The online ramblings of Dylan Bland

I love web apps. I love having access to the same data at home and at the office. I love being able to collaborate with members of the team who work remotely.

At Zillion we already use Google Docs and Basecamp and last month to prove I’m not a total hater we added Xero to the mix.

Xero doesn’t disappoint. It works as well as it looks. I’m yet to be convinced the numbers stack up on the business side but they’ve built a truly world-class product that should benefit hugely from word-of-mouth. My new accountant works for a firm and while she’d heard of Xero she’d never used it. Thanks to the intuitive interface (that recently picked up an award from one of my usability hero’s Jakob Nielsen) she was up and running in no time and has already signed up to one of their Auckland-based advanced training sessions. Another convert that will no doubt tell her friends.

So thanks to Xero when my accountant enters and reconciles transactions I can see the results in real time. It’s a great feeling and I recommend Xero to any web savvy business owner. Aside from the price and the possiblity of it being increased once you’re “locked in” I don’t see any reason for small business owners to stick to MYOB.

Good work Xero and best of luck getting those subscription numbers up.

PS: if anyone from Xero is reading this. We loved Xero so much we did the unthinkable and re entered three years of historical data into Xero. Because BNZ Internet banking doesn’t let you export data further back than 6 months we did a lot of manual entering. While I appreciate entering transactions manually one at a time isn’t your core business the interface for this could be improved hugely if you let people enter more than one transaction per page. Web apps will never be as fast as local apps and waiting for pages to load is a pain, especially if you’re reloading once every 20 seconds or so.

Earlier this year I reported that Zillion members who use Slingshot as their ISP were able to read and access other people’s private information on Zillion, including private messages. Slingshot accepted responsibility for the problem, claiming “browsing and authentication issues” (probably due to the misconfiguration of a proxy appliance) and the issue was eventually resolved.

So I was therefore shocked today to read this story on the nzherald…

“Slingshot customers trying to use their own accounts were directed into random email, Trade Me, Facebook and Bebo pages.”

“User Michelle Smith also saw another person’s emails through Facebook.”

“On the Cre8d Design blog, Rachel wrote: “This afternoon I tried logging into Gmail as I usually do to check my email and discovered that I was logged into someone else’s account.”

“Mr Andrew’s account became public and someone who was signed in under his name downloaded pornography to his page.”

“Another user, Roxanne, found her profile showing National party leader John Key as a “friend”.

Sound familiar? Imagine what it would feel like to know someone else was reading your email, your Facebook messages etc. If you’re a Slingshot customer…that’s exactly what’s happening.

How do Slingshot get away with this? It’s the third time (that I’m aware of…probably more) this very serious problem has occurred. What’s to stop it happening again?

If I were a Slingshot customer I’d be switching ISPs immediately. No question.

Related posts

• Slingshot/CallPlus serve up random cached pages

On Monday we launched an interesting feature for Zillion that allows sellers who use Auctionitis (a third party software application for listing on Trade Me) to export their listings from Auctionitis and import them straight onto Zillion.

This is a small but significant improvement to Zillion as it’s estimated that 60,000 auctions per week are listed on Trade Me through Auctionitis. Now those 60,000 auctions are just a few clicks away from being listed on Zillion too.

Sometimes it’s the little things that have the biggest impact!

There was a great post earlier this week on Signal vs. Noise about how not to apply for a job.

It’s got me thinking about the importance of attention to detail and using terminology correctly and consistently throughout your web site.

To use some examples from Zillion, an “auction” is how you sell an “item” and an “item” is what you actually sell. You can therefore “win an auction” but you eventually “pay for an item”.

Sellers are not “listers” and pictures are not “photos”. A Member Name (not “member name” or “username”) is how you’re identified on the site and what you use to sign in (not “login”).

Zillion is not “zillion” and happysheep is not “Happysheep”. nzflatmates is certainly not “NZ Flatmates”.

In my opinion, getting this wrong is right up there with misspelling someone’s name, so as a team we try our very best to remember to get it right.

