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Archives for May 2008

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Do big names impress you?

Continuing our Rails discussion. Should be wrapped up by next post.

Most of the web development world has dabbled on the bleeding edge of technology. Few, however, are brave or stupid enough to live out there. When pushed to pick a language for that new corporate ecommerce site, we all reach for that dog-eared copy of O’Reilly Cookbook for [php, asp, .net, java] because its safe. No one wants to be that girl in the action movies, you know the one who tests the rotted out bridge by walking across it real, real slowly.

There is comfort in knowing you are not the first down some path. So here is a cribbed list of names that are using Rails today. This comes from Obie Fernandez’s Blog and the source material is from rails100 and Working With Rails The comments on Obie’s post are worth reading as well. These represent some big industry names that are using Rails today.

  • amazon.com
  • BBC
  • CapGemini
  • BPN
  • Cisco
  • C|Net
  • EA (Electronic Arts)
  • IBM
  • JP Morgan
  • NASA
  • Oakley
  • Oracle
  • Siemens
  • Chase Bank (mentioned in the comments)
  • American Express

Newspapers like NY Times, LA Times, and Chicago Tribune are trusting Rails for their online sections, which if they are at all trying will be hosted through advertisements. The thousands and tens of thousands of smaller companies that are using rails have each looked at this list and decided that ‘Yeah, I guess I can trust my business on this platform’. I dunno, the bridge is kinda getting crowded.

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Consumers using blogs and user-generated content

Interesting information regarding online consumer use of blogs, video and podcasts:

Groundswell: From the chart: In the US, of online consumers, 25% read blogs, 14% comment on blogs, 29% watch user generated video, and 11% listen to podcasts. The US is the clear leader in both creation and viewing of user-generated video, which is at least partly due to the fact that YouTube is mostly in English….Podcasts still haven’t caught on the US after years of availability.”

These numbers will be different for the B2B audience, but are very important for the B2C audience.  B2B often follows directly in the footsteps of the consumer market, so they’re interesting from a trend point-of-view. Looks like video is still pretty important.

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Give your Business Users Voice

One way to know what people are saying about your company or products is to have a place where people can post their opinions and ideas.

Similar to Get Satisfaction (covered in my last post), UserVoice provides a forum for customers to post their ideas, opinions and ideas. Once a company sets up a profile, their customers are asked directly for their input at the top of the page which says “I suggest…”. Each idea can be voted and commented on by the entire community. Companies can leave an official response and mark each idea with a status: planned, started, declined, or completed. Ideas can be searched for or browsed by top, new, accepted and completed. Customers can also add ideas free form from a widget that companies can place on their website or blog.

UserVoice is geared towards customer feedback and ideas, but lacks tagging, related issues, general discussion and a tie-in to a larger community. However, segregating the forum for each company could allow customers to feel more comfortable leaving their feedback. Voting on ideas is another valuable feedback, but without negative votes, you only know how many were for it (everyone else either abstains or doesn’t care). UserVoice is still in beta (free for now) so it will be interesting to see how their features develop over the next few months.

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