Answer Guy Central

Last night I went to the theater. I took my son to see the Broadway-ized version of Green Day’s Rock Opera American Idiot. I was ready to hate the show, and instead I loved it. I didn’t expect to find business change there. I was wrong. Hats off to Green Day and the entire production staff of American Idiot for a business change that worked.

But WOW do I have issues with Foursquare.

On the good side: as a long-time Green Day fan and coming from the position that American Idiot is one of the best examples of the Rock Opera Genre behind perhaps only The Who’s Tommy, I was worried that having the music Broadway-ized would ruin it. It didn’t. My review of American Idiot on Broadway is simple: see it. The music was fun, the production was amazing, and while I didn’t care for a couple of the performances, John Gallagher Jr. was simply fantastic.

Staging American Idiot this way was a business change that worked. I’ve always felt that Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong is too impressed with himself and seeing this show only firmed that up for me, but . . . American Idiot on Broadway was great and deserves a nice long business-successful run.

Now onto the real issue:

When we got to the theater I checked into Foursquare. In fact, I checked in three times, because that’s how many copies of the Saint James Theater are in the Foursquare database:

I’ve written a few times about Foursquare. Despite growing very quickly and looking like the clear leader in its space I think Foursquare is still just a toy and may never really become anything more than that. And unless they clear up the problem of having multiple entries in their database for the same thing they won’t ever be taken seriously by the businesses they’re now trying to do business with and be taken seriously by.

And never mind that Foursquare scolded me and took away points when I covered myself against the flaws in their system. Yes, really.

Business change is  about . . . well, change. Green Day’s American Idiot on Broadway is a good business change—if by no means a definitive one. Foursquare needs to start taking their business change a lot more seriously, or the business change that they’ll be remembered for will be fading into oblivion.

You know what I hate? Tofu (insert sound of angrily indignant health-conscious readers here).

Actually, what I really hate is when I do business with a company that makes a promise and doesn’t keep it. There are lots of flavors and shadings to that, of course, and I understand that sometimes there are things that are beyond your control.

Panera Bread, you lose.

I travel during my business day. I carry my Droid and from it I can manage a lot of what has to get done while I’m out. But sometimes I need to get on line from my laptop and so I go in search of a Wi-Fi signal. Starbucks gives me nearly-free Wi-Fi, and McDonalds does the same. So does Barnes & Noble. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll see me as I move around.

Yesterday, for the umpteenth time, I went to the Panera Bread in Roxbury NJ. Panera advertises that they have free Wi-Fi, and at the other Paneras I’ve visited I’ve always been able to get connected. Not only that; Panera’s signal feels better and faster than the ones I get at many other places.

Not in Roxbury. The Wi-Fi at the Panera Bread in Roxbury just can’t be counted on. I’m not going to give you numbers like “one time in four”; it works sometimes for months at a stretch, and then it doesn’t work for months at a stretch.

I’ve asked the people who work there to reset their router. They refuse, citing corporate rules. I’ve spoken to their corporate IT department (no, I’m not kidding). Those people were polite, tried to be helpful, troubleshot the issue with me and seemed as though they wanted to do something about the problem, but ultimately failed.

So what? I’m ranting, right? I want free Wi-Fi and want to make an example out of Panera Bread? Not exactly.

While it’s true that I want what I want and do wish to use Panera as an example, the point isn’t to whine, vent my anger or get something. The point is that Panera Bread advertises free Wi-Fi as a way of getting people to come be in their stores and then doesn’t deliver it.

I mentioned that I’ve spoken to Panera about this problem, and the people I spoke with “got it”. I pointed out that it wasn’t really about getting the free Wi-Fi so much as knowing that when I walk into Panera Bread with an hour to kill and some work to get done that I’ve chosen the best place to stay productive. If I go into a Panera only to find that their W-Fi doesn’t work and the staff in the store refuses to help me, now I’ve wasted my time and need to go looking for another option.

Panera, listen: I really want you to fix your Wi-Fi, because when I’m out and it works you’re my favorite place to set up shop for a few minutes. But I can’t run my business if you can’t run yours.

