Website Reviews

April 28, 2009

Volunteer Match

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 11:24 am

VOLUNTEER MATCH is a social community service for teens to match their interests, availability, and expertise. Listings run the gamut from tutoring, donating toys, serving meals to the homeless, or even hosting an exchange student. The site also offers a variety of virtual volunteer opportunities kids can do online, as well as listings of nonprofits and businesses that need volunteers.

November 12, 2008

Bulletproof Vest for Protection

Filed under: Ecommerce — Tags: , , — admin @ 8:40 pm

Bulletproof Vest or body armor is termed as a protective covering or simply a piece of cloth which covers the torso of a person i.e. back, abdomen, and chest. These protective coverings provide safety to the wearer and also protect him or her from the deadly revolver bullets and certain pistol and also from the fragments of disastrous explosives and certain devices such as hand grenades. Usually, these vests are worn by security guards, soldiers, police officers, and by those who have a risk of getting shot like politicians of country or any leading personality.

These bullet proof vests work in a very normal way as a shield does. They are made in layers of fabric which is tightly woven just like Kevlar or any other strong, hard material such as titanium or ceramic which have the tendency to stop the revolver or metal pistol bullets or other fragments of a metal shell from penetrating into the body of a person. Augmentation of textile vests with metal such as titanium or steel, polythene plates or ceramic provides extra and undulating protection to the vital areas of our body. These hard and strong armor plates in a bullet proof vest have been effective against most of the handgun bullets. The tightly woven or laminated layers of strong and hard fibre catch and deform the bullet and spread its thrust over a larger area of the fibre of vest. In this process the bulletproof vest absorbs all the energy from the bullet and brings it to stop before it penetrates into the vest. In some cases bullet may penetrate some of the layers but as it deforms, its energy is absorbed by the larger area of fibre. Specifications of a bullet proof vest includes both, that is, requirement of penetration resistance and control on the amount of impact thrust or energy being delivered to the wearer’s body.

Bullet proof vests are very much protective for a certain limit or impact which is bearable but can be visa versa too. A person wearing a bulletproof vest can get serious injuries from the impact or thrust of a metal bullet on the vest worn. A person can even get killed if a shell fragment or a bullet hits that part of the body which is not protected by the vest or if they are shot by a pressure gun, machine gun or powerful rifle bullet.

In present time, different types of body armor or vests are available which vary in composition and their functionality. Those bullet proof vests which are worn by a security guard or police official are usually made of different layers of fabrics which are tightly woven just like Kevlar. Whereas, the vests worn by soldiers are stronger and heavier than those worn by the security guards and police officers because a soldier needs protection from machine gun and rifle bullets. Soldier’s bullet proof vests often have a strong metal such as titanium or flat pieces of ceramic materials. These types of materials have tendency to stop the bullets from machine guns or rifles.

November 11, 2008

Getting Higher in the SEO Ranks

Filed under: SEO — Tags: , , — admin @ 3:46 pm

You might think it is too late to get your web site in the higher rankings on a search engine.  After all the holiday season is beginning.  Many television channels have already begun to show Christmas sales and offer commercials regarding the holiday.  These companies are jump starting the season because it is expected to be a low revenue holiday compared to years past.  The credit crunch has effectively squashed the ability to spend money on all but the necessities.

If you have a website it is not too late to upgrade your search engine optimisation techniques.  You still have time to reconfigure your site.  However, you need to do so now. Don’t wait a few more weeks.  You may find that some search engines will not allow for the most optimal changes to actually help.  Google though has made an assurance to the public and media that it is not too late to work in some more search engine optimisation strategy. After you have read this article you will need to do some further reading. A good place to start is http://www.topclickmedia.co.uk/pay-per-click-advertising-blog

What you need to do in the land of search engine optimisation is check your site from a consumer perspective.  Can the consumer find your site with a keyword search? An example would be if you sell calendars.  Those are always a hot purchase item for the Christmas season.  Can your site be found with a search with the word calendar?  Can it be found by searching UK calendars?  Once you know where your site is listed you can work to gain a better search engine optimisation.

If you do find your site is the link you found working?  How about other links to your pages?  Is every link you have working?  This is just normally search engine optimisation features you need to maintain, but at the holiday season it can be more important.

If your link doesn’t work even in the high rankings then the consumer will not try to find another way onto your site.  You also might want to increase your links.  The more decent links you have the more traffic you will receive.  It will also give you a better rating when Google begins to crawl through your site.

The last thing you can do for the holiday season or any search engine optimisation is work on the content.  When was the last time your content was reworked?  Do you provide a newsletter for loyal consumers?  Do you send out discount notices?  By having updated information and ways to market your site you will get more consumers.  Your content is searched by Google.  When you update the content Google finds this refreshing and may up your ranking.  The search engine also looks for better keyword placement, relevancy to your product, and much more.  Target what the search engines will be looking for.

Even if you don’t think you need to do this for the holiday keep in mind that you will have to maintain your site to help with search engine optimisation.  Consumers and the search engine always welcome changes and a useful website.

For more information on not just search engine optimisation there are many useful resources such as SearchEngineNews.com and www.topclickmedia.co.uk.

Gaining Search Engine Optimization with the Right Techniques

Filed under: SEO — Tags: , , — admin @ 3:28 pm

You may have attempted to use search engine optimisation in the past and been shot down by web engines like Google.  In fact you might have concentrated only on getting your site easy to crawl for the search engines.  However, it is more than just using part of the search engine optimisation tips you have learned.  You need to use an array of techniques that have been proven to work.

A good web design is more than just targeting the search engine to get yourself crawled by spiders.  It is more about the quality and ranking of the information combined with the ability of the spiders to crawl.  Many experts have been offering their advice to businesses and other websites lately in the hopes that they can help individuals get the rankings they need. Such companies as Top Click Media click www.topclickmedia.co.uk/seo.htm.

The search engine actually gathers data by the truckload.  All of this new information it gathers is in one way great.  It means it can troll through the web sites and find what is the best for consumers when they do a search.  However, for a business it can mean being reduced to page ten.  You don’t want to stop the search engine from getting through your site.  In fact you need something that is completely unique that will make the search engine place you on the top.

You might be asking how you can get on the top.  After all there are hundreds of other websites trying to do the same.  If you own a business online, but don’t know much about search engine optimisation or even web design you might want to enlist a professional.  A professional web host will know what needs to be maintained, fixed, and highlighted to increase your ratings.

It is not just about the ranking your page obtains though.  In fact it is more about the content than it used to be.  Duplicate content is a major no-no.  Anyone who uses duplicate content will end up in the pit of no return.  You can also get penalised for stealing content.  What you need is unique language, content, and information.  Search engine optimisation is about pleasing the consumer as much as it is about pleasing the search engine itself. See this page to learn more about this: http://www.topclickmedia.co.uk/pay-per-click-advertising-blog/google-talks-about-the-duplicate-content-penalty

If the search engine doesn’t like what is being offered neither will the consumer.  It used to be that the search engine cared less about quality and more about keywords.  This was until the web became full of information.  Now to make things more relevant the search engines have to come up with ways to ferret out the better information.  To do this they have plenty of algorithms that you don’t need to understand.  Instead it is about what you do understand regarding increasing the quality of your site, getting the right links, and making sure that you are using the right techniques.  Marketing your website can only be successful when you offer the best that you can to your target consumers with an eye for search engine optimisation

November 10, 2008

Pets for Sale Website Launch

Filed under: Pets — Tags: , , , — admin @ 3:32 pm

Pets for Sale, is my new Website launched on October 25th to Public for listing their pets, currently supporting dogs, puppies, cats and kittens. I will be pretty soon adding listing options for other pets like birds, horses and some other exotic pets too. I also added the Pets forum at my new website over the last weekend, to help communicate with each other, better. Ofcourse, the looks of my pets website is inherited from my social network website, but it was done only because the bounce rate was very low with this design. I think my members will like all the Free features I provide them at my website. Feel free to check it out and let me know, if you find any bugs or want to suggest some design improvement on it.

Dont forget to register at my pets for sale website, as I am offering first 1000 members, 2 years of Free Elite Membership, there is no limit on how many listings you can put on our website with Elite Membership and if you are a dog breeders or cat breeders, you get Free Listing too.  So join up and start advertising your pets in our website to list dogs for sale & cats for sale. If you are a breeder, you might be interested in listing puppies for sale or your kittens for sale.

