I think to myself DABS is reputable - lets order with them, well 3 days later I am still waiting for ‘address authorization’ - our work address is inside Reading University, but we have a normal postcode and I have never had any problem with any other site delivering here before. The DABS system sends me an automated response on the first day asking me to confirm the address as they think it is incorrect. I immediately respond. I wait 1 day. Nothing.

So I go onto the DABS website and see how I can contact customer services, firstly they have removed all sign of a telephone number, not good. So I fill the online contact form just in case my direct email had got lost. Nothing.. So I then look at their help system.

In the side bar I see they are proud to announce their response times for customer support.

Average email response time: 8 hours 38 minutes (based on working hours)

I also noted that they have an online chat system which also states ‘Average wait time for chats: 5 seconds’ - for last 2 days the chat box has stated ‘all our chat representatives are busy’ - So either this is a total fabrication, or they base it upon the time it takes for the chat to open.. obviously it does not take into account the amount of time when no representative is available.

Today Day 3 - I finally get onto the online chat system.. below is a transcript.

You have been connected to Liam 1441.
Liam 1441: Good morning, how can I help you?
Nicholas Halstead: I have an order No ****** which is stuck - the address is awaiting my confirmation which I sent 2 days ago
Liam 1441: I will just check this for you.
Nicholas Halstead: I have raised several queries via your contact page and apart from the automated response have had no answer
Liam 1441: Its not stuck at all we just have an email queue at the moment and your order will be looked into shortly
Nicholas Halstead: shortly? its been 2 days!
Nicholas Halstead: your page says all responses are dealt with within 6 hours - a total lie
Liam 1441: That’s not the webaccounts inbox
Nicholas Halstead: I dont care - if you dont fix this in the next hour I will cancel the order
Nicholas Halstead: the address is correct
Nicholas Halstead: just mark it as resolved
Liam 1441: Ok that’s fine, This is just an address authorisation and will be completed shortly.
Liam 1441: Is there anything further I can assist you with today?
Nicholas Halstead: yes - but when is shortly? 5 minutes? or hours?
Liam 1441: This shouldbe done today
Liam 1441: I am sorry I cannot help you any further as we do not deal with address authorisations
Liam 1441: Thank you for using this service. Goodbye.
Thank you for using InstantService. You may now close this window.
Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

They closed the window on me! And I still have no idea how long before they will mark the address as confirmed! Given this experience I will never order from them again.

UPDATE: Received this from the CEO of DABS, after I contacted him via Linkedin inMail.

Sorry to hear that you had a poor experience shopping at dabs. In indepenednet surveys - 9 out of 10 customers would recommend us to family or friends, but that still means that we’re disappointing 10% in some way.

Please can you give me the order reference and I can get you a better response. Sounds like that your address didn’t pass the address file which would be part of the fraud checking procedure. But I’m guessing. Even so, issues like this should be resolved in a timely fashion.

Yours faithfully,

Simon Curry

UPDATE 2: So after waiting another 2 hours to see if the intervention of the CEO (Simon Curry) had any effect the order has still not changed. So as @ewantoo suggested I have cancelled and now ordered on EBuyer who also have a twitter account @ebuyerdotcom.

A real lesson to learn here about social media, DABS have lost £2000 of business today (and any future purchases from my company) - purely because they did not listen and or respond. In this realtime world speed + engagement is king.

I spoke at a Mashup Event last Thursday. I was asked to talk about the ‘realtime web’ - and as some of my core interests are with how brands are engaging with the social web. I decided to cover how the transition to more realtime technologies has meant a decrease in ad-revenue, and how the smarter brands are now actively engaging in the conversations that are already going on within social networks and the wider social web.

Slides

I am afraid the event was not video’ed (you can see photo stream here) and the slides I work from tend to very visual - but I have included the slideshare version below. I use KeyNote which is actually a million times better for presenting very visual presentations (and with new version you get iPhone support).

I think the 20,000 number is irrelevant, because of the growth twitter is going through any number will have been perceived as too low.

Money, Money, Money

They key here is money, right now we are all building free apps upon another free app. This of course cannot continue forever, at some point twitter needs a revenue model and also the sites that use its data need a revenue model. I own 3 whitelisted sites including tweetmeme. Tweetmeme itself consumes the resources of one medium sized server and month on month as the twitter traffic grows it is likely we will have to upgrade + add further hardware (and or likely optimize code / db - but which also costs money in development time).

