September 2006 Archives

Sad how the successor to two of the world's best airlines, Crossair and Swissair, has turned into Crapair.

Normally I can't be bothered with mailing customer relations, but this time, enough is enough. I'm in Zürich. Swiss is based here. Their call center is in South Africa. Ticketing is done in Australia. They take 2 days to clear a credit card payment. They are appaling - at least the aircrew seem to know what they're doing... Anyway, for the record, here's my latest rant:

"I have just called your service line with a question about seat allocations. I am by now used to calling a Swiss airline, from Zürich, but talking to somebody in South Africa. But I am not yet used to the dismissive way my calls are handled.

My problem was this: I just carried out an e-Check In for myself and my partner for tomorrow morning. I discovered that we are not seated together. Of course, by the time the web check in process informs you of the seat number, you are already checked in. There is no way to back out. This system does not appear to have been tested on customers before being put into production.

The service agent informed me that no seas were actually allocated to me. I then pointed out to her that I had them printed out in front of me. She retreated. She told me that two adjacent seats were available, but she could not do anything about it, and was clearly just trying to get rid of me.

I asked if we could be seated in Economy together. I was told this was impossible - indeed, it was clear that she thought I was quite stupid to ask for this.

I regret to say this, but this is not the first time I have had an experience like this with your call centre recently. The level of customer service is atrocious. The staff are rude, unhelpful, and appear very badly trained. This experience has nothing to do with a swiss, or "Swiss", experience.

It is noticeable how much better the service is from Helvetic. I will take this into account the next time I want to fly from Zürich.

A very disappointed customer - Erlenbach, Switzerland"

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If you're flying to Zürich... DO NOT FLY SWISS. You have been warned.

Rant mode well & truly ON.

What people use the web for, how they use it, and how this might evolve in the future are the questions at the core of the ongoing discussion on the real-world relevance of social tools (read "Web 2.0"), as summarised and commented on by Stowe Boyd . There are plenty of erudite arguments for, and a good number against believing that there is a real sea-change. But, as far as I can see, the people engaged in this debate are using the web because they want to use the web. Their whole life is wrapped around the web. Their income depends on it, so, obviously, they hype it up. Their social life depends on it. They blog about the web, and its ramifcations, on their private blogs as well as their professional blogs, and the most exciting thing in the world seems to be attending parties where everybody is pushing their latest Web 2.0 application. I can well understand how fulfilling it can be to be at the epicentre of such a whirlwind, but at the same time, I'm not sure how substantial it really is. Whatever I think of it, is this community likely to provide an unbiased opinion on the future of social applications ? Seems doubtful.

When I joined the Fantastic Corporation in 2000 as product manager, my early statement that our applications should be "easy enough for my mother to use" became quite famous - as did speculation on my mother's grasp of technology. Well, she's doing fine with her MacBook, but she'^d have had a bit of a struggle with Fantastic's MediaSurfer. And she'd be well and truly baffled by, say Talk Digger. Perhaps not so much as how to use it, but why use it ?

What, and Who are all these social applications for, finally ? Leaving aside MySpace, which clearly works as a website, if not yet as a business, what about all these other things ? Let's look at what is currently "hot" on the Digg, delicious and technorati entry pages:

(is it even obvious what Digg does ? Stand back a bit, and put yourself in the shoes of a newcomer.)

Pretty dull stuff, really, unless you're a geek, and / or your whole life revolves around social tools...

Stowe Boyd believes that we have to take the long view, that things will settle down, and that eventually tagging etc etc will be of use to the general public (aka the "crowd", for some reason). Well, that's a commendably optimistic view, but I'm not sure how he expects it to work. For this to happen, the "general public" has to have a growing influence on the tag cloud. This isn't going to happen if every resource which supports social networking is dominated by geeks. If the start page for Digg, etc, is dominated by technical mumbo-jumbo, Star Trek, and juvenilia, then the "crowd" is going to get off the bus right there. And the 2nd law of thermodynamics tells us that that unordered systems become more so. Of course, if the "crowd" ends up being composed 100% of 2.0 bloggers and associated hangers-ons, then, sure, perhaps it all works. Sounds like Douglas Coupland's worst nightmare.

