Blue's Movable Type Blog

I posted earlier about the way that the main support@ezboard.com e-mail address has been bouncing merrily, despite ezboard/Yuku's developer and an ezboard Help [sic] Forum moderator* saying they'd get it fixed.

Well there have been some changes now. That feedback link in the domain-wide footer has now been removed completely.

And Reg (Brian James, or "the Brain" as he's being referred to in some quarters...) has been forced to admit he's wrong - something he hates to do, what with that inflated ego of his. Having written:

"The e-mail address is valid. It should be working again shortly."

he has now been forced to admit that:

"Yeah, I was wrong.

The e-mail infact does not work and it was my mistake. There was some miscommunication at the office.

http://www.yuku.com/help/ticket/

If you need to contact staff, use that URL."

Don't forget that according to the adverts they placed for developers and other staff, they work in one office together...

Of course, it might have made sense if someone had told Reg about the announcement posted over on ezboard back on 13 May 2002 where they said that the support@ezboard.com "is defunct".

So I decided to look at how people can make contact with Yuku. Details are provided here for the meantime - ezboard does have a habit of changing things to suit themselves:
http://www.yuku.com/homepage/contact/t/Contact-Yuku.jsp

"You'll want to contact us in different ways depending on why you want to reach us.

You may be tempted for example to use the Great Ideas e-mail to ask a question or to send a legal issue to the ads e-mail. But the fastest way for you to get satisfaction is to start at the right place to get your answer.

• Help - Help and FAQ pages or the Yuku Help Community
• Legal Issues - Yuku Terms Of Use pages
• Great Ideas - ideas@yukucorp.com
• Advertising - ads@yukucorp.com
• Bugs? - bugs@yukucorp.com
• Comments? - comments@yukucorp.com
• Good old Snail Mail - Yuku, 564 Market Street, 705 San Francisco, CA 94104 USA"

Now there isn't a formal Yuku Help Community any longer, but as usual, ezboard haven't chosen to correct the page.

So let's have a look at those e-mail addresses. Firstly, we'll look at who they're registered with and who handles the MX (e-mail) records. Domain names are getting cheaper and cheaper to register with the normal cost around $10 when they're not charged at zero as part of a hosting package. So let's do a lookup on yukucorp.com:

Registrant:
ezboard Inc
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400x255

Domain Name: YUKUCORP.COM

Administrative Contact:
Labatt, Robert robertlabatt@ezboardcorp.com
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400x255

Technical Contact:
Gakovic, Ceco ceco@ezboardcorp.com
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400x214

Record last updated 06-20-2005 01:48:44 PM
Record expires on 06-20-2007
Record created on 06-20-2005

Domain servers in listed order:
NS29.1AND1.COM 217.160.224.2
NS30.1AND1.COM 217.160.228.2

Yes, it seems that ezboard is using 1&1 for this domain. Nothing wrong with that, of course: indeed, I've been suggesting that people do as ezboard does and use someone else like 1&1 to host a proper message board system like I already do.

Except that this brings up an interesting question: has ezboard fallen out with Everyone.net? Surely the cost of a domain name can't have come into it as any difference would be peanuts. Now we know from the e-mail bounces to support@ezboard.com that ezboard uses Everyone.net for that domain's e-mail. And what would the big deal be if they had fallen out with them?

The simple answer is "Labrador Ventures". Now as I've mentioned before, Sean Foote is on the Board of Directors of Everyone.net and the last time I was able to check ezboard's web site, he was on ezboard, Inc.'s board too. He's also a partner at Labrador Ventures where Robert Labatt's wife is CFO.

So why would ezboard, Inc. ditch Everyone.net and go with an 'external' company for its e-mail? The same 'external' company that also handles e-mail for the domain name ezboardcorp.com.

Well at this stage it would be pure conjecture if I were to suggest that maybe ezboard, Inc. has outstayed its welcome in the Labrador Ventures camp, although that might be understandable given the cash burn that is Yuku - remember that Yuku has been in development since early 2005 at least and has yet to generate any income, apparently.

Or maybe ezboard, Inc. are worried about privacy concerns - which would be rich given their continuing libel about me. Yes, ezboard continue to publish untruths about me, despite my having asked them repeatedly for any shred of evidence to justify their assertions since June 2005 when they first libelled me.

*You can't call the ezboard Help [sic] Forum moderators that when they're dealing with Yuku, since the closure of the Yuku help [sic] forums.

Posted by Captain Blue at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A number of so-called Web 2.0 sites use what are known as "tags" to allow mainly collaborative sites to classify or organise articles, although I prefer to have a 'proper' search mechanism in place and hardly every use tags on my own blogs, given they are generally categorised or classified into major subjects and have a search function anyway.

Nonetheless, my Movable Type blog and LiveJournal have this facility with words or phrases being allowable as tags.

Per Movable Type:

"Tagging is a popular method of classifying and organizing entries. Tags are simple, comma separated words or phrases that you attach to an item which describe particular facets of it. Tags provide extra metadata that can be used later to find a particular entry or other entries like it within the system. Tags are most effective when they are very specific. This specificity is gained through the use of tag combinations, which essentially form “tag intersections.” Tags can optionally be displayed on the published weblog where readers can click on them to find other entries that are similarly tagged."

Per LiveJournal:

"Tags are words and short phrases used to organise your journal entries."

So I can see how a decent tagging system using phrases might be useful. Guess what? Yes, Yuku has tags! Kudos to them ;)

Except there's a catch. Didn't you know there would be? