Providing customer service costs money. Providing good customer service takes commitment and money. Money to hire the right people, commitment to provide a good level of service and learn from what your customers are telling you, and more money to actually do something about it.

What does indifferent customer support cost? While it doesn’t hit your bottom line today it’s going to have an impact when the customer doesn’t come back or shares a negative opinion and you lose business.

I know how tough it can be to provide good service. I spent some time running a support team for a software company as well as making sure we had support in place for premium services on some web properties. In every case there was a cost associated with creating service levels that made the customer feel you were on their side, and a cost associated with resolving the issue (sometimes engineering costs, sometimes time, sometimes smiling and giving a refund and hoping we’d do better next time) – from this I learned a simple lesson.

I learned that you don’t treat support as a necessary evil, you treat it as a pre-sales and marketing exercise and you focus on making happy people who are more likely to engage with you and your brand again. If you focus on getting them off the phone as quickly as possible with as little fuss as possible then you’ve already lost the battle.

As technology improves providing good service shouldn’t be hard. Companies like Starbucks, Comcast, HP and Polar all have multiple ways to talk to them – Live Chat, Twitter, Forums, Email, support systems like FogBugz – all of which allow tracking and continuity of engagement and potentially very public resolutions.

How they approach the task is very different and varies from ignoring negative comments and promoting positive ones through to active outreach and open communication. Sadly though even where individuals do a good job the process and attitude of the company lets them down (I’m looking at you HP – does it really take weeks to find out you don’t know how to change the assignments of buttons on a PC you make?!)

With a current issue with another company they have been great. Lots of communication and I’m sure we’ll resolve the issue and I’ll say nice things about them in the future.

The opportunity cost to HP of providing ineffective support is that I bought a new Acer machine at the weekend for home, so for want of a simple software fix they lost at least one machine.

Frame by frame, the scanner’s spidery arms reach down, grasp page corners, peel them back. I’ve never seen anything at once so fast and so delicate. The arms—I can’t tell if there are four or eight or sixteen—stroke the pages, caress them, smooth them down. This thing loves books.

It could have been a description of me (well, apart from the number of arms) but it’s actually a description of a book scanner from Robin Sloan’s short story Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store which I stumbled upon recently.

The story really caught my attention and left me wanting more.

That’s when I discovered that there was an option to help that. Robin is using Kickstarter to solicit patrons for his first full length novel. If he hits his target our contributions (hopefully including yours) will go towards the costs of publishing, distribution and promotion.

By contributing to Robin’s project you get a copy of the book as well as an inside peek into the creative process. The premise of the story intrigued me: “Imagine a Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century. All the really good cases are on the internet. And Holmes is a woman, and Watson is an A.I., and San Francisco... oh, poor San Francisco...” so I decided to pledge.

Even if Robin’s work doesn’t grab your attention you should check out Kickstarter to see if there are other projects where you can support and become a patron.

Back before graphical user interfaces on PCs and the rise of Web 2.0 and the Rich Internet Application you could tell a power user by their mastery of the command line.

It may have been typing ls in a Unix shell or dir at a DOS prompt but these guys knew how to get things done in the leanest, most efficient way. No redundant mouse clicks, no waiting for the translucency animation to rotate your menu options into view. Bang! and move on to the next thing.

Part of the beauty of Twitter is that it goes back to those days of terse interaction and great power.

When it started it was just a simple way to display your status and post messages to your friends (publicly with @ and privately with "d {username}") but it's started to become a lot more.

My first discovery was that I could pipe things to twitter - so I didn't have to do anything to publicize a new blog post but automatically pull from the sites RSS feed to twitter. I use twitterfeed for that.

Then I discovered there were other robots out there that I could send messages to and have things happen. Sandy (sadly now closed down) was an ever helpful personal assistant, gtFtr tracks my exercise stats, Kvetch lets me vent and my most recent discovery is TrackThis which lets me get updates on any FedEx, UPS, USPS or DHL package I have in transit just by sending them a message with the tracking number.

Twitter is also reducing the amount of time I spend in email, IMing and blogging. Rather than clutter up my inbox with one line emails I can use Twitter. I can use Twitter when I don't want to be distracted by the constant ping of Messenger. Rather than try and turn a 2 line blog post into something interesting I can tweet it. if I can't express myself in 140 characters then maybe I need to think more about the post.

