This post, excerpted from Forrester Research’s Experience-Based Differention, argues that with more access to information, more sensitivity to price, and less sensitivity to advertising, customers are getting harder to win and keep. Organizations try to woo these empowered consumers with mediocre customer experiences — but it won’t work. Firms need to dramatically raise the bar on the customer experience they provide. How? By adopting what Forrester calls Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD). This enterprisewide effort focuses on three principles: obsess about customer needs; reinforce brands with every interaction; and treat customer experience as a competence, not a function.

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mattmarlowe writes “Imagine if Red Hat released a version of Linux, and after it was deployed, customers noticed that any processes with a start date of today would refuse to run? Well, that’s what happened to VMware… a company that wants nearly all server applications running in virtual machines within a matter of years.” Supposedly a fix will be available… in 36 hours.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Photo sharing service Shutterfly has announced the public launch of Shutterfly Share Sites today. Rather than sharing individual photos or photo sets, Share Sites allows you to create a page around an event (e.g. birth of baby, wedding, launch of a startup, etc.).

Share Sites is basically a mini photo blog with features including a gallery, comments, privacy options, forums, polls, weather information, etc.

There are a variety of templates or you can setup your own. I like this concept and it should hit the sweet spot for the mainstream audience that Shutterfly caters to. 

The Shutterfly Share Sites service has been in private beta for the last few months and over 60,000 Share Sites have been created to-date.

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On Tuesday, blog commenting add-on tool Disqus is launching version 2.0 of its free service. Many of the biggest changes are on the back end, but the user-facing elements have been given many small tweaks that should make it a faster, more approachable solution for the mass market.

I chatted with co-founder Daniel Ha about it on Monday, and he says one of the biggest changes blog owners are going to notice is the plug-in support. The plug-in with the most improvement is WordPress, which can now be moderated from inside of WordPress’ admin area instead of on Disqus alone. (Download WordPress from CNET Download.com.) All comments are also synced up both locally and to Disqus’ servers, so if Disqus goes down your comments won’t. Likewise, you’ll be able to copy over Disqus comments to your existing system if you decide to ditch it later on down the line.

For commenters, the experience has also been improved. Gone is the up and down voting system, which has been replaced with a simple up button to give a good comment a nod, and smarter tools to flag offensive or otherwise spammy comments. Commenters who write a veritable opus can now turn that nine-paragraph work into its own standalone blog post that lives right on Disqus’ servers, where other users can comment and interact with it. Ha says he’s not trying to take away from existing platforms, but give these really good, in-depth comments their own place to start another conversation without completely thread-jacking the conversation that’s going on there. Think of it kind of like FriendFeed, but using the same engine people are used to.

Disqus' new comment admin area lets you quickly remove, restore, and jump user comments from one blog or several at once.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

These are just some of the improvements with the updated platform. Disqus comments are now SEO-friendly systemwide, so your blog posts will be indexed both by content and discussion. The administrative area of Disqus has also been tweaked slightly to be simpler to manage across multiple blogs, although there’s still no way to mass delete messages via search query, or select multiple messages from a list like you can in some blogging tools’ stock comment systems. After having used Disqus to power our Webware 100 2008 award pages, the lack of mass edits and deletes was one of the only weaknesses that really bugged me. Luckily it’s something Ha says is working in testing and will be coming soon in another update.

Disqus is currently in use with about 30,000 blogs and competes with tools like SezWho, IntenseDebate, and JS-Kit to enhance the built-in functionality found in mass-market blogging platforms. To play around with the new system I’ve embedded it below. You can also check it out by visiting one of our Webware 100 2008 winner profile pages.

blog comments powered by Disqus

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Long before there was a Facebook, MySpace, or even Friendster, message boards were the de facto online communities. And while there are still thousands of popular boards scattered around the Web, there has been little innovation in terms of the software that powers them, minus a few upstarts we recently profiled.

This week, community software builder Userplane is throwing its hat in the ring with an innovative new message board product – Userplane Boards. The service combines aspects of Userplane’s other services like chat and IM with threaded message board discussion, creating a real-time environment that makes following conversations much easier.

For example, let’s say you’re in an active message board discussing the Olympics. In a traditional message board, by the time you finish typing your post, a dozen other people may have already posted similar ideas, making your post repetitive and creating all sorts of noise on the board. With Userplane Boards, which are Flash-based, the new messages (which can include photo and video) stream in real-time, meaning you’ll see what other people are posting as you write. In this sense, it’s sort of like a chat room, except, like a message board, people who join in later can see the prior discussion.

Beyond the real-time features, which include integration with Userplane’s IM products for one-to-one messaging, a number of other options make Boards a viable replacement for existing systems like phpBB or vBulletin. For one, Userplane is making it easy to migrate, offering a tool for vBulletin users to migrate their posts and user data, and allowing an import of any standard XML file for those currently using other board software. Beyond that, Userplane Boards feature a CSS style system so message board owners can customize the look and feel to match their site. Finally, each thread also offers an embeddable widget, so the discussion can be embedded elsewhere, in turn generating more traffic for the message board.