By the way, there are a couple of really simple solutions:

1. Stop advertising free Wi-Fi at Panera Bread
2. Teach your in-store employees to reset a router

The solution that will not work and will chase people away from Panera is to promise something you won’t deliver.

Business is a tough enough sport for all of us without getting in a loop where you set customers’ expectations one way and deliver something else. And when you actively refuse to do what you’ve promised, you’re asking to be the next Panera Bread. I’m done with Panera, and until they fix this very simple issue I’m asking you both to take the lesson and help with the practical solution: stay away from Panera Bread.

Jason Calacanis, currently the CEO of Mahalo and a guy with a long track record of creating stuff in the tech world that sell for a bundle of money, isn’t known for being all warm and fuzzy. Or even a particularly nice guy.

OK . . . not direct enough. From all indications, Jason Calacanis is a bit of a jerk.

This week, he managed to outdo himself, responding to a politely-worded resignation letter from one of Mahalo’s employees in a way that can only be called “nasty”.

I don’t know whether to be more floored by his attitude there, or by his show of ego in delivering the Jason Calacanis manifesto on “the right way to resign”. I am amused, though, that Calacanis believes that his personal experience deserves prominent placement in a set of guidelines that everyone else should follow.

Here’s the takeaway: Human Resources is a business process, and needs to be handled as such.

If Jason Calacanis gets the company he runs sued because he allowed his personal “anguish” to infiltrate his duties as CEO of a company that employs several dozen people, he’ll have a problem on his hands. But it’s a problem that could have been avoided simply by understanding that business is . . . business. People come. People leave. It’s not personal until you make it personal, and from what I’ve linked above you can see that Calicanis is the person who did that here.

I don’t much care about Jason Calacanis or his reputation, and he’s got enough people kissing his feet that this won’t really hurt him. But I do care about you; please . . . remember that business isn’t personal. It will keep your business running well, and keep you happier, too.

Today is my birthday. I’m getting very little done because . . . well, because it’s my birthday! But on other days I don’t really have an excuse.

I use software to keep me on track, to track my time, and to keep me from forgetting things. I’ve carried a PDA of one sort or another since 1994 (a Sharp Zaurus), and because I was one of those people who wrote about technology trends was sent and started using a Palm Pilot about a month before they hit the street in the summer of 1996. Of course, I’ve been using a Droid since late last year.

But when it comes to managing the ever-growing-and-changing list of stuff I need to do every day, I’m as guilty as anyone of recycling; and this isn’t the kind of recycling that’s good for the environment or anything else.

I have a list of stuff that shows up every time I flip to my To-Do view in Outlook. It’s all neatly categorized, sorted either by importance or date depending on my mood, and even includes alarms that alert me to certain things. This system is imperfect because there’s no way to make my Outlook To-Do list work on an Android device, but I stick with it because I like having everything in one place when I’m at a computer.

But there’s a much bigger flaw in the system, and that flaw is . . . me.

I can look at my To-Do list as many times as I like, but when there are fifteen or twenty ever-changing things that need to be done staring me in the face I spend as much time re-categorizing as I do getting the to-do items done. Multi-tasking, as I’ve pointed out before, is just not efficient.

Today’s lesson in productivity, business change and discipline comes from a new service that changes the way your to-do items work. To→done is a web site where you enter all your to-do items, provide a few details, and then simply obey. When To→done tells you that you have something to do, you . . . do it.

It won’t always work, of course, and ultimately you can misuse To→done the same way so many of us misuse other reminder-based systems, but if you’re constantly in a state of “not sure what to do next”, To→done could be your ticket to better productivity.

And that’s a business change we can all use.

Remember back when Google launched the Nexus One SmartPhone and told us we should expect to see “their” phone on every major phone network? I commented at the time that the Google Phone looked like way less business change than Google wanted us to believe they were creating, and later told you that Google’s fragmentation of the Android Operating System might kill phones they were less attached to, like the Verizon Droid.

