Active Product Development

Dear Consumer

JeremyGThomas — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:38:21 GMT

Dear Consumer,

I’d like to address feedback we’re received about active.com from our uservoice forum and Twitter. I know I’ve written a few posts here already but thought it appropriate to take the time to introduce myself before diving in. I’m the Director of Product Development for what we internally call “Web Properties”. This includes half of www.active.com, results.active.com, search.active.com, community.active.com, coolrunning.com, sportspower.com, laxpower.com, developer.active.com and a slew of services that support these products. My job is to oversee a team of developers and quality assurance engineers administratively and architecturally. My team and I work closely with Product Management who’s job it is to prioritize features and bugs and communicate important information with the rest of the company. I came on board in February, 2008 with a background as an Enterprise 2.0 guy (I co-authored this book) and Management and Technology consultant where I talked to large companies about how best to leverage social media (Web 2.0).

In 2006 a bunch of smart people (Tim O’Reilly, Martin Fowler, John Musser from Programmableweb) met to define attributes of Web 2.0, and these attributes highlight a positive mental shift in the approach to developing web-based products. The first of the six attributes they identified was “Do one thing well”; stay single-purposed. Looking at the current active.com homepage it’s hard to tell what we’re trying to get you to do. We have information about events. We also have links to articles and blog posts produced by our Content team. And we have ads (gotta pay the bills somehow). We have a lot of purposes manifested on that page.

I have a passion for Web 2.0 and believe firmly that web properties should focus on you, the consumer. The fourth attribute the group defined was “Encourage participation”. To-date we haven’t always done a good job there. We have a lot of very interesting information that could help runners discover other runners – to make you want to connect with other like-minded athletes - but we’re not exploiting the data to that end…yet. We do have a strong Community team that oversees community.active.com where it is easy to participate. But we haven’t presented a clear path for you to understand that this option is available to you after you’ve registered for an event or when you’re planning your events for the year.

Web 2.0 preaches “Honest voice over Corporate speak”, and in following this spirit I wanted to address some of the feedback we’ve received over the past few months. We do get a lot of positive feedback, such as this "@activenetwork love active.com and use it for the races i sign up for. any opinion on my idea for sunblock+running? http://twurl.nl/wrws3h", and our page view metrics seem to indicate that people like using our site. But here are some not so positive things people have said.

1. Most Ridiculous Site I have (seen)

“Pardon me but your site is the most ridiuculous site I have ever used. It is not only confusing, it is difficult to navigate. Please hire a pro to re-organize the site, otherwise we "Active" people will be forced to use a crappy monopoly like ticketmaster to preregister for events.”

This is fair, in part, as we’re not giving you clear direction as to what we want you do to on our site. Regarding the half of www.active.com that I oversee technically, we’re working to make navigation more intuitive and consolidate the site’s purpose to make things much clearer for you. We’ll be launching the redesign in Beta in the next few months and will be looking for user feedback at that time.

We’re also working on a new registration platform (the part of the site I don’t oversee) that will improve user experience significantly when it comes to race registration. That product isn’t scheduled to be released for several months, but I’m excited about what I’ve seen so far.

2. Fix the Unsubscribe Link on your e-mails. Unsubscribe me

“you send out unwanted e-mails and then your unsubscribe link doesn't work so you tell people they can write to an address to unsubscribe. I don't think so. Fix your link!!!!”

Our unsubscribe links do work, but in most cases only unsubscribe you from that specific newsletter. Generally speaking, unsubscribing to newsletters is a complaint we receive often, and I understand how this can be frustrating. Soon we will be releasing a new page on www.active.com where you can view all of our newsletters, view those you’ve been subscribed to, and either A) opt-in to more or B) unsubscribe from each.

3. Dear Active.com, Know what are not events? Tshirts and running/relay teams. Why are they showing up in my event searches? Me

We know that search.active.com is far from perfect, and we set out at the beginning of the year to deliver a significantly enhanced search experience on active.com. While still in early alpha, we’re expecting to unveil the new search.active.com in Q4, and will reach out to a handful of you when we release our closed Beta for feedback.

