What it all boils down to

Personalized LinkedIn profiles… and I don’t mean wallpaper!

Hagit (Vickie) Katzenelson — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 06:22:53 +0000

A few weeks ago, LinkedIn announced a new profile format for students. I love this idea because it recognizes that the so-called “standard” format, the resume-like list of employers organized by date, doesn’t work for everyone. It didn’t work for students, because they need to put education front and center, and with a small tweak LinkedIn made their profiles much better.

It seems like such a good idea, why not take it farther? There are other professionals who don’t fully benefit from a standard, resume-driven LinkedIn profile where Summary, Experience, Education and Skills are the only sections. Here are just a few:

Academics. They’re all about publishing and research (and vice versa) and less about various positions. After all, after tenure, don’t they usually spend years at the same institute? Research can be built like the positions, with dates and headers, but in a different section. Publications truly need a different section, one where books, chapters and journal articles all have their own space.

Designers. Sure, they can put a link to a blog or portfolio on another site, for images of their work but wouldn’t it be nice to give them the ability to put a spotlight on a few select pieces? Their professional experience is almost visual in its entirety and that should be reflected in their profile.

Architects. As a sub-segment of designers, they, too, would benefit from visual representation. But architects also have another problem with LinkedIn’s current sequential format. Many times they work on several projects at once and complete projects not in the same order that they were started.

Lawyers. Yes, they work at various firms, sequentially, but there’s also significance to specific high-profile or precedence-setting cases they were responsible for.

I’m sure there are other professions that could benefit from a few additions and re-sequencing of their LinkedIn profile. Any other ideas?

Trust: the biggest problem with cloud services

Hagit (Vickie) Katzenelson — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 21:16:50 +0000

Two days ago I read about Dylan’s Google crisis. In his long post he described in painful detail how Google closed his email account along with all its accompanying Google services such as documents, photos, calendar, reader, bookmarks and so on. Basically his entire personal digital life was in the cloud and in one really unwarranted decision Google annihilated it and disrupted his personal and professional life. I say “unwarranted” because he had no idea what item of the terms of use he supposedly violated.

Sure, it says in Google’s terms of use that they can delete your account at any time if they see a just cause for doing so. We agree to the terms and most of us do our best to adhere to them. But the sad part of the story is not that Google made a mistake, not that it denied a terms-abiding digital citizen access to the data that he trusted Google with. The sad part is that Google left him no way to try and fix the problem.

It turns out that once Google decides to terminate your account there is really nothing you can do about it. Dylan tried calling, emailing, asking questions in forums and physically going to their offices. Nothing helped until he started tweeting and his story received attention. I hope that his story has a happy resolution but the problem remains that Google (or any other cloud service) can deny access to accounts without giving you a reason or a way to appeal that decision.

Dylan thinks that government should intervene but I’m not sure we want that. We need a quick response to problems like these.

My idea is simple. Google cancels accounts they think are being used for “evil” purposes such as spamming, spoofing, phishing and so on. Most of these abusers, once denied access to an account will simply open another one. If an account is canceled in error, the owner can ask for an appeal and pay, say, $50 for the process. This is to weed out the evil-doers. Google then has a real live person contact that individual and explain the reason for the cancelation and offer a way to repeal that decision. Also, the user can explain his/her side of the story. If the account was canceled as a result of Google’s error, Google needs to refund the $50. If the account was canceled because of a minor and unintentional breach of the terms of use, the user has a way to fix the mistake and get his account back. This way someone like Dylan can be heard.

Trust is one of the reasons people are slow to use cloud services. Cases like these show us that we are right not to trust all of our data to the cloud… yet!

Women in tech and Lego

Hagit (Vickie) Katzenelson — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:35:43 +0000

A bit off my regular blog topics but nevertheless a subject close to my heart.

Growing up, I was a devotee of Lego. I would play for hours, build according to instructions and freeform, depending on the parts I had at my disposal. I would build houses, cities, farms and create stories around my “characters.” I had fun and I didn’t realize I was laying the foundation for a love of creating, building and, yes, engineering.

