I was in San Francisco for a conference this week so I decided I’d take Wesabe up on their kind offer to drop by. If you don’t know, Wesabe is a website where users can engage in social personal finance. Upload your bank and credit card transaction data (it’s secure and anonymous) and then tag your purchases. With that done Wesabe delivers money saving tips based on your spending habits!
The Wesabe staff struck me as a very cohesive, intelligent, and dedicated group. All were very kind as as I interrupted the busy day before the launch of a major new feature. Great equipment (i’m sooo jealous of those monitors), a nice library of O’Reilly books, and open and natural light filled workareas all show that Wesabe cares about it’s employees and gives them what they need to do good work for their users.
A special thanks to the Marketing VP Gabe Griego for showing me around and taking me to lunch. Also, Thanks to Marc Hedlund for taking the time to show me the new Tip page enhancement before it was launched.
I’ll cover the tip page enhancements later, but to give you a general idea the new tip page uses all the collected data to help you better compare your merchants and pull in tips. It’s tapping into the Wesabe community’s subconscious frugality to save you money, a very powerful new tool for Wesabe users!
I recently wrote a little about Toluu when I released a Toluu badge widget, since that time I have really grown to enjoy the RSS sharing and suggestion service and to respect it’s creator, Caleb Elston. His ability to listen and focus on the user’s needs is driving Toluu, a side project for Elston, to grow and earn attention with a speed that would make many full time startups jealous. Between working full time and building Toluu, he was kind enough to answer a few questions:
First off, can you tell us a little about yourself?
I have always been interested in computers and the internet, my Mom and Dad are both programmers, so I was surrounded with technology from an early age. I was going to school for a business degree, but in my spare time I was always working on some internet project or another; doing the design, planning the interaction, thinking about what would actually be useful, or how to present data and ideas in a new way that was simpler than had been done before. I was recruited by a startup before I finished school and that is where I currently work.
Is Toluu a project or a full time job?
Toluu is a side project for me. I have always enjoyed working on more than one project at a time. It helps keep things fresh and allows my brain to work on different types of problems at the same time. It is also great having to learn new skills for a particular project that then see those new learnings trickle into your other work. Instead of watching a lot of TV or just bumming around the house at night or on the weekends I work on Toluu.
Many recent startups have taken on unconventional names to have something short and pronounceable. What led you pick Toluu?
I think that shorter names are better than longer names. I also think it is better to find a name that has little to no meaning, so that meaning can grow into the name based on the reputation and thoughts people have about the project or company. Starbucks is a great example of a name that is part of the lexicon now, but had little meaning before Howard Schultz grew the company into the Starbucks we know today. Toluu sounds playful to me and it was a name that my friends and family actually remembered a few days after I mentioned it to them as a possibility; needless to say it stuck.
With some of the large feed reading services offering feed suggestions already, what advantages does Toluu have that should draw people to upload their data instead of just using what’s already at hand?
Toluu aims to make finding new and interesting feeds easier and more rewarding. We think that connecting with your friends and those who have similar tastes to you is the best way to find interesting feeds. We are completely focused on creating the best experience for discovering these feeds. Many feed readers are integrating suggestions of one form or another, but the problem is they treat it as a minor feature. They all have so many other functionalities they need to focus on that suggestions are just an afterthought, they are tacked on. The other problem is that feed readers are quite isolated. You are isolated from your friends and you are isolated to your particular feed reader. Toluu is feed reader agnostic so you don’t have to get people to switch feed readers to use Toluu, and we match users against everyone else on Toluu so you are very quickly brought into the community and finding new people and feeds.
Have you had to explain Toluu to a parent/grandparent or older relative, how did that go?
I have explained Toluu to all sorts of people, and it has gone pretty well. When you frame it as, “You can see what your friends actually read and it helps you discover new things to read” people get it. Terms like RSS, ATOM, OPML, hCard, and OpenID tend to confuse people outside of blogosphere. These are our jargon. I think as more mainstream sites adopt these technologies it makes it easier for people to use the underlying technology in a casual way without even understanding how it works. I hope that Toluu can help in some small way to make these things easier for people to understand and use on a day to day basis.
Toluu is taking off, I know you’ve already had to upgrade your server to handle the load. Can you share a few insights into what it’s been like and what you’ve learned?
We just launched our private beta about 2 weeks ago and the response has been absolutely tremendous. I did not expect people to latch on so quickly or feel so passionate about the service in just a few weeks, but people have, and I am so grateful to them. We have upgraded our servers twice since launch to deal with the growth in users, feeds, and the exponential growth in the number of calculations we compute that power our recommendation and matching algorithms. I think the most important thing for anyone launching a new webapp is to be available to your users as much as possible. Answer emails as quickly as you can and be where the conversation is happening. I read every blog post anyone writes about Toluu and answer any questions or address concerns they may have brought up. Remembering that the service would just be a pile of code in a datacenter somewhere if it weren’t for the community is a humbling thing to remember everyday.