November 1, 2008

Find your defence gear online

Filed under: Ecommerce — Tags: , , — admin @ 11:00 pm

It is always better safe than sorry. In my profession as a member of the military where our life is always in danger, it is always advised to take safety precautions. Wearing our bullet proof vest is a must. You shouldn’t go on a mission without it. This is where you depend your life. This is my body armor and I make sure I take it with me wherever I go. Last week I bought another vest that features the latest bulletproof protection, comfort and style. Not only that it should be comfortable but it also has to be light enough to float, highly resistant to flex fatigue and low coefficient of friction. The new vest I bought was so convenient unlike the old traditional bulletproof vest that you have to strap and adjust every time you put it on. Truly a life saving suit for me that comes with style. Of course the best armor still is safetiness and the Lords guidance. Feel free to check out more Defence Gear Online at http://www.dangerproof.com

Is Saliva a Cure?

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , — admin @ 10:48 pm

Oct 30, 2008 – Salvianoid is a US based herbal firm which assures the users of ultimate pleasure. Salvianoid.com is must visit website which provides detailed information for their users.

It is mandatory to know more on the mysterious herb called salvia but it is actually misunderstood by many. One should know and experience all the wonderful and enlightening effects that it has to offer. There are many flavors of salvia divinorum provided with different concentration strengths such as Apple, Spearmint and Strawberry. There are various ranges and one can choose from the 5x, 10 xs, 20 xs, 40 xs and 60x salvia extracts to suit all their personal needs.

Salvia Divinorum provides very safe and enjoyable experience. Salvia is legal in most country and state. It will be made legal in other countries also within few days Salvia is almost licensed actually the salvia plant was traditionally used by indigenous people for healing and shamanic vision because of its unique properties when it is being chewed or smoked. Actually no membership is required. Tracking is also done inside the member area .Once purchased in salvianoid.com the address is saved for further purchase; the address is also joined in the mailing list for special coupons and promotions. All plants are packaged in discreet plain bags or boxes. At Salvianoid.com, a good quality salvia divinorum extracts are supplied.

To know more about the different products about salvia and the attractive offers visit www.salvianoid.com

There are also starter packs offered so that a person who is new but curious can easily experience it. The starter pack will also benefit experienced users. Once decided   to buy salvia it can be bought through safe and secure online purchase facilities at salvianoid.com. In  Salvianoid.com  a flexible range of payment methods are there  to suit or ease mode of payment  and  salvia  is also delivered  straight to one’s residence , no matter about in which part of the world  one live . Once when one browses through the site www.salvianoid.com  at leisure, they can select the range and the flavor of salvia divinorum and have a trial even using starter pack.

Salvia accepts all types of credit cards visa, master card etc. Payment made through this site is highly safe and secure. There are no third party risks here. All the goods are shipped in the presence of an experienced person of the firm.

Actually the initial users are advised to try salvia first at lower concentration strengths, to familiarize with the physical and psychological effects of the herb before moving onto higher strength concentrations. However, a bundle of salvia like the Rookie Pack is the best option. The Rookie pack is the starters pack.

You can buy salvia divinorum, the ultimate privacy for the user is provided. The necessary information such as name address alone is collected. The information sis never shared with external parties. The credit/debit card information is not collected. The gift cards are also offered so that it can be gifted such that the receiver will be surprised by salvianoid.com.

October 23, 2008

Facebook review

Filed under: review — Tags: — admin @ 10:19 am

Facebook.com is in top 20 websites reaching over 50 million U.S. monthly people, creating a new era for social networking. The site caters to a more affluent, teenagers and adult with a very slightly female biased following. The network is made up of hundreds of separate networks based around schools, businesses and regions. The only thing we feel keeping Facebook lacks is of customization options. Facebook’s website design is straightforward; it has few graphics or decoration, but they managed to create a uniform utilitarian interface that most users adore. Facebook includes a comprehensive help section complete with ‘getting started.’ The FAQs are broken down according to the various sections of the site like account settings, privacy and security, applications, advertising, social ads, mobile and more. Facebook is a great social networking website that doesn’t waste time with extras and eye candy.