Why is Userplane getting into message boards now, when the format has seemingly been supplanted by other forms of online community? According to Product Manager Shane Hall, who I spoke with last week, Boards represents a happy medium between passive and real-time conversation. “The problem with chat is you need to get critical mass … boards solves this problem because when people join they can see the full history of the conversation … and also, if it’s a really active thread that’s based around an event, you’ll see it in real-time.”

Like most Userplane products, Boards are available for free, but include advertising from parent company AOL’s Platform-A. But that can be turned off, as Userplane works with larger publishers individually on revenue share and/or licensing deals if they would like to sell their own advertising.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Userplane Splits Revenue With Facebook App DevelopersUserplane to Offer White Label Video Uploading to Web PublishersUserplane’s OpenSocial APIsUserplane Offers Exportable, Interactive ChatUserplane Hands Out $500,000 in Rev-ShareAOL Buys Userplane to Expand AIMUserplane Plug-Ins Now Support WordPress, Drupal, and More.

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[Update: I’ve reached a partner at the fund, who requested anonymity because of securities laws governing public statements while fundraising, but he says the PEHub story is bogus. “We’ve never talked to anyone about an $800 million fund, in print or verbally.” Instead, VentureBeat has learned the firm may eventually raise a fund, but the […]

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Dropped calls. Flaky high-speed connections. Short battery life. The San Francisco Chronicle rounds up not one, but two unhappy iPhone users and an analyst who backs them up to prove that this new iPhone thing isn’t working as planned. Not to get all Fake Steve on these guys, but look: The problem isn’t the iPhone. It’s you two. The iPhone is so popular that AT&T’s networks can’t handle the load. The onboard apps — so easy to install, just go to the store, click, and boom, it’s that simple — are so hypnotic that you’re running out your batteries playing with them. Pull your pants up and look in the mirror. If you can’t handle it that your phone is more popular than you are, maybe it’s time you and the iPhone went your separate ways.

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Sometimes viewing pictures in rows and columns can be dull. Luckily, there are a number of services dedicated to making the photo search and viewing experience more interesting. Here are 8 resources that provide a new approach to searching and looking at pictures online.

Which are your favorites? Let us know in the comments.

PicLens

PicLens is a neat Firefox addon that lets you search through thousands of images and videos on a stunning 3D wall or on full screen mode from sites like YouTube, Google, Yahoo, Picassa, Facebook, Photobucket, Flickr, DeviantART, and more.

Once you launch the PicLens application on your browser, you can search for images and videos by keywords and by selecting the site you want to search. You can also simple click the ‘Discover’ button to let PicLens bring you the latest images, news, and videos from around the Web. You can zoom into pictures by clicking on an image or by using the scroll button of your mouse. There is also a new beta version of PicLens, rechristened Cooliris Beta, that lets you share pictures and videos from its 3D wall to your friends through email. For Wordpress bloggers, there is a plugin for creating picture and video slide shows on a blog.

Imagery

Imagery is an image search engine that displays search results in a whole new way. Whenever you search for something using a particular keyword, you will see the resulting thumbnail images in an online Web album gallery style and text free. Mouse over each picture and you get the option of going to the source page of that particular image or of opening the image in a new window. If you simply click on an image, it will open below the thumbnail gallery (see screenshot above).

You can set the number of image results Imagery will show you per page, or define the type of files like small, medium, large, black & white, grayscale, color, or on file extensions such as jpg, png, etc.

Zleek

Zleek allows you to create photo albums called Zleek Books, in amazing layouts and share them with your friends and family for them to comment on your pictures. What makes Zleek special and different from other online photo albums is that it allows you to go beyond the rows and columns positioning of your pictures and create collages in a manner that you choose. You can resize and rotate your pictures on the Zleek Book page, choose from multiple backgrounds, and set the album sharing permissions settings.

Interestingness

Interestingness, as the name suggests, creates stunning collages of up to 500 pictures from Flickr that you can feast your eyes on every day. Just keep the site as your homepage and rest assured you’ll be greeted with pleasant images every time you open your browser.

WebMynd

WebMynd is a Firefox addon that tracks the sites you visit and displays them in an attractive visual playback, whenever you want, online or off. WebMynd stores the screenshots of websites you visit on your computer hard drive and the text is sent and stored in its server. You can choose which websites WebMynd stores on your computer and which ones to ignore.

WebMynd provides a reel view in which you can see the screenshots of your visited sites one by one or the grid view wherein you can see the thumbnails of the various sites you visited. WebMynd also integrates into the Google search results page whenever you run a search and displays its results alongside the Google search results on the same page.

Compfight

Compfight is a Flickr search tool that displays images from Flickr without any frills. So if you are just looking for pictures without descriptions, Flickr user names, comments, and other details, you might just want to use this tool. You can search by tags or ‘all text’. The tool also has some features like filtering by Creative Commons or commercial use pictures, safe search, and displaying picture dimensions on mouse hover.