I'm extremely dubious about the real-world relevance of social tools, and by this, I mean how they can become universally useful, and function within a business model. The web is about two things: applications, and information. However, what people actually want is quality information. For example, if I want to get information on a travel destination, I want to read reports written by professional writers, who can rate what is important and what isn't, who can take perspectives other than their own, and who have a track record I can verify (yes, this might come in time with tagging and recommendations, if you take an extremely optimistic view). And as for the general public, well do they really want to dig through 200 comments by "anonymous from Oregon" when they just want to know if Portugal has nice beaches ? Unordered, unsorted information is just noise. It has no value. Tools which just come up with a million different ways to present, re-present, summarise and cross-reference noise still end up giving noise, however clever the way they present it might be. Tools which just serve to mutually prop up the egos of a small circle of technology utopians will just collapse in on themselves.

Then we have another wonderful piece of nonsense, posted by Jason Calacanis. In "blog or die", he states "You can't compete in the web-development space without a blog any more. Period, end of story". Total rubbish - even in the narrowest sense of "web-development space", no amount of blogging can save a bad product, and good (really good) products have always done pefectly well without blogging. Blogging is not marketing, or advertising. And again, in te "real world" I keep referring to, just about nobody is ever going to read this blog. Blog addicts are more likely to be your competitors than your customers. Sure, engage with them, converse with them, share ideas if you think you should - but don't expect to derive real, financial value from it. The only people who will get business out of this are blog platform vendors and Web 2.0 consultants. Guess who fits into that group...

The real challenge, in my opinion, is to work out how to deliver exactly what users want, in near real-time, to any device, in any place, at any time, and let them get back to their real-world lives as fast as possible. Then you have a globally (in every sense of the term) useful web, and a long term business model. Otherwise, the most likely conversation social tools and blogging are going to end up leading to will be along the lines of "would you lkie fries with that ?"

There's quite a kerfuffle going on at the moment around Tim Berners-Lee's mild put down of Web 2.0 in a recent IBM podcast. Predictably, The Register are using it to ridicule everything from blogs to wikis, exagerating it out of all proportion along the way. The Register is verging on tiresome in this particular Quixotic crusade. What Sir Tim actually got miffed at was the suggestion that Web 2.0 is about "connecting people", implying that everything that came before wasn't. This, of course, is utter hogwash, and he was quite right to put the record straight. What Web 2.0 is really about is a bunch of techno-lemmings too young too have got rich quick in the dot-com years, rushing around building countless near-identical 'social' web services, pretending they're not interested in filthy lucre, whilst praying to be acquired by Google or Yahoo. On the other hand, Web 0.01 (beta) was about nothing other than connecting people - and it was 100% a "read/write" web....until Silicon Valley discovered it and ruined it all.
However, I do think Berners-Lee was missing the point a bit. Sure, there's nothing new about connecting people, or indeed social applications. But what is new is that these things are much easier to use, more intuitive, more responsive, and more reactive. The amalgam of technologies underlying Web 2.0 essentialy make applications more user friendly. It is surely no coincidence that the coalescence of much of this into 'Ajax', a key foundation stone of Web 2.0, came out of the usability field. Jesse James Garrett didn't really invent Ajax, he was simply the first to clearly express what he, his colleagues at Adaptive Path, and others had realisd they had brought together. The birth of Web 2.0 as a movement came from a desire to get rid of the clumsy interaction patterns imposed by the traditional browser-server model. Of course, the inevitable next step was that Silicon Valley saw it as an opportunity to Get Rich Quick, and hence the self-propelling bullshit cycle started up, as frequently lampooned by the Register. Of course there are some true innovative thinkers in field - Tim O'Reilly being a stand-out example, whatever people think of his invite-only policies - but they're few and far between.

So acually I do think there is a major difference between Web 1.0 and 2.0, and it is to do not with connecting people as such, but rather making connecting, and everything else, easier to do. A really impressive example of this is far away from tags and memes and trivial 2.0 Beta lash-ups (er, sorry mash-ups) so beloved of the pontificators - the Swiss home hunting site, immo.search.ch, uses plenty of Web 2.0 techniques, but most users have no awareness of this - they just find it almost magically useful. The true creative forces behind the ongoing web revolution get very little credit, being drowned out by the empty vessels of the self-referential blog pundits. And it seems these have even managed to distract Tim Berners-Lee.