Now it looks like the entire Google Phone movement and creating the Nexus One was nothing more than a red herring to get carriers to develop Android devices.

Last week, Google basically abandoned the Nexus One. This morning, Google told Verizon customers to buy the upcoming Droid Incredible instead of waiting for the Nexus One.

Let’s examine:

Any phone running Android is a “Google Phone”. Google launched the Nexus One amidst much anticipation and with great fanfare, showed us a road map for a time when we’d be able to buy phones and take them to any carrier, telling us they were changing the entire phone business, selling the Nexus One using a business model that made no sense and charging incredibly high Early Termination Fees.

And three months later they want people to buy a non-Google-branded-or-distributed phone that is very much like the Nexus One from the one US carrier that could never use the Nexus One.

But Android is now huge.

Looks like Google never really meant to be in or change the phone business, other than to promote Android.

Google lied. It’s the kind of thing that happens every day in business, and as “don’t be evil” is no longer an official Google slogan there’s not even a joke to append here; Google has become the evil empire.

I’m off to use my Google Docs account now . . .

FOLLOWUP May 14 2010:

It’s official. The Nexus One is dead, and Google is shutting down their phone store

Just yesterday I asked a question: can you really trust Google’s tools enough to run your business in the cloud? And it got me thinking about yet another initiative Google recently announced: printing documents in the cloud.

I’m not talking Google’s often-questionable security on this one. In fact, in a way I think cloud printing makes more sense than many of the other things we’ve all started doing virtually since Google became big brother. But because it’s so simple I pretty much ask “who cares”?

Let’s start with what the cloud is. In simple terms cloud computing means that you’re using resources you don’t actually possess or aren’t physically connected to. In a sense, if you’ve set up a wireless network to access the Internet in your home or at your business you’ve created your own cloud, albeit one with only a single virtual resource: your Internet connection.

So Google Docs, for example, is a cloud resource that exists on the Internet, and you need an Internet connection to get to the documents you store there. And now Google wants to make it so you can print over the Internet to a printer you aren’t physically attached to.

And I ask: so what?

In the late 1990s, I was one of the principals at a company called Planet Computer, which among other things developed software that made this possible way back then. And in its way it’s a cool enough idea, but honestly it was a limited implementation that really gave our clients the ability to send a print command home to their business when on the road so that . . . what? Someone else could pick up the documents and either put them aside or mail them to you? Neat, but not actually all that useful other than in situations where you would have your assistant organize something for you now, rather than when you got back.

I own a printer right now that cost barely $100 and lets me print that way in my home, and share the printer among everyone on my network. Honestly, it does the same thing Google is trying to tell us will be another great “cloud resource”.

Why do I bring this up?

Business Change is an interesting topic, but sometimes the best changes you make are the ones that involve saying “no, thank you” to new and supposedly improved things. So while I think Google Docs can be a great tool for storage, collaboration, and accessibility (assuming you take steps to make sure you can get to your documents when the Internet is “down”), printing through the cloud sounds like an idea that doesn’t really mean all that much, and worse, becomes just another distraction to deal with.

The Computer Answer Guy and PC-VIP are our two flavors of business help to manage your computers, and at both we stress working smart. Speaking as a guy with decades of experience helping businesses manage change, create business process, and save time I implore you: please manage ideas like cloud computing very carefully.

The shoemaker’s kids don’t have shoes.

I’ve been known to apply that old saw to lots of situations. Friends get angry at me when I do it, clients pay me to teach them about making sure they have shoes of their own, and because I’m human I’m as guilty as anyone; the things I’m best at teaching to others I don’t always handle well for myself.

What do you do when Google shuts you down?

Chris Brogan, one of the business-gurus-of-the-moment, is going through it right now. I’ve scolded him in a comment on that post, and now I hope I can teach you something that Chris really should have known:

In business you always need to have a backup plan.

Chris has every right to be frustrated by all of his stuff suddenly not working. And hey: Google really does owe  us a way to recover without having to cross a border (Europe for a week, anyone? At least Chris Brogan’s story has him in driving distance).