My business subsidizes this willingly as we believe as twitter goes mainstream that a model for commercialization will become more achievable.

Charging

The twitter revenue model discussion/meme/competition gets rolled out every other week. The difference this time is that I think the changes being made have a real chance to creating a new revenue model.

To me twitter needs to put in place a charged API - and before you all start screaming ‘NOOOO!’ think how else this can ever work, the fact is everyone is concerned about twitters long term survival - it does need a revenue model and it being based upon it being a central hub of micro-messaging that is reliable and scalable (which I think they are now starting to prove) is the most natural solution.

Secondly although I enjoy the weekly popping up of a new twitter app these are in general sites that are likely to come and go, the sites that consume the 20k+ requests an hour need to be long-term commercially viable websites (like tweetmeme must be in the long run.) - I am not proposing that suddenly twitter starts charing, that would be counter productive. But within the next 6 months all whitelisted sites who start breaking the 20k+ limit would need to be given a warning that after a period that they would need to start paying.

Quality

This could fundamentally effect the future type and quality of services that are built upon twitter. If we are going to take twitter mainstream then the services built must have a far reaching appeal which in turn brings better opportunities for monetization.

Lastly if you agree or disagree with me come talk about it with me on twitter.

The rest of the article is on TechCrunch UK as a guest post.

The good news is that I have also in the last 12 months learnt a lot. The first 12 months of running a new business is a pretty stressful time but also hugely enjoyable. As the owner you get to choose how you spend your time which for me is a double edged sword, I love programming yet I must also make sure the company is pointing in the right direction. So lessons learnt cover programming (lots of PHP, and some C++) - management, recruitment (I hate it, or I should say I hate agencies.), sales + marketing, investment (more than I want to know!) and also lots of legal stuff.

Zend Framework

Along with the rest of the favorit team we have become very good friends with Zend Framework having adopted it at ver 0.7 we have seen it mature very rapidly. I am a massive fan but with all things you grow beyond certain limitations, we have especially made a lot of performance improvements which I am more than happy to share with the community. These in a lot of cases are advanced classes that sit in front of Zend Framework rather than re-writes or sub-classes.

I will in later posts cover as many of the core libraries/classes that I think would be most useful to give back.

Lastly, I hugely enjoyed writing the game review (Fable 3) last year, this is probably due to my 10 years in the games industry and of course I still love games, so do expect to see a few more.

And so today Mike Arrington is being further attacked because at Le Web he said that europe was unwilling to put in the work required to compete at the highest level. (he kept pretty quiet about the fact that the event itself had boring speakers / No Wifi + was like the inside of an Igloo)

The attendees did not like it, and it seems from a poll that Loic is running that they do not want Mike back.

If that was the general reaction from the European crowd then frankly I want no part in it, I have been networking in the London/UK for over a year and the startups that I know are some of the most hard working and I think our work ethic, vision, and startup culture is much closer to the valley than the rest of europe. The London scene has gone from 1 year ago barely scraping together a decent event a month and now you can take your pick every night of the week.

The startups are collaborating like never before and I see real innovation, and probably most important I see companies being built on the basis of real business foundations and have a future even in this downturn.

UK Startups I salute you, and I look forward to partying with you all at Twinterval.

If Europe thinks that lunches / culture is more important than putting in 70 hour weeks, then sorry but you will fail, but the UK certainly will not.

Below is a video of my presentation - and below that the slides that I was presenting from.

Make IT Scale - brought to you by Startup Essentials - Nick from fav.or.it from stewart townsend on Vimeo.

So after putting a lot of my time into playing this game, (and I only continued as all the reviews said it got better as you went along). I felt I needed to put down in writing what I think really sucks.

1. Disjointed World

The world in general feels very disjointed - maybe because there are load screens (how 80’s is that?) but the world does not feel well put together and at no point during playing it did I feel well orientated, e.g. if I go north I find this, or go east a bit and I will find a castle. Again this may be because in Fable you always follow a path and cannot go cross country.