Is there anything else you’re working on or that’s coming up you want to plug?
We are still ironing out the bugs that users are finding with the site and we are totally grateful to our users for working through the kinks and driving the service to where it is today. As we continue to grow and let more users into the beta we will have to continue to scale our infrastructure to handle the demand. Regarding new shiny things, we have many new features and improvements already in development and we will be sure to let you know when they launch!
If anyone would like to signup for the beta leave a comment below and we will coordinate with David to get you an invite.
Thanks again to Caleb for taking the time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions. If you already use the service we would love to have your impressions, and as Caleb said – if you want to try the service out, then please leave a comment and we’ll see if we can’t get an invite to you.
And you want to know what it means, you want it decrypted and according to my post title you think I’ve got the answer…
I Don’t :-p
*UPDATE: Thanks to Knetwork Reader Frank for posting the needed cypher (ROT13). The text BUJUNGNSBBYVNZ decrypts to OHWHATAFOOLIAM or Oh What A Fool I Am. And as an extra bonus I’m not going to kill you now that I told you!
Happy April Fool’s Day! I’ll tell you what I would suggest, order yourself $20 worth of goods, get the shirt free, and maybe they will give you the decryption key. Of course it’s entirely possible that the shirt doesn’t decrypt to anything or that if someome tells you what it means, they’d kill you. If you’re going to order something I suggest that you pick up a USB Rocket Launcher. You know you want to…
April Fool’s Day pranks know no bounds and you’ll find them all over the web today, here are some of my favorite from the sites I regularly visit. I’ll try to update as I come across more today.
ThinkGeek: Always one of my favorite sites, the top banner advertises Wii Sports for the iPhone and it only gets better from there…
The NSA Mega Encrypted Tee – This is a “real” product for April Fool’s Day. Free with orders of $20 or more!
Virgle Pioneer – “Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.” (be sure to apply!)
Google Wake Up Kit – “The “wake up” notification uses several progressively more annoying alerts to wake you up. First it will send an SMS message to your phone. If that fails, more coercive means will be used. The kit includes an industrial-sized bucket and is designed to be connected to your water main for automatic filling. In addition, a bed-flipping device is included for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.”
GMail Custom Time – Set the time on your e-mails to anytime (min of April 1 2004 when GMail launched) Only 10 custom time changes a year so use them wisely!
Woot: For April Fools Day, Woot has Woot-Off featuring the same product over and over and over! Click the pictures from the posts to see the power pack on vacation!
When it was released, the Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin seemed like it was going to be a HUGE help in making my posts more useful and more attractive, and while it helped, I finally got fed up with it and turned it off. There seemed to be very little development going on for it and some of the major bugs, like stacking the photo credits if you use the same picture for multiple posts and the fact it blew up and spewed code on my archive page led me to deactivate it. The Yahoo! search links were also not very helpful in adding other relevant content, and for some reason it didn’t like double spaces after a sentance. so blah! and bye bye.
Now, new on the scene is Zemanta, currently available as a Firefox plugin. I’ve installed it and am giving it it’s first run and I have to say I’m impressed. It’s still in heavy development but is very impressive, here are a few of things they are doing better than Yahoo! shortcuts:
Zemanta puts everything on the Write Post screen, With Yahoo! you had to jump to a new page, make your additions and then jump back and fix anything the plugin made a mess of.
Link suggestions are single click and go where you would naturally want. Right now you can generally pick between the site’s home page or a Wikipedia entry, more options are on the way.
Tag suggestions! Zemanta suggests tags for your post from your content and semantic search for related keywords you may not have written about.
Related Article Suggestions from around the web (see below). You may not like this if you hate the idea of sending a reader to another site, but it increases the benefit to your reader and that’s important for return visitors.
There are a few things that I would like to see added, or if they exist make it easier to find them:
A WordPress plugin. It’s not hard to install Zemanta, but if it were a WordPress plugin I could use it on any computer and any browser. Then it would have access to suggest from my existing categories and make use of other internal WordPress functionality.
Gallery Scroll for more pictures, everything I see now is Firefox and WordPress none of which I want to use so let me scroll for more than just the 9 available.
Internal links – give me a section of related links that are only from my site
OPTIONS! Give me options! What if I don’t want suggested articles with adult content and want all my inserted links to be no follow? Even changing the color scheme or the ability to turn off some of he features would be nice.
Overall, I’m impressed. I’m not real sure about the Zemified button down there, but I’ll certainly leave it up for this post!
Image by bgreenlee via Flickr
