AJAX is all beautiful and good and you can use it to build wonderful applications, but it’s important for web site designers to keep in mind one very important customer: search engines. You want to get good, content into Google and Yahoo so they can find your site, don’t you? Well AJAX is not good for that. Search engines attempt to treat all web applications the same and I’d be surprised if any of them actually attempted to index a site based that was built with AJAX, I suppose Google could somehow attempt to, but I doubt they can do it well.

Part of what makes AJAX applications so powerful is the ability to build responsive contextual applications. Search engines typically operate on a page by page basis and don’t really remember the context of what a user is doing when they find a new page and index it. It doesn’t really make sense for them to index highly contextual information, because then the search engine user would have to follow the same path to get to that page.

So what do you do to build an AJAX application which can be indexed by the major search engines? I’m not sure, you probably don’t want to go to the extreme of building two separate sites, or serving up special content just for search engines. Google has said they put a significant penalty on sites that cloak(give different content to search engines than to regular browsers) because it’s so often abused by search engine optimizers.

I picked up my Prius yesterday. It’s nice. Among the features are a total touchless system where I can walk up to the car and start it without putting a key in. It senses when I have the key nearby and lets me start the car automatically. It tells you how good your mileage is(I’m currently doing about 40mpg). Plus the extra space is nice, and of course baby likes the side curtain air bags and other safety features. I will have to spend some time figuring out the subtleties of the GPS navigation system and some other things, but overall I’m pleased.

I decided to take the tradein value on the s2k. They upped their offer to 14.8k which was enough to seal the deal. I felt like it was only about about $1500 less than the real value of the car and for $1500 I was willing to avoid the hassle. If it were $3k like I originally thought then I would resell it on the open market. But I re-evaluated the value of the car after checking out the price of actual completed auctions on ebaymotors. There were quite a number that closed at 15-16k without meeting the reserve price. So that means I’d feel very lucky to get 17k for it, and that’s with the hassle.

OK. I got the friends and family discount. It’s only good until November 30th so you’ll need to act fast. It’s %20 off everything, and it’s good for one order only, so you’ll need to load up on as much stuff as possible. Send me an email and I’ll forward you the promotion.

My Prius should arrive this week, so I have to get rid of my S2000. The Toyota dealer was honest with me beforehand and said he wouldn’t be able to give me a good deal on a car. But he said he’d make his best offer anyways and he would guarantee it for 3 weeks which is nice because it allows me to shop it around for other offers.

When I told him it was an S2000 he seemed more upbeat about being able to make a good offer on it. So I was a bit hopeful when I went in that he’d be able to give me an offer that would be good enough for me to take so I wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of selling it myself. Kelly Blue Book told me that it ought to be worth about 18k and people on craigslist seem to be asking more like 20k for it. Unfortunately the Toyota dealer was only able to offer me 14k for it, which is so low that I really can’t take it. He mentioned that I could try Auction City as a good place to sell it. From the web site it looks like they’ll just sell it on ebay motors and manage the whole process for you. That seems like a pretty good business model really, because I know I am happy to pay someone to do everything for me. Looks like they’ll charge about $250 in fees plus %8 of the price. So if it sells for 18k, that’d cost me about 1700. The breakeven point of having them sell it instead of selling it to the dealer is roughly 17.2k. I’ll try and call them this week and check the prices and how the arrangement works.

Our sales guy also mentioned how hard it was to sell a black car because spots and dirt shows up so badly on them, which I knew. However I didn’t think it made it them hard to sell from the pristine environment of the showroom.

One of my new favorite pieces of reading material is Mark Cuban’s blog where he talks about everything. He’s the famous owner of the Dallas Mavericks who accumulated $1m in fines in one year for arguing with various NBA officials. He’s very smart, very internet savvy and shares a lot of information.

In particular this post is pretty interesting analysis which I agree with. To summarize it, his argument goes like this: once people get High Definition TV content they will never go back to standard definition. HD is expensive to distribute because of limited bandwidth, and only a few networks can afford it. Therefore instead of the fragmentation of viewership we are currently seeing to hundreds of channels, we’ll actually see a consolidation of viewership into a relatively few HD channels.

As a user I have to agree with what he says. We got HD at the beginning of this year and there is really no going back. We spent some extra money on an extra large HD TV and Tivo system and it has been amazing. Everytime someone looks at our TV for the first time they are really wowed. Our channel selection is almost entirely relegated to the half dozen channels where they can actually broadcast in HD(that includes ABC,NBC,CBS,ESPN,ESPN2,DiscoveryHD,HDNet and a couple others). We upgraded so we can watch pro football in HD. So what Cuban has said so far is true. However, I’m not entirely convinced that the bandwidth required by HD TV is the insurmountable challenge that he says it is.

