New features: offline support, Google Analytics, operator groups

We're pleased to announce some exciting new LiveLeader features.

Improved offline messages. One of our most requested features has been better offline message support. We've now added support for this to all plans, including the free plan. Simply select Settings > Options to set an offline message. If you signed up a while ago, you'll need to re-embed LiveLeader to see the change (click Settings > Embed code).

Operator groups/departments. LiveLeader now lets you group operators together. This can be very useful if you want to divide chat requests between e.g. sales and technical support. Operator groups are available with the Enterprise plan. To set up an operator group, create a new template by selecting Settings > Customize > New template, and then select the Operators tab.

Google Analytics support. Google Analytics is a free must-have for the webmaster of today. If you use Google Analytics on your web site, you can now tell LiveLeader to track chats. Simply select Settings > Options to switch on Google Analytics support. Each chat session will be tracked with the name of the operator, and the address of the current page. Google Analytics support requires the Enterprise plan.

Customization improvements. In response to customer requests, we've added several ways you can customize LiveLeader:

• Set a maximum number of concurrent chats per operator
• Adjust the timeout for when operators are considered offline
• Override all language strings used
• Code your own offline notifications using HTML+CSS
  

Note that not all customizations are available in the free plan.

We're all ears... If you have feature requests or suggestions for how we can improve LiveLeader, we'd love to hear from you:

https://www.liveleader.com/en/feedback/

Beating Google

Beating Google on search is hard. The latest entrant is Cuil, which recently launched amid much fanfare. Predictably, they've been lambasted by the techno blogs. Google is so good that you get a sense of whether a competitor has a chance within about 20 seconds. Cuil doesn't smell like a winner.

But but but. Whereas most Google clones copy Google's interface pixel-by-pixel, Cuil's interface is better, in some respects. For one thing, they cram more search results into the page, without making it look crowded. The category widgets work quite well, too: pretty yet functional. And it is surely a useful innovation to keep the links to the other results pages visible at the bottom of the window. My guess is that Google would be doing some of these things if they weren't scared to death about messing up their famously simple and usable interface.

Admittedly, Cuil's results are a little strange. When I Google, er.. Cuil myself, the picture above is one of the first results. Thanks! :-)

Web builders and PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint has been around for a few years. I'm sure that Microsoft borrowed the GUI from some other program, but I've always liked it. It's super-simple and immediately intuitive. "Click here to edit title" is very difficult to get wrong. In a way, the GUI philosophy is similar to Google's, in that users aren't really expected to learn anything, they just click where it says "click".

Web building tools, though, have taken a while to get as simple and intuitive. In part, this is because drag-and-drop GUIs have been difficult to do robustly on the web. But as these problems are addressed by a number of tools and libraries, there is really no reason why editing a website could not be as simple as making a presentation. Or simpler.

The startup hailstorm known as web 2.0 naturally includes a few dozen companies tackling the challenge of visual web building. ReadWriteWeb has an interesting rundown of some leading contenders. Weebly seems to be pulling ahead of the field. And their tool is impressive, if a little flaky. (Weebly is also the only tool on the list offering a live demo. That tells me they believe in their product. More importantly, people will actually bother to try it.)

Now the market needs to get more clumpy. Even with the latest web 2.0 toolkits, it is a lot of work to build these GUI-intensive tools, at least if you're aiming for desktop-app robustness in most browsers. The testing alone can keep a small development team occupied for months. As bigger companies enter the market (as Lycos appears to have done with Webon), the products will get more mature, and we'll start to see a new level of competition. And PowerPoint-style web building will truly have arrived.

Email is dead

Well, not quite. But as this post at ReadWriteWeb points out, real-time is very much in the ascendant on the web. The latest evidence is Google's launch of real-time stock quotes (also here).

The mind boggles at all the productivity lost through inefficient use of email. The long emails that everyone hates to read. The never-arriving replies. The carefully worded requests for detailed information that are answered with "Yes that looks fine" in the subject line.

As everyone gets more comfortable with instant messaging, its usage in the business world will explode, as it has with consumers. Already most tech-savvy companies are using them for internal communication. The next step will be to use them to talk to customers and vendors. The customer of the future won't be willing to accept the typical email response you get from companies today: "Thank you for emailing us. We will try to answer your query within 48 hours". Really? But you pick up the phone when a customer calls, right?

One interesting consequence of the impending real-time revolution is that time zones will be back in fashion. They weren't actually out of fashion, but email made them less important. Now, if you want to be available to your customers when they want to talk to you, you'll need to think about when they're awake. For a European company with a customer base in the US, that can mean unorthodox working hours.

(Our own small contribution to the real-time revolution, LiveLeader, is a free, AJAX-driven embedded live chat product).

The usability chasm

I just made the switch to Mac. After 20 years in the Microsoft world, switching operating systems is a little like learning to walk again. All of a sudden I don't know the shortcut for making text bold. Or how to install programs. (Turns out you just have to drag and drop.) I can feel my brain rewiring the shortcuts, and the process is not very pleasant.

