Не так много power

Не хочу вдаваться в демагогию проблемы, однако на лицо однозначный факт — если кто-то до сих пор верит что возможна единная система обмена данными среди социальных сетей в сети, то facebook сделала очевидным что нет.

Все будет как и было раньше, несмотря на громкие заявления и внедрение всевозможных Connect'ов, Data Availability, и прочей показушной мишуры, которые, в принципе все имеют однозначные цели (далекие, правда, от того чтобы "сделать информацию доступной") — дать инструмент интеграции пользователей к себе, сдавая их потом "внаем".

Все что вам остается — принять эти условия (а, к сожалению, для многих это экономически выгодно на первых этапах "борьбы за критическую массу"), а в последствии подписать себя на диктаторские условия (которыми, поверьте, не забудут воспользоваться).

Atomkeep, созданный весной прошлого года и набравший некоторую популярность, уже проходил этот путь. Однако, к сожалению, мы не готовы были предложить механизм, который был бы одиннаково устойчив к подобным действиям со стороны "правообладателей" и одновременно выгоден экономически. С другой стороны, не могу не заметить, что кроме крупных игроков, которые диктуют свою монопольную политику, существуют большое множество сетей, которые нашли нас полезными и заключили с нами партнерские соглашения. А это значит что доступная информация все-таки имеет место быть. Может быть не сегодня, и не завтра. Но начало положено.

Reverse FriendFeed and AtomKeep

Robot Monkeys :: Reverse FriendFeed and AtomKeep

Well, I don't think it worth trying that much, Jonathan. Calling something an ugly hack even before trying it — it's a pretty wrong point. I don't buy you with my concerns? Well, I never meant to.

Atomkeep is not an "open standard" like you're proposing (but it addresses pretty much the same problem, though). We just solve the problem. People tend to use something because it helps, but not because it's a nice written spec on the table.

I'd be happy to have this discussion one day, but it looks like Jonathan is pretty much looking for Holy Grail and I'm just trying to make the things work (even when they're not supposed to, fragile and hard to maintain). It doesn't mean there is no solution that can combine both his and mine vision. Just keep looking. ;)

Robot Monkeys: Reverse FriendFeed

Robot Monkeys :: Reverse FriendFeed

I wanted to leave a comment on the site, but didn't find any place for that, so I'm making up one more post for my own blog. ;)

This idea has got a rational seed and pretty much crosses with Atomkeep — people indeed have too many accounts and they need to manage them properly. Either you like it or not — the reality is that there are too many different sites with your personal information and profiles and, within time, this number is going to grow pretty fast. You've got to manage tons of repetitive and redundant data or you'll get down to the chaos.

Unfortunately, even if the problem exists, the idea like it was described, will never work. At least, not in the imperfect world like we're living in. Why is it so?

1. First of all, something that does anything without confirmation from a user can be pretty scary. Personally, I would be afraid of such a thing. I don't know when the shit is happening to my data and this is not the way I want my life to be.
2. Moving forward, something that needs to do anything on my behalf will need to know my user name and password. Even more: something will need to store this data somewhere. Keeping in mind #1 — and this becomes even more scary now.
3. Getting back to #2 — something that have credentials to many different other sites is extremely attractive for hacker attacks. There is no such way like absolute security, you can't be 100% protected even when you aware and, basically, you don't want to be the one to get the responsibility if something is going out of control.
4. Can you name many sites and networks that provide public API for changing someones information in it? I bet you can't. Trust my experience (Atomkeep ;) — you'll get "handcuffed" pretty soon with numerous limitations and policies. So now it's time for screenscrapping and this is the time when it fcuks up completely. Just a simple captcha will rip off any site transaction with no human interaction involved.
5. What will make your site sticky, or, "how will you make money"? I don't think that you can make a fortune on paid membership that can't be more expensive then a few bucks — otherwise it doesn't worth it for the end user. But there is no way to get rich out of advertisement as well — nobody needs to go to your website, because your site can do everything automatically (just imagine that ;).
6. Every single site wants to be the center of the world. Nobody will ever give up on this right, unless, it's only temporary and necessary to attract visitors at the beginning and get of the ground. At some point of time every single popular Web site will want to own the information, but not lease or rent it from other Web site. So, no central repository is possible ever. It's utopia, you know.

It's just the basic thoughts. I don't pretend them to be the only ones that are right and I'd be more then happy to enter the discussion. However, I've invested a significant part of my life into this problem, and I pretty much know what I'm talking about.

But let me also go all over these issues once again and tell you a little bit more about how Atomkeep works with them:

1. We do not do anything without user interaction and explicit confirmation. Every single step that requires access to personal information or third-party site happens only after the user confirmed it.
2. Atomkeep's policy is strict about storing usernames and password. We link accounts from other sites to the Atomkeep, but we never ever store passwords. At all. From the other side, keeping passwords was one of the major requests from many of our users, though. We're about to release a tool that will simplify the process of passwords management, but we're not storing any single bit out of someone's password and we're not going to do this in the nearest future.
3. We can be attacked, nobody is perfect, but intruder can't get much out of our database. We just don't keep it.
4. Every user is involved in every transaction. If some site will decide to introduce captchas for data updates, it will be passed directly to the user then. We're not playing dirty.
   
