Yahoo - What are they thinking?

With all the online buzz and interest Early Miser has been getting I submitted it to the Yahoo Directory. It seemed only natural since it was awarded an Editor's Pick over at Yahoo Gallery. You can vote for the Earlymiser at Yahoo Gallery.

I then got this email from Yahoo (9 business days after submission, not the required seven business days)

Dear Yahoo! Directory Submit Client,

Yahoo! has reviewed the URL you submitted for expedited review

http://www.earlymiser.com/

with Yahoo! Directory Submit order ##########. We're sorry to report that we've decided not to include your site in the Yahoo! Directory at this time. We base our evaluation of each site solely on the content it has on the site at the time of evaluation. When we reviewed your site today, we found that it did not have enough content to support a listing through the Yahoo! Directory Submit program.

Needless to say I was aghast and took a look at what they recently approved in the my category.

http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Shopping_and_Services/Retailers/Virtual_Malls/Shopping_Agents/

And the new site is
http://www.costhelper.com/

Costhelper is literally 38 - 200 word articles with Adsense attached. Would you tell me how on God's green earth that got in the directory under Shopping Agents?

Want an example?

http://www.costhelper.com/cost/finance/health-insurance.html

That's the "Shopping Agent" in action. I poll 4 seperate web APIs in real time to bring the lowest price on a product in the United States - that's why the guys over at Web service made it an editor's pick. Costhelper.com shouldn't be in the directory - yet I am the one lacking content? No one else on the planet does what I do and yet I don't belong in the directory?

I am guessing it's because I keep my customers informed at this blog about changes to the api or minor corrections. Well that's never going to change - I am always going to keep my customers in the loop about changes. And I am always working to make the site better and here's another hint guys - I am always going to be announcing bugs, changes etc here.

I guess I am upset about not getting in the directory. I also guess I am angry that some static article directory is in my category. I am also upset that Yahoo didn't respond within the guaranteed 7 business day window. I applied on the 13th and got a response today, the 28th - even with 2 days for Thanksgiving that is 9 days guys. I guess Yahoo must be planning on introducing some of my features. I guess they can't take the competition. I appealed the decision pointing out "CostHelper.com" and the Gallery Editor's Pick. Knowing Yahoo however, I am sure they will CYA. Here's a hint guys to use the social networking features - you gotta create an account.

Bugs fixed and New features

Ok. We have fixed the custom feed rss error and the have a set of changes for release this week. This is a minor release week but expect subcategories to be more prominent at EarlyMiser. Additionally we will have more exact search results from Yahoo search. We have tried to make a series of user changes to make the site more user friendly incuding making generated store names more readable. Small changes but hopefully will improve the user experience.

Custom Feed Error Bug

We are currently seeing a bug where not all the items in a custom RSS feed are appearing there. We should have a fix for it tomorrow.

Current Round of Changes

We have pushed a whole series of changes to EarlyMiser live this week. Most of these changes are minor but some are some increased functionality that you will currently on the site when you create an account. You can now tag individual products which will appear on your page. Additionally you now have a tag cloud with both your tagged products and tagged feeds at Bdespain's tags. We also have a seperate page for tagged products at Bdespain's tagged products. As a reminder all of your tagged products and tagged feeds can be found at http://www.earlymiser.com/nickname. Mine is found at www.earlymiser.com/bdespain

Nicknames

When you create an account at Early Miser you set up your nickname. Your nickname is used to share the products you tag and the custom feeds you create. For example I am pretty avid user of Early Miser so my custom feeds and tagged products reside at Bdespain's custom feeds and products. So you can share your custom feeds and tagged products by simply appending your nickname to the end of the earlymiser.com URL.

How to Use Early Miser - Pricing Triggers and Custom Feeds

One of the cool features of EarlyMiser is combing the custom feed feature with the pricing trigger. This allows you to moniter a group of products and set a price trigger when any product reaches a particular percentage discount. At EarlyMiser a pricing trigger can be set on any item or group of items in custom feed. So after adding items to your custom feed you can set a pricing trigger on that custom feed. Typically when setting a pricing trigger I would recommend a percentage off that you would like buy the item. The system currently calculates prices based off a running average of the following providers, shopping.com, and Amazon.com. We use those providers as they tend to provide the most accurate results (sorry Yahoo Shopping). We don't use ebay for determining the average price as the ebay price fluctate far too much.