Monthly Traffic US
Visits per Month 1,242,838,638
People per Month 42,097,145
Comparison To Prior Period Region People Visits
Daily US 2 % 2 %
Weekly US 0 % 0 %
Monthly US 2 % 13 %

Demographics :

Female : 55%

Age (18-34) : 47%

Caucasian : 74%

College grapduates : 43%

Audience Also Likes Affinity
Communities 3.5x
Teens 2.9x
Bridal 2.7x
Fashion/Cosmetics 2.7x
Humor 2.4x
Schools/Universities 2.3x
Job Search 2.3x
Baby 2.3x
Discussion/Chat 2.3x
Instant Messenger 2.2x
African American 2.2x
Parenting 2.2x
Fantasy Sports 2.2x
Educational Resource 2.1x
Music/Radio 2.1x
Audience Also Visits Affinity
nliven.com 10.2x
sometrics.com 10.2x
honestybox.com 10.1x
mepopular.com 10.1x
ayisnap.com 10.1x
socialcash.com 10.0x
coolapps.com 9.8x
sgnbar.com 9.8x
sgn.com 9.5x
railsmachina.com 9.4x
mobscience.com 9.4x
playfish.com 9.4x
birthdays-calendar.c 9.4x
snapinteractiveapps. 9.4x
hive7.com 9.3x
ICANN Registrar: TUCOWS INC.
Created: 1997-03-29
Expires: 2010-03-30
Updated: 2008-05-28

October 17, 2008

Debt CC - the one-stop resource for people challenged by debt problems

Filed under: finance — Tags: — admin @ 10:24 am

Debt CC or Debt Consolidation Care is the earliest get-rid-of-debt community on the Internet. Currently, the community consists of more than 129,000 members in all. The debt consultants and community members of Debt Consolidation Care provide valuable tips on debt consolidation, debt consolidation loans, debt settlement, payday loans and negotiation with collection agencies. They will help you become debt free in a systematic way.

If you want to get rid of your financial difficulties related to debt, Debt CC can offer you a debt counseling session free of cost where a debt consultant will assist you to solve your problem. For this purpose, you need to sign up by filling out a simple counseling and analysis form.

For becoming a member of the community, you just need to do a community signup.

If you are finding it hard to negotiate with the creditors directly, Debt Consolidation Care would also help you locate the most dependable debt consolidation company.

What are the financial options for debt consolidation that are suggested by Debt Consolidation Care?

Following are the financial options for debt consolidation that are recommended by Debt Consolidation Care:

o Debt consolidation loans
o Self repayment plan
o Debt settlement
o Debt management
o Bankruptcy

What are the advantages offered by Debt Consolidation Care?

1) By implementing the advices offered by Debt CC, you can get the following advantages:

? Lower interest rates
? Reduce your monthly payments
? Avoid bankruptcy
? Get rid of collection calls
? Relinquish late fees
? Become free of debt
? Pay only a single monthly payment
? Acquire good credit

2) You can ask any question about your debt related problems and get the answers from the community members.

3) The community members of Debt CC are able to discuss on various topics on debt and exchange their views in forums.

4) If you become a community member, you can earn points to earn dollars just by posting your queries or answers associated with debt problems.

Some important features of the Debt Consolidation Care Community

Following are some significant features of the Debt Consolidation Care Community:

Articles

Articles on the following topics are published on the community website:

o Bankruptcy
o Credit card and credit counseling
o Credit score, credit repair and credit report
o Debt settlement and debt management
o Debt reduction and debt counseling
o Debt negotiation and debt freedom
o Mortgage, loan and cash advance
o Identity theft and other forms of scams
o Other relevant topics

Forums

Discussions on the following topics are held at the forums of Debt Consolidation Care:

• Debt consolidation, debt settlement and debt management
• Creditors and collection agencies
• Payday loan help
• Credit score, credit repair and credit reports
• Collection agencies and creditors address book
• Bankruptcy – Chapter 7 and Chapter 13
• Student debt consolidation
• Identity theft – scams, training and security

Ranking chart

For your convenience, the community provides a comprehensive ranking chart of the debt consolidation companies operating in the U.S.

