plaxoed!

Since joining Plaxo, I’ve been on a team that’s working to define our policy regarding employees that want to participate in public communication. We wanted to include blogging, message boards, e-mail groups and any other media by which people are able to share ideas nowadays. Here’s what we came up with; have a gander at it and feel free to give feedback through the comments or e-mail me: mark @t plaxo.com.

Plaxo Public Internet Communication Policy

The following policy applies to all employees and contractors of Plaxo, and covers all publicly accessible communications via the Internet relating to Plaxo. This includes, but is not limited to: blogs, discussion forums, newsgroups, and e-mail distribution lists.

OVERVIEW

This company depends upon not only the strong formal competencies of its workers (programming abilities, writing skills, etc.), but their “soft skills” as well. Specifically, the fabric of this company is sustained by a sense of camaraderie and trust.

While we encourage open communication both internally and externally in all forms, we expect and insist that such communication does not substantively demean our environment. This means that constructive criticism — both privately and publicly — is welcome, but harsh or continuous disparagement is frowned upon.

Externally communicating about aspects of the company that are part of your non-disclosure agreement (partnership deals, earnings, upcoming unannounced features, etc.) is ALWAYS forbidden, however, and grounds for immediate termination and legal action.

In a nutshell, be prudent. Ask yourself: “Would this public expression regarding Plaxo impair my ability to work with my colleagues on a friendly basis? Would it give a leg up to our competition? Would it make our current or upcoming partners uncomfortable?” If you could answer yes to any of those questions, please avoid this communication.

Additionally, you should first express with your management and co-workers any Plaxo concerns you may have. Voicing concerns about Plaxo publicly without first communicating such concerns to your management and co-workers is counterproductive and inadvisable.

SPECIFIC POLICIES

1. Your public communications concerning Plaxo must not violate any guidelines set forth in your employee handbook, whether or not you specifically mention your employee or contractor status.
2. You may participate in Plaxo-related public communications on company time. However, if doing so interferes with any of your work duties and/or responsibilities, Plaxo reserves the right to disallow such participation.
3. You must include the following disclaimer on published public communications if you identify yourself as a Plaxo employee or if you regularly or substantively discuss Plaxo publicly: “The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of [your name]. Content published here is not read or approved by Plaxo before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Plaxo.”
4. You may not communicate any material that violates the privacy or publicity rights of another.
5. You may not attack personally fellow employees, authors, customers, vendors, or shareholders. You may respectfully disagree with company actions, policies, or management.
6. You may not disclose any sensitive, proprietary, confidential, or financial information about the company. This includes revenues, profits, forecasts, and other financial information, any information related to specific authors, brands, products, product lines, customers, operating units, etc. You may not disclose any information about any specific customer. Further detail is provided in the “Security and Confidentiality” section of your employee handbook.
7. You may not post any material that is obscene, defamatory, profane, libelous, threatening, harassing, abusive, hateful or embarrassing to another person or any other person or entity. This includes, but is not limited to, comments regarding Plaxo, Plaxo employees, Plaxo’s partners and Plaxo’s competitors.

Failure to follow these policies may result in disciplinary action, up to and including discharge. Only a written document signed by the President of Plaxo can approve an exception of any of the above policies.

Additionally, here are some guidelines you may wish to follow for your own protection. This is not a comprehensive list and Plaxo will not indemnify you from legal action if you follow these guidelines.

1. If you think you will get in trouble directly or indirectly because of any communication you are about to make, please discuss it with your manager first.
2. Remember that you are not anonymous. Even if you write anonymously or under a pseudonym, your identity can still be revealed. You should communicate as if you are doing so under your own name. Indeed, it is recommended that you do communicate using your real name.
3. You will probably be read or heard by people who know you. Post as if everyone you know reads or hears every word.
4. You are personally legally responsible for any content you publish. Be aware of applicable laws regarding publishing your content or regarding the content itself before you post. This includes adhering to applicable copyright laws.

Looks like after the merger with AT&T Wireless, Cingular is #1 in quite a few areas. According to Consumer Reports, Cingular blows by all other wireless providers in number of complaints per million customers; almost twice as many complaints as Sprint and a staggering four times as many as Verizon.

It’s not hard to figure out why. AT&T already had a bunch of problems - I didn’t know of a single AT&T customer who was completely satisfied - and after the merger, Cingular’s been implementing a bunch of rules that make the experience even worse. I’m one of the pre-merger AT&T subscribers and every time I think about my experience, I get annoyed.

