So, I have been thinking (and working) about defining "experience" in the context of a web site or a web application, you know, like our Centerd.com and define the factors that influence it. More I think about it more deeper it gets in terms of where the experience starts and where it ends. People often think experience as the pure visual experience, while visual experience helps the over all experience, the real experience is not just what you see, but it is the whole thing. So I tried to come up with 5 factors that I think contribute to create a great experience and here is the quick summary:

1. Acceleration Factor

How fast can you get your user from 0-60? The second a user lands on your site, does he/she know what they can do, where to go and what to do and so on? What kind of words/images/anchoring techniques do you need to get them going fast? Clearly, messaging what benefit they get out of your application is the most important thing - and faster you get them to act on the primary task that they need to do better the experience is going to be.

2. Performance Factor

Okay, once the user figures out what to do on your site - then how quickly can they do it? In many cases its not an exaggeration to say that a great experience starts with a very fine tuned database query that runs very fast. So it is super critical to provide that level of performance to keep the user going at the same rate that they got started.

3. Consistency Factor

Once user does something on your site, how can they do more? So, consistency is about providing a way to parlay the experience the user had in one application context to another to move forward and do more things. So creating an environment where there is a consistent way of doing things helps greatly with the experience.

4. Reliability Factor

Reliability is about providing the same level of experience on 1, 2 and 3 over a series of visits and sessions - remember the term "it just works" or IJW? That's what it is about - how reliably you can deliver the promise that you made in the user's first visit.

5. Interface Factor

Finally, a good interface coupled with nice visuals improve the overall experience greatly - however, the real secret is in designing the interface bottom-up. Means you need to define the interface with 1, 2, 3 and 4 in mind and then build it ground up. So an interface is not an after thought - it is an integrated piece of the whole experience puzzle.

So, experience is something that one needs to consider very early on and define it as the first step - and also as you imagine great experiences are built from within (like iPhone multi-touch)!

So what do you think? Did I miss any other factors?

Building a product from scratch is hard - and building it in a startup is extra hard (for all the obvious reasons you can think of); having said that one thing that I did learn from working on Virtual Earth at Microsoft and now at Center'd is that if you focus on meeting or exceeding the expectations of your users rest all is taken care of.

So how do you know if you are meeting the expectations of your users? Some times you have to 'listen' carefully (through analytics) and some times get it in your email (feedback emails) but some times though, you see the feedback publicly in blog posts, magazine articles and news letters, and we have been having our fair share of that with our "Local Planning" product that we launched a couple of weeks ago.

As Dan pointed out on our official blog we feel fortunate to have so many folks publicly talking about what we do. So thank you Erick, Erin, Michelle, Beverly and Susan, please keep the feedback coming!

As planned, some of us were in San Diego last weekend launching Center'd at the National PTA Conference. It was a

fantastic experience to be able to connect with parents and teachers from across the country and listen to them talk about their experiences on local planning; after all who else can understand the local planning better than parents and busy professionals? So we got tons great feedback (and some kudos!) - we are now back at our Center'd HQ and we have work cut out for us.

BTW, work is not the only thing we did while we were down in San Diego (even though we LOVE what we do) we also had a fun time at the Old Town Mexican - and yes, we discovered this wonderful restaurant using our own search tool! While we are at it, what are your favorites in San Diego? Tell us by saving them to your places on Center'd, we would like to explore them when we go back there again (and your friends will benefit from it too).

I'm off to San Diego tomorrow to attend the National PTA confernece where we will be showing newly launched product: Center'd. Local planning is a broken today and the pain particularly clear with busy adults and parents - so this is going to be a great avenue for us to get real feedback about how we can improve the experience and features.

As you probably know already, Center'd is live and today we visited the Scoble's at Half Moon Bay.

You can see the video here.

It was a fun (albeit long, an hour long) and insightful conversation about the state of online calendaring, social networks and maps.

And BTW, Scoble said that the 3 Amigos in Half moon bay is a great place (but sorry they don't have tequila) for a nice dinner! :)

I have a new addiction these days - browsing the web using PicLens - if you don't know what it is, it is a browser plug-in that enables you to view rich content (such as photos and videos) on the web in an immersive way.

I was introduced to one of their co-founders last November '07 and that's how I came to know about it - at that time it only had the ability to browse photos - but more recently they added Youtube integration to search and watch videos - the quality of videos is not matching up to PicLens cool factor but the experience is way better than browsing Youtube directly. Now I exclusively use PicLens to view photos and videos online, now this result has an interesting implications: picLens is showing us a new way to navigate the web - as the technology matures and gets adopted for other types of content (I'm thinking local/maps), it starts disrupting the existing/known browsing models on the web (as a result disrupts the concept of page views, ads and so on...). That would be very interesting to see.

If they deliver up to their "mantra" of "think beyond the browser", which they have been so far, it is going to change the way we experience the web - and I must confess, PicLens is one of those companies that I make me wonder why I did not start that company :)  

Internet browsers that helped us understand the "Web" are already coming in our way to experience and realize the full potential of the Web. The world wide web is a much deeper and more richer than what our current browsers can show us; and for now, PicLens is my way of realizing that.

Just happened to stumble upon a new feature on Google Maps called "explore".

To experience it, just go to:

http://maps.google.com then search for a location, say "Seattle, WA"

and it loads photos, popular searches and videos from around that location.

Very cool - this kind of data aggregation is interesting - but I was surprised that this content was "on" by default for me.

Nonetheless, it gets definitely interesting to see what others do with this kind of integration...

Had a great opportunity to sit and talk with the Dr. Jon Kleinberg today (also attended his session along with Dr. Eva Tardos last night @ Yahoo! HQ) about what we are up to at Centerd and how we are mixing the known social elements with other real-life entities that do not exist in other existing social networks today. While talking to him it occurred to me that how different entities can actually contribute to different threshold levels in the spread of social networks. If you haven't already you should really read up some of his publications, absolutely fascinating stuff!