Calculators offered by Debt Consolidation Care

The calculators offered by the community are widgets that would assist you to analyze your present financial condition and formulate plans in advance to handle it in a competent manner. Presently, the following calculators are being offered:

? Debt to income ratio calculator
? APR (Annual Percentage Rate) calculator
? Debt reduction calculator
? Credit card payment calculator
? Debt consolidation calculator
? Unsecured loan calculator

August 27, 2008

Amazon review & architecture

Filed under: review, webstore — admin @ 10:36 am

Amazon grew from a tiny online bookstore to one of the largest stores on earth. They did it while pioneering new and interesting ways to rate, review, and recommend products. Greg Linden shared is version of Amazon’s birth pangs in a series of blog articles

Site: http://amazon.com

Information Sources

  • Early Amazon by Greg Linden
  • How Linux saved Amazon millions
  • Interview Werner Vogels - Amazon’s CTO
  • Asynchronous Architectures - a nice summary of Werner Vogels’ talk by Chris Loosley
  • Learning from the Amazon technology platform - A Conversation with Werner Vogels
  • Werner Vogels’ Weblog - building scalable and robust distributed systems

    Platform

  • Linux
  • Oracle
  • C++
  • Perl
  • Mason
  • Java
  • Jboss
  • Servlets

    The Stats

  • More than 55 million active customer accounts.
  • More than 1 million active retail partners worldwide.
  • Between 100-150 services are accessed to build a page.

    The Architecture

  • What is it that we really mean by scalability? A service is said to be scalable if when we increase the resources in a system, it results in increased performance in a manner proportional to resources added. Increasing performance in general means serving more units of work, but it can also be to handle larger units of work, such as when datasets grow.
  • The big architectural change that Amazon made was to move from a two-tier monolith to a fully-distributed, decentralized, services platform serving many different applications.
  • Started as one application talking to a back end. Written in C++.
  • It grew. For years the scaling efforts at Amazon focused on making the back-end databases scale to hold more items, more customers, more orders, and to support multiple international sites. In 2001 it became clear that the front-end application couldn’t scale anymore. The databases were split into small parts and around each part and created a services interface that was the only way to access the data.
  • The databases became a shared resource that made it hard to scale-out the overall business. The front-end and back-end processes were restricted in their evolution because they were shared by many different teams and processes.
  • Their architecture is loosely coupled and built around services. A service-oriented architecture gave them the isolation that would allow building many software components rapidly and independently.
  • Grew into hundreds of services and a number of application servers that aggregate the information from the services. The application that renders the Amazon.com Web pages is one such application server. So are the applications that serve the Web-services interface, the customer service application, and the seller interface.
  • Many third party technologies are hard to scale to Amazon size. Especially communication infrastructure technologies. They work well up to a certain scale and then fail. So they are forced to build their own.
  • Not stuck with one particular approach. Some places they use jboss/java, but they use only servlets, not the rest of the J2EE stack.
  • C++ is uses to process requests. Perl/Mason is used to build content.
  • Amazon doesn’t like middleware because it tends to be framework and not a tool. If you use a middleware package you get lock-in around the software patterns they have chosen. You’ll only be able to use their software. So if you want to use different packages you won’t be able to. You’re stuck. One event loop for messaging, data persistence,
    AJAX, etc. Too complex. If middleware was available in smaller components, more as a tool than a framework, they would be more interested.
  • The SOAP web stack seems to want to solve all the same distributed systems problems all over again.