And Google could even make money at giving us a backup plan for when they screw up, although I’m sure we’d all then accuse them of breaking things on purpose so they could charge for premium support on something that we thought was free.

But at the end of the day the story is that any time you put all your eggs in one basket you’re asking for trouble. I’m not just talking about data backups, by the way; I’m talking REAL redundancy. What Chris describes is like a company having one connection to the internet and then trying to blame the ISP for lost business when service goes out.

With so much of your business now run “in the cloud”, do you have a plan to keep moving if things stop working? And a way to implement that plan?

That’s what Business Process is all about.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that privacy has been getting repeated coverage here, lately. Whether it’s about the US Congress trying to pass new data privacy laws, the US Supreme Court protecting employer rights, or even something as superfluous as ChatRouletteMap, privacy has been on my mind, and of course the way it affects your business and the changes you’re trying to make to keep your business vibrant are effected by how you handle privacy.

Our friends at Google, a company that’s long been playing both sides of the privacy game, have a new tactic: Google has set up a page that shows a map with details about their data and privacy communications with governments.

The level of detail is impressive. And since government transparency is legally guaranteed here in the USA I’m a big fan of the information also being made available in such an easy-to-access-and-digest way.

And of course it’s not really very useful.

So Google, in showing this information in the way it is, is really just doing so because it can. In essence, they”re thumbing their noses at the man. Like a child would. Not entirely surprising given Google’s recent whiny attempt to get US government help with their issues in China, but . . . really, Google?

Lawyers will often tell their clients to be quiet about pending issues; the less information that is “out there”, the better you are. My opinion is the opposite: privacy issues notwithstanding you’re often better off being transparent than secretive. Google plays it both ways. And this is where the issues they’re starting to have come from.

Managing business change is a challenge on a good day. And the more successful you become the harder business change management becomes. But until you become a business with the power and influence of a Google it’s almost never going to be a good idea to play issues “both ways”. Decide what your policy will be on privacy, disclosures, and the way to speak, and stick to it.

Whose business is it, anyway?

It was just a few weeks ago that the New Jersey Supreme Court made me embarrassed to have lived many years of my life in the often-unfairly-maligned state. Now, the United States Supreme Court looks to be ready to fix the problem.

Let’s recap:

First, there is no constitutional right to privacy. We have many laws in the United States that establish privacy as something that may be reasonably expected under certain circumstances, but privacy isn’t a right.

Second: when you run a business, you can set rules for how those working for you behave so long as those rules don’t break any laws. Human Resources Departments keep up on these issues, and standards of behavior can be made preconditions of continued employment.

Third: if for no reason other than to protect a business’ own legal interests, it’s reasonable to impose these standards, and if I issue you a company-owned-and-paid-for cell phone (or computer, or pretty much anything) and explicitly define how you can and cannot use it, you need to follow those rules.

And finally: if I own the phone and have warned you that I reserve the right to look at its content and/or what is done with it, you have been explicitly advised of what level of privacy you can expect.

I ultimately don’t care what happens to the police officers who were using their phones for naughty purposes, but as a business person and advocate of controlled business change, I care very much that we’re about to have law passed down by the highest court in the land that states more or less clearly what rights are associated with using employer-owned assets.

And when planning your business change, you should care, too.

Is it time to dump e-mail?

My head hurts just thinking about that question. But as great as e-mail is, it has problems.

For one, e-mail is too linear. So while e-mail is great for communications that involve me sending you a message, you answering, and the subject either being considered addressed or me being able to ask the next question until the chain of e-mails reaches its logical conclusion, it’s limited.

And as much as I Hate Texting, I’ve come to realize lately that in cases like what I just described it’s just as effective as e-mail. There are storage issues to be addressed, but the linear nature and “answer when you’re ready” back-and-forth are of an identical mechanism in texting as in e-mail.

So maybe I hate e-mail as much as I hate texting.