Want to add a line? Change your plan? Get features like rollover? Too bad. You have to buy a new phone and sign a new contract. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with my current account and my Audiovox SMT5600; I just got in less than 6 months ago! First off, Cingular should be able to change my account features without having to issue me a new SIM card. Secondly, even if they insist on issuing a new SIM card, at least let me keep my phone. Lastly, if you insist on issuing me a new SIM card and a new phone, you’d better not charge me for any of this unnecessary swapping.

Of course, there aren’t any better options really. All the cool phones are GSM nowadays and T-Mobile’s network is the same or worse than Cingular’s in most areas. I guess we can only hope that one day, wireless service in the US will be better. In the meantime, we’ll be stuck choosing between the lesser of multiple evils. (Is it just me or does it seem like we’re always choosing between the lesser of evils? :P)

So with a little help from Terry, I’ve added a small JavaScript link at the top of my blog that allows you to switch between “cased style” and “classic style”.

As I was hacking away at my header file, Terry commented that I was so “old school”. It’s been a few years since I’ve done any JavaScript so I naturally created a script tag with language=”JavaScript”. Apparently the correct way to do this now is to set type=”text/JavaScript”. I’ve never been called “old school” before… makes me feel all grown up :o

Of course, for all those reading through aggregators, you’ll always get cased style.

New URLs:

http://blog.plaxoed.com (main blog site)
http://blog.plaxoed.com/index.php?feed=rss2 (RSS feed)

Well, I’m finally off Blogger and so far it’s been awesome. In the past few months, the performance of Blogger has been simply terrible; pair that with a lack of features, difficult to customize templates, and a lack of web stats and it was just a bad place to blog.

Now I’m hosted through GoDaddy and it seems to be pretty good. They have a nice admin console that lets me do what I need and the price is right - it’s only $3.99/mo. for a good amount of bandwidth and PHP/MySQL support. Additionally, they are also domain registrars so they have a nice package deal. I looked around at other hosts (lunarpages, 1and1, startlogic) but they were all a bit more expensive or required year long commitments to lock in decent prices. Some of them might have better admin consoles, but I haven’t had to do anything not supported by GoDaddy’s limited console yet.

As part of getting off Blogger completely, I wanted to transfer my old posts and comments. Although there is a provided script and there’s one available for download that imports comments as well, it still took a lot of work to import everything out of Blogger. The main problem is that they seem to be having technical difficulties in publishing remotely. I had to modify my template, post to 99zeros.blogspot.com, save the archive pages manually, copy them over and run the import tool. It was quite annoying, but at least it worked. It would’ve been really bad if I had to manually import each entry :o. When I tried re-publishing my old blog entries directly to my new host for import, I’d sit at this screen forever:

Not sure what it was processing, but it never got past 0% :(

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg and the WordPress team! So far, I’m quite impressed with what you guys have been able to whip up and provide to the community. Plus, it was super easy to find different themes and tons of plug-ins. Any problems or questions I ran into were solved with a quick search on the web. Congrats on building up a great user community.

Lastly, a new blog means a new style. You’ll notice that I’m using correct capitalization and an easy to read black-on-white color scheme now. Hey Scoble and Zawodny, now you can’t say I never did nothin for ya! ;)

blog stats 2, originally uploaded by 99zeros.

well, here’s the updated traffic info from my blog. you can see a very slight traffic spike a few weeks ago when news that i joined plaxo hit the press. in general, things are settling down - which is quite nice! now, i can use this blog for its original purpose: keeping friends and family up to date on what i’m up to and my thoughts and feelings in general. looks like there might be a few thousand extra readers, but i’ll just count you guys as a few thousand extra friends ;)

in related news, since google has done some revision of their adsense rules, i can finally increase transparency of the advertising i’ve been running on this site.

i put adsense up on my blog on 2/9 and for the month of february, i made $194.21. at the time, the ads were only running on the right hand side so it was getting really crappy exposure.

for the month of march, so far i’ve made $133.22. sometime a few weeks ago, i added a second ad unit at the top of the page as an experiment. i figured that clearly the more prominent placement would net me better results; however, click through rates stayed approximately the same though. numerous people have told me how they’ve optimized their sites for adsense. i find it quite interesting that people spend so much time fiddling with the system - the way they describe it, it sounds like a full time job! fortunately, iâve already got a full time job, so i’m not too interested in optimizing my ads.

so in total, that’s $327.43 plus another $60 some odd bucks from amazon going towards celiac disease research :)

i’m blogging from flickr again; i hope this time the connection between flickr and blogger doesn’t get messed up, resulting in duplicate posts. with the performance of blogger lately, i’m keeping my fingers crossed!