In the same way that the command prompt made you more productive if you were willing to learn a few tricks (such as idiosyncratic syntax) Twitter is filling that space in the interconnected internet world... and it's allowing me to do it from everywhere - at my desk, on any web enabled PC or via my phone - it's bringing consistency of experience and incremental benefit to learning those tricks.

So how do you use Twitter as the command prompt for Web 2.0?

A while ago I volunteered for a couple of days at the World Vision AIDS Experience. It's an eye opening look at how poverty and disease are threatening the future of the developing world, and how we can make a difference.

World Vision are not alone in seeing the problem, but it's interesting how many of the solutions revolve around the role of women in that environment.

With World AIDS day and Thanksgiving fast approaching, stop for a moment and consider the girl effect. What can you do to help fix the problem?

As a blogger who just happens to work at Microsoft I sometimes refer to an official team blog when I want to link to more information on a topic. The problem is sometimes finding the right official blog for a definitive answer – while a personal blog might sometimes have the information it’s usually better to go to the source!

The biggest problem has often been tracking down the right blog for the right topic, but thanks to the Windows Experience Blog I now have a handy list of official blogs at my fingertips.

Just because there’s official blogs for particular teams that doesn’t mean that MSDN or TechNet or any of the personal “off network” Microsoftee blogs (or for that matter ones written by MVPs, enthusiasts or simply folks who have found a great solution to a  problem) are any less relevant.

So, if you don’t find the answer here in my ramblings… there’s always the official list :)

Peer to peer technologies have a pretty bad name. The immediate association is with BitTorrent and pirated movies and ISP throttling but step back from that and you’ll discover that there are some interesting products turning up that take the old idea of the network being the computer and putting it to good use.

Probably one of the first peer to peer applications to get traction was SETI@Home which parceled out data from the Arecibo radio telescope for users to analyze in the hope of finding repeated patterns. They may still be searching for intelligent life in the universe, but the idea spread and a number of similar @Home projects developed their own architectures but all on the underlying premise – by getting users to donate CPU cycles they could contribute to the project – be it searching for aliens, a cure for cancer or the largest prime number.

Over time a number of these projects realized that having different runtimes and communications infrastructures was inefficient and didn’t help optimize the network effects of a peer to peer community and eventually BOINC evolved as an open source grid computing platform that in turn supported SETI@Home, Folding@Home, ClimatePrediction.Net and many others.

But searching for aliens isn’t the end of the platforms taking advantage of the power of peer to peer processing. There are two other platforms that have recently launched that are challenging the established thinking.

Search

Search itself has traditionally been the remit of the companies with the big pockets. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and others dedicate millions of dollars to building and running the server farms that crawl the web, build the indexes and serve up the queries to their visitors and unless you’re pretty sure of your business model that’s going to be a scary market to break into. Unless your business model doesn’t need you to deploy all those servers or storage because your uses will.

Faroo, a German start-up, have exactly that model. Users run a small, lightweight application on their machine which serves three functions. The first is that it runs using idle CPU and network bandwidth to crawl the web building up an index and distributing it around other connected peers for optimal search performance. The second function is that responds to search queries – both yours and, if suitably configured, other users to give results from your local cache, the distributed index and various 3rd party search solutions. The third function is that it monitors where users are going on the web and uses that to prioritize the search indexing, which enables it to react very quickly to trending topics while still maintaining the ongoing drive to build a bigger network.

While Faroo are not yet making revenue off their search engine they have a plan that will allow them to share the revenue with both the users who are contributing most to the network and a number of charitable causes. It will be interesting to see if this will scale and be able to remain relevant – ReadWriteWeb asked this question and others, but they, and much of the commentary seem quite positive on the ability for Faroo to do well.

Storage

The other technology that requires a fairly high investment in infrastructure is remote storage. Services like Microsoft’s SkyDrive obviously provide robust and reliable storage but at a cost that most startups would find hard to compete against. Wuala (another strange name, and from Switzerland this time) have taken the same concepts of peer to peer networking that underlie the storage requirements of Faroo and similar projects and use it to launch a scalable file storage and sharing platform in a way that enables them to minimize their bandwidth and storage costs. They do provide a copy of the data on their servers but by default they serve it from the peer network first and only refer back to their infrastructure if there isn’t a viable instance available.