When setting a price trigger, it's important to remember that the discount is calculated from the average of the current suppliers. Given the number of suppliers we are calculating from we are going to have a fairly accurate number based a wide distribution. Given the breadth of retail suppliers, set the percentage discount realistically - ie a 90% discount might be too high but you can set it in hopes that someone will run a promotion where they treat your item as a loss leader. It is fairly common to see someone running a 30% percent off promotion on a item, so setting your pricing trigger at 30% of the week averaage is a good way to get a good deal on items.

You can set a pricing trigger based on the running average of the last day, last week, last month, last three months or last six months. I typically set my pricing trigger at a week or a month depending on the nature of the item. Last week running gives the lastest averages and using the three month running average is likely to give you a higher average.

Once any item in your custom feed reaches the price trigger criteria you will be sent a email with a link to that result, allowing you to purchase the item at your desired discount. You can delete the item from the feed after you have purchased it.

Free 60 GB Playstation 3

I purchased a Playstation 3 this morning at the local WalMart this morning (One of the benefits of living in a rural area). So as a promotion for EarlyMiser I will be giving the unit away to any who has created an account and set up a feed deveoted to your favorite topic (it doesn't have to be the PS3). One option is to include P3 games and accessories. I will post the official rule shortly on the site and here on the blog since contests like these have rules from state to state. Once you have set up the feed, please feel free to mail me @ Brian at earlymiser dot net

Global Preferences

One thing I haven't covered is Global Preferences at Early Miser. Once you have created an account at Early Miser, you will be able specify which shopping channels you want use to pull results from. Since Early Miser, this means that you the user can select what shopping sources you want to see on your version of the site. We have tried to be as broad as possible and we will be adding new sources every month or so as we can bring them online. At this point you can chose from Shopping.com, Amazon, Ebay and the Amazon Marketplace. Some people don't think we should be accessing Ebay as it's an auction but we are only hitting auction with the "Buy it Now" price. So we avoid high prices typically generated by an auction. So all prices listed from Ebay are the "Buy it Now" price. Of course the great thing about global preferences is that you can simply just set the site to not display Ebay.

Catchpa Removed

The CATCHPA that you initially needed to fill out to create an account has been removed. As I have noted our feedback has indicated it was too hard to use on a regular basis. It's now easier to create accounts in general. Product tagging, user tag clouds and new set of features are going live on Wednesday. I want to think everyone that is currently using the site and giving me feedback. For those of you having trouble, please keep those emails and feedback reports coming. Please feel free to email me at despain.brian@gmail.com or brian@earlymiser.net.

Change that will go live on Monday, November 13, 2006

I have been getting a lot of complaints about the registration form - namely that the CATCHPA is too hard to use. Apparently people are having a hard time telling the difference between zeroes and the letter O. They also don't realize that the CATCHPA is case sensative. I already have a CATCHPA in the email - you must cut and paste the activation code, nickname, email and password in the form.

What we are working on right now

Tag syndication is sorta working. It's up on the site but I will be making changes on a near daily basis so it's likely to break at a moments notice. If you want to see an example of Tag Syndication (or TagOut as it's called internally) simply look on the right hand side of this blog. There you will find a Google Adsense style ad with everything tagged at Early Miser tagged with Stem Cells. Soon you will be able to export your own feeds to your own sites and share the products you have tagged and feed you have created. It works right now on items that are tagged on the site generally. So when you generate an "Advertisement" as it is now call you can select multiple tags to display products there. If there are more than 4 products in the feed it will rotate between the items. For example the Stem Cells feed has something like 100 or so items (it changes weekly based on adding more items). Early Miser rotates through those items when the page is displayed.

