All I can say is wow.

Ok….well maybe a little more then…..We opened up our main site last week and got some great writeups on Rotorblog.com and Mashable and since then have had some great feedback from initial trials of the system.

The energy in the office is great and we are cracking through feedback and bugs amazingly fast. We plan to open up the service next week which is exciting and are just getting everything ready for the real fun to start.

We are in an interesting space and there are some great competitors out there but I beleive that this is not a 1 horse race. The very nature of social website builders is that they cater to so many situations, most of which have yet to be put into practice. We are at the beginning of a revolution in the way that groups, businesses and other organisations represent themselves online and we intend to make SocialGO the simplest most powerful way of creating this next generation of social website.

The best is yet to come…..

By the way, if you aren’t already make sure you follow me on Twitter.
http://www.twitter.com/alexhalliday

Is if you have yet to do so, check out http://www.faceyourmanga.com/  to create your own funky avatar….looks like me right?

First of all, the o2 iPhone store experianced massive technical difficulties….Apparently they “did not anticipate such huge demand”…..highly unlikely considering the amount of coverage of the launch, huge spike in traffic to their website leading up to the launch and success of the first iPhone. Have they not heard of cloud computing? It would have been very easy to to use a service like Flexiscale or EC2 to fire up a few hundred extra servers for the day and would have kept all of the current customers quite happy.

Secondly, new customers are able to buy phones at o2 stores and Apple stores in London while existing customers are being turned away. While the economics of this move seems logical (if not a bit unfair), in this day and age of Blogging, twittering, texting Apple fans, the average iPhone consumer is far better informed than 5 years ago. This is obvious, irritating and a cheap shot. By drawing forward this revenue a few months, they do little to better their position in the long term and piss off the early adopters.

Finally, the phone itself. It just isn’t as nice as the original iPhone. Cheap plastic feeling, lower battery life and NO dock included. Give me something for free one time and i expect it the next time….very irritating.
Anyway, i look forward to Nokia’s iPhone competitor and let’s hope they take a leaf out of Steve Job’s book :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0UjU0rtavE

While preparing for the launch of SocialGO, on issue that has been a source of much debate has been how are we going to handle the customer service side of things. We tried a number of different services including Kayako support ticketing system and a few others but something wasn’t quite right.

Then we started to use Get Satisfaction, a new, fun and extremely open support system that allows companies, employees and customers all get involved in the customer service discussion. I love it because it makes me feel great as a user and as an employee.

First of all, everthing is public. This is interesting because it makes your customer service that much more critical. Perform well, and potential customers will feel encouraged that you provide a good service. Perform badly on the other hand and you will air your dirty laundry for the world to see.

The effect of this super-openness is interesting. From a customer point of view, brand loyalty is built as customers can see their problems in a public place. As fellow customers  watch the issues they feel like they are contributing to the service and a quasi-celebrity status within the brands commuity. From a company point of view, it puts serious pressure on them to perform. No longer, can Norma  the moaning accounts manager from Middlesborough be ignored. Everyone gets an answer and by the way if she really is being unreasonable other customers will tell her. I have noticed everyone in the company react positively to the pressure that our GetSatisfaction presence has started to place on us.

GetSatisfaction turns your support dialog into a public advert for your business, a self-ranking suggestion box for new ideas, a knowledgebase for all and a self-help area for your users to help other users so you can spend your time more productively…

One concern that the CRM-traditionalists have had is that it could expose the bugs in the system. But in all honesty, I think you can have as many bugs (in the early stages) as you like as long as you fix them quickly enough. An evolving exciting service is a million times more exciting than a stale perfect one. I remember using GetSatisfaction.com myself in the early days and it being very buggy but they reacted quickly and continuted evolving the service. That kind of energy around a web service turns me on. Quick evolution, quick response to problems and an eargerness to please…. all qualities that make consumers excited.

Ok, so I am turning into a bit of a fanboy. But it’s not just me! Their traffic is going through the roof and more and more big brands are hiring “community liason” officers to get involved in the conversation. My final thought is about the openness of the service. They a full API allowing you to recreate the entire GetSatisfaction website on your server……and someone has. ‘Sprinkles’ (after their obsession with muffins?) is a PHP based application allows you to do just that.  We are currently working on creating a SocialGO support commuity with full GetSatisfaction integration. It’s a few months off but I’m excited……… 

Image by orwellsvision

For the templating competition, we produced this quick whiz through of the features of socialGO. 

Stay tunned! Should be able to announce it tomorrow.

Google : Don’t Be Evil*

Unbelievably China’s ever active censorship machine has decided to block access to Google News and YouTube.com over recent information regarding reporting of the riots in Tibet. If you have ever taken candy away from a kid, you will know what happens when you take something away that people love and enjoy……it just makes the problem worse. Efforts to circumvent the censors will increase and the end result can only be negative for China in the long-run. Corporate America should do all it can to encourage freedom of speech.

When Google started filtering search results in China that was the first step in the wrong direction. The internet is designed through and through to be uncensored. To try and impose restriction on what people can and can’t see goes against the very fabric of what the internet and it’s resulting connectivity is all about.

This to me is just shocking and will nothing to win China positive press in the run-up to the Olympics. If anything it was just draw more attention to what is going on in Tibet. Actively covering things up does nothing but send a strong signal that they have something to hide.

* Unless the second largest economy in the world asks you to do so….

So what is it I hear you ask? Well, it’s a DIY social networking service. Any group, business, society, school etc can create a completely customisable social experience for their members. We want to help the administrators and organisers of these groups have an easier time of running things and we want their members to have more tools to interact.

At the beginning of the month the whole team went off to Miami to the Future Of Web Apps organised by the lovely people over at Carsonified. It was a truly amazing experiance. We have been stuck in our office (or the programming sweatshop as it is referred to) for the past year and it was nice to meet some other people working in this exciting industry.

Highlights for me included Cal Henderson who managed to make subversion into a stand-up comedy, and Brian Oberkierch who gave us a fascinating workshop on brands and marketing web apps (i am a massive fan of his blog and podcasts). I also massively enjoyed the team from Remember The Milk and am now an avid user.

So in the next few days we should have finalised the name of our service and should be ready to roll! If anyone is interested in becoming a BETA group for us, then just drop me an email amhalliday at gggggmaaaaillll.com or twitter me alexhalliday.