2. Repetition Makes Good Gameplay?

Am I really expected to sit in front of a swinging meter that I have to press a single button to stop to simulate me fashioning a sword? So I get to be a level 3 blacksmith (after a good 30 minutes of MINDLESS boredom) - and I have made a decent amount of cash (totally unbalanced amount in comparison to what you get from quests at the stage I was in the game.) - I get to another town and I am asked if I want to do the same for cutting logs? I laughed myself silly.

It is not even as if I get a special weapon for doing this? or that what I am making goes into the stores of the blacksmith, it really feels pointless.

3. No Mini Map

I watched a few interviews in which Mr M ranted about the virtues of not having a mini-map and that mainstream players did not understand them, I think this is a complete and utter lie, they did it because each area is small and a mini-map would have shown that off badly. The map on the pause page is static and is really hard to navigate, so if I cannot work it out, how is a mainstream player going to?

4. Missions repetitive

Apart from the core storyline the side missions are all really simplistic and repetitive, e.g. rescue the slaves, kill the robbers. And because you can just skip to a region you lose sense of location never have any adventures along the way, this is partly responsible for why the game is over in such short order (12 hours or less)

5. Morale decisions have no meaning

How over hyped was this again? The decisions like first time round are purely black and white, save the slaves or resell them to some else. The game has no conversation trees so all you get is yes/no decisions to make along the way and during any one quest you have to make only a few decisions and none feel like they have had any long term effect.

6. The Golden trail of Dispair

In a game like Oblivion when you get given a quest you can go around and talk to anyone most of the time they will have something useful to say to assist in the completion of the quest. The ‘follow the golden trail’ totally destroys any feeling of adventure - as you just follow the trail to the next objective - you are never encouraged along the way to interact with anyone else.

7. Dog sucks

How much was this dog over hyped? It has no gameplay value whatsoever, in fact its core ability of helping you find things actually contributes to Fables woes, and walking along a path seeing a big chest on the path and your dog runs up to it with a ‘treasure’ icon above its head is just stupid, like ‘I can bloody see the chest you idiot’. (oh and btw - chests on paths for no reason? other than the designers couldnt think of anywhere else to put them.)

Never did he actually help in any fighting that was useful (and I levelled him up a lot) - but he really was just a pain.

8. Economy, What Economy?

Much has also been made of the ability to buy every building in the world and other monetary elements that make you feel that the world has a true economy. I have really no idea if the claims of market economy are true because the game was over before it began, by the time I was rich enough to get involved in understanding the -cough- ‘complexities’ of each towns economy I was basically at the end of the game. I was also meant to be able to make money by trading items between towns, but frankly the interface to buy stuff is clunky - and that most shops only ever sell ‘one’ of each thing meant the money could be made far easier using the mindnumbing blacksmithing / woodchopping / headbanging.

9. Gameplay Balance Terrible

About 6 hours into the game I managed to purchase a sword for about 15,000 gold which served me all the way to the end of the game, I never ever felt under real threat from any bad guys as I just spammed the spells, no mana? no gameplay. I also never got to level 5 spells and I really did not need them. The interface for selecting spells is just so simplistic to make it very boring indeed, again having the ability to constantly cast spells is fun for 10 minutes, but its like using a cheat code - its fun for a while and then you realise you have spoilt the feeling that you need to work at something to get stronger.

10. Terrible Ending

When they ending came my Wife turned to me (who happened to be watching at the time) and said ‘Is that it?’ - I sat in stunned silence, the final fight was beyond pathetic (I won’t -cough- spoilt it for you). And then I was made to make a single ‘moral’ decision that would affect what happened next, what was the point? I wasn’t going to play the game any further afterwards, and especially in my case the decision I made meant that everything in the world was practically worthless (spoiler warning: I got 1,000,000 gold - which meant I could buy anything which basically meant any further adventuring totally pointless, I could buy anything I wanted, including the castle. This also means that any further add-ons will be pointless)

Reviews

I really could go on, every aspect of the game falls well short of expectations and this comes back to one point, how the hell did this get all the great reviews? either Microsoft did amazing job on all the games reviewers or I am mistaken?

Funnily enough my wife started playing Oblivion a day after I finished Fable 2 (she watched me play Oblivion when I first got it when it was released and she was a massive fan of Morrowwind) - well she has been playing the game about 12 hours (time it takes to finish Fable 2) - and she has barely got out of the initial first story line!