Blackr

Blackr is a neat bookmarklet that you can use to view a Flickr picture on a black or white background, without any of the text, comments, and other details that come with it on the Flickr site. You can choose to have a white or black border on the picture as well.

When you are viewing a picture on Flickr, just click the Blackr button on your browser bookmarks toolbar and viola, you will see just the picture minus everything else. If you want a search engine that displays pictures on a black background, try Flickriver.

Photoree

Photoree is to pictures what StumbleUpon is to websites. You can set your preferences about what type of pictures you want Photoree to show you. You can also rate the pictures and those that have been up-rated by you will automatically get included in your personal gallery.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Zoomr Adds Social Stream for Stalking Photo FriendsPhotobucket and Picasa on your TV with TiVoMeeVee Launches Free TV Episodes HubMostrips is a Mobile Photo Gallery SitePXN8 - Online Image EditingPicnik Leaves Beta, Now Officially OpenNielsen Launches Improved Video Tracking Tools

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Shutterfly, the photo sharing and printing company today launched Share Sites, which will allow users to create photo albums centered around events like travel, birthdays, or weddings. Shutterfly member can also invite others to upload their own photos to a shared album. Share Sites is Shutterfly’s first foray into providing a more open, Web 2.0 oriented service to its mainstream audience. While Shutterfly markets Share Sites simply as a different way to share photos, it is really a fully featured photoblogging platform.

Mainstream Photoblogging

We spend some time testing out the service this morning and came away impressed with the capabilities of Share Sites. Most of the sites functions are accessible even for novice users. Share Sites comes with a very wide range of templates for various special occasions, most of which are actually pretty well designed. Users also can decide to make a site public, only accessible to invited members, or to simply password protect them.

While Shutterfly announces the service to its users as a way to “create a custom website for sharing,” Share Sites are really fully featured photo blogs, with comments, polls, RSS feeds, and even the ability to download an OPML file with feeds for your various photo galleries. For those who want to photoblog on the go, Shutterfly provides you with an email address to send your pictures to. You can also embed YouTube videos, though the embedded Google and Yahoo video search for finding those videos didn’t yet work during out tests.

Competition

With Share Sites, Shutterfly is obviously competing with Flickr, Google’s Picasaweb, and Photobucket, but its real competition includes Kodak and HP’s Snapfish, as Shutterfly’s business model revolves around making money from physical prints (most of Shutterfly’s employees actually work in its printing plant). Indeed, most photo sharing sites rely on Snapfish or Shutterfly to fulfill their printing orders.

Out of the Silo

What is most important about Share Sites, though, is that it provides mainstream users an easily accessible entryway to the sharing and commenting culture of the modern web. In the near future, as the New York Times reports, users will also be able to embed their pictures on any blog or social network.

Though it allowed for sharing, Shuttefly’s old system was mostly a closed off silo. However, adding these photoblogging features makes a lot of sense for Shutterfly. After all, the more people you share your photos with, the more people are likely to want prints of them.

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software, Beta

Digsby is probably one of the coolest free Windows applications released in recent memory. The utility is like Pidgin mashed up with Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, and it has email notifiers for Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail as well as other services thrown in for good measure. There’s just one problem: Digsby is a major resource hog.

Early builds of Digsby have been known to eat over 100MB of memory. If you’ve got 4GB of RAM, that might not seem like much. But if you have an older PC with 1GB or less, there’s no reason that a messenging program should eat up 10% or more of your memory.

A few days ago, Digsby pushed out a new alpha release that addresses the memory issue. I find that the alpha version tends to hover around 30MB of memory use, and according to the developers, it shouldn’t go much higher than 50MB even if you register a ton of email and social networking accounts.

The new version also features other performance enhancements, and improvements that will attempt to help you get around firewalls and proxy servers if necessary. There’s also a new crash reporter.

Keep in mind, the latest version of Digsby is still in alpha, which means there are likely plenty of bugs to be worked out. Normally I wouldn’t recommend replacing stable software with an alpha. But if you’ve been frustrated with Digsby’s high resource usage in the past, you should really check out the latest version. Just make sure to backup your settings first.

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News Corp. CIO Dave Benson, who’d had occupied the top tech job at Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate since 2003, is out. A tipster tells us he was fired, and that other members of his team are out as well; a News Corp. source tells us that for official purposes, the company is going to say he “has resigned to pursue other interests.” No replacement has been named.

Anyone want to flesh this out for us? Reach us at pkafka AT alleyinsider DOT com, or anonymously via our tip box.

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Online real estate firm says the decline in the housing market is accelerating and there are no signs of a short-term turnaround.

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Provider of search functions for bloggers closes on round led by Colorado’s Foundry Group.

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In an effort to curb spam on Twitter, the site’s developers added follow limits, capping the number of friends users can follow. That may help fight spam on the service, but it also might be detrimental to the site’s overall usefulness.

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Justin Berka / Infinite Loop:
Phishing e-mail appears in MobileMe disguise  —  A few weeks ago, a number of MobileMe users in the UK were affected by a billing glitch that led to Apple placing a £121 hold on their accounts, which isn’t something you want when you’ve just signed up for a free trial.

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