4. Active.com is SNEAKY SNEAKY! Watch out for the $59.95 charge on your account

When you sign up for a race you have the option to opt-in to Active Advantage – a program that provides discounts on race registration and other products. And that program costs $59.95 annually. To be fair, the “opt-in” checkbox used to be automatically checked (a year or so ago, so it was an “opt-out” checkbox), and we received a lot of complaints like this one. But that’s no longer the case, and you have to check the box to be signed up. Regardless, if you think you were erroneously signed up for Active Advantage, support@active.com can always help you out.

I’m excited about how far active.com has come, and for where we will be in the near future. We have a bunch of new features and enhancements (such as improved page load times) in development now that I, as a Web 2.0 enthusiast, find enticing. More to come on these enhancements as they become available.

Regards,

Jeremy Thomas

The API is Live

JeremyGThomas — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:28:18 GMT

(cross-posted from developer.active.com)

After much anticipation I'm happy to announce the launch of our Event (Asset*) Syndication API. This is a simple XML/HTTP API that returns a list of events matching specified filters as per API documentation. A subset of our events can be queried through this service. These are (note the api_key below is a demo key, so use it at your own risk):

Triathlons - http://api.amp.active.com/assets/triathlon?api_key=rnxjx6ts3pg579gvrbe42qn7
Cycling Events - http://api.amp.active.com/assets/cycling?api_key=rnxjx6ts3pg579gvrbe42qn7
Running Events - http://api.amp.active.com/assets/running?api_key=rnxjx6ts3pg579gvrbe42qn7
Environmentally Friendly Events - http://api.amp.active.com/assets/green?api_key=rnxjx6ts3pg579gvrbe42qn7

You might use this data to create an iPhone app of upcoming events or a widget for your website. We're excited to see what your ideas are. If you're interested in using the Event Syndication API, sign up for an account, register for an API key, and read our terms of use. We'll review your request and will get back to you (via email) asking you about what it is you'd like to do with the API. We're still scaling our infrasture so not all requests will be automatically approved.

*Note the word "Asset" appears in the title of this API as we have more than just event in our database, so generically we call these things assets.

Active Inspiration

JeremyGThomas — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:20:07 GMT

During a recent meeting somebody on my team came up with the idea of pulling in "inspirational" tweets, photos, videos from around the web for a given Active topic, like marathon or 10k. I thought it was a great idea, so we worked together to build a prototype and threw it on Labs.

Enter Active Inspiration. We're pulling in the latest tweets and photos about marathons, triathlons and cycling. I suppose you could say this was also inspired by flickrvision and twittervision, except ours is meme-based and also aggregates from multiple sources (we'll be adding more soon).

We think there are lots of interesting things we can do with this data. This is just the beginning. As always, let us know what you think.

Microformats on active.com

JeremyGThomas — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:52:58 GMT

Consider the following statements: Microsoft Corporation created C#. C# is used to develop computer programs.

Great.

Now think of all of the concepts and relationships between them that are introduced in this statement. As a human, interpreting these is dead simple.

Microsoft is a company
C# is a computer programming language
Microsoft created C#

But, making it so that a computer program can reduce this statement to concepts and the relationships between them is difficult. It is indeed a harrowing task to make computers derive the same meaning from natural language that people do.

Enter the The Semantic Web. The Semantic Web wants to convert the Internet into a database; to make it so computer programs can understand concepts and relationships between concepts contained within in the natural language on web pages.

Microformats are an element of the Semantic Web that define concepts (but don't do a good job of defining relationships), and we've recently introduced them on active.com. Microformats "...are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards" that make it possible to annotate a web page with metadata describing concepts contained within them. On active.com we've implemented the hCalendar microformat to annotate events.