Years later, in Business School, our Operations professor tried to show how hard actually building something was. He divided us up into groups of six and gave us a mission to build two identical anythings out of Lego, as a team, in under 5 minutes. Quickly I ordered my team to look for parts as I built two small cars. All the other teams failed this exercise. My Lego experience saved the day!

Now, with my own daughter, I wanted to create this same love of logical building. My two elder sons loved Lego and I figured, with her birthday coming up, it was time to get her her own Lego to play with. All I needed was a set that would fit in with her quite typical imaginary play habits, mostly scenarios from daily life like a house, store, fairy castle… all the regular stuff.

Heading over to the Lego site, I discovered a cruel fact. Lego has really changed over the years and now offers way more what I call “highly-targeted” sets than before. This means that there really needs to be a strong fit between the child’s interests and the Lego set.

Second problem are the product lines. These are Lego’s current product lines where I’ve removed non-Lego items, items for younger kids, generic (brick and minifigure) items and expensive collector’s lines:

City

Star Wars™

Ninjago

Universe

Hero Factory

Alien Conquest

Cars™

Atlantis

Technic

Kingdoms

Pirates of the Caribbean™

Master Builder Academy

Pharaoh’s Quest

Creator

Hero Recon Team

Harry Potter™

World Racers

Racers

Toy Story™

Space Police

Power Miners

Prince of Persia™

Indiana Jones™

Spongebob Squarepants

BIONICLE®

Ben Ten

BELVILLE

Result: there are 27 product lines. All but one, Belville, have a male (or robot, or alien) mascot. All but one are targeted at boys.

I’ve taken a closer look at each of the 26 product lines and have come to the conclusion that even the lines that can appeal to girls (such as City, Kingdom and Harry Potter) are strongly targeted at boys. City, for example, has mostly police, fire rescue, trains, construction and so on. All three lines have a disproportionate amount of male minifigures in comparison to females, and many don’t even have even one female minifigure in the box. I’ve also tried looking for female minifigures but of course those are not available as a set and you need to order the more expensive custom-built ones.

Regarding Belville, it’s practically a joke. There are only four sets and all of them have a very limited amount of building to do. Sadly, the figures are not standard Lego minifigures so even they are not compatible with every other Lego line.

I’ve read other comments and questions to Lego regarding sets for girls and it seems that many other parents of girls are concerned that Lego isn’t offering enough sets that appeal to girls’ play patterns and that Lego either doesn’t care or thinks they’re doing fine. They’re not.

Maybe I’m overemphasizing Lego’s impact on children’s love of engineering. I don’t think so but I would love to hear what others think.

As to my daughter: I bought her a Creator house (wonderful role-playing set), the Camper and the Bank (where it seems the only female is the bank manager and other 3 men are a cop, robber and driver).

The Hierarchy of Contacts

Hagit (Vickie) Katzenelson — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 05:25:44 +0000

Fact: not all contacts are created equal.

Nothing newsworthy there, so why a blog post? Two new services I started using this week have both forgotten this fact.

First, the worst offender, my Android phone. Right away, after signing into my Google account, all my Gmail contacts were automatically loaded into my “contacts” on the phone, regardless of their importance. Thus, people that were on multi-recipient emails with me were added, people who I had communicated once, many years ago were added, people who happened to be on mailing lists that I was on were added and every parent from every class each child of mine had ever been part of was also added.

And to most of these names my response was “Who are these people?” and then “What are they doing in my contacts??”

To add insult to injury I now have to go and remove these people one-by-one from my contact list. There are hundreds of them. I shouldn’t be doing this.

The second offender was Google+, who also imported my entire contact list and made me wade through them.

This nondiscriminatory sorting is especially frustrating given that Gmail is already separating my contacts into two lists:

Most Contacted (20)

and

Other Contacts (564)

So granted, a division of 20 vs 564 seems very roughly done. I assume that lots of people that I do want on my contact list are currently in “Other Contacts” so I need a middle ground. There are really easy ways to determine who my important contacts can be. Some ideas:

1. Those I’ve exchanged emails with in the past year, or let me decide the time period.

2. Those I have exchanged emails with more than twice, or let me decide how many times.

3. Those I have included in special groups within contacts.

Google+ can even go one step further and can automatically create Circles for:

1. Those I have included in contact groups

2. Those that Gmail already knows to suggest that I add when I email someone. Those that it recognizes from my sending patterns that I usually communicate with these people together.