To leverage the network effect best Wuala reward active, online participants who contribute storage to the pool (with a reliable, high availability connection earning you a higher reward) with additional storage options. Their business model doesn’t rely on serving advertisements (which seems to be the de facto Web 2.0 pitch) but allows users to also buy additional guaranteed availability storage without having to provide capacity to the network in return. In the short time since they launched they’ve gained quite an active user base.

Broadcast

While BitTorrent may be the first thing to spring to mind when you talk about p2p and video today, that not may be true in the future if the new LiveStation platform takes off (and having used it for a while I can see why it should!)

Using technology licensed from Microsoft Research, and Silverlight to deliver the user experience LiveStation uses a peer to peer network to deliver a scalable live video broadcast platform. In a traditional experience the more users viewing the content the more infrastructure was required (either for the broadcaster or the content distribution network) but with LiveStation the opposite is true – the more users the better the platform is able to distribute the loan between peers giving a better end user experience without having to worry about scalability of the backend solution. As long as there’s enough infrastructure to seed the network they should be able to cope with any number of viewers – and use their dedicated infrastructure to insert adverts or manage other aspects of ensuring the service is commercially viable.

Is Peer to Peer the answer?

It’s hard to know at the moment how well any of these services will take off.

BOINC and it’s predecessors appealed heavily to the more technical end of the spectrum so installing and configuring a download wasn’t too much of a barrier to entry (though as it becomes more mainstream and they continue to not evolve the user experience to that audience I wonder if that will harm their growth). Both Faroo and Wuala are aiming firmly at the typical end user though so they’re going to have to overcome trust issues to get their engine running on as many machines as possible as quickly as possible, and they’ll have to make the experience so easy that after the initial installation the nodes work as effectively as possible.

At first glance Faroo has done a good job of making a fairly simple installation experience with sensible defaults to provide maximum benefit to the user and the network without too much downside (as it’s developed in .Net on a Windows machine there’s no need for additional overhead such as the Java runtime) but the Wuala experience has a little way to go – not only does it require Java the configuration process and usage isn’t as intuitive – but both of these are in beta so I’d expect them to improve and evolve over the coming releases.

LiveStation seems to have a great platform and user experience but needs more varied content to make it a viable long term winner – partnerships with more networks and perhaps providers such as Netflix or Blockbuster would make them a winner.

I think in the  foreseeable future the traditional model of centrally hosted and managed solutions are going to continue apace but the viability of peer to peer solutions is going to allow more new competitors to enter the landscape and scale quickly and reliably. Perhaps we’ll even see a generic platform like BOINC evolve to provide a common services layer that handles the communication and security (and the initial install issue) and subsequent solutions simply deploy as add-ins with their own user interface, secure storage and networking / CPU asks of the user…

What those solutions look like… online time – and imagination – will tell…

Do you Tweet?

Do you have a Windows Mobile phone?

I do and I love TinyTwitter. It's the best mobile client for twitter bar none (try it and see) and it's now even better.

How could it get better you ask (because you already use it.... right... if not.... try it now!)

It's better in two ways...

• Picture uploads: append a picture to any tweet and it gets posted to TwitPic. You don't need to do anything, magic just happens. Click to see what I've uploaded.
• Geolocation: if you have a GPS you can tell everyone where you are. It takes the boring latitude and longitude numbers your GPS returns (built in or bluetooth connected) and can do a reverse address lookup to tell you where you are near (not close enough for stalkers to find you!) and posts it to your timeline along with a Live Maps link so people can see where you are on a map as well.

So if you want to try out the (new) goodness go to TinyTwitter.com on your PC or direct to m.ttwt.at if you are viewing this on a phone.

Oh, and there is a J2ME/Blackberry version available as well if you're not a Windows Mobile user.

Oh, and on the PC I still like Digsby for updating Twitter and checking Hotmail and Gmail...

Lifecasting is a big thing at the moment. One step beyond blogging and tweeting is the ability to record and broadcast live video from a cellphone to share what you’re doing – and engage with your audience.

Qik is probably the best known of these, and is slowly rolling out an early beta service for Windows Mobile users. But Qik are not the only game in town – there are a couple of existing solutions that have great support for Windows Mobile users.