My Dad used to always say to me “good manners costs you nothing” and this is no different. Attention to detail costs you nothing either. Microsoft would never refer to themselves as “Micro soft” just as eBay wouldn’t refer to themselves as “Ebay”.

Just because you’re small, why treat yourself and your brand with any less respect?

And before you ask, yes I’m a bit weird and at times I can be very difficult to work with…but I’m lucky that I’m by no means the only person in the team who shares these values!

Seeing lots of small improvements go live feels great.

Today on Zillion we increased the size of pictures in categories and on the listing page. With more and more people upgrading to bigger LCD monitors and broadband, the timing felt right. The site looks great. We also jiggered the Favourites page so it’s possible to view new listings from your Favourites quickly and easily from the one page. Very cool.

On happysheep we created a page where enthusiastic members can download banners and buttons (go go go!) to display on personal web sites and blogs. It’s important to encourage things like this when you have a near non-existent marketing budget (it’s hard to justify spending big bucks on advertising when you have a “free to list” business model).

These changes only took a small handful of hours off and on over the past couple of weeks. The only tricky part was running a script to resize the images on Zillion and reducing how long we retain images on expired listings to ensure our backups don’t balloon too much.

Unlike some changes we’ve made in the past, today’s improvements feel well worth the effort. Small wins FTW.

The 2008 NetGuide Web Awards were held last night and Auckland, and I’m happy to report that Zillion was a finalist in the “Best Trading Site” category and happysheep was a finalist in the “Best New Site” category.

Unfortunately we didn’t actually win either of the two awards, however Simon won “Best Shopping Site” with GPStore and “Best Gaming Site” with Gameplanet, two very well deserved wins! I’m especially happy to see the GPStore team continue to win the Best Shopping Site award, as the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to keep meeting and exceeding their rapidly growing number of customers is truly impressive. Well done guys!

The Web Awards did however highlight for me the relative lack of emerging web talent in New Zealand. In most categories, it was the same sites up for the same awards with few, if any, real surprises. I’d love to see more new sites launched in 2009 and more young people getting involved too.

But overall a really fun night, and my congratulations goes out to all the winners.

We were so impressed by the huge number of volunteers who put their hand up to distribute happysheep stickers that this week we’ve decided to try something similar on Zillion.

We thought it would be a cool idea for sellers who are selling on both Zillion and Trade Me to include a little business card with their Trade Me parcels, pointing their Trade Me buyers to their listings on Zillion. This kind of direct marketing should be really effective as it’s getting into the hands of exactly the kind of people we want to reach.

Here’s what the card looks like…

Once again we’ve had a fantastic response to our invitation to help out, with over 60 sellers offering to include the cards in their Trade Me parcels. Check out some of the comments below…

“Hi I would like to request your free business cards please. This offer is very generous and it will surely be a good way to end up a sale.”

“Thanks for that! Will be good to give other people some more options for buying online.”

“Great idea please forward”

“Great, thanks, i’ll look forward to that. We are currently promoting all our listings on several sites quite vigouressly. I believe that those of us who try to keep prices down will start doing exceptionally well due to the huge increases in the cost of living. Zillion is assisting with that by once again having free gallery photo’s. As Trademe gets more expensive to list with, listings will drop dramatically”

“would love some business cards…about to get back into zillion ..Biz cards would help heaps”

“Haven’t sold much yet but do make a habit of telling my trademe customers where they can find me on zillion so cards sound a good idea. Thanks.”

“please send me business cards to include in the parcels I sell on Trademe. I have temporarily not relisted any items due to a slow trade. I intend to resume my listings with new items soon.
This is a great idea”

“I would be keen to start sending out Zillion cards, put me down for a hundred or so”

“What a brilliant idea! If it’s free, I would like 100 pieces (I’ve been a trader on trademe since 2004….am keen to gradually switch to zillion too:)”

“I would love some of these.”

“we would like some business cards – we currently send out about 100 packages minimum per week to our trademe customers.”