At Dave’s house there was a poker get together in honor of Brian being available. Among the other attendees: myself, Tommy Angelo, Patri, Kojo and Andrew. I won’t go into specifics other than to say I played poorly but made out with a lot of money mostly due to various suckouts, including a 9 outer against Andrew, and 2 two outers against Patri.(In fact it was the same two outer where he flopped small tripped and I caught one of the two remaing jacks to fill up). This game really has a tougher lineup than a home game ought to have, but I think most of the people play a little bit worse here than their normal game.

In addition to the traditional games we got in some Habu and we also played an amusing new variant of Mississippi stud Hi/Lo where the low is the best Badougi hand. I wrote up that wikipedia entry on Badougi, someone ought to correct it because I’m not sure if it’s accurate. Brian said Habu is Mexican Hold’em Hi/Lo although no one else had ever heard of Mexican Hold’em so that description wasn’t really that helpful. Others called it Stud8 with a community board instead of individual boards, which is also accurate and was one way I thought of describing it, but that might make you think it’s played with antes/bring in. There were some amusing incidents of people misreading their hands in the Stud/Badougi game, in big pots no less.

Yesterday I got to take a tour of the Shutterfly print facility. It’s an impressive amount of mechanical hardware. They have massive Indigo printers which are state of the art printing machines, more traditional silver based photographic paper, and a variety of other things which do folding, cutting, labelling. It’s a very high volume plant operation so every little thing that can be optimized for efficiency pays for itself in labor costs. There’s lots of industrial engineering at work, getting all the pieces of an order together as quickly as possible isn’t particularly easy if there are 5 types of products in the order each made in separate batches in different buildings.

Among the more labor intensive products products offered are photobooks, which look very nice, and personalized greeting cards which we will stamp and mail for you if you upload all the names and addresses(which you can import from Outlook/Palm). It was important to the business people that those greeting cards seem personalized. So direct mail cards have no indication on them that they are from Shutterfly and they we use regular stamps and ship them out like regular mail. That isn’t cheap, but for customers it makes their cards seem a bit less impersonal.

We’ll be running some special holiday deals for employee friends and families, so if you’re planning an order, email me and I’ll email you the details and the promotion codes. I don’t have the details quite yet, but I will shortly.

Amazon is not given enough credit for one thing that they’ve done right, opening up their information and their engine for everyone to use. It’s very very hard to go to your senior management and say “I want to give away our information and let other people access our data including our competitors because I think it will generate us more revenue in the long run.” And it’s even more surprising when management actually signs off on it.

One of the reasons that Amazon has built the best brand for shopping on the net is because they have done that. They are a portal for shopping because they offer products of their own but also those of competitors. Amazon has defied conventional wisdom and put out a large set of APIs and services designed to let affiliates and partners access to a surprising amount of information. The advertising of competitors is risky, but it has allowed Amazon to become the destination for shopping which translates into more repeat business.

The one place I think Amazon is bad is their UI. There really is way too much information on every single page and they must lose some people because of the confusion.

By the way, if anyone is interested in working at Shutterfly check out the job opportunities. I of course am on the software side, but we have a number of seasonal/temporary positions at the print facility in Hayward in case you want to learn how to operate a super high volume photo processing center. Because of the seasonal nature of the business, we have several contract positions on both the web and print sides. I get a nice referral bonus (especially for permanent people) that I’d be happy to share with you.

One of the things that is really nice about working here is that there’s a customer focus that comes from people being passionate about the photography business. Employees are users and can empathize and visualize problems. Passion for the business is something that helps eliminate politics. It’s also possible that this is a business where the goals are simple and so it’s easier for everyone to agree on what’s right.

Two new products I’ve seen from the two premier internet companies have impressed me with their mediocrity. It’s true that both Google Base and Yahoo’s Shopping pick lists are just releasing first beta versions, but these products suck. It’s possible that both the products have potential, but right now I am just a disappointed customer asking “Where’s the Beef?” Other people may have different opinions, but at this point I can’t see how’d you say that these are great things.

In their defense these companies still have a history of making great products. Yahoo releases lots of products which don’t last(remember Yahoo Invites and Yahoo’s payment system)? And Google has built their reputation on organizing information(which Google base will eventually do).