Consider, for example, the Carlsbad 5000. Peering into the HTML source, you'll find:

<div class="vevent">
<h3 class="summary">Carlsbad 5000</h3>
<span class="description"></span>
<span class="dtstart" title="Sunday, April 05, 2009 @ 7:05 AM">Sunday, April 05, 2009 @ 7:05 AM</span>
<span class="dtend" title="Sunday, April 05, 2009 @ 10:05 AM">Sunday, April 05, 2009 @ 10:05 AM</span>
<span class="location">Carlsbad, CA</span><span class="uid"></span></div>
</div>

By annotating the "class" name attributes within the HTML elements according to the hCalendar standard, we can let a computer program know there's an event called the "Carlsbad 5000" on this web page, its start time, end time and location. The Tails Export Firefox plugin, for example, is a computer program that detects microformats on web pages. In the screenshot below we can see it detecting the hCalendar microformat on the Carlsbad 5000 event page:

This stuff's a little geeky sure. But we're proud to contribute to the Semantic Web! on active.com to come.

RSS Comes to active.com

JeremyGThomas — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:30:31 GMT

When I started working at active.com the first thing I noticed was that there were no RSS feeds on our pages. It seemed like a simple oversight to me. But, it turned out adding RSS was harder than one might think, mainly because we had to make sure all was kosher with our content partners.

Well, the time has finally arrived. RSS is now on active.com! Here are some feeds you may want to subscribe to:

RSS feeds for events are in store for the future so you can be notified when, say, next year's Carlsbad 5000 is available on active.com

Generating Sitemaps

JeremyGThomas — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:07:38 GMT

active.com is an aggregator of data from disparate sites within the Active Network. Because the source of content is distributed and because we have so much of it, creating a sitemap.xml file for SEO purposes has become challenging. We're working on a new search solution (which you can access in Beta at http://labs.active.com/search) , and the engine behind that has a sitemap.xml generating capability.

But there's only one problem: the file it generates is huge.

According to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html, a sitemap file can only be 10MB in size or up to 30,000 URLs (whichever comes first). The sitemap for active.com has over 220,000 URLs and is about 34MB in size.

We needed an application that would split the sitemap.xml file, according to the constraints above. I searched all over the internet for something that would do this, and was found only with commercial applications that wanted to crawl my site before generating/splitting the sitemap.xml files.

So, my team developed a simple, .NET-based application that splits a large sitemap.xml file into smaller ones, and also creates the sitemap index file which references them.

Because I'm feeling philanthropic, I decided to give you access to this tool, free of charge. Download it here.

Made Over

JeremyGThomas — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:22:28 GMT

After much anticipation we have finally released our new Event Details page. Check out the screencast below, browse around active.com and let us know what you think.

Active Classifieds new on Labs

JeremyGThomas — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:52:47 GMT

We've just released our newest project to labs.active.com, Active Classifieds. Have you ever wanted to assemble a group of people to block wind for you on a weekend ride or sell an old baseball glove?

Active Classifieds is a simple app designed to make it easy for you to sell your old sports stuff or meetup with like-minded people.

Dive in and let us know what you think.

Active's Pepsi Challenge

jspitzberg — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:24:57 GMT

In the latest installment of "No man can..." challenges, we bring you the Active.com Product Developer Pepsi Challenge. Can any of these fine men drink 2-liters of Pepsi in less than 4 minutes? Let's, as they say, go to the video tape...

Coming Soon.

JeremyGThomas — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:15:51 GMT

Based on what our analytics tools tell us, many of you go straight to what we call our "event details" pages on active.com. These pages are designed to showcase information about, say, a 10k, to help you decide if you want to register or not (check out the event details page for the Niantic Bay 10K, for example).

We think there's a lot that can be improved about this page. Namely A) it's design, B) the speed at which it loads, and C) its lack of focus on, well, you. So we're starting into a sequence of updates that will spice things up bit. Here's a preview of what's coming in the first update.

It's got a completely re-vamped look and feel. We've also modified the reviews system, making it so people who review an event also rate it on a scale of 1 - 5 (using our fancy stars).

Future releases will include Youtube and Flickr integration as well as a host of other goodies. But look for this update in the next month or so!

