Incessant Rambling

Pretty cool, to-the-point gadget site at Gadget Watcher. I pay pretty close attention to Engadget, but they’ve gone a little wonky gratuitous on what they include in their articles. I only care about maybe 10% of the stuff I see at Engadget. I like the little boutique shops, hence my interest in Gadget Watcher. There’s no bloat; They focus on the cool and useful, not just the cool; And the favicon made me think I was looking at our current President’s site for just long enough to second guess myself.

Update: Engadget themselves said in a PSP-related article today

Yes, we’re aware this is entirely gratuitous given that we already knew the ceramic PSP was gonna be launching today. But, you know — we’re big fans of gratuitous. Whaddya want?

I couldn’t have said it better myself. “Gratuitous” is exactly the word I was looking for yesterday. Thanks, Engadget!

Rarely do I actually get excited about a produt. As Scrivs has recently pointed out, hype is readily available on the web. From anything 37signals puts out, to Blinksale from Firewheel Design, you can’t click three times without seeing someone say “[Insert app name here] is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen - a life saver” or something very similar.

And each of the companies developing these apps build on that hype by saying “10,000 people signed up on day one.” Okay, great. Tell me how many of those were using the free version (read: trying it out), how many are at each level, and how many are still actively using the product 6 months, 1 year, 2 years down the road. That to me is what makes a solid product worthy of hype, not how many people you can get to sign up based on advance marketing.

However, there is one product that I just plain can’t wait to use. I read an interview with the company’s CEO this morning. I found the product when I was looking for some solutions for a company I used to work for. We were needing to better manage email newsletters and this looked like the exact answer to our needs. Too bad I couldn’t convince management of that.

Now that I’m in business for myself, I just can’t wait until I need to send out some material. I WANT to write a newsletter just to use the service. When someone wants to use your product so badly they’re looking for ways to do so, you’re doing something right. Kudos to the Campaign Monitor team.