  • Offer both SOAP and REST web services. 30% use SOAP. These tend to be Java and .NET users and use WSDL files to generate remote object interfaces. 70% use REST. These tend to be PHP or PERL users.
  • In either SOAP or REST developers can get an object interface to Amazon. Developers just want to get job done. They don’t care what goes over the wire.
  • Amazon wanted to build an open community around their services. Web services were chosed because it’s simple. But hat’s only on the perimeter. Internally it’s a service oriented architecture. You can only access the data via the interface. It’s described in WSDL, but they use their own encapsulation and transport mechanisms.
  • Teams are Small and are Organized Around Services
    - Services are the independent units delivering functionality within Amazon. It’s also how Amazon is organized internally in terms of teams.
    - If you have a new business idea or problem you want to solve you form a team. Limit the team to 8-10 people because communication hard. They are called two pizza teams. The number of people you can feed off two pizzas.
    - Teams are small. They are assigned authority and empowered to solve a problem as a service in anyway they see fit.
    - As an example, they created a team to find phrases within a book that are unique to the text. This team built a separate service interface for that feature and they had authority to do what they needed.
    - Extensive A/B testing is used to integrate a new service . They see what the impact is and take extensive measurements.
  • Deployment
    - They create special infrastructure for managing dependencies and doing a deployment.
    - Goal is to have all right services to be deployed on a box. All application code, monitoring, licensing, etc should be on a box.
    - Everyone has a home grown system to solve these problems.
    - Output of deployment process is a virtual machine. You can use EC2 to run them.
  • Work From the Customer Backwards to Verify a New Service is Worth Doing
    - Work from the customer backward. Focus on value you want to deliver
    for the customer.
    - Force developers to focus on value delivered to the customer instead of building technology first and then figuring how to use it.
    - Start with a press release of what features the user will see and work backwards to check that you are building something valuable.
    - End up with a design that is as minimal as possible. Simplicity is the key if you really want to build large distributed systems.
  • State Management is the Core Problem for Large Scale Systems
    - Internally they can deliver infinite storage.
    - Not all that many operations are stateful. Checkout steps are stateful.
    - Most recent clicked web page service has recommendations based on session IDs.
    - They keep track of everything anyway so it’s not a matter of keeping state. There’s little separate state that needs to be kept for a session. The services will already be keeping the information so you just use the services.
  • Eric Brewer’s CAP Theorem or the Three properties of Systems
    - Three properties of a system: consistency, availability, tolerance to network partitions.
    - You can have at most two of these three properties for any shared-data system.
    - Partitionability: divide nodes into small groups that can see other groups, but they can’t see everyone.
    - Consistency: write a value and then you read the value you get the same value back. In a partitioned system there are windows where that’s not true.
    - Availability: may not always be able to write or read. The system will say you can’t write because it wants to keep the system consistent.
    - To scale you have to partition, so you are left with choosing either high consistency or high availability for a particular system. You must find the right overlap of availability and consistency.
    - Choose a specific approach based on the needs of the service.
    - For the checkout process you always want to honor requests to add items to a shopping cart because it’s revenue producing. In this case you choose high availability. Errors are hidden from the customer and sorted out later.
    - When a customer submits an order you favor consistency because several services–credit card processing, shipping and handling, reporting–are simultaneously accessing the data.

