subscribe to groups, tags, and people by RSS.

If you want to know more about the standards Ma.gnolia is using, have look at a small article I wrote about the topic last year. Most of them are still there.

If you think these standards are just some geeky additions, you might want to think again. When Ma.gnolia disappeared users couldn’t access the service anymore and their bookmarks were unavailable. But due to those standards users could find them elsewhere on the internet and restore at least a great part of them. That’s not replacing a backup strategy, of course. But if the bookmarks were hiding behind a walled garden, they were gone. All of them, forever. I’m using Delicious to back up my bookmarks, by the way.

The Not So Relevant Service for Readers

Alright, the headline is a joke but read on. If you’re using both Ma.gnolia and Google Reader you might want to add Ma.gnolia to the Send to list of Google Reader, so you can easily bookmark you favorite articles when reading your feed items. Just head over to the settings page of Google Reader and add the necessary information:

Currently users need to sign up for an invitation to Ma.gnolia. But please do yourself a favor and check it out. You might like it.

Update Oct 6: Since yesterday Ma.gnolia is just called Gnolia because another company is claiming the name.

Just drop the ma. everywhere (e.g. in your Google Reader settings) and you should be able to use Gnolia just like before. However if you use an OpenID Provider that supports directed identity (e.g. Yahoo! and Google) you have to re-associate your OpenID with Gnolia. Just go to http://gnolia.com/recover and recover your account. Delete the OpenID from your settings and re-associate it. In the case of directed identity the OpenID Provider issues a unique URL for each Relying Party. Ma.gnolia and Gnolia are seen as different websites by those providers.

Thanks to Larry Halff for providing fast support and dealing with this issue last night!

Tags: Delicious, Larry Halff, Ma.gnolia, Microformats, OpenID, RSS, Social Bookmarking

How Many People Read Your Articles?

September 20, 2009 in Blogging by Carsten Pötter

Attention: Don’t read this if you despise meta blogging!

Once in a while I do what probably every blogger does: I check the number of feed subscribers and the number of visitors to my blog. I don’t do that regularly, though, because the numbers are low and don’t change much anyway. However I was much surprised last night when having a look at the FeedBurner statistics.

FeedBurner’s Reach

FeedBurner is not only publishing the number of feed subscribers but also a measurement called Reach, introduced about two years ago. According to FeedBurner Reach means:

Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.

Also it means:

Additionally, there may be people viewing your content beyond your known subscriber base. For example, they may view your content on a feed search engine or news filter site.

Usually Reach is only a small percentage of the number of feed subscribers. Sometimes this number even equals zero, at least for this blog. Well, that’s not really surprising considering the sporadic updates of the blog. However things changed after my last article.

Not only did the number of Reach increase, it even surpassed the number of feed subscribers. The following day Reach was three times more than the number of feed subscribers. I was stunned last night when realizing this. How could this happen? I had a look at Google Analytics expecting a considerable increase in visitors to the blog. Of course, there was the usual increase after a new article was published, but nothing spectacular. I double-checked with StatCounter but the same results.

Shared Article

Both analytic tools showed something interesting, though. Visitors came from various social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and some more. I had visitors from those sites before, of course, but this time they outnumbered any other sources. And that’s probably the reason for the high number of Reach. The article was shared and re-shared on various platforms by different people. I don’t know who shared the article and I don’t know on which platforms it appeared. But it seems it had found its readers.

Nothing changed for this blog, though. The number of visitors and the number of feed readers stayed the same, basically. Also I don’t know how exactly FeedBurner is measuring Reach. It’s probably exaggerated and not accurate. But it is obvious to me that not only page views are dead but also feed subscriber numbers.

Tags: FeedBurner, Feeds, Reach, Subscribers

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