So it looks like I wasn’t the only idiot who couldn’t work out just what Wave was supposed to be used for (see my post here – http://tim-gregory.com/2009/11/google-wave-makes-me-feel-stupid/).

Google is gonna shut it down…

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1. Google Wave makes me feel stupid

I’ve created my first Facebook group, dedicated to drumming up some support for stopping the Yellow Pages and Phonebook spam we’re subjected to every year.

I’m hoping we can get the group up to a decent number and then set a date for returning our unwanted phonebooks.
Maybe it can become an annual event until the bastards decide to ask us if we want the books first before dumping them on our doorsteps.

So go here, join the group, post it to all your friends, and let’s hatch a plan to deliver on Operation: Yellow Snow – the mass return of unwanted Yellow Pages and Phonebooks to the Trudon offices.

UPDATED:

Can you believe that the line “Please consider the environment before printing this email” was added to the mail from a Trudon employee? Should perhaps read “Please consider the environment before printing 6 million phonebooks”

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1. Yellow pages gives me the blues

I hate it when the Yellow pages gets dropped off at my house.. it usually arrives as a bundle of 2 books (the phonebook / white pages) and the Yellow pages, and they sit around the house unused until the next edition arrives.

They are massive, ugly, and for me – completely useless.
I would never page through the Yellow Pages looking for a plumber/electrician/painter/doctor/whatever, and any directory-type searches I need are done through Google and have been for years.
I don’t have it in me to simply chuck the books in the trash, and even sending them straight into the recycling seems like a complete waste.

I was peeved when I arrived home a couple of days ago to find that a new set of books had been dropped off, and they have been sitting on my dining table irritating me ever since.

I heard voices outside the house this morning and was pleased to see a couple of guys wearing high-visibility vests with a van full of telephone book, and going door-to-door to hand them out.
I rushed outside, and the conversation went something like this:
“Oh good, you’re back – I don’t need a phone book and yellow pages, please take mine back”
“Sorry sir, I can’t do that, I only distribute them, I can’t take them back”
“Why not? Give them to someone else. I haven’t used them.”
“No sir, I get paid per book I drop off, so I can’t take them back, I must hand them out”.
“So give mine away again, get paid twice”.
“No, I get paid for distributing these ones. Rather take another set from me and I’ll get paid”
“I don’t want another set. I don’t want this set either. If you won’t take mine away, I’m just going to throw them away.”
“Fine throw it away, but take another one and throw it away too so I can be paid”
“WTF???”

At this point I closed the door and put my phone books back on the table and vowed to ignore them for another year.

UPDATE: I’m clearly not the only one who hates this unsolicited dumping –
Check out http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/ and http://www.paperlesspetition.org/

Related posts:

1. Operation: Yellow Snow (updated)

I received a newsletter from Jobs.co.za this morning, and read an article linked from it called “Beware of Job scams“.

This seems to be a big problem all over the South African internet, and I know the Dealfish team use human moderators to delete thousands of scammy posts every day. I assume the same is true for Gumtree and all the others, and Careers24 is not immune from scammers either and we’re forced to keep an eye out for their appearance.

The bit that made me laugh was this line from the article:

Jobs.co.za explains that the most typical strategy used by scammers to trap Job Seekers is by posting job advertisements on websites or in the newspaper requesting CV’s to be sent.

Unfortunately, this strategy is also employed far too often by recruitment agencies, the legitimate customers of the job boards!
Some unscrupulous recruiters will load up fake jobs so they can harvest CVs for a particular industry and then contact the job seekers later with other real jobs that might not be as interesting as the fake one they have posted. Similarly, a some recruiters will load a fairly generic job ad and then repost it again and again, sometimes for years! Many of these ads link straight out to the recruiters own website for CV upload, meaning that the job board that carried the ad doesn’t get to build their user database either.

This practice is not unique to South African recruiters, nor is it limited to the recruitment industry, and it’s not uncommon for real estate agents to list houses that have already been sold so that they can do the same bait and switch – “oh, sorry, that one has just been sold, but I have another house that has just come onto the market that you should see”.

