srikrishnan

Look forward to it too! Would love to have folks try out both our tools while they are here.

Since we have attention of folks who want to do better onboarding, some cool resources from us: https://preflight.cx - our community for customer onboarding and implementation folks https://www.rocketlane.com/propel - the first ever conference for customer onboarding

Believe it or not, I've been pitching this to them since 2013 :D. Finally. It was a broken experience to submit an issue in the app and then converse painfully over email. In fact, my first slide for customer presentations I've been making for Konotor earlier, and Hotline.io now has always been about showing them Uber's support experience and then showing them how it should be done right.

I run a "inbox for your app" product (plug: www.konotor.com), and I must say a lot of people end up using it as a way to request Happy customers to leave ratings. Nothing wrong in that. Its not as though they are offering money to leave a rating - these are genuine people who like the app afterall. If you hate the app you will still find your way to the app store and leave a review - its not like they blocked out that ability :).

I had twitter's 2 factor auth set up. Guess what? I was once logged out and couldn't login again. It just stopped working. I enter the code I receive over SMS and I go back to the login screen. I tweeted to @twitter from a signed in device and tried to get help for days. No response. Finally ended up dis-associating my phone number from twitter via an SMS and haven't gone back to 2-factor auth again.

"companies sit around trying to figure out what customer charges they can get away with" That is so true! I used to work for a US telco and I've read all the stories about the "mystery charges".

Also, I must say that telcos, and even banks, in India are to an extent like this. Had one bank put a 1.5$ on my credit card statement for an analysis that they did on my spend the previous month - which indicated that 100% of my card spend was towards airfare. I used the card only once, EVER, and I did not ask for that analysis! I ended up spending 3$ (counting just travel cost) fighting the 1.5$ charge, but I absolutely wasn't going to let them have it!

Imagine telcos making an extra 1$ on some random charge on some 10 million customers. Even that is a lot of money!

Super! Will write some tests and share :)

Totally agree that word's review functions are really simple. Which is why even all legal/contract documents are exchanged back and forth between companies in Word today. The hassle is that its done over email - sending versions of attachments back and forth. Nice naming convention helps, but there are definitely better solutions to do the same online today.

The fact that 3 years after it was started, most of us still don't know of it means Baraza questions are clearly not ranked higher than other results :)

Well, I see the same news (on Google Baraza) has been doing rounds on HN since 2010 :D. So its definitely not new software.

I can imagine I would have said the same had I been doing "web development". The way some stuff works on one browser but doesn't on another drives me mad. It is as though web programming is not about logic, but about just knowing how to get stuff to work on the browsers.

I think the fact that we've all grown used to pretty UI and are design/experience conscious means there are more developers spending their energy in prettying up stuff, making it mobile friendly, etc. which not everyone enjoys - though looking at it after its done might still give some satisfaction.

On the other hand, I still enjoy writing scripts to help me with tasks, figuring out a nice algorithm to solve a problem, etc.

If you have a 60-40 mix of stuff you don't enjoy and stuff you enjoy, I think that is OK. If that 60 grows to 70/80, makes it really tough to stay motivated.

For the first time, other than for my own app, I am one of the first 50 to try a new app :) We built a voice messaging app called PhonOn (its on play store and iOS appstore). This was one of the pivots we were considering before opting to pursue another idea. Do you stream the content to the server or is it record the whole thing and then upload the file?

+1. I think it is definitely valuable to allow the user to control the speed of information.

You can look at it as punishment for playing those mindless Zynga games :P

Wanted to add a couple of items:

* Would rather always over communicate than under (respecting the 'maker schedule', of course)

* Make sure you are always aware of what your team mates are working on - not because you don't trust them, but so you know they are always spending time on higher priority things. A daily scrum - even over a skype call or text based chat can help set clear priorities. Should be part of process for any remote team so its not at end of day that you now time was wasted.

maybe it needs to be more generic than 'marketing'. Sometimes its about making the right connections and getting distribution right. Sometimes its about creating barriers to entry that are not via the core product itself.

I saw quite a few opponents mistake themselves to be the wrong snake and crash out. A little callout saying "this is you" at the start of a match would help!

Took me back a decade to days of playing Gnibbles with 3 others on the same keyboard in my computer lab in school :D.

Great point! This makes sense for techies - I tried hard to give Bing a good run, but found myself hitting google.com too often (after looking at the results). " !g" would have definitely made Bing sticky for me!

I used to work on a search product. Interestingly, a lot of layman users don't even realize which search they use. So this would not help for any real gain in numbers for the search engines adopting it (other than in the tech community).

There was a time when mywebsearch (or some such search engine) had its stats very close to the numbers of a very popular torrent client. Needless to say, a mini-survey revealed the users did not even realize their browser's home page had been hijacked (when they installed the torrent client)! They thought they were "googling" (results might have been powered by Google, but thats not the point.)

LinkedIn - yes

FB - how much ever they make it look like email and function in a compatible manner, I don't think its used the same way email is(talking user behavior). It is just an asynchronous text messaging system. It is closer to chat/IM than to email in the way it is used. FB's bid to make it email-like seems to be an effort to move more of your messaging to FB or have the "unified inbox".

Is it really tough to imagine that 10 years from now we won't use "email" for more than 5% of our communication? And that subsequent generations will probably not use it at all?

Younger generations seem to use various other forms of "inboxing" (messaging apps, FB, etc) already. We can see some of the business documents now just being shared over the cloud, more communication over Skype and just meeting invites over email. As for personal mail, form my experience, the only email I receive today are newsletters, notifications, and the occasional BCCed broadcast mail (wedding invites, etc).

I think email is still relevant only for a document trail for business. If its about leaving a document trail, maybe there should be something new and more suited for it - for approvals, discussions, etc.

Its not like people are looking for a solution for a "problem", but then someone is going to create that something - which will make email less relevant even for the business use.

Its also about ownership (of the end product) for some of us. I first thought I like coding as I am solving problems. Then I realized its about writing neat code and algorithms, about finding the best way to do things. Later I figured it was about creation and ownership. At that stage, I figured there are a ton of other things I would enjoy as much as coding - new consumer product development of any form (not necessarily to do with computers or tech).

I believe the right mental model is the first step towards understanding coding or computers. The easiest way to start for a kid might be with something that interests them - like creating shapes/graphics. (I am grateful for my school introducing me to programming via logo when I was nine)

I've been at it 2 weeks now trying to teach my grandma how a computer works. She now understands how a processor works, what is a software program, etc.

I made my grandma dictate code to make me dance giving her exactly 4 commands (moves) I could take (I am a 2-bit processor ;) ). We had fun! Ha. So she coded. No computers. I could also explain processor speed, n-bit processors, different instruction sets, instructions that need operands, etc. Of course I used none of these words.