All posts by GuruOfSales

All new Twitter, now available!

I can not be more addicted to Twitter than this, so I will try to finish this post as soon as I can so I can tweet about it here.

Twitter has always been a great an easy service to use, however, due to the extreme amount of users, it tends to be down or slow so many times though out last year.

Last night I logged in to tweet as usual, and to my great surprise I found a new Twitter user interface, kind of like the new facebook UI.

To keep it simple, I am in love with it, so much easier, faster, AJAX’ed! just nice clean and simple.

To follow what I am doing right now on twitter go here.

Here is an exact copy of the official twitter blog post about the new changes and Ihope you enjoy it as much as I do:

Changes Afoot

We’re getting ready to launch a refresh of parts of the Twitter.com interface. This release does not include any new features (well, one). It’s mostly cosmetic changes. This post describes what we’re doing and why.

Moving the tabs

The most significant change you’ll notice on the logged-in homepage (/home) is that we’ve moved the tabs that were on the top of the timeline to the right sidebar. We did this for a couple reasons. For one thing, it makes them larger targets and easier to access. But more importantly, it was an investment in the future. We plan to have more tabs, and we’d run out of room putting them along the top. This was the driving factor for this redesign, but you won’t see all the benefits until a future release (hopefully, very soon!).

Ajax for speed
When you click on the Home or @Replies tab when you’re already on that page, the updates are now refreshed via Ajax, instead of loading the whole page, which should be faster.

Action icons: When you need them
At first you may wonder where the star and reply swoosh beside every update went. Hover over an update to see them show up.

Lighter, Prettier, Simplified
Besides hiding the icons until you need them, we’ve done many things to try and make the look of the page less cluttered — like lightening the lines between posts and spacing things out more. Some things we’ve made smaller (like our logo), while other, more important things, we’ve made bigger (like the tabs and the Update button). Some things we’ve made the tough choice to get rid of all together (see below).

We’ve also done some things for pure aesthetic reasons — like rounding some corners (which you won’t see on Internet Explorer but will in Firefox or Safari — or Chrome). In general, we think the site looks a lot better. Hopefully you will, as well.

New design customizer
For some people, this design probably does not look better. If you’ve customized your Twitter colors, it’s possible you have a combination that doesn’t look quite right with this new design. We did our best to maintain customizations in a pleasing way. But if, for example, you have a white sidebar or sidebar border color, it may not look quite right.

But good news! One new feature we’ve added is a completely revamped design customizer, which you’ll find under Settings / Design.

With this tool, you can choose from pre-designed themes, as well as play with your color scheme and background and see the results in real time.

Removed Archive tab
In the interest of simplification, we’ve removed the “Archive” tab from /home which showed you your own updates. The reason is, it showed you the same stuff you see on your own profile page, it was oddly named, and people rarely used it. It didn’t deserve the space it took. If you miss it, hopefully you’ll get used to going to your profile page (which you can get to by clicking on your picture or the Profile link up top).

What we haven’t done
This hardest thing about doing a redesign like this deciding what not to tackle. I’m fairly certain that much of the feedback to this will be, “What about…[your favorite feature request / annoyance].” Please be assured the changes we’ve made here aren’t the only things we want to (or will) change. They’re not even, necessarily, the most important. The scope of this project was limited to light-weight front-end work. We have whole other teams working on back-end changes and more fundamental functionality changes (which, as mentioned above, this is also laying the groundwork for).

A new brilliant idea for Online shopping

As some of you guys may know that one of my favorite “Geek merchandise” website is thinkgeek.com, and there is only 2 other places that I shop online, eBay and Amazon.
That was until I wrote the article about ping.fm and I got a comment on it from a follower (now a friend) from twitter, so, as usual I went to check their site like from their twitter bio at: http://thebuyersnet.com and I found out a new way of shopping online.
The idea is simple yet brilliant, look for items, join or create a club for it, other people like the same item, they add it to their wish list or join the club, everyone buys it at the end as a group, and that’s where the savings come by buying the item wholesale price.

A great diagram explaining how it works is here.
I am currently looking for a new laptop, so far (As a proud geek) I am falling in love with the new Sony Vaio FE series, most likely with a read/write BLU-Ray player. If anyone else interested, let’s create a club for it and share the savings on http://thebuyersnet.com.
The site have categories including: Automobiles & Accessories, Computers & accessories, Electronics, Fitness, Furniture, Appliances, sports & more.

I just wanted to share the discovery with you all 😉
To follow http://thebuyersnet.com updates on twitter go here.

$65,000 for this blog!

The picture above is an actual $50,000 photo of cash I took out today from the bank.
Why did I do that?
I am just sick and tired of this one company (That they requested to remain anonymous) offers.
Here is the story in a nutshell:
4 Weeks ago, a New York based electronics company contacted me via the contact form asking me for my number!!
I thought it was like any consultation request or any developing service of mine. I was wrong..
Their “Sales manager” called me (Not even the companies manager nor the owner or CEO), simply to offer me $50,000 for this blog that you are reading right now.
As you may know that I migrated 5 of my blogs into this one, one of them was about gadgets (Electronic gadgets of course) and he said that they wanted to buy this blog, delete all categories (except for the gadget category), have me write for them for the next year in a regular bases, then they will redirect the URL to their own blogs…. HUH?!
First of all, this blog was appraised for more than that, then the fact that I would make this amount in less than a year, got me asking my self: Why stop the cash flow after a year?! And why would I work for someone else for an entire year?
I simply said: Thank you for the offer but my answer is no.
2 Weeks later the owner of the company called me (the day after my interview with John Chow) and raised the price to $60,000 and I don’t have to work for them (Except for a 2 weeks visit just to get them used to the blog “blog training” he said), I thought about it and said no again.
4 Calls followed some of them were very rude (That’s not a good way to do business) 2 calls were the day after my (interview with Yaro Starak).
They have contacted me again 2 days ago by email, the offer was $65,000, and left me with 2 choices:
Ask them for no less than $100,000
Or
Ask them to stop the rude and annoying calls and leave me alone.
I took my time to answer this time, I thought about my readership (You guys), I thought about the income that would stop coming in, and I thought about my future plans for this blog (Like the Online school I am working on launching soon), So I tweeted about it 2 days ago (If you follow my twitter you’ll know how annoyed I was). I guess they didn’t like that, I got a twitter reply by one of their employees asking to keep them anonymous.
OK… it’s over now… no wait another phone call this morning from the secretary telling me they want to raise the offers price but I have to approve to them that I actually make this kind of money, So I took on the challenge to send a clear message and went to the bank, withdrew the cash and used my photo studio to take the picture!!!
If all the above was not working, I thought maybe this blog post will, here it is loud and clear:
I am not “under-selling” this blog, for all the reasons above.
That’s the bottom line.
Another reason I blogged about this is for the lessons I learned that I will share with you:
Lesson 1: Don’t under estimate your power.
Lesson 2: Negotiate, don’t send rude emails or bad calls, be smart and you might get what you want.
Lesson 3: Don’t play games (Like having your secretary calling to raise the offer) just be straight forward.
Lesson 4: Don’t forget your people, your friends, your readers. They are the reason that made this blog as big as it is today.