A couple of weeks ago, Google added a new feature to GMail that at first made me think “a-ha!” and then made me realize that there’s a reason Google seems so much smarter than the rest of us. Now, you can have nested labels in your GMail inbox to organize your stuff in a way that resembles the way you nest folders in standard e-mail.

And as soon as I could do this thing that I’ve been wishing for I realized that it was best if I don’t. And Google explained why in the page linked above.

And they’ve explained it before, but up until now the explanation was just “it’s better our way”. Now, it’s more like “it’s better our way but while we’re finally ready to let you do it this is a business change that will be better left unused“.

Wow.

Let’s assume that not too many people who rely on Gmail are going to be all that interested in nested tags. OK, so Google is pandering to us in an attempt to gain greater adoption of Gmail and whatever other tools they can drag us into. Fine; business as usual.

What about people who have seriously stopped using e-mail? They really are out there, and in growing numbers; “I don’t care to keep a record and it’s already out there in the cloud anyway, so I’ll just use Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites to communicate“.

And so, we move on: the biggest business change of all as it relates to the issue of dumping e-mail is what we dump e-mail in favor of. And this makes me think for the first time in months about Google Wave. Is it ever going to be opened up for use by anyone who cares to figure it out?

Whether Google Wave, an existing social networking platform, or something else is the ultimate “winner”, it truly looks as though e-mail is on its last legs. This might be a tough business change to navigate, but it’s one you’re going to have to work through. And it’s time to start figuring out how.

Depending on your perspective, there’s a change brewing in the bowels of the airline industry that’s either the best, most brilliant business change of all time, or complete cocky-doodie. European short-haul carrier RyanAir, already notorious for making pretty near everything a paid extra in their flights between European cities, wants you to pay to use the bathroom.

Yes, you read that right. Always seeking new ways to make money, RyanAir, the airline that has been known to price the occasional seat at just one euro and make money instead on extras, has decided that using a bathroom needn’t be free.

Before you get your panties in a twist, let’s go over a few details.

• First, the idea is only to be put in place for flights lasting under an hour. Given that you need to be strapped into your seat for the first and last 10-15 minutes of every flight anyway there’s really not much of a window to cover.
• Second, RyanAir’s CEO has promised to donate the fees his company collects for bathroom use to charity. Not some of the bathroom use fees; all of them.
• Third, he has two really good reasons to want to do this: the plan is to convert the planes to have more seats in them when a few of the bathrooms can be eliminated based on less demand, and by keeping people in their seats and creating a more orderly overall environment the bathroom fees become a genuine productivity and time savings mechanism. In the airline business, that translates to big money.

I think this is brilliant. Human-compassion uproar notwithstanding it’s what’s business change is all about.

As stinky as this particular business change may sound to you, let’s be frank about what business change is: you’re looking for ways to make things better (whatever that means on any given day).

And I’m not sure charging bathroom fees on short-haul flights makes things worse.

The fly in this stinky ointment? Even though RyanAir doesn’t operate in the United States, they’ll need US approval to reconfigure the seats in their planes because their fleet is made by the American company Boeing.

Strange but true. But often, that’s exactly how business change works. Now if only RyanAir could figure out what you were doing in the bathroom and how to charge you extra if you . . . well, you get it . . .

I’m all for privacy.

To be honest, privacy is a relatively new phenomenon sociologically and absent issues like identity theft and stealing from other simply by having their private data and knowing how to misuse it privacy shouldn’t really be that big a deal; just don’t do anything you’re ashamed of. But in the Internet / electronic age there’s a need to protect information. Privacy matters.

But as anyone who knows anything about the technological practicalities of privacy will tell you, there’s really no such thing; data systems will always get breached, and the best path to privacy isn’t about technology so much as knowing how technology you create will get used, and by whom.

Yeah, yeah . . . stop using Facebook right now. And with the US Library of Congress having just decided to start archiving the entire stream of everything that goes through Twitter, you’d better be really careful what you slap up there unless you don’t care about privacy.

Of course, you’re not going to stop tweeting, friending people, or anything like that, and from a business perspective you can’t. So you move on, hopefully at least a little bit aware of the potential consequences of your actions.