“could you send me some free business cards please like 50 or so if u can coz ur the best lol thx heaps n heaps :p”

“I think that is a great idea. I dont sell on Trademe but if I do, i would be more than happy to add your your card to them or anyone I sell to when I am at markets selling.”

“Hey thats a great idea, and would like some of these cards..cheers”

“Can i have some please? i still sell alot on tm and often put in emails about z, but this would prob get noticed more”

“Hey how you going, i like your idea of the business cards. Just new to using zillion sick of trademe haha. layout is much better and pricing is better for fees. How do we get the free business cards?”

“thank you very much! What a great idea Dylan.”

“Would love to include some in my parcels, thanks Dylan”

“hi there im a trader on trademe.co.nz i use it for selling things that dont sell on here and buying things i cant find on here. i use trademe quite alot i think it might help if i have about 200 ish cards so i can also give them to my friends and recomend them to you part of the 200 cards will go out with my packages i send away to trademe buyers.”

“I am more than happy if you would like to send me some business cards to pop them into all my outgoing parcels to promote Zillion.”

“Hi i just received your email , and would love to send them out with my other sales , I cant wait for Zillion to get bigger as it is a far better system than Trademe”

I really love little win/win ideas like this, and the total cost of the excercise was only a few hundred dollars. I wish we’d done it years ago!

A little over a week ago I was interviewed by StartUP and asked questions about Zillion, happysheep, nzflatmates and what it’s like starting a web site in New Zealand.

Having now seen the video and the huge bags under my eyes, I can confidently say I need more sleep!

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Sometimes I take a moment to reflect on the way I go about doing things, and often catch myself making life much more difficult than it really needs to be.

Take email newsletters as an example.

Monthly email newsletters are key to all of our sites. They’re the cheapest way to obtain traffic and keep our brands near the top of people’s minds.

But preparing them every month can be a real *#^!@. Actually sitting down to write them is easy because I can do that on my own in my own time, but then I need to organise the artwork, wait for that to get drawn up, send it back if I didn’t do a very good job of describing what I was looking for, then forward the copy plus the visuals through to get coded up, then proof read then finally send it some five days later. Drama!

As you can see, the end result is basically a work of art. But boy do we pay a price! Is it really worth all the time, hassle, money and stress? I don’t think so. Plus, the whole rigmarole actually puts me off sending one in the first place.

So with happysheep we tried something different. No images, no artwork, nothing but the bare bones of what we wanted to communicate to our members. And what do you know? It works. People still open them, people still read them, and people still click through to the site. In fact, I actually prefer receiving newsletters like this because they take less time to read. Just the key points with no happy text to fill the space beside a random piece of artwork!

And the best part of all? The whole thing took 30 minutes to write, and less than an hour for Shane to code up and send. Oh, and that includes building the online survey. The effort vs. reward ratio doing it this way is awesome and so much smarter for a small team such as ours. We don’t have a marketing department or an ad agency, so every minute we spend working on stuff like this is a minute we cant spend on developing the site.

Keep it simple ftw!

Last week we had a mini crisis over at Zillion with some members reporting that they could view private information belonging to other signed-in members. Obviously this was alarming and the issue had our complete attention until it was resolved.

After eight long hours of investigation and various attempts by five people to get to the bottom of what was happening, we eventually uncovered that the problem was experienced exclusively by members who use either Slingshot or CallPlus as their ISP.

It turns out that Slingshot and CallPlus were experiencing “browsing and authentication issues” (probably due to the misconfiguration of a proxy appliance) which basically translates to “we’re serving our customers random cached authenticated pages belonging to other customers.” Scary stuff.

Once we understood what was going on we were able to make a quick change to our headers to prevent Zillion from being affected. During our investigation we also uncovered that Trade Me experienced exactly the same problem in 2007. It’s sad that Slingshot/CallPlus obviously didn’t learn their lesson…

..or perhaps Annette was offered her job back and has fallen off the wagon, again

Moral of the story? We recommend customers of Slingshot/CallPlus switch to a decent ISP and recommend Maxnet, Orcon or even Telecom as suitable alternatives