Feature Suggestions (12)

Recently I signed up for isabel.wang.name as my OpenID through FreeYourID (which I read about on TechCrunch).

If nothing else, they managed to sell me a .name domain. My question is, why isn't 1 1 in this market as well?

February 19, 2007 | Posted By : Isabel Wang at 2:47 PM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (2) If You Don't Have Time to Blog, Twitter Might Be a Fast and Easy Alternative It's a service that lets users post 140-character-or-shorter updates on what they're up to. If you scroll through the public timeline, you might not immediately conclude that Twitter is a must have business app. (A few minutes ago, xboxbetty was eating chocolate and BrianWarren was making coffee.

And as you can see, I am writing a blog post about Twitter.) But as LifeHacker points out, it can be a nifty communication tool. You can use Twitter as a shorthand newsletter.

The example that LifeHacker gave was a video store, whose employees can post new movies now available for rental, holiday business hours, limited-time sales promo, etc. Likewise, web hosting providers can keep customers posted on network status ("some DC2 circuits scheduled for maintenance @ 2-3am") or announce new products ("this just in: quad core servers for $199!").

As Amazon's Jeff Barr puts it, the 140 character limit forces you to be brief without wasting time on formatting. Customers can stay up to date via your RSS feed, which is both more reliable and less intrusive than email. Twitter could also be useful for managers who are responsible for scheduling sales or tech support coverage, especially if your reps are scattered across multiple locations.

You can subscribe to a feed that aggregates your entire team's real time updates ("running 15 minutes late", "leaving for meeting, back @ 3pm", etc), which they can post via SMS (or a web browser, or IM or an internal app that you integrate with Twitter's API). Lastly, LifeHacker recommends Twitter as a to-do list, but Anne Zelenka says it might be better as a "already done" list. For instance, if you and your two partners are traveling to three different cities, you can use your aggregated Twitter stream to keep each other informed on important events that don't require follow-up action ("contract signed with Company X", "new batch of switches will be delivered next Tuesday", etc).

It reduces email clutter and is more flexible than IM; each member of the group can catch up at his convenience. Technorati, CNN, BBC Video and Google News all have Twitter channels; shouldn't you? It's free, it's super convenient - and according to Kathy Sierra's "Asymptotic Twitter Curve" (which I came across via David Terrar's blog), it might help you capture a little more of your audience's attention.

February 9, 2007 | Posted By : Isabel Wang at 9:47 AM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (4) Between Jan 2 and Feb 7, TheWHIR published 23 announcements of shared hosting price reductions. * HostMySite, Hostway, Sibername, MyDomain, 4Domains and Web World Ireland are among those who cut domain prices. * AIT, HostICan , LunarPages , NetPivotal, CWCS, and Netazen increased bandwidth and/or storage allocations.

* Webair, Hosted and 1 1 ran half-price promotions. Many of these announcement mention a desire to make it more affordable for small businesses to maintain a web presence. I don't know about you, but I've never come across a company that held off on building a website because it can't come up with $5 or $10 a month.

And of course, all of these promotions are intended to enhance competitiveness. But as CrystalTech's Robert Cichon puts it, "survival will be brutal, marketing impossible and customer acquisition badly flawed" if one's only sales propositions are price and resource allocations. I think the average small business owner is probably shorter on time than web hosting budget, which is why I feel like BT might be onto something with BT Tradespace.

(As David Terrar reports, this is BT's third small business initiative, following their SaaS marketplace and online collaboration service. Here is an example of a BT Tradespace. The site owner can provide a company description, upload photos and post news updates via a web-based interface; no FTP client or HTML knowledge required.

Visitors can rate the company, map its location, request an appointment, or contact it via email or VoIP. As David points out, it delivers a lot of usefulness for very little effort. No, BT Tradespace's functionality won't be enough for everyone.

Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces has a relatively limited feature set as well, but it signed up 650,000 new users in January alone! The trick to bringing new users into the market, I think, is to lower the entry barrier - not in terms of monthly fee, but time investment required. PS - BT Tradespace and BT's "Workspace" collaboration service are both powered by SMBLive.

Telus is another SMBLive partner. December 19, 2006 | Posted By : Isabel Wang at 11:32 PM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (0) Ok, check out this graph. Blue represents Google search volume for "wiki", red is for "web hosting".