But even after a few days of stumbling, it's clear that I'm here to stay. Mac OS X is a thrill to use. Partly it's the eye candy, but mostly it's the usability. My bar is set fairly low, though - Microsoft Windows is built on a number of dubious usability assumptions that should have been abandoned long ago.

The Windows Start button was never a good idea. Intuitively, if every task starts with clicking on the same button, that button might as well not be there. One should think that the idea of providing direct links to the most common tasks should be a staple of good interface design. Yet Microsoft still clings to this idea, making it even more prominent in Vista.

And then we have the madhouse that is the Start menu. I try to be conservative when it comes to installing programs. Even so, I have perhaps 50 or 60 programs and utilities that I use on a semi-regular basis. And they all have their own entry in the Start menu. But a direct link? No, I have to open a little folder, and then click on a link to open the program. So that means three clicks to open a program. Very convenient.

Yes, yes, I know we have the desktop and the quick-launch toolbar and the various different areas of the start menu that try to guess what program you're likely to use next. But the end result is messy. And forcing users to grapple with several different ways of doing the same simple task is hardly a triumph of good user interface design.

The Mac OS X application dock, however, is such a triumph. It has two important advantages. One, it provides a convenient way to launch your most-used programs. Direct link, always visible. And two, it provides an intuitive link between launching a program and re-activating it later. Windows breaks that link, since programs are started from one location (Start menu or desktop) and re-activated from another (task bar).

And then there is multitouch. Instead of using only one finger on the trackpad, the newest Macs (as well as the iPhone, of course) lets you use several fingers at once. You scroll a window with two fingers. You right click with a two-fingered tap. You zoom pictures using a pinch motion. And best of all, you can flip web pages back and forth using a three-finger swipe. They almost always work, even if your fingers aren't perfectly positioned. They're a joy to use. (Microsoft has also understood this, and seem to be pursuing this idea quite aggressively in Windows 7.)

Windows does score a few points. It is surely more logical for the application pulldown menu (File, Edit, View etc.) to be attached to the application window, as is the case in Windows. Currently, for instance, I'm typing this blog post into a window that's open on a standalone monitor attached to my Macbook Pro. That means I have to switch to another monitor in order to e.g. add a bookmark. And the concept of maximising a window, which is quite useful, doesn't seem to exist on a Mac. (There is the green little button, but what does it really do?)

The most important difference, though, is that Mac programs on the whole seem to be much better designed. Windows programs usually have more features, but they're never precisely the features you want. So I'm here to stay, and I'm not looking back.

Bye Bye Windows?

Microsoft Windows is still amazingly ubiquitous. To a good approximation, everyone uses Windows. The actual figure is above 95%, measured by people's browsers. (Compare this to opinion polls: nothing ever gets 100 % support. There's always the 3 % who don't agree to anything.)

It may therefore come as a surprise that two Gartner analysts are quoted as saying that Windows is 'collapsing' (also here). The Windows software platform is too bloated and inflexible to be competitive, they say, not least because of backward compatibility. The Windows codebase is Microsoft's Iraq - a quagmire.

To those woes can be added Microsoft's relative absence in the web space. I, for one, don't use any of Microsoft's web services. Not because of any ideological opposition, but because they're not competitive. I try Live Search from time to time, to see how it stacks up against Google. It doesn't. HotMail versus Gmail - puh-lease. I even signed up - in good faith - for Office Live when that came out. Nice try.

That's why Microsoft really needs Yahoo. People live their lives inside their browsers these days. True, the web does not yet solve all the problems that desktop apps do. I don't know how many people do their video editing online, for instance. And Microsoft maintains its stranglehold with Office. But check out some of the features that are coming out on Google Docs: offline access, email notifications, gadget integration, and form support. The latter lets you publish web forms that submit directly into spreadsheets. Pretty cool. So Google is not only copying Office, they're adding innovative, web-enabled features. Stiff competition on the horizon, in other words.

But don't underestimate market inertia. It's going to take time to eat into Microsoft's market share. With 95% market dominance, rumours of Windows's imminent death are clearly somewhat exaggerated. I have a feeling we'll be having much the same discussion in 10 years time.

Now let me upload my Java app

The market for outsourced application hosting just got a whole lot hotter. Google has launched Google App Engine, which lets you host your own app in Google's infrastructure, taking advantage of highly scalable services like the Google File System and BigTable.

This competes head-on with Amazon's suite of web services. Google's offering will be attractive because it does automatic scaling and load balancing. While Amazon-hosted apps are easy to scale, you have to roll your own load balancing, and that requires a little fiddling. With Google, it looks like you need not worry about scalability at all.

On the other hand, an application-oriented hosting service will likely be more limited than a server-oriented service like Amazon's. Most likely, there will be a few limitations on which libraries you can use. For instance, they do not currently support threading.

So far, it's Python only, although the platform is meant to be language-neutral. The question is: when can I upload my Java .WAR file?

Check out the Google App Engine blog