Jeremie Miller (of Jabber) …

Jeremie Miller (of Jabber) writes about peer-to-peer and conversational technologies in this new book by O’Reilly.

So, I think this weekend is OS X weekend for me. I’m debating with myself whether to put OS X on my main work machine (a dual processor 450Mhz G4) or whether to first put it on a spare desktop beige G3. Given the reports of incredible speed boosts I’ve been hearing, I may just put it on the G3 to test it out, play with it, and learn it — and then put it on my main box at a later date. I’m ecstatic, though, about being able to SSH into my main workstation from home and have all 500+MB of my email archives available in mbox format! This, of course, means that I finally need to teach myself procmail, so as to replicate the filtering and mailing list management features I currently have in my GUI email client. And I think I may finally give up on Pine and start using Mutt, since I hear so many awesome things about it from my coworkers.

Another Mr. T sighting this morning on the Today show. He’s definitely making a comeback. Did you know that Mr. T. once sang a song called “Treat Your Mother right.

Sing-a-Long: “Please Mr. Wallace, Send Me Some Spam

XML.com: Tim Berners-Lee on the W3C’s Semantic Web Activity

Amazon.com Problems: OK, I’m starting to get pissed off at Amazon.com’s ordering system. About once a month or so I send in a sizeable order for more DVDs to add to my growing DVD Video Library. Upon logging into Amazon.com, I found it rather odd that my previous order (which I have already received) was still in my shopping cart. OK, a glitch, so I simply deleted them all. I then spent about an hour picking out my latest order, and got to the very last step in the ordering process and decided that I didn’t want one of the movies I had in my cart, so I did what most people would do: I clicked the back button until I got to my shopping cart list where I clicked the “delete this item” button for the DVD I didn’t want. I then proceeded through to the checkout again only to discover that my shopping cart now contained not the DVDs I just spent an hour picking out, but the DVDs of my previous order — the ones I had to manually remove from the shopping cart. Argh! I have a feeling it has something to do with the way Amazon uses session IDs in their URL strings to track user sessions. In fact, this same ID ends up being your order number as well. Certainly convenient for Amazon, but clearly my browser got confused. Perhaps Amazon should stop dynamically assigning session IDs in this way and figure out a better way to tie a browser cookie to a user session.

And despite the very polite communication I’ve had with Amazon’s customer service people, they still have not resolved their problem of having two user accounts for me in their system that share a single email address (this causes endless problems with order tracking and accessing a single account from multiple computers). If Amazon is listening, I hope they correct these problems soon…

The bottom line is that I ended up not submitting my order to Amazon because I didn’t want to deal with going through adding all the same titles again. And Amazon loses out on my order because their sytem is flawed in some way. We’re both losers here. Low prices and convenience are only part of the equation of shopping online. If you can’t provide a satisfying customer experience and resolve known issues with existing accounts, then you are likely to lose more customers than you think.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at March 23, 2001 03:28 PM

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