5. Making site sticky could be an issue and nobody knows the only one right answer for it. Atomkeep is a great tool to manage your personal information, and you have to come to our site and to use it every time you need it. From the other side, this doesn't happen too often, so we will be running pretty low on advertisement profits. We're about to introduce the paid membership that is expected to be pretty profitable according to our polls and market reviews. But we're also working hard on introducing more tools and services, that will make Atomkeep something that you might visit few times a day, every single one.
6. That's the exact problem that we're solving right now. Atomkeep is not the center of the world, but it's something that allows any single site to own the information directly.

I hope it helps.

Interview with Olexiy and Alexander Prokhorenko, Atomkeep.com | socalTECH.com

Interview with Olexiy and Alexander Prokhorenko, Atomkeep.com | socalTECH.com

Thank you, Ben. ;)


However, my name is spelled wrong again because of that crazy spelling. My name is really Alexander, however, my international passport spells my name turned into Olexandr, because it first translates into Ukrainian (orig.: Александр - Олександр - Olexandr).

I was born in Soviet Union, everybody spoken Russian, my name is Alexander. However, when the Soviet Union crashed, I've appeared to be the citizen of independent Ukraine, and became Olexandr.

P.S. However, I'm lucky enough to name my son Ivan. His name is pretty universal ;) (orig.: Иван - Iван - Ivan).

Atomkeep has a new release

We are trying to keep the Atomkeep's release frequency high and introducing new release with new systems, new features, new design elements and less bugs. ;) You're welcome!

Customer service

I had a pretty complex professional career way. And while I'm still at the beginning of it, I already took a lot of steps to get here. So it means that I've started my career from the very grounds and I saw it all. :)

One of my first steps in IT career was a position of Support Engineer on the phone in NOC (Network Operation Center) of one of the first ISPs (Internet Service Providers) in my city, Alkar Teleport. It was about 10 years ago and Alkar was a pretty "luxurious" employer those days for every IT person in our city. It was an established company with a pretty solid team and great people relations inside. It was kind of a community for those who worked there.

I wanted to get there so much, however, there were no job openings for my job position those days (System and Network Administrator). The most technical job was Support Engineer in the NOC. It was very little about solving technical problems and finding greal solutions, but more about routine DIYs or HOWTOs that everybody hates. But I took it with mostly no hesitations, as I wanted to get in, whatever it takes. I was very sure that I can get promoted to System Administrator position shortly, and I didn't want to waste any single minute.

Support Engineer position was a 24x7 job and had two shifts: the day and night one (yeah, that were cruel days ;). There were days when I was taking both shifts. Most of the time that happen because my colleagues were getting drunk on the parties and had no chances to say even "Hi". Well, I did that (drink and getting drunk), too, so we're pretty even. :)

It was a great school for me, 18 years old, ambitious, with pretty decent technical skills (I started early), but pretty modest personal and communication abilities (lets call it that way). However, the biggest lesson that I took from there was not how to communicate, but what is it all about. I mastered how to communicate pretty easy, the first days were terrible but I quickly found the way how I can enjoy the communication process, and it worked well. It's hard to remember, but I think I enjoyed the conversation itself.

You know, sometimes people were scared talking to technical person just because they're afraid that they can't explain what's wrong and they wouldn't get the problem solved. Someone thought that being aggressive is an excuse for being lame. Well, it's not and I did my best to explain that to several of such guys (and few gals :).

We had no cliches, no templates, no scenarios or scripts (fuck the outsourced customer support lines!). The only one thing we had to say is "Hello, this is Alkar Teleport and my name is ...". It's more then enough. Everything else had the only one goal: help the person on the other side. That's it. Simple to say, but hard to achieve. :)

As I said already, it was a great school. I found myself enjoying talking to other people (well, not all of them, but still nice :) and I got some grounds of how you can help, if you really can't. That was mostly the answer to what is it all about. And the answer was simple: you can be a winner even if you can't help. Just do your best to be helpful. Don't give up too soon. I had millions of opportunities to give up just because this is not something we supposed to help with. Well, as I said earlier, I was over skilled for the current position and I could help with much broader number of questions. However, the most thankful people who even took time to call next day to my boss and say that they're very happy with the service and me, personally, were those whom I really didn't help. But I really tried to.

You can't fake your willingness to help. You can either help or try to to pretend that. And if somebody thinks you can fake that feeling, you can't. It'd be a lame try that gives you even more negative points.

What's my post about? Well, first of all this is my history thing. What's more important though is to remember what the customer service center is all about. Customer Support is supposed to be a real live person, reading your email message, receiving your call and reading the mailed letter. The job is not to follow stupid, bureaucratic and corporate-envenomed script, but help the person. Whatever it takes.