    Lessons Learned

  • You must change your mentality to build really scalable systems. Approach chaos in a probabilistic sense that things will work well. In traditional systems we present a perfect world where nothing goes down and then we build complex algorithms (agreement technologies) on this perfect world. Instead, take it for granted stuff fails, that’s
    reality, embrace it. For example, go more with a fast reboot and fast recover approach. With a decent spread of data and services you might get close to 100%. Create self-healing, self-organizing lights out operations.
  • Create a shared nothing infrastructure. Infrastructure can become a shared resource for development and deployment with the same downsides as shared resources in your logic and data tiers. It can cause locking and blocking and dead lock. A service oriented architecture allows the creation of a parallel and isolated development process that scales feature development to match your growth.
  • Open up you system with APIs and you’ll create an ecosystem around your application.
  • Only way to manage as large distributed system is to keep things as simple as possible. Keep things simple by making sure there are no hidden requirements and hidden dependencies in the design. Cut technology to the minimum you need to solve the problem you have. It doesn’t help the company to create artificial and unneeded layers of complexity.
  • Organizing around services gives agility. You can do things in parallel is because the output is a service. This allows fast time to market. Create an infrastructure that allows services to be built very fast.
  • There’s bound to be problems with anything that produces hype before real implementation
  • Use SLAs internally to manage services.
  • Anyone can very quickly add web services to their product. Just implement one part of your product as a service and start using it.
  • Build your own infrastructure for performance, reliability, and cost control reasons. By building it yourself you never have to say you went down because it was company X’s fault. Your software may not be more reliable than others, but you can fix, debug, and deployment much quicker than when working with a 3rd party.
  • Use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from the bad. I’ve been to several presentations by ex-Amazoners and this is the aspect of Amazon that strikes me as uniquely different and interesting from other companies. Their deep seated ethic is to expose real customers to a choice and see which one works best and to make decisions based on those tests.Avinash
    Kaushik calls this getting rid of the influence of the HiPPO’s, the highest paid people in the room. This is done with techniques like A/B testing and Web Analytics. If you have a question about what you should do code it up, let people use it, and see which alternative gives you the results you want.
  • Create a frugal culture. Amazon used doors for desks, for example.
  • Know what you need. Amazon has a bad experience with an early recommender system that didn’t work out: “This wasn’t what Amazon needed. Book recommendations at Amazon needed to work from sparse data, just a few ratings or purchases. It needed to be fast. The system needed to scale to massive numbers of customers and a huge catalog. And it needed to enhance discovery, surfacing books from deep in the catalog that readers wouldn’t find on their own.”
  • People’s side projects, the one’s they follow because they are interested, are often ones where you get the most value and innovation. Never underestimate the power of wandering where you are most interested.
  • Involve everyone in making dog food. Go out into the warehouse and pack books during the Christmas rush. That’s teamwork.
  • Create a staging site where you can run thorough tests before releasing into the wild.
  • A robust, clustered, replicated, distributed file system is perfect for read-only data used by the web servers.
  • Have a way to rollback if an update doesn’t work. Write the tools if necessary.
  • Switch to a deep services-based architecture (http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/262024.htm).
  • Look for three things in interviews: enthusiasm, creativity, competence. The single biggest predictor of success at Amazon.com was enthusiasm.
  • Hire a Bob. Someone who knows their stuff, has incredible debugging skills and system knowledge, and most importantly, has the stones to tackle the worst high pressure problems imaginable by just leaping in.
  • Innovation can only come from the bottom. Those closest to the problem are in the best position to solve it. any organization that depends on innovation must embrace chaos. Loyalty and obedience are not your tools.
  • Creativity must flow from everywhere.
  • Everyone must be able to experiment, learn, and iterate. Position, obedience, and tradition should hold no power. For innovation to flourish, measurement must rule.
  • Embrace innovation. In front of the whole company, Jeff Bezos would give an old Nike shoe as “Just do it” award to those who innovated.
  • Don’t pay for performance. Give good perks and high pay, but keep it flat. Recognize exceptional work in other ways. Merit pay sounds good but is almost impossible to do fairly in large organizations. Use non-monetary awards, like an old shoe. It’s a way of saying thank you, somebody cared.
  • Get big fast. The big guys like Barnes and Nobel are on your tail. Amazon wasn’t even the first, second, or even third book store on the web, but their vision and drive won out in the end.
  • In the data center, only 30 percent of the staff time spent on infrastructure issues related to value creation, with the remaining 70 percent devoted to dealing with the “heavy lifting” of hardware procurement, software management, load balancing, maintenance, scalability challenges and so on.
  • Prohibit direct database access by clients. This means you can make you service scale and be more reliable without involving your clients. This is much like Google’s ability to independently distribute improvements in their stack to the benefit of all applications.
  • Create a single unified service-access mechanism. This allows for the easy aggregation of services, decentralized request routing, distributed request tracking, and other advanced infrastructure techniques.
  • Making Amazon.com available through a Web services interface to any developer in the world free of charge has also been a major success because it has driven so much innovation that they couldn’t have thought of or built on their own.
  • Developers themselves know best which tools make them most productive and which tools are right for the job.
  • Don’t impose too many constraints on engineers. Provide incentives for some things, such as integration with the monitoring system and other infrastructure tools. But for the rest, allow teams to function as independently as possible.
  • Developers are like artists; they produce their best work if they have the freedom to do so, but they need good tools. Have many support tools that are of a self-help nature. Support an environment around the service development that never gets in the way of the development itself.
  • You build it, you run it. This brings developers into contact with the day-to-day operation of their software. It also brings them into day-to-day contact with the customer. This customer feedback loop is essential for improving the quality of the service.
  • Developers should spend some time with customer service every two years. Their they’ll actually listen to customer service calls, answer customer service e-mails, and really understand the impact of the kinds of things they do as technologists.
  • Use a “voice of the customer,” which is a realistic story from a customer about some specific part of your site’s experience. This helps managers and engineers connect with the fact that we build these technologies for real people. Customer service statistics are an early indicator if you are doing something wrong, or what the real pain points are for your customers.
  • Infrastructure for Amazon, like for Google, is a huge competitive advantage. They can build very complex applications out of primitive services that are by themselves relatively simple. They can scale their operation independently, maintain unparalleled system availability, and introduce new services quickly without the need for massive reconfiguration.
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