Fallout 3 turns up in the post tomorrow (fingers crossed) - lets hope for something better…

If you disagree please leave a comment, or come give me abuse on twitter

These are my 10 reasons why I have this rather unhealthy attitude towards them.
 

1. Asking ‘What is your interview process’

This is a classic, every agency wants to give their candidate ‘the edge’ by finding out what our techniques are for recruitment, I deliberately give them random feedback or just ignore this as I don’t want the interview to be prepared! That is the whole point, if they need to prepare for an interview then they ‘ARE THE WRONG PERSON!!’

2. Ring you up to tell you nothing

This really gets me going, so either

1. they send me an email and then ring up immediately afterwards to ask me what they thought of the email, do they think I do not have a reply button?
3. They ring up to have a ‘a chat’ - right yes someone working in public sector may have time to while away but I actually have a job to do

3. Asking to come meet us

At some point every agency decides (mostly at the beginning) that it would be good ‘to come meet’ - Why do they want to do this? Well they think they can better ‘judge’ the sort of person who fits into my company. WRONG - Only I know this, what they are really trying to do is build a bond with your company and that by visiting they will get some preferential treatment. DOUBLE WRONG.

4. Editing Candidate CV’s

Yes this happens ALL the time. It is an easy one to spot because if you get CV’s from more than one agency you can compare them if you get the same person from different agencies. And what the edits? Normally they have added any particular requirements that you have specified, or rejigged it so that the bits you are looking for are the most prominent.

5. Lying

Yup, all of them, all the time. Whatever they need to do including lying is the name of the game. In the last 6 months I have made it 100% clear to all the agencies I work with that we are not interested in contractors, or anyone who has previously been contracting. But I repeatedly got people who on the CV showed as permanent then turned out (when I got references) that they were actually contracting.
What else? If it gives them an edge then they will forget / deceive / outright lie if required.

6. Imaginary Companies

Another favourite, if you have a candidate that you are really interested in (and they get wind of this) then all kind of imaginary companies can appear that are also ‘interested’ and are likely to be offering more than you. Do not fall for this ploy, pay what you want someone is worth and ignore anything else.

7. Spam

They love it, spam spam spam. There are several UK based agencies (and I am sure we are not alone) that the general business plan is to basically spider the web find anyone making any mention of needing programmers and then randomly emailing them candidates that they are never going to want. I have sent numerous emails to these companies asking to be taken off their mailing lists, never to any avail.

8. Removing Contact Details

The other little CV editing that takes place is the removal of any way of us contacting the candidate directly. Because the judge us on their own terms that we are not trust worthy enough to go off and recruit that person directly. So you get stupid things like not displaying surnames (you only get that once you go to full interview!) or when setting up a telephone interview they use their internal phone system to connect you both together rather than just giving you the number.

9. Recruiting those they just placed

I have caught out several agencies trying to poach people that they have previously placed with me. Basically all recruitment agencies store their databases on ROM (read only memory) because try as you might it is impossible to get yourself removed. So once they have placed someone with you, they still appear in their listings, and so they still come back and ring them up again to see if they ‘are happy’.

The most fun way to handle this is to have them hand over the phone and say in the nicest voice ‘Hi there, this is [insert name]’s manager, how can I help you?’ you wouldnt believe how fast they try and get off the phone.

10. Lastly they are all scum

I am sure they are actually nice people outside of their work but the pressures to work on a commission make them do things that normal people would never stoop so low to do.

Just to balance this article, I will add my one thing I like about them.

They on occasion find me brilliant people

I would be very interested to hear your stories. And also if you know any agencies that do not behave like this please let me know!

As always if you want more frequent updates the best place to find me is on twitter

We have had our issues with performance as we got closer to launch but this is always a risk when using a complex framework built by others, you take a lot of granted and enjoy the speed in which you can build things. But there are always downsides but they are ones we we are happy to have taken, as we have built a massive product with a tiny team (3 developers!).

Now we have launched I really hope it will free my time up much more to start blogging properly and also to start documenting a lot of the framework code that we have extended and give it back to the community. We have built a large raft of performance related code for doing a lot of caching within web 2.0 apps. We have also built our own RESTful library which IMHO is much more powerful than the zend one and also much much faster.

Please do go try out fav.or.it and see what we have built!