Here’s a new one to watch out for: the United State Congress is trying to pass a law that makes it illegal to send out fake information about your phone.

Constitutionality/free speech issues notwithstanding (and speaking as a non-attorney I suspect that most legal scholars would discount free speech as not applying to this issue), this is a law that looks like one more ineffectual band-aid. Simple reason: it doesn’t apply in a way that couldn’t be easily circumnavigated by any second-year law student.

The legislation would only outlaw the use of spoofing technology when the intent is to deceive and harm the recipient of the call

<Sigh>

All those who believe they have the definition of “deceive and harm”, please step forward.

As is the case with so many laws and rules, there’s a tremendous amount left open to interpretation. But data by definition needs to be tightly defined, and all this or any law that attempts to regulate the use of data without specifically outlining what’s acceptable for its use (as opposed to what isn’t) is going to do is create new loopholes that exploitative types will happily step through in defense of their own actions.

So, please: watch your data carefully (we can help). Don’t (for example) mask your caller ID information or change it to something else just because you can; it’s wrong.

Most important, be sure that when you create business process you’ve actually created process. Otherwise, like Congress’ new data spoofing law on privacy, you’re just being counterproductive.

This morning I got to work, and found a comment in my in-box. One of our subscribers to this blog had taken exception to something that happens here at Answer Guy Central.

Here’s the way things work: each time a new visitor comes here, we point out as they leave that we’re happy to stay in touch. We make that happen by having a small window pop up on their screen and offering a chance to  receive a monthly newsletter from us.

As you can see from the response I left to that comment, we view this as a business process. Writing this stuff takes time, and we want to make sure that you remember us and stay in touch. Ask anyone who writes, is a journalist, does blogging, or whatever you want to call it; we all like attention!

This post isn’t about that, though; it’s about Customer Service.

When someone visits Answer Guy Central, we treat them like a customer. That means we care what they think, and if they offer a suggestion, criticism, some comments, or give any reason at all for us to engage in customer service communications, we respond.

And when people are unhappy, giving that response isn’t always fun. OK, It never is.

At the same time, it’s important, and we learn. Believe me when I tell you that customer service is the most important activity your company engages in. And all you need to do to be good at customer service is listen, and care.

I’ve commented before that a few of the better known folks in social networking don’t actually seem to understand this. Let me give props to someone who does: Dani Shapiro, an author of books that I personally find impossible to read, answers every single person who writes to her. Ringo Starr (yes, that Ringo Starr) says that he answered all his Beatles-related fan mail until about a year ago. LOTS of it.

Is that kind of customer service hard? Is customer-service-for-all a time consuming and expensive business expense? You bet. And in today’s business environment, it’s important to growth and business success.

Treat your customers the way you want to be treated. Customer Service doesn’t have to mean giving in; bit it does mean giving.

Over the years since this Internet thing started taking hold, there’s been a lot of debate over an important question: Are Bloggers Journalists?

Of course, the question seems more important to former journalists who are unable to find work than it does to most other people. Well, I know a few of those and the one point that I’ve heard a few times and sticks is that journalists are held to a set of professional standards that separates their work from what bloggers do by virtue of imposing external or reporting and editing chain of command accountability for the accuracy of what they write.

Merriam Webster is of no real help. They define journalist as one who reports “for a news medium” (this defends the old-school position), but also simply as “one who keeps a journal”, which does not, and one who “aims for a mass audience”, which can be argued either way. Dictionary.com helps a little more, suggesting that a journalist is one who is in the profession of journalism.

OK, so . . . aren’t bloggers who get paid to write journals or whose work as writers of journals gain them money even indirectly (cripes, like me?!) therefore journalists? I have no answer. And that’s the nature of business change; as formerly-clear issues evolve there’s going to be disagreement over what that evolution means.