3. Those that I have created an identical filter or label to tag all of them.

Also, my guess is that 600 contacts is not that high a number and that some long-time users of Gmail have thousands of contacts. Don’t make the assumption that they’re all good friends.

Why I like Google+

Hagit (Vickie) Katzenelson — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 02:06:36 +0000

Lots has been written about Google’s new social network and, naturally, comparing it to Facebook. Having just read GigaOm’s take on it, I found myself agreeing to two points:

1. The typical Facebook user is “diluting” his/her social graph by adding too many users that are not close enough to be friends.

2. When that user considers posting a status update on Facebook, he/she has to consider that people that he/she would rather not see it, will see it.

This is where Google’s concept of Circles works great. I’ve already realized that not everyone in my social graph needs to see all of my updates and in the past I have censored my updates because of that. I have old work colleagues, new work colleagues, college friends, childhood friends, family and really really casual acquaintances. With Circles, I can quickly decide who gets to see my updates and I don’t have to censor anything.

Here’s just one example from the past where having Circles would have helped immensely:

A family member was ill, suffering from a disease that required many tests, exams, scans, operations and all that fun stuff. My friends and family wanted updates on the situation but having each of them call and me repeating the same information was stressful, to say the least.

I considered updating via Facebook. The pros: it was the kind of asynchronous communication mode that I liked. I could post my updates when it was convenient for me. Friends could read them at their leisure and ask questions which I could answer, again, when and if it was convenient for me. Also, this way I could spend time on one update and not on multiple phone calls. The cons: I really didn’t want coworkers, past and present, to know anything. The end result: email.

Circles would’ve been perfect!

That and the challenge of getting my older family members on any sort of social network.

Coupons anyone?

Hagit (Vickie) Katzenelson — Sat, 07 May 2011 04:57:08 +0000

It seems like everyone is starting to offer coupons.

Just so we’re clear on what kind of coupons I’m talking about, they’re NOT the kind you cut out of your Sunday paper to get $1 off on deodorant.

They’re the kind that starts out as a potential discount that is sent out to a group of people. Theoretically, the deal is on only if a minimal predetermined number of people buy it. I say theoretically because I have yet to see a deal that hasn’t been tipped.

Groupon is credited with the invention of this kind of group coupon (hence the name) but since December 2010, when Groupon was rumored to decline a sweet buyout offer from Google, the number of coupon wannabes is increasing daily. With Facebook joining the race two weeks ago and Google launching their own, this market is ready for a showdown.

So who does it best?

The best-performing coupon company is probably the one that is able to couple the knowledge of what I prefer with great deals at local establishments. To get me to buy, it really needs to be all three:

What I like…
where I like it…
and at a price I like to pay.

Let’s look at the contenders:

In corner #1: Groupon and its clones, (aka Living Social) who don’t really know what I like as I haven’t established a meaningful purchase history with them. My assumption is that Groupon, being first, probably has the most users to offer merchants therefore the ability to get a better deal. It also is beginning to learn about its user’s preferences so that in the future I might get a better fitting offer than the generic one for my area. Groupon does 2 and 3 well, but so far has managed to target my preferences once.

In corner #2: the newspapers: my local paper has a “daily deal. It really only meets criteria number 2, somewhere local. The newspaper cannot really tailor a coupon just for me as it knows nothing about me. It can attempt to meet number 3.

In corner #3: the social network, aka Facebook. It has the potential for meeting all three criteria really well because it knows me the best. But from what I’ve seen so far it operates just like Groupon. It can do better by seeing where I’ve checked in using Places or see where I’ve checked in using other location applications such as Foursquare and Gowalla. Both, by the way, are also in this corner given that they know much more about businesses I visit.

In corner #4: localization services, such as Yelp, that offer user-written reviews alongside the offered deal.

So back to the question, who does it best: I think it’s Yelp.