There is a growing backlash against this practice, and there are some job boards emerging to fill the gap that offer a “no recruitment agency” policy, insisting on direct employer ads only. This obviously hurts the industry as a whole, and it’s grossly unfair to the ethical recruiters and job boards who choose not to engage in this sort of policy.

One of the first pieces of advice I was given by someone previously in the industry when I joined Careers24 was to do exactly this – post my own fake job ads to grow the CV database.
I don’t think this is ethical behaviour, and I won’t be engaging in the same scam that the real criminals are trying on the job boards.
And over time I’d like to build the reputation of Careers24 for listing great jobs that really exist.

I encourage recruitment agencies to take a stand, stop taking advantage of people looking for work, and to serve the South African job-seeking market better:

• List real jobs! it’s that simple – if you want to build a great relationship with your candidates and place them again and again, don’t start out by lying to them
• Don’t create a spruced up version of a hard-to-fill job so you can do a bait-and-switch on suitable candidates
• Don’t keep refreshing generic job ads for developers or admin people so you can collect CVs from the job board and keep them in your own systems
• Do let the applicant know who you are recruiting for if at all possible – job seekers love responding to direct ads
• Don’t repost the same ad multiple times with different keywords and under different names – you’re wasting everyone’s time if the candidates write up multiple intro letters and tweak their CVs for the posts that are all for the same job

And if you do need to post an ad for a position or skills need that you think is coming up but doesn’t exist yet, please mark it as a “sourcing ad”, or “future hiring” so that candidates know exactly what they are responding to.

What do you think? Ever been stung by a fake ad or an unscrupulous job board?

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24.com has launched a free Food24 Restaurant Finder iPhone app. The app is great – it lets you search or browse for restaurants, view restaurant details, click to dial the restaurant phone number, create a list of favourites, and read and post reviews and ratings from your phone.

The app is also something of a landmark development for us, as it’s the first app we’ve created using only in-house developers and designers, and it’s also the first app we’ve delivered that is tightly integrated with our CMS and search technology rather than being driven by content feeds in the same was as the News24 iPhone app.

A couple of things about the app that I think are super-cool:

• The app is integrated with our CMS platform both for reading data from the Food24 site and for posting back to the site. This means that ratings and reviews are shared between the site and the app in real-time, and if you’re sitting in a restaurant waiting hours for your food or you’ve just had the best service of your life you can share your thought immediately with anyone using the Food24 site or iPhone app. This CMS integration also lets the Food24 website editors update elements of the Food24 app like the “Featured” restaurants simply by dragging the restaurant name into a category in the CMS.
• Solr search for the restaurant search – we’re using a Solr index on the Fod24 restaurant database, and this same search technology is exposed to the iPhone app for powerful keyword and parameterised search queries
• True geo-search – the app has a button labelled “Near Me” which actually uses the phone GPS and then does a search for all restaurants within a 3km radius of your current location. You can manipulate the radius used in the search, which opens up really amazing search opportunities such as “show me a map with all the restaurants that serve sushi within 2km of where I am now”

This was a tech-led project, and was a great illustration of what’s possible when you leverage existing data and internal capabilities to create a new window on your content and new ways of interacting.

If you haven’t tried it yet, go to theiTunes App Store and download it, and please rate the app in iTunes once you’ve used it.

Drop a comment here if you have any feedback on the app.

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MWEB’s Facebook group is called “Free the Web South Africa“,  but their clever little reference to “FTW” is apt – I think they’ve done something pretty amazing.

The uncapped ADSL products they launched were not revolutionary in the sense that they were the first to market or had features never seen before, but MWEB managed to nail the right combination of timing, features and price to create a killer product that fired the imagination of consumers.

I realised this a few weeks back when I heard my hairdresser’s kid asking her for money to go to the internet café and I asked whether she had a computer at home and was considering getting her own internet access. She said that she had heard that MWEB were the ones to go for, that they were doing something special.

That sort of spontaneous awareness is the stuff marketing people dream about – unprompted recall of just one brand when asked about an entire industry.

Enough has been said about the merits of the actual products, but I want to comment on the brilliant way MWEB has embraced their Facebook group to engage with their customers and critics after the launch of their uncapped products.

