21st Century Digital Boy

Daring Fireball’s linked list has magically appeared in my Google Reader list … Has Google Reader opened up support for authenticated feeds?

(Update: DAMMIT.)

The Safari nightlies are working (nearly) flawlessly with Reader and Calendar. Reader hasn’t worked for some time (really screwed-up rendering issues) and Calendar had lots of cosmetic problems, making it ugly to look at. Both seem to be working well.

No love for in-mail chat, but it’s unlikely I’ll ever be at a Mac sans iChat or Adium; and Spreadsheets still kinda only barely renders (but Docs seems to work fine). And still no ad-blocking natively, of course, but this CSS file helps a bit.

It’s good to see things working; the WebKit/Safari team has fought hard for love, and I look forward to them winning me away from Mozilla.

In the beginning was Urchin; and Urchin was good.

OK not really “in the beginning”, but whatever.

Anyway, before I joined up, we were an Urchin shop. We had been using it since sometime before version 3; we still have customers on version 3 right now (it’s a long story). Customers where by and large happy with Urchin.

Around Urchin 5, Google bought them, and turned their hosted Urchin 6 into Google Analytics. All was still well (after the launch fiasco, that is) with but one exception: having to tell all our customers 1)we no longer can offer them Urchin and 2)you’re now Google’s customer for analytics.

BROADLY SPEAKING, neither of these is particularly bad. Obviously Urchin was pretty good, if Google bought it. (Or, Google could get Urchin at a price they were happy with, but never mind) Many of our larger customers have AdWords already, so integration was great for them. We picked up a couple of billable hours converting their UTM-based analytics to Google.

Lately we’ve started doing the same thing for Co-op: it’s easier than dealing with 20 different, custom search engine installs (htdig on one, some other search tool on another, hand-rolled PHP on yet another …). Again, everyone’s happy, right? Customer gets best-of-breed search, we get a few billables.

BUT. In the big picture, we run around evangelizing for Google, handing over portions of our customers. Like I said it makes lots of sense for them, but it would be nice if Google would at least acknowledge that we’re doing some work for them, here.

I suppose there was various ways to handle this - ours probably isn’t optimal - but let’s face it, Google is a little on the nutty side with respect to this. They don’t want to deal with a 3-person company, they’re too ADD to write up a strong “partner” API like everyone else … but we need it. We need to manage our customers as sub-units of “us”, not “a random person attached to the Teat of Goog”.