Yelp has all three criteria covered:

Yelp has something none of the others do: it has super-local reviews. It not only gets me a deal, but it gets me a deal at a place that’s rather good. In fact, when I get a deal from one of the other coupon companies, I end up going back to Yelp to check out reviews on the business. It could be a drawback from the business side, where Yelp cannot really afford to send out a coupon to a place reviewed badly by its users, but the upside is fantastic. It also knows a lot about my preferences, seeing what kind of places I’ve reviewed. All it has to do it get good deals, the easy part of the equation.

Finally, who CAN do it and isn’t already: Amazon and other major retailers, not for local businesses but for merchandise. They know so much about me and Amazon is already suggesting stuff I might like. All they need to do is work with merchants to get a group deal and present it to me according to my taste.

Let’s revisit this in a year, shall we, and see just how many players are still left in the game.

Let’s search again

Hagit (Vickie) Katzenelson — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 20:39:32 +0000

In February Google changed its search algorithm to put less emphasis on results provided by content farms. But it’s hard to put a stop to something that is so profitable for sites like eHow and About.com and harder still when a significant amount of searches are of the question variety.

Options are these:

Block these sites, what Google did in February. Pro: make it less profitable to run content farms. Con: Is this really leading users to the results they need?
Optimize best content: use +1, link following and other secret parts of the google search algorithm. Pro: unbiased and potentially relevant. Con: has this really been working?
Create content. Pro: be in charge of content, provide consistently good results. Con: there’s a lot of content to create even when focusing on the most popular questions.
Partner with a quality content provider. Pro: provide more relevant search results. Con: creates a result bias, essentially paid results, one which Google should stay away from.
Socially prefer one content site over another based on positive reviews and user’s positive experience. For example, Quora, which gets consistently good answers from highly qualified people and not paid writers. Another example is Yelp who has good reviews on local places. Pro: provide more relevant search results as determined by users, not Google. Con: need to put in protection against manipulation.

How to cook quinoa, the most popular cooking question.

I prefer the last option. As an example, let’s use Google predictive search to get the top searches starting with “how to c” where “c” is the first letter of the third word. Interestingly enough, of the top 5 predictions have to do with food: cooking quinoa, rice and brown rice. As you can see, there is already a content-farm, SEO-optimized site called cookingquinoa.net created to cater to specifically answer this question. I suggest looking at Epicurious.com, a site that has recipes from official sources (i.e. Bon Appetit & Gourmet magazines) with user rankings and comments available for each recipe. Wouldn’t a more relevant response for “How to cook quinoa” be the highest ranked/most reviewed/most commented recipe on Epicurious?

There are also ways to socially optimize these results. Did your friends prefer a specific quinoa recipe? Do your friends prefer another recipe site? Did your friends share a recipe?

And finally, why do so many people like quinoa when it tastes like something you’d give your horse? But that’s a question for another day.

With a little help from my friends

Hagit (Vickie) Katzenelson — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 22:13:44 +0000

There have been several Techcrunch posts recently discussing the quality of Google’s search and they prompted me to take a look at my own search experience. It’s true that even though I still use Google for most of my searches, I’ve been going to other resources to get search results, too, in areas where Google wasn’t giving me the results I needed. For example, I’ve been going to Yelp for local listings and reviews for restaurants, stores, attractions and just about anything local. I’ve been going to Amazon to read product stats and reviews, even if I don’t plan to purchase the product there.

My problem isn’t searches that I can find relevant results for elsewhere. It’s where Google is my only hope of reaching a relevant resource. Then, depending on the actual search, I often end up on the spam sites described so aptly by Techcrunch. In fact, there are some topics that I’ve realized that I cannot search for any more on Google such as travel, appliance care, car care, health and more. I simply have to wade through too many spammy sites to get any trustworthy content.

So Google comes up with +1, in some ways taking search back to the days of directories, where humans had a say in search results. It makes perfect sense. Why not let humans determine at least some of the value of a link? Even better, if these are humans I know, I actually trust their judgment to tell me one site is better than another. Mix that with the sophisticated relevancy results and hopefully I get results that are better for me and can’t be gamed.