This weekend, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the American Society of News Editors and told them that he thinks bloggers aren’t journalists. Yesterday, Curt Hopkins, a writer at ReadWriteWeb, reacted angrily. Mr. Hopkins, a guy with a long pedigree as a “real” journalist, overstepped and in doing so perhaps undermined his own point; Mr. Schmidt never stated that people without print distribution channels were by definition not journalists. But the CEO of the world’s largest media company did some evil, and after Google’s decision a few days ago to start making size matter in search rankings I find myself wondering whether the only business change Google thinks is good is the one that doesn’t happen.

In other words, when the little guy becomes the big guy, does his perspective automatically change?

I guess the question ultimately really is about where you make your money. When Google was just a search engine and still looking for alliances with big established companies they would never have tried to define journalism narrowly. Now that Google is the big guy the rules have changed.

And that’s what business change is all about: you see the rules change, and you change your business to take advantage of it.

By the way: I don’t consider myself a journalist, but I reserve the right to change my mind.

How fast is your web site? You ask yourself that question all the time, right? You don’t want your customers waiting around for pages to load, and you certainly can’t risk losing the interest of someone new as they wait to see your web site for the first time.

It’s the biggest, if not only reason we’ve long recommended against heavy use of Flash. Now Google has added a reason for you to care about the speed of your web site: faster web sites will get higher rankings.

This troubles me.

While it’s obvious that faster is better, making speed a component of the formula that decides who matters most favors the better-capitalized business over the smaller one, further diluting the democratization of the web. In other words, if you have a better server with better bandwidth, this gives you an advantage.

But that advantage has nothing to do with the quality, accuracy, or popularity of your content

The place this is most concerning is when a web site is hosted on a shared server and/or using a shared IP address. Somewhere, servers have built into their operating parameters a “maximum connections” rule. If you’re buying the typical $10/month hosting plan, therefore aren’t a machine-level administrator, and are sharing space with 400-500 other web sites, this can REALLY smoke your results. Imagine GoogleBot crawling for you, finding that your server can’t/won’t respond quickly because your site is queued to respond behind a dozen or two of your co-hosted sites which have received requests for information at the same time as yours—maybe even from Google—and therefore sees you as being “slow”.

You’re now going to be rank-penalized because:

• A) you have a cheap plan (MAYBE fair) and
• B) at the moment Google came knockin’ your neighbors were creating traffic and making noise and so Google thought you weren’t home (NOT fair).

There’s some good news here: slow-performing web site elements will be cut back. The Flash-heavy aspects I referred to above are almost certain to become less and less prevalent, and sites that call dozens of advertising elements every time you load a page are going to have to change the way they do things or face the ire of Google as their SEO rankings drop lower and lower over time.

But if concern for how search engines see sites drives business process you might also find a bias toward going back to the way web sites looked circa 1999.

In the statistics Google is making available to me as of this writing, the three web sites I control have very different speed results.

• answerguy.com takes 1.6 seconds to load a page (82nd Percentile)
• pc-vip.com takes 0.3 seconds (99th Percentile)
• hatetexting.com loads a page in 0.9 seconds (95th Percentile)

Why the disparity? Here are a few points:

1. Answer Guy Central and PC-VIP are hosted on the same machine, while I Hate Texting is hosted elsewhere, so we know it isn’t just the machine creating the results.
2. PC-VIP is the only one of the three web sites  that uses (minimal) Flash, Answer Guy uses a Content Management System, and I Hate Texting is as simple as simple can be. This says that I Hate Texting ought to be the fastest, but it’s right in the middle.
3. PC-VIP shouldn’t manage to be as fast as it is, but because the measurement is “per page” and what looks to a human like one page is actually three in the eyes of a search engine delivering a measurement, its numbers are amazing.
4. Answer Guy, fully 500% slower than PC-VIP, still manages to load a tremendous amount of information at a speed that’s faster than 82% of all web sites.

Given how much information is loaded when you ask for a page here at Answer Guy Central, I’m pleased that it takes “only” 1.6 seconds to load. But what if Google decides that’s “slow”?

Is your head spinning?

Keep an eye on this; it could have a big impact on the way you’re seen on the Internet. Contact Us if you want help. And please: when you work on your SEO plans, make sure you take everything into account.