LiveCast provide a live video streaming platform for Windows Mobile and laptop or UMPC users. The video is synchronized with GPS position data so your viewers can see where you are when you’re broadcasting (or when they review archived footage where you were).

While the video quality on LiveCast is pretty good for high end phones the client is not the most intuitive (so expect to spend some time figuring it it), and the web site is a bit clunky.

LiveMedia from IncaX provides very similar capabilities – private or public broadcasting from either PC or Mobile device, though as well as streaming video it allows you to insert other media from your device to enhance the presentation.

The LiveMedia GPS mobile client (currently in beta) adds GPS location data to the broadcast from your phone, and also allows you to record a broadcast to local storage for later upload. This feature is particularly useful as it allows you to keep a record of a trip without having to worry about connectivity.

Although feature-for-feature these two solutions are fairly similar my preference is for LiveMedia. The video quality is slightly less fluid and there is no audio in the current beta version but the interface is significantly easier to work with and there are more options to share your broadcasts.

The great thing is that both of these products are at fairly early stages and are evolving quite quickly, as are the capabilities of the phones they run on. Missing features and complicated user interfaces will quickly give way to slick controls and, especially as bandwith increases, high quality video and audio.

Apparently there are some people using Gmail and the Google Calendar service rather than Live Mail or an Exchange solution and they’re not sure if they can still get their email, calendar and contacts synced to their Windows Mobile phone or PDA.

Well luckily for them (and me, yes I use Gmail as well) there are solutions – and they are simple (and free or cheap).

Although connectivity is pretty good I like to make sure I have a local instantly available backup (and you can’t check your web calendar on a plane yet). Being able to store contacts, schedule and email in Pocket Outlook and work with them anywhere is one of the biggest reasons I’ve used a Windows Mobile device for quite some time.

Email

To get the most of out Gmail you’ll want to use IMAP to sync your mail – leaving the technical stuff aside (click here if you want that) it’s a two way sync so if you read a mail on the phone then Gmail knows about it when you go back to the website.

To use IMAP in Gmail you’ll need to enable it first. Once that is done you can access Gmail over IMAP in any mail client – Outlook, Thunderbird and, of course, Windows Mobile Outlook Mobile. To set it up for your device follow the steps for Windows Mobile5 or Windows Mobile6 (the instructions are slightly different because the default mail setup wizard for WM6 tries to use POP3 and you’ll want to work around that!)

Of course if you don’t want to do this there is always the Mobile optimized web version of the Gmail site but once you‘ve tried using the Outlook Mobile client you won’t want to go back

Contacts and Calendar

What use is email if you don’t have all your contact details available (and after all it probably makes sense to keep your contacts details in sync across web and the phone).

If you get an email inviting you to a meeting or a party you want to be able to put it in your calendar… but unless your phone and the online calendar are in sync how will you ever keep your schedule straight?

Well, for Live Mail users there’s always the Windows Live client which takes care of keeping that in sync for you, but for Google users there is OggSync.

OggSync supports both Outlook and Windows Mobile clients so you can choose one or both depending on what you need. Personally I usually use the web interface from a PC so just have the mobile client.

The free version supports basic calendar syncing and the (very reasonably priced) pro version adds a lot more flexibility/control to the calendar sync (including support for multiple calendars) and contact sync.

With the pro version you can synchronize multiple calendars (with mapping) to a time schedule so you never have to lift a finger.

All of the sync functionality (in either version) is bidirectional so you can update on the phone or via the web and, like using IMAP for email, know that everything will be only one sync away from being up-to-date.

Check out OggSync and … welcome to the world of Outlook Mobile

Over the last 20 years I’ve worked on several systems that rely on pushing data around to the right place at the right time in order to be effective. Hotel reservations systems need real-time availability information, LPG distribution needs to know what state various tanks are in, streaming video to cellphones needs to get over the air to the user and live video needs to get over the network to the broadcast center.

40 years ago much of this wouldn’t have been possible as the lines of real-time communication didn’t exist or were prohibitively expensive (compare the cost of a telegram message in 1900 to a text message today, or a transmission from the Hubble Telescope.

In 20 years will networks exist as we know them today – patchy, unreliable and certainly not ubiquitous enough to rely on consistently? Or will the promise of an always on connected affordable  cloud become real.

Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture.

Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?