The “Free the Web” campaign started as a Facebook group without any reference to MWEB, and built up to over 12 000 group members shortly before the product launch announcement. The groups description claimed the following:

The purpose of this page is to highlight the effect of high bandwidth costs on ordinary South African small and medium business owners as well as the man on the street.

Something big is on the horizon… the time for change has come.

It’s time to Free the Web! Be part of this movement for change!

On March 18, MWEB launched their new ADSL products and revealed that they were behind the previously anonymous Free The Web SA Facebook group. Some online commentators had spotted the setup and worked out that it was likely to be an ISP announcement, while others were deeply disappointed to discover that a large company with a vested interest was behind the campaign and set up a short-lived protest group to vent their irritation.

Within days many competing local ISPs had announced competitive uncapped ADSL products, a fantastic outcome for South African consumers – better pricing than we’ve ever had and lots of choice.

Unfortunately the whinier elements of our collective South African persona were quick to appear and knock the new products, with the usual comments made about how much better and cheaper broadband is in the UK, completely ignoring the fact that we don’t yet have our local-loop unbundled (i.e Telkom still controls pricing for the piece of copper between your house and the exchange), and we have only very recently had access to competitive pricing for wholesale international bandwidth with the arrival of the Seacom cable.

MWEB may also have unwittingly set the tone for the group by originally pitching it as a consumer lobby group aimed at addressing an uncompetitive industry, as it attracted a vocal group of dissatisfied internet users and gave them a platform to vent their frustrations.

At this point many companies would have had a round of high-fives with their PR and online marketing companies and left the Facebook page to rot, but MWEB instead put a team of facilitators into the group posting under the handles  “MWEB Guy” and “MWEB Business Guy”.

Unfortunately the honeymoon was short-lived and it didn’t take long for network issues to appear. Customers who were getting poor speeds (and random non-customers happy to throw a few free punches) started to leave brutal and angry comments on the wall.

The response from MWEB was amazing – the long-suffering “MWEB Guy” just kept slogging it out and responding to critics, and in the latest act of engagement, Rudi Jansen, MWEB’s CEO has started posting directly into the group under his own name, much to the confusion of some who seem to think he is another MWEB tech support person.

This particular individual does unintentionally get right to the heart of the matter when he says “I want to speak to a person, not voice prompts, that’s why I’m here”.

Whether this guy knows it or not, he is interacting directly with the CEO of a large organisation and being given the opportunity to comment on using their products and the frustrations he is experiencing with their service and support. Facebook is being used here as a platform to cut through all the layers that usually exist between customers and suppliers and allow them to communicate directly and publicly. There are a couple of CEOs who make great use of social media (notably Gian Visser, CEO of a competing ISP), but it’s the first time I’ve seen the top guy in a South African organisation the size of MWEB take the time to get involved, face his critics head-on, take responsibility for the issues and engage with his customers in a very direct and immediate way.

Comments like these show the power of this engagement to build loyal customers in the face of temporary problems:

Can you imagine this level of engagement from your bank? Your insurer? Your telephone company? And not only getting in touch with them and communicating direct as you might do over the phone if you got past the voice-prompts and receptionists, but in a public forum for all to see.

I’m impressed.

UPDATE: See below – one of MWEB’s vocal critics has been swayed by Rudi’s out-of-office-hours efforts to communicate with the Facebook group. Gives me the warm’nfuzzies.

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The news has kinda leaked out via my my LinkedIn status update – yes, it’s official, I’m moving over into the hot-seat in Careers24 as the new General Manager.

And I’ll be handing over my current responsibilities leading the central Development teams in the next month or so.

I’m super-excited about the move:

• I’ve been managing development, production and operations for other people for a long time.. this is my shot to get into the drivers seat and live or die by my own decisions
• Careers24 is sort-of the underdog in the market at the moment. There are a couple of strong competitors with a clear lead, and then a bunch of noisy job boards all fighting for attention. It’s good to have clear targets.
• It should be run with a much stronger technical focus in my opinion, but it hasn’t been until now. Looking for a job is all about search, and so is searching CVs. I plan on rolling out kick-ass search and matching functionality to both sides of the customer base.
• It’s a really interesting business model – if you want to get clever about it, it’s a platform business in a 2-sided market, with strong cross-side network effects. Actually 2 markets (for jobs & candidates), each with cross-side network effects, and the possibility to cross-subsidise across markets too.
• I’ve got great support from News24, and they are cooking at the moment… we got 250k+ South African users in a single day on Tuesday this week. Couldn’t ask for a better partner to build audience.
• I get to stay at 24.com and work with a great bunch of people. The saying is that familiarity breeds contempts, but it’s also great to be operating as part of a big team, with lots of collective experience, and niche expertise tucked away all over the place. Need some SEO advice? No problem. Want to test UI? Sure. Got deep database questions? Sorted.