Well, sometimes you don't need your skills just to be helpful. This doesn't mean you should take this chance as an excuse and forward the person to the answering machine or hang up on him: just help or quit the fucking job. Asshole-ish customer support can end up with more problems than the person really comes with.

Here, at Atomkeep, I want every our user to know that I'll personally do my best to help anyone who contacts us. We have no scripts, no scenarios, not even "Hello, my name is ..." (although, we'll have it someday ;). All we care about is are you happy or not. I want you also to understand that we might not be able to helpful all the time. There are some things that are behind our possibilities. However, what I can assure you about is that we'll certainly do our best.

Widgets, badges, ...

HOWTO and DIY on Atomkeep' widgets — an unofficial guide.

Let me tell you a little bit more about Atomkeep's widgets. This is the typical one, mine, taken few days ago (as a picture).


So what's that? First of all, it links to your Atomkeep profile, so everyone can see your most recent information, of course, if you allow them to. To allow people to see your Atomkeep profile you need to click on the checkbox I want to share my profile and make it visible to other users in Profile Settings tab.

Okay, so going back to the widget. The icons on the right of your name are direct links to your accounts on different networks and sites. You — are the only legitimate owner of your information, so why should we point them anywhere else? Besides, what if there is somebody trying to reach you, but doesn't know how? That's the way out — find the network's link and go through it.

The most interesting thing is on the right side, the vertical status name. We've got several of them. It indicates the number of networks and sites that you're linked within Atomkeep. The more connections — the better. It's also one of the privileges indicator in our system. The most connected people are the ones who are willing to experiment (most of the time). So why not let them do that? ;)

Try us, see who are you? at Atomkeep and let us know what you think.

Atomkeep on TheFunded

Some interesting stats...

As I discovered recently, Atomkeep takes the 4th place on TheFunded Connect by the number of supporters for it. The number of supporters sounds like a relative measurement of being an interesting project.

While the 4th place is not the 1st one (and easy guess, right?), it's still better than nothing for 14 days old Atomkeep. It makes even more sense especially when you'll consider that there are 15 different companies running live on TheFunded Connect (and potentially compete for number of supporters there) and 47 more that can't make to the list, yet.

More to come, first three spots are taken by the companies that generate some cash already and make $100-250K annually in revenue. The 1st place is breaking even and want to expand their business, the other two are still struggling, but making some cash. Atomkeep doesn't make any money, yet and we clearly state this.

Well, I might be wrong considering this as a competition, although, this is just the way I am — sometimes I feel to compete with anyone :). More likely it's just a nice measurement of what are you actually doing. I like what I do. And I happy to see that people like it, too.

We've got pretty much plans for Atomkeep. It's impossible to tell you everything in just few sentences of company introduction. We made a good judgment and don't stick to just one idea. There is no golden bullet, but the more times you fire, the more chances for you to get closer to the target (even occasionally and unintentionally ;).

Some of our ideas are already in development and hopefully will show up soon. Some of them are still waiting for more resources to come. We are receiving a lot of feedback these days. While we'd be happy to make everything that we've been asked for, sometimes we've got to make decisions and to pass on something. We don't remove anything from our tasks, though, we just save them for better days.

Some of your feedback really opens up a golden niche for us. I wish I can tell you more, but my partners would kill me and throw into the ocean within the few hours after posting that. ;) So I'd better keep silence. But, please, keep getting back in touch with us! ;)

P.S. My personally thanks for Adeo Ressi, the person who stands behind TheFunded. He's a pretty nice guy and I hope to meet him for a cup of coffee someday next week. ;)

Успехи

Позавчера Atomkeep заключил первую (дебютную ;) партнерскую сделку с небольшой нишевой компанией занимающейся подбором персонала. Как показала практика, о нас говорят больше чем пишут.

Обо всем об этом будет официальная новость в блоге Atomkeep и, со временем, на самом сайте. Ждите новостей. :)

P.S. Новый релиз на носу. Вы просили - мы сделали.

Please, support us at Digg

Everyone!! We need your support at Digg!

Dear friends, please, vote and register on Atomkeep. It's free and I, personally, will appreciate this a lot.

http://digg.com/tech_news/Atomkeep_your_profile_everywhere

Thanks!

Свежий релиз Atomkeep

Только что освежевали большой релиз Atomkeep.

Несмотря на то, что прошло только девять дней с момента нашего первого публичного запуска, из которых три дня были выходные, мы подготовили новый релиз который поддерживает уже одиннадцать (!!) различных сайтов и систем. В них входят такие сети как LinkedIn, facebook, Twitter, Mixergy, Slide и Yelp, фото-сайт Flickr, а также сайты по поиску работы Monster, Jobster, JOBcentral, и, конечно же, популярная блог-платформа Blogger.

Конечно же это еще не охватывает даже трети всех популярных сетей и сайтов (Интернет - он большой). Однако это уже большой шаг вперед для нас и всей команды Atomkeep. Все работали очень усердно и всем большое спасибо.

P.S. Если мы выпустили семь сетей меньше чем за десять дней, представляете, что будет через месяц? :)