Srcasm

I was scanning through my hundreds of RSS feeds and decided to share this with the rest of the class –

Stock market crash confuses Google Finance — has the wrong closing price for nearly every stock!

–VentureBeat

The gist of the story is that Google Finance was showing incorrect closing prices where it has the big red numbers as proper closing prices according to their stock charts.  Who would notice this you ask?  Everyone!  It’s not a mundane detail.  Things like Google’s finance services are relied on by many hundreds of thousands of people (I would venture a guess) and that means that it’s not only for fun, money-watching extravaganzas but also for their careers.

This leads to the point of this post — Attention to detail matters.  It doesn’t matter if you’re building a house, raising a child or creating Google Finance, all of these things need a lot of attention to detail.  It’s the little things that make the difference.  Take a look at Yahoo’s old email compared to when Gmail rolled out.  They both did the same basic things.  They received and sent email, they categorized it and filed it away and they allowed email signatures.  What Google did was made it simpler with the little things.  They made the interface AJAXy and they redesigned how “folders” worked.  They turned over a new leaf when it came to the amount of storage and more.  Under the hood, the site did the same thing as Yahoo’s email but they blew them out of the water with the other pieces.

I know that a lot of this advices sounds like, “DUH!  Everyone knows that!”  But apprently that isn’t the case.  Due to a coding error, miscommunication or some other issue, Google’s Finance missed one of the mundane details.  If you had relied on their service for your job, you could be as low as the stock market really is today.

Today it seems like there is a never-ending supply of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), contact relationship sites (Plaxo and Salesforce), email address books (Gmail and Yahoo) but what about when I need to reach Alex from my cell phone and I forgot to put his number in? What if I never even had Alex’s number? What if he’s available via IM right now and doesn’t want phone calls? These are all great questions and I think I have an idea or a solution…

Aggregated address book system

On the top level, it’s simply a way of pulling in contacts from all over the globe. Bring your friends from Facebook (with their IM name, email and phone numbers), your business contacts from LinkedIn (with their title, company, email and website) and your main homeboys from Gmail (with their emails, phone numbers and whatever else you’d like to include) and pull them all together into one simple, online and offline-capable address book. Add the ability access this service via SMS or WAP site and you have yourself an always-on address book system

To sweeten the deal, add the ability to not only have presence detection (such as if the person is on Gtalk, AIM, Yahoo Messenger or simple available via text message) but also allow masked-communication with users. This could use a service like Jajah to connect the two parties.

On top of these amazing features (which are already out there, they just need to be mashed together), offer both natural language search (i.e. call Joe Schmoe at home) as well as opt-in and opt-out communication methods. For example, say I am “friends” with Joe on Twitter. Twitter knows that Joe’s phone number is 555-1337 (this would take some work with Twitter to allow this in their API with an opt-in option) but I don’t know that Joe’s number is that. I text 232665 (ADBOOK) or visit m.addbook.com from my mobile and type in “call Joe Schmoe’s mobile”. Within seconds, Joe Schmoe is notified that I’d like to get in touch with him. He can simply reply to a text message with Y or N as to whether he’d like to talk and voila, with a Y response, Joe and I are connected (neither of us know the other’s phone number).

See how helpful that could be? Now get out there, and someone, set this up as I have a lot of contacts I’d like to reach.