The only downside is implementation: I need to click my +1 before I follow the search result to the web site. At that point, I don’t know if it’s a good/relevant result yet. If it’s a bad/irrelevant result I usually click back to the search results page but if it’s a good one, I usually don’t, and therefore usually don’t have a way to add my +1. Maybe the +1 option should be moved to the toolbar? Just a thought.

Hey LinkedIn, May I Have a Word?

Hagit (Vickie) Katzenelson — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 06:18:56 +0000

As a job seeker, I’ve been visiting LinkedIn on a daily basis for a few weeks now. I’ve set up a few job searches, fluffed and pruned my profile and reconnected with classmates and business acquaintances. Yet, some things on the site continue to drive me crazy. LinkedIn, if you’re listening, these are my top three gripes:

1. Suggested jobs: I’ve set up three job searches in the 94306 zip code AND I’ve set my location to the “San Francisco Bay Area.” So why, oh why, do you keep suggesting jobs in the Washington DC and Boston areas?? Both by email and on the website, LinkedIn constantly suggests jobs that are not even close to where I am living and searching! You know where I live, use it!

LinkedIn Job Suggestions. Um, I'm in the SF Bay Area...

2. Applying for jobs: one of LinkedIn’s nice features is that it lets you track the status of your job applications, see where you stand in the often long hiring process. Many of the sites I applied to asked that I apply on their own site, which is fine. Different companies like to do their hiring in their own database. (Aside: I don’t know what LinkedIn offers recruiters in terms of hiring management tools. Maybe it should ante-up the feature set so that recruiters will prefer run the entire process on LinkedIn instead of on their own site.)

Lately, though, many recruiters use Jobvite. In fact, even LinkedIn started using Jobvite for its own recruiting which bugged me because I had recently upgraded my LinkedIn account just so that I could ”stand out from all the applicants” – which I can’t on Jobvite. I rather like Jobvite but you can’t sell me a premium account based on features that I later discover I cannot take advantage of. Result: premium account cancelled. Make your recruiters happy, keep applications on LinkedIn.

3. Reconnecting with classmates. LinkedIn has a problem with universities and colleges, one it really should not have. This is also true for really large organizations. The first problem is that I’m not linked with all my classmates automatically. My class at Berkeley had 240 people, probably all are on LinkedIn, but I need to seek them out individually and link one by one. Instead, once I indicate that I am a member of the class (and it’s verified) ask me if I want to send out link requests to all my classmates. If I say yes, allow them to approve me and that’s it. Every new member to join the group sends out requests to those already in it. Presto, all the class is connected.

The second problem is that currently LinkedIn thinks that everyone who graduated a certain university during a certain year is my acquaintance. Not true. I graduated EE, I didn’t really know the architects and chemists. How about using more characteristics to define a university group than year of graduation? How about school? Department? Major? Same goes for large organizations (say those over 1,000 employees): how about grouping by division? That way when you say that new members have joined I’ll really be interested.

Thanks for listening. I will now return to my job hunt.

Not your grandfather’s Facebook

Hagit (Vickie) Katzenelson — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 01:33:49 +0000

According to FastCompany, Facebook has 600 million users, a quarter of them in the USA. Nathan Lustig on Entruset looked at the numbers and wrote a rather morbid post on how many Facebook users he thinks will die this year by extrapolating Facebook user age data and death rates for each age group.

What caught my attention was the fact that out of the estimated 150 million American Facebook users, only 6.3 million users are over 64 but that this is one of the fastest growing age groups on Facebook, even faster than the 25-54 group! All this growth has been taking place as Facebook has done nothing to encourage this older group to join and use. In fact, with its pace of innovation and new changes, I’d imagine Facebook is targeting users in their teens (with over 100% penetration!) and 20s.

I think that Facebook could be friendlier towards this older group. They (I’m generalizing) joined Facebook to stay in touch with either kids or grand kids and ended up discovering that many of their friends are already connected. Are there too many privacy options for this group to manage? Will they understand the rapid change of their news feed? Can groups be easier to set up? Are games and other applications easy to understand? How hard is it to remove a company/product/TV show from their feed after they “liked” it? How easy is it to find their friends and family, even if their name is Jennifer Smith?

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Facebook needs to dumb down its site or remove features once you’ve entered your age but it would be great if the “basics” were easier to navigate and use.