update: well, it got messed up again and double posted. they need to make posting blog entries transacted! (props to my old co-workers at microsoft working on indigo)

oops this is really belated, but two weekends ago i went up to visit rose in seattle. while i was up there, we hiked up mt. si with jon, one of my childhood friends. here’s a picture from the top of mt. si:

truly breathtaking, eh? (and scary too if you’re afraid of heights)

here’s the rock face at the top of the trail you have to scale to get up there :O

anyways, if you’re the outdoorsy type and are in seattle, i highly recommend you check out mt. si. it’s a great day hike; it’s 8 miles round trip and it only took us 2.5 hours to get to the top of the trail. if you want to get to the summit, figure in another half hour for scrambling up the rock face. and of course, if you’re more of “enjoy nature from the comfort of your couch” person, you can check out the rest of my mt. si photos on flickr.

i finally got my shiny new work laptop today, an ibm t42p. it’s got all the fixin’s including a 15″ 1600×1200 screen, 1GB of RAM, 128MB of graphics memory attached to an ATI mobility fire gl t2 chip, and a 60GB 7200RPM hard drive. so far, i’m really liking this machine but i’m pretty annoyed with my purchasing experience.

the first problem (though minor) was that ibm’s website sucks. if i hadn’t been set on this laptop, i would’ve just said forget it and went to dell.com. not only is the website unnecessarily slow, but there’s an extremely limited selection available online and the product information is scattered everywhere. i literally had to open up 4 or 5 browser tabs just to compare the specs for two laptops. since i’m a big thinkpad fan, i’m able to gruel through this, but you’d think they’d make the purchasing process as smooth as possible. after all, they want people to buy their products don’t they?

the next problem was that it took forever to get the laptop. the only customization i put on it was to upgrade the wifi to 802.11b/g (the default config only had 802.11b). seemed like a pretty vanilla order to me, but it took them a full 10 business days to ship the thing out. maybe i’ve just been spoiled by dell, but what’s up with ibm’s supply chain? the worst part was that when i called up to check the status of my order, the reps had no idea when my laptop would be ready. one rep would tell me that my laptop would ship in a week and then another would say that there were hundreds in queue and it would be until next month.

<side rant>speaking of slowness, anyone notice how laggy blogger is nowadays? *sigh* all the more reason to host my own blog i suppose…</side rant>

the last - and by far the worst - problem was that they shipped me the laptop without installing the 802.11b/g card. at first i figured this wasn’t going to be a big deal; on my t30, it’s extremely easy to access the miniPCI slot. however, after much head scratching, i finally looked online and found out that i would have to pretty much take the entire thing apart to install my wifi card. i had to slide out the battery, take out 20 screws, pop out the keyboard and remove the palm rest bezel just to get to the slot. it took a good 45 minutes, but after much tinkering, i finally got the 802.11b/g in there and put everything back together. i mean, if you’re going to take 2 weeks to ship a laptop, at least put the wifi card in there!

so all in all, i’m really liking the laptop, but lenovo really has its work cut out for them. if they manage to improve the purchasing experience while maintaining thinkpad’s legendary quality bar, they should do quite well - but i’m sure that’s easier said than done :D

in deciding to work at plaxo, i also signed on for a 45 minute commute, twice a day. i don’t mind too much, i just use the time to listen to music, talk radio or the news. for the past two months, i’ve had the same cd in my stereo: a david crowder album rose gave me (btw, it’s quite good but you can only listen to the same songs so many times before you start to get delirious). so after work today, i decided to swing by best buy to look for some new music.

i didn’t do any research on what cds to buy; instead, i figured i’d just browse the selection and pick a few cds that looked promising. this proved to be a huge mistake.

i guess i just haven’t bought anything at a brick & mortar store for quite some time now (except for groceries, i still go to safeway for those). i expected it to be easy, but i had forgotten that best buy wouldn’t have any customer testimonials, nor would i be able to sample any of the tracks. this realization didn’t faze me at first, so i started perusing anyways.

a few minutes later, i realized i was in trouble. best buy has strategically placed all the best sellers in one place, thus people are always able to find the hottest music in the same place. however, i hadn’t listened to new music in so long that i didn’t recognize most of the artists - even worse, i didn’t even know what genre some of the artists were!

well, 15 minutes later, i finally just randomly picked the newest jack johnson cd. then, i walked around the store, waiting for something to jump out and demand an impulse buy. believe it or not, none of the gadgets were too enticing - which makes it seem that either they are stocking the wrong toys or whoever plans the floor displays is failing miserably.

as i rounded the corner on my way to checkout, i encountered a huge line. to make matters worse, only one register was open and the employee working it didn’t seem to have a clue. a single transaction took almost 10 minutes! since there were 4 or 5 people ahead of me and i didn’t feel like wasting more than 30 minutes to overpay for a cd that might be terrible, i left frustrated and empty-handed.