We are finishing up this item by early to middle of next week. So what have we been doing in the mean time? Well as much as I like custom product RSS feeds it's clear that most people are having difficulty with the concept. So to make things easy we are implementing direct product tagging. Every product will have a box that will allow you to tag the item on the fly or while browsing the catalog. We will be using AJAX to update the tags in real time on a product so if you are looking at a product and tags start appearing then someone somewhere is tagging that product. Additionally we will be implementing User Tag clouds in the latest release, so look for this towards the middle of next week.

Special Characters in custom feed names

Please note right now you cannot have the following characters in a custom feed name - namely the following: & # % + ? / \

If you have difficulty using any other special characters in a custom feed, please let me know.

How to use Earlymiser.com - Notes Section

In the MyFeed Management section of Early Miser you will find the feeds on the left side of the screen. You can change feeds simply by clicking on each feed. You can then take notes, tag the feed, set the pricing trigger. The notes field is just that a notes field that you can fill with notes abou that feed. Notes are private information that isn't shared with anyone on the site. There is no limit on the notes you can effectively write so knock yourself out.

How To Use Earlymiser.com - Custom Feeds

In a previous post I covered one the basic concepts behind Early Miser the product RSS Feeds. Now I am going to cover how to use custom RSS feeds. Custom rss feeds are ones you build yourself. The best way to think about custom RSS feeds isn't to think about the RSS part at all. Custom feeds at Earlymiser can operate as a grocery list, a want list or stuff tracker. One of the constant applications I see built on Amazon web services is a media tracker (track your DVDs etc). At Early Miser you can not only use it as a media track but you can do it easily. Put all your documentaries in a feed, your music cds in another and tag both feeds as "owned" and you can track everything you own along with tagging it.

So the custom feeds at Early Miser can operate as a nice way of organizing your collection of things that you want or are interested in or perhaps you own.

Custom feeds also have another cool feature - you can set a pricing trigger on a custom feed. Pricing triggers are feature on the site that a lot of people haven't used yet.

You set a pricing trigger in the MyFeed Management. A price trigger allows you to be notified when an item in your feed is has reached a specific trigger. You can set the trigger to a specific dollar amount or to a specific percentage off. This will apply to all items in the feed so if any of them meet the specific condition you set up in the trigger, you will be sent an email.

Here's the pricing trigger page.



Please note you can set the polling interval on the as a day (so it will check every day to see if your conditions are met) week, month, 3 months or 6 months (for those infrequent purchases). This will then send an email when you pricing trigger is met. Looking for the at great deal on group of items - you could put them in a single custom feed (say named 50% off) and then set the pricing trigger for 50%. Once you buy each item you can delete it from the feed.

One more note about custom feeds. They also have an RSS feed associated with them. This feed updates when any product in the feed is updated. PLEASE NOTE right now the system isn't handling special characters well in custom feed names. Please don't use the following characters "& # % + ? / \".

How To Use EarlyMiser.com Related Posts
How to use Early Miser product RSS feeds
How to use Early Miser custom RSS feeds

Christmas Shopping

Ok since it's the day after Halloween, now is the time to begin Christmas shopping in earnest. First off Christmas is one of those rare times when you are almost forced to wear appalling bad Christmas sweaters. You also listen to more Christmas Music than you are going to want to listen to. Don't forget that other upcoming holiday - Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving is that rare time of the year when you stuff yourself with gourment Thanksgiving foods and candies. To prepare those delicious Thanksgiving day feasts I suggest looking for a wide range of Thanksgiving Day recipe books. For your turkey, it's not complete without Wild Thymes Cranberry Fig Cranberry Sauce or if you are looking to spice things up a bit this year I would suggest the Impromptu Gourmet Fully Cooked Cajun Turkey, 10-12 Pounds which is spiced with Cajun spices and delivered overnight to your door in a insulated container.

Of course no holiday is complete without the necessary Peanuts Holiday specials - now on DVD. Or maybe you were more a fan of the The Original Television Christmas Classics (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer / Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town / Frosty the Snowman / Frosty Returns / The Little Drummer Boy). In any case don't forget the tasty pumpkin yule log.