Any time I move on from one role to another I feel like I’m leaving things undone, and if I’d just stayed a bit longer I could have made a bigger difference, but I’m pleased to say that the dev and design teams seem to be doing fine with only minimal interference from me, and they could probably do with someone new to join them in my place and bring some new perspective and experience to the table.

Watch this space…

Careers24 Jobs Online: 5306

Registered Users: 298211

I hope to report good things in the coming months.

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1. Recruiter or scammer?

Sometimes Cape Town really busts out the most incredible sunsets. I caught this one on my iPhone from the Sand Bar while having drinks and dinner with a couple of friends.

I’m impressed with the image an iPhone can capture with a pretty poor camera unit.

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Sometimes we encounter an object that has no logical reason for its existance.

I encountered one of these rare things…. Behold, the hand-made Spork, fashioned from a simple plastic spoon.

Why??? What is its purpose?

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I’ve had a Kindle DX for about 10 days now and thought I would jot down a few thoughts about it.

A couple of friends have said “Uh…you chose a Kindle? Really?” in a way that sounds like they’re asking “So you bought the whole Britney Spears back catalog on vinyl? Really?” – as if there’s something simultaneously uncool and outdated about the choice.
What lies behind the question is the imminent availability of the iPad, and the question is really “why buy the big Kindle, when you don’t have long to wait for the iPad to be released?”

In a word – the screen.

I had high hopes for the iPad. I really thought it would be incredible. I thought it was going to be the most sci-fi device you could have until robot girlfriends and flying cars are available. I was deeply disappointed.
No multitasking. No cameras for video conferencing. No direct file access to the device (iTunes only). And the most disappointing – a plain old, 1024×768 LCD screen with a backlight.
In other words, the iPad is a giant iPod Touch. I can’t really see it fitting in to my life when I already have a powerful Macbook Pro and I have an iPhone – what I really wanted was a device that I could use for long reading sessions.
I’m studying at the moment, and I cart around a backpack full of files containing material printed from PDFs. My eyes can’t take an LCD screen for a whole day at work and then still look at one in the evening.
Working at a laptop is different from reading on a laptop – when you work you actually look all over the place – different windows, your keyboard from time to time, around your desk etc.
 Reading 100′s of pages on an LCD screen doesn’t work for me.
 So it had to be e-Ink or a hybrid screen.
The choice was pretty simple for me – Kindle DX was the best way to get a high-resolution e-Ink screen with native PDF support for documents that were designed for A4 printing. 
I would have preferred a Que or an iRex device with built in Wacom tablet for note-taking, but then the price would double.
If the iPad had used a next-generation screen from Pixel Qi, Liquavista or Mirasol then it would have been an obvious choice, but not with an IPS backlit LCD panel.
I’m glad I made the choice I did – the Kindle screen is amazing. At this point, I think I prefer reading on it to reading on paper. The soft grey screen with crisp text is extremely easy on the eyes, and it’s absolutely flat, unlike a book or magazine page that seems chaotically bendy and unstable after using the Kindle.
On the down side, it’s difficult to manage files on the Kindle. Although you can simply connect it to your computer via USB and create folders and documents on the device, they all appear in one flat non-hierarchical view. I have about 200 documents stashed on mine, and it means scrolling through 13 pages if I want to browse the whole collection. I’ve been assured that a software update is on the way, but until then it’s an interface failing.
Overall, I’m super-happy with the device. It does exactly what I wanted it to do, and it reminds me a lot of my first monochrome iPod in it’s focus on doing just one thing very well. No regrets on the Kindle, and I’ll take a closer look at the iPad when it hits version 2.

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2. Confusing distribution and consumption in News