Guillaume Lerouge's blog

On the heels of Twitter announcing that they will shut down Posterous, Google just announced that Google reader will get the axe in about 3 months. It's the second time in quite a short timeframe that a free service I was using will be shutting down in just a couple weeks.

I was lucky enough to be able to switch to Posthaven promptly. So far so good, even though the service does not support yet many important features (Twitter sharing, I'm looking at you). According to its pledge, the service is for-pay and should hopefully stay alive quite a while.

I was lucky enough to stay at @edwk's house a couple years ago, where I was treated to a demo of his great feed-reading app, Feedly. Although I didn't like the way Feedly re-organized my Google Reader feeds, it looks like things have changed quite a lot since then.

I have already migrated to Feedly and the latest version of their interface is still as sleek. I have also installed the Feedly iPad app, I will test it as soon as I get home. Last but not least, Feedly is working on its very own feed-fetching backend, code-named "Normandy".

There's just one thing I look forward to: be able to pay Feedly for the service. Their choice to use Google App Engine for their new backend has to generate costs, and currently none of their applications costs anything. I don't mind paying for a service, in addition to Posthaven I also have an Instapaper subscription running.

Feedly, I want you to live: please give me a way subscribe for a fee!

Cool article from the New York Times:

“Once we amplify these small motions, there’s like a whole new world you can look at.”

Go watch the video at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/scientists-uncover-invisible-motion-in-video/

Amazing picture a couple days ago:

A Tartigrade in Moss Is this an alien? Probably not, but of all the animals on Earth, the tardigrade might be the best candidate...

I've moved! Posthaven is the new home for my posts, effective right now.

I still need to figure out a couple things and the options are still pretty limited, but this is starting well. As outlined in my second Quora blog post, the most important things missing for me are:

1. A service that will hopefully not close down in the next 10 years
2. Support for personal domain name (I want to reuse guillaumelerouge.com)
3. Posterous importer (I have 1.04Go of data to bring back to life)
4. Ability to post by email (this one is just too good to let go)
   

Out of those 4, the last one is the only one missing right now. As for #1, time will tell, but it seems to be off to a good start: 

Posthaven is for anyone, but it's not free. It's for pay, but with the goal of keeping the content and website online forever. We're considering becoming a nonprofit to support that goal.

Now let's hope my next wishes come true as well!

I had not come across it yet. Lot of good stuff in there: 

The idea is pretty simple: Create a list of users who look like they’re about to cancel, based on the past behavior of users who cancelled. Then contact this list and ask how you can help them or give them ideas on how to better utilize the service. Ideally, this should discourage them from cancelling.

From http://ryancarson.com/post/23942657106/reducing-churn-with-econometrics

Some great nuggets of insight in this piece about Google's POPS team (POPS stands as a shortcut for People Operations).

After crunching the data, Carlisle found that the optimal interview rate—the number of interviews after which the candidate’s average score would converge on his final score—was four. “After four interviews,” Carlisle says, “you get diminishing returns.” Presented with this data, Google’s army of engineers was convinced. Interview times shrunk, and Google’s hiring sped up.

The group ran a “conjoint survey” in which it asked employees to choose the best among many competing pay options. For instance, would you rather have $1,000 more in salary or $2,000 as a bonus?

“What we found was that they valued base pay above all,” Setty says. “When we offered a bonus of X, they valued that at what it costs us. But if you give someone a dollar in base pay, they value it at more than a dollar because of the long-term certainty.”

Some very interesting advice:

Clayton [Christensen] contends that “products find a certain market only when they help their customers get done the jobs that they have already been trying to do.” [...]

You say people aren’t switching from anything to use what you’ve built?

That means one of two things: either you don’t understand your product, or no one wants what you’re selling. Every product has competitors. Sometimes they’re other products and sometimes they’re human processes.