Angies List

Ever since I moved to the bay area and joined Aster, I have started listening to KQED in my commute. The best thing about public radio stations is that they you don’t feel like ripping your hair out just listening to commercials. They do have some advertising, but it usually doesn’t show up on my radar.

Over the past few weeks, one particular commercial caught my attention: the one for Angie’s List. The ad proclaims Angies List to be the go-to destination for customer reviews on movers, painters, lawyers, doctors and more. What a great idea, I thought. So one day as soon as I got home, I decided to check them out.

Angie's List

The first thing that hit me was that it is a paid site. I would need to sign up as a member and pay subscription fee. Bummer! Don’t get me wrong, I think websites reserve the right to charge for whatever services they want. But in this case, I did not really see the value that Angies List itself was adding.

According to them, here are the top 3 reasons why I would use Angies List (as seen in the quick tour):

  1. Service providers don’t (or can not) pay to appear on the list
  2. They receive over 5000 reports each month
  3. They have information on over 250 types of services

Hmm, lets see. AFAIK, service providers don’t (or can not) pay to appear on either Yelp or Craigs list. I’m pretty sure Yelp receives way more than 5000 reviews each month. And both Yelp and Craigslist have more than enough categories as far as I am concerned.

At the end of the day, the value of the site like Angie’s List, depends on the quality of the reviews. Since the content is user generated anyways, I don’t see how Angie’s List can claim a higher quality than Yelp reviews. Just becase I paid a hefty fee does not incentivize me to actually write a detailed and thoughtful review. In fact, since I paid, I just want to get access to lots of high quality reviews, not worry about writing them.

Yelp

I have seen “Yelp loves us” badges on several restaurants. I have yet to see an Angie’s List badge anywhere. On Yelp, because it is open to anyone, people are recognized for their reviews. What is the reputation model in Angie’s List?

I digged some more on their website and found these nuggets (non-italicized text is mine):

Angie’s List is better than free review sites:

  • No anonymous reviews. Really? In some sense, Yelp reviews are not anonymous either. On the other hand, if you are going to force me to reveal my real name etc on the site, I would consider it a loss of privacy. Besides, what does this buy us?
  • Certified data collection process prevents companies from reporting on themselves or their competitors. Any details on what this process is? A closed system is not necessarily a good system. There have been many cases where customer issues were resolved or a problem was addressed due to the public nature of Yelp.
  • Our Complaint Resolution Team will intercede if a project goes bad.
  • Companies respond to reports, so you get the whole story. Which companies? Is there a partner program for providers? I thought you couldn’t pay to be on the list?

And there’s more:

What you get:

  • 24-hour access to reviews on AngiesList.com. Wow, the Internets have arrived. Are you listening Yelp?
  • Live support through our call center. Ok, this one might actually be a useful value-add.
  • Award-winning Angie’s List magazine. What does the magazine add beyond the website? I don’t want to be party to more paper wastage. I already get enough catalogs as it is.
  • Access to our Complaint Resolution Team.
  • Discounts from highly rated service companies. What is the business model here? Why/how would companies know they are highly rated, unless they sign up as well? Why would they offer discounts?

Overall, I just don’t see why anyone would use their service. If you have used Angie’s List, I’d love to hear your opinions on how it compares to Yelp or even Craigs list.

Blogging bug bites academia

Back in 2004, when I discovered blogs, blogging was received with cautious optimism among most academic circles as far as I know. But over the past year or two, more and more people in academia have started to blog. Probably a sign that blogs are being taken seriously as a means of disseminating information, as a vehicle for sharing ideas and gathering feedback, and also, as a valuable tool for brand building and maintenance.

This post was triggered by the fact that my advisor, Prof. Amin Vahdat, is also blogging now! Let me take this opportunity to highlight some academic blogs that I know of.

Please share any other interesting blogs from the academia you may know of in the comments!

The Celeste Prize

As some of you know, my wife is a media artist. She recently won the Art vs. Design contest, organized by Artists Wanted. Her work PEEL, which was the winning entry, is also a contestant for the Celeste Prize. From their website:

An international prize for contemporary arts and a network for art professionals.

There are some really amazing videos in there. If you are interested in video art at all, I highly recommend checking out some of the entries. And of course, if you like Surabhi’s work, please vote for it! Here’s PEEL:

Irony

Computer science is comprised of many many different areas such as theory, graphics, vision, AI, systems, databases to name a few. Naturally, one can not expect to master or even grasp the basics of all the different areas. But there is a difference between not getting a chance to learn all the different areas, and having studied but not understood the different areas.

Oh, the irony

The irony that I’m talking about is this. Throughout my undergraduate and graduate education, I was mostly a “systems and networking” person. Obviously I took classes in several other areas as well, and I think I learnt or retained something from most of these classes, with one exception. I took a database course in IIT, and then once again at UCSD, and both times I failed miserably to appreciate the subject.

At this point it would be easy to blame the faculty for not doing a good job, but I’m confident that the fault was no less my own. I remember sleeping through a lot of my database classes :(

Anyways, the point is that here I was, with a systems PhD, with zero background in databases and having pretty much zero appreciation for databases as an area, and where do I end up working at? A company that builds distributed database systems. I think its funny in a way. But the great thing is that I’m learning so much about databases now and appreciating the kind of engineering insight and effort that goes into building a performant, robust distributed database system.

Vim and the future of editors

As is evident from the image below, something about my last post clearly struck a chord with a lot of people.

Traffic spike
Traffic spike

I don’t know if it was “vim” or it was “sexy”, but somehow this post landed up on Reddit. This is the closest I’ve come to being slashdotted — for that one day, Reddit drove nearly 95% of the traffic to my site. Also, before you start jumping to conclusions from the graph above, let me put some numbers out there. On average, my site gets anywhere between 200 to 400 visitors daily. On April 18th, my site got 7000+ visitors, an order of magnitude more than I normally get. That is the spike you see, and now the traffic is back to normal, thank you very much.

Since a lot of people seem to be interested in Vim hopefully, I want to discuss the space of text editors (in particular, editors for programming) and where I think we are headed.

The first observation is that both of the giants on the editing world — Vim and Emacs — are ancient by any standards. Depending o how you look at it, I think it is fair to say that neither editor has evolved significantly in terms of the underlying code, architecture and usage model in the past two decades, if not more.

The second observation is that despite the large number of editors out there, IMHO few have any significant mind and market share other than Vim and Emacs. Obviously there is Eclipse, Visual Studio, IntelliJ etc.

And so I wonder, what would the text editor landscape look 5-10 years down the line? There are many who would say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, I’m a big believer in change, and I think over time, change is inevitable. However, at this point I don’t know what, if any, substantial change is happening in the text-editor arena. No new editors with fundamentally new ways of manipulating text or amazingly compelling features are emerging. I actually don’t mind reinventions of the wheel either, as long as the reinvention delivers a much better wheel. For instance, the Vim source code is not the most modular, extensible or maintainable. And it is in C — not that there is anything wrong with it, but I think an object oriented language is better for a complex piece of software like Vim.

The only recent buzz has been about Textmate and the many clones it has since inspired. I’m really looking forward to Yzis reach a usable milestone. What are other promising editors out there that you are excited about?