Experimenting with the Cloud

JeremyGThomas — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:17:26 GMT

We recently rolled out a private Beta for our new Search solution. Not only is it a good functional test for us, we're also experimenting with Amazon EC2 and S3 for hosting and data storage. And from what I've seen so far I'm impressed with Amazon and the approach they've taken to cloud computing.

Amazon has made it dead easy to provision new servers. They've created a collection of webservices to integrate to for starting and stopping instances. It seemed odd to me, at first, that I'd have to manage my infrastructure through SOAP calls. But client-side tools like Elasticfox and now Amazon's own AWS Console make it easy to manage. There's also a good selection of Windows and various Linux flavors to choose from when setting up servers (we're running mostly Ubuntu 8.1.0 in Labs).

We wanted to make our Labs infrastructure extensible so we can new pilot applications quickly, regardless of platform. To do this we're setting an Apache server on an EC2 Ubuntu host that routes http://labs.active.com to the appropriate app. Requests to the base URL will be sent to a CMS/wiki that describes the various things we're working on. Search, which currently resides in the root, will soon be available at http://labs.active.com/search. Any future pilot we rollout will be available, then, at http://labs.active.com/{pilot-name}.

We're also setting up "global" memcached and MySQL servers, so that any application deployed to labs might benefit from these services (we love memcached by the way).

Each pilot application will be responsible for load balancing its requests. The Search application uses HA proxy running on a dedicated Ubuntu server to route requests to a collection of Apache instances running mod_rails distributed across Ubuntu "workers" (we can scale horizontally here, pending load, by adding more workers).

So far (and it's been about 1.5 months) we haven't had any Amazon-caused downtime. Personally, I think this is a game changer.

Search Beta - Looking Good

JeremyGThomas — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:55:11 GMT

We now have over 100 users in our Search Beta, and the feedback we've received so far has been positive. One user has asked:

"I would love to see something interactive where I could quickly access different multimedia from past events. It wouldn't necessarily be official race photos (I'd actually prefer that they weren't) but even links to a search results page for the event's name in Flickr or YouTube would be great. Even a search OUTSIDE the active network, bringing me to different bloggers who have posted about the events or written race reports from past events would be great to see."

I couldn't agree more. There's a ton of interesting, relevant content out there in the cloud that would add value to search. We're working now to implement this feature, pulling in photos from flickr, videos from youtube, tweets from twitter and blog posts from technorati (a blog search engine).

Sign up for access to our Search Beta at http://labs.active.com/users/new using the invite code "blogsearchinvite".

update: we've just rolled out integration to Twitter, Flickr and Youtube!

Evolving Search on active.com

JeremyGThomas — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 23:43:16 GMT

We've been listening to our users, like bikehugger, who asks "Possibly not enough coffee, but has anyone else just stared at Active.com wondering how to register for an event?" (http://twitter.com/bikehugger/statuses/998940596). Our users want to a) find the events to register for and b) run through a no-hassle registration process.

Here we're addressing "a" - making it easier to find stuff to do.

So we've been working to make search a bit easier and a bit more relevant. I'm happy to invite you to our highly experimental, closed search beta. The first 100 users can sign-up at http://labs.active.com/users/new, using the invite code "blogsearchinvite".

Watch this screencast to get a better idea of where we're headed.

Active Video

ActiveFergy — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:10:13 GMT

For some time now, Jumpcut has been Active's video provider. As some of you may be aware, Yahoo has decided to shelve Jumpcut and they are no longer accepting video uploads. The decision to halt uploads came as a surprise to us; we were notified only a week prior. Since our video migration is scheduled in early 2009, this leaves us in the unfortunate position of turning off video uploads on the Active website. We are trying our best to retrieve the current video content and will restore functionality soon.

Dailymile Launches

JeremyGThomas — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:47:02 GMT

Congrats to Ben Weiner and Kelly Korevec for the public launch of dailymile.com. I admire the way dailymile focuses on building user communities around events. The UI is easy to use and intuitive, and they've amassed a good userbase while in private beta. I especially like the feature where users can submit events, and this is something we're contemplating doing here at Active too.

You can read about their launch here.

update: turns out we have an older feature that allows users to submit events here.