If you have been watching the blogosphere there were a number of blog entries that talked about the demise of fatdoor and how we are going away from local space. It's amusing to see people speculate about who we are and what we are doing. But some folks did get it right.  

The reality is that there are a couple of changes in the product name and the a little bit of execution (specifically about the way we wanted to connect people using whitepages data) from the old fatdoor days - mostly driven by the private alpha testing and our user feedback. More details on that are on the fatdoor blog and on the center'd blog.

Now, coming back to the point of we getting out of local: to set things straight, we are not getting out of local, if anything we are enhancing the local offering in multiple ways - to give you a little more detail, in more technical terms, we built fatdoor as a pure spatial index based system - now with center'd we take it a step further by extending the spatial index and coupling it with temporal index. What does it mean for our users? a well integrated system that gives ability to switch modes seamlessly from spatial (space based) to temporal (time based) while running our utility based applications. And one of those apps, the planning application, is being covered by TechCrunch this week.

But to tell you the truth, I'm flattered with the attention that is being paid to what we do :) but please stay tuned as I discuss more details on the applications and the sub-systems that we are building in coming days. And yes, also please sign-up for an invitation if you haven't already - we are very close to sending invitations.

This morning I read a couple of blogs that reported the free neighborhood API from Urban Mapping. Neighborhood data is one of those public datasets that we all need but not really freely available. When I needed neighborhood data for my company, I went with one of the data vendors to license the dataset; and the dataset is far from complete but it does the job for me, for now.

So I was obviously excited to see this move from urban mapping folks and spent a little bit of time on their API to understand what is offered and I have to say that I'm disappointed with the offering; here is why:

1. No Geometry: The neighborhood API does not expose the neighborhood geometry - which is the polygon (also known as the shape data) data points that actually "define" the boundaries of the neighborhood. If I'm looking into integrating any neighborhood level data into my applications, I want the shape data, without that, the neighborhood data is useless.

2. Non-Standard Neighborhood IDs: This is not an issue with Urban Mapping API per se, but they expose neighborhood IDs that are proprietary to them. What we need is a standard-based way to identify neighborhoods, some sort of taxonomy you know. For example, the neighborhood that is identified as "17476" in Urban Mapping API is not the same neighborhood in some other dataset. So if I'm building a mashup with neighborhood data, I want it to be portable (more on the map APIs and portability later).

3. Lack of wire-format choices: This is not a serious limitation, but the API currently only supports SOAP. Brady has pointed this out in his post too. If you want serious adoption for your APIs, you need to either support multiple wire-formats (SOAP, REST, JSON) or provide toolkits (API libraries) for multiple platforms/languages. I'm sure the folks at Urban Mapping are working on this, but this is a deficiency they need to fill at some point.

While this is a good first step in the right direction, I'm not going to spend much time on this API, for now anyway.

What do you think? Do you think the data exposed by Urban Mapping is useful in your mashups? I would love to hear your thoughts!

Wish you and your families a very happy and prosperous new year.

Looking back, 2007 was an eventful one for me: left Microsoft, co-founded a company, gathered a great team, previewed our product, raised funding, gained friends :), and had a baby! Of course, I also learned a great deal along the way and looking forward to more exciting sutff this year.

Happy new year everyone!

I have posted a blog entry on fatdoor blog with a couple of updates from our side, which btw was also covered by TechCrunch, Mashable and Greg Sterling and so on...

Got suggestions or feedback on what we are doing? Send'em our way: feedback@fatdoor.com!

We released new features last night on fatdoor - check it out at our official blog: http://blog.fatdoor.com

Cheers,

Chandu Thota

We are live with bunch of new features on fatdoor.com.

Major features include:

1. Real Neighborhoods

2. Exploring the neighborhood

3. Organize people and places

4. Neighborhood events

and so on.

I have posted more details on the official fatdoor blog - check it out for more details.

Cheers!

We have been busy wrapping up our upcoming release - so I haven't been active in posting blog entries. But will try to be regular in future :)

BTW, I also setup fatdoor blog at http://blog.fatdoor.com, so if you haven't subscribed to the feed yet, please do so.

I will be cross-posting some blog entries soon when we have the bits out the door.

Cheers!

I used to have this download readily available on my old MSDN blog (but unfortunately that blog's content has been taken down after I left Microsoft). So here is the link again to the free download that you can use to import any shapefile into MapPoint:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=ada44a9e-3ee0-4fd7-a923-c900c6c9d5b7&displaylang=en

I also found this cool C library that can read and write ESRI shape files: http://shapelib.maptools.org/

Cheers!

One of my friends forwarded me this link:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Rcw43Dm9dbkC&pg=PP1&ots=oxrNLxwfHX&dq=chandu+thota&sig=CBmtPprOqFDkkLsfBravrQt5r74

Yes, this is my book on programming mappoint in .net (from O'Reilly) now available in Google Book Search. Eventhough the entire book is not available, you can still see significant portions of the book :)

I will be on a panel at Inman SF Connect 2007  where we will be discussing the aspects of Social Networking in in real-estate.

Here are some details about the session:

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Social Networking: New ways to participate and prospect

Moderator: Marc Davison, Partner, 1000Watt Consulting

Panelists:
David Gibbons, Director, Community Relations, Zillow
Chandu Thota, Co-Founder & CTO, Fatdoor
David Bethoney, Co-Founder & CEO, PropertyQube
Ben T. Smith IV, Co-Founder & Chairman, MerchantCircle

I would love to see you there if you are attending!

James Fee says

"It isn't that I don't mind knowing who my neighbors are, its just that I’d rather meet them on the