needless to say, i’m not going back to best buy anytime soon. from now on, i’m just buying my music online.

with the exception of yesterday, i’ve been staying quite late at work. there’s just so much to do! i’ve got tons of stuff to ramp up on, we’re actively developing new stuff and i’m trying to get to know everyone as soon as possible. between all that, i’ve been putting in 10-12 hour days - not counting the time i spend checking e-mails before i head to work and when i work remote after i get home. hey, working at a high-intensity start-up isn’t for everyone - but it sure fits me just fine :)

why am i so jazzed? first off, everything in the system at plaxo is subject to change. if something’s not working, we’ll see how we can fix it; if things are working well, we’ll try to make it work better. none of this “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” crap. think we’re crazy? go see what’s made toyota a leader in the global auto industry. in a recent interview with fortune magazine, toyota’s ceo likened the growth of the company to pushing a cart uphill - he felt that if the company stopped for even a moment, the cart would come flying back down the hill, taking them along with it.

secondly, at plaxo, everyone is in it together. i’m not the only one who’s got the drive and motivation to stay late and get stuff done. at microsoft, forget about it. most people pretty much do 9 to 5 nowadays, unless there is a major deadline coming soon. at google, a few people would stay late, but the “campus feel” of pulling late nights and getting stuff done was missing. during the two short weeks i was at google, i’d leave around 8 or 9 and i’d see maybe a few people on my way out. sure, there were a few diehards at the googolplex, but i got the feeling that most people were just staying for the free dinner and checking out.

lastly, we’re actually listening to customers and using feedback and metrics to enhance their experiences. we don’t hail from a grand vision at the top and plan out features that won’t get shipped until 2008. we take real customer feedback and implement it into the system as soon as we can get the bits out the door. we try different things and empirically figure out what works and what doesn’t. it’s almost like a large scale science experiment, where the outcome is a better product and happy users.

for those who are wondering what’s in the works, check out this article on SFGate. for those too lazy to click through, here are the interesting parts:

… “Ten years ago, people were afraid of buying anything on the Internet,” said Golub, who knows a thing or two about Internet security from his days at VeriSign. “Largely, Plaxo has a perception problem. Plaxo is far safer than most of what is done online.”

So, how you gonna make money? “We’ve started to introduce ways to make money,” said Golub, who added the firm has plenty of seed money left but wouldn’t specify how much. “We’re creating premium services. Cell-phone synching. Address book optimizers that eliminate all duplicates in your system. And premium support. But there will always be a free service.”

anyways, needless to say, some people’s wishes will be answered soon. for those who had other requests, give us some time, we’re getting to it as fast as we can :)

a lot of people have been wondering what plaxo does. by now, most people have, at some time or another, gotten a request to update their contact information from a friend through plaxo. oftentimes, as plaxo spreads through a social group, those who join plaxo last end up getting sent a large number of these contact info update requests. these people naturally - and unfortunately - mistake plaxo for a spam company :(

what plaxo actually does is harness the power of social networking to keep your contacts up to date. if you and all of your friends are signed up for plaxo, when someone moves, they only need to update their info in plaxo. plaxo then automatically sends the updated info to everyone in the group - to make it even smoother, the people in the group don’t need to do anything; their address books are just always up to date. for me, the only contact info i have left for most of my college friends is an e-mail address. fortunately, with just an e-mail address, i can quickly reconnect with all of my friends and keep in touch effortlessly.

the best part is, if you use outlook or outlook express, plaxo has a client plug-in. this plug-in will automatically keep your outlook contacts up to date too. there are also cool features that help you keep your calendar, tasks and notes synced up. if you have multiple computers, you can install plaxo on all of them and your information can be synced automatically.

they also have a really cool web interface and an IE toolbar in the works - it’s got integrated yahoo search too, so you don’t need a search toolbar anymore (don’t worry, they haven’t put in an autolink feature… yet ;P).

what about privacy concerns? well, plaxo, unlike other social networks, is very concerned about privacy. first of all, you choose what information other people can see and get updated from you. also, no one ever knows who is in your address book unless you tell them they are. plaxo isn’t a spamhouse so they aren’t interested in selling your information; plus, even though you only get e-mailed by plaxo when one of your friends requests it, you can still opt-out and you won’t receive any more e-mails from plaxo.

hope that answers most questions. if you want to keep in touch with me, just add my e-mail to your plaxo account (it’s 99zeros at gmail).

for the doubters out there, don’t worry, i haven’t drunk too much corporate kool-aid; check out the product and i think you’ll see why i am so excited to be working here :)