I decided to look this up on Google Trends after seeing that "wiki" is one of Google's top 10 search terms for 2006. Wiki is also #2 on the top how-to's Also interestingly, a friend who works at the Department of Labor mentioned that he's just attended an information session on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' upcoming wiki. He's so excited about the idea of web-based information sharing that he wants to sign up for SocialText and start collaborating within his group immediately.

Update: Just found out via Techcrunch that Zoho has launched their hosted wiki. It looks awesome: along with all the usual wiki features like edit history tracking and reversion to previous versions, you can insert graphs/spreadsheets/slideshows/forms from Zoho Office, as well as videos/photos from third party sites. Zoho's other apps include word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, file sharing, project management, CRM, calendar, database, chat and polling.

A couple of months ago, the company implemented single sign-on across the entire suite. Zoho is hosted at Savvis, on internally developed grid infrastructure. Read/Write Web calls web office products like Zoho one of 2006's major technology trends.

(And indeed, Zoho has more than 150,0000 users - which is 50,000 more than when I first heard about the company in October.) Might there be an opportunity in partnering with Zoho to offer your hosting customers a web office solution? December 18, 2006 | Posted By : Isabel Wang at 12:53 PM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (0) When I was first hired by EV1Servers, I sent then-CEO Robert Marsh a loooong wish list for internal apps.

One item near the top was a dynamic customer map. If I were going to a conference in Chicago or visiting friends in Portland, wouldn't it be cool to find out which major customers are nearby? If 50 companies from a certain city lease 1000 total servers from EV1, shouldn't we fly out there to meet with these folks - and see if they have contacts who might be interested in our services?

There was no Google Maps API back then, so building such a tool didn't seem feasible. But now that there's a Flickr layer and a Wikipedia layer on Google Earth (I read about those in this O'Reilly Radar post) and map mashups for everything from apartment rents to handmade jewelry, why not do the same for your customer base? You could use an internal map that shows customer count, server count, support ticket volume, recent orders and cancellations.

.. by location.

In addition to identifying sales opportunities, the map could also help set content localization priorities. If customers in China seem to submit an unusual number of tickets for very basic issues, maybe they'd appreciate a Chinese FAQ. More interestingly, you could offer customers the (optional, of course) ability to put themselves on a public map.

For instance, Etsy, an arts and crafts marketplace, has a geolocator where buyers can find local sellers. Your customer map could have an ecommerce layer for retailers, a web services layer for developers and designers, a local vendors layer for doctors, lawyers and plumbers..

. I'm guessing there are hundreds - if not thousands - of GoDaddy and 1 1 and DreamHost and BlueHost customers in just about any major city. It costs very little to encourage these companies to do business with one another, but hosting providers could earn major brownie points (and longer-lasting customers relationships) by facilitating these connections.

PS - On a totally unrelated note, I just read on Wired that there's a Santa tracking layer on Google Earth. December 11, 2006 | Posted By : Isabel Wang at 10:50 AM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (0) "0.1% of the Functionality for 99% of the Population" Niel Robertson from Newmerix wrote a very insightful blog post last week about inversion as the cornerstone of the Web 2.

0 revolution. (Niel used to be VP Research at Exodus.) ZingFu offers about 0.

1% of Photoshop's functionality, but it's instantly accessible to 99.9% of the population. In contrast, the other 99.

9% of Photoshop's features might only be understood by less than than 0.1% of the population. Following Niel's logic, a successful web hosting service might look like MySpace or YouTube or Flickr.

Each of these sites offers a tiny % of the average web hosting package's functionality, but their simplicity appeals to an *enormous* audience. In contrast, the other 99.9% of web hosting features might not be readily accessible by the general public.

As a point of reference, none of my friends outside the industry have any idea what FTP is. My favorite simplified web hosting case study is PhotoBucket, a company founded by Alex Welch, a former Level 3 exec. Wired reported a couple of weeks ago that PhotoBucket passed the 30 million user mark, and is signing up 80,000 new users per day.

According to PhotoBucket's official blog, 30 million is also the number of (a) dog owners in the US, and (b) hot dogs consumed in baseball parks. Recently I signed up for isabel.wang.

name as my OpenID through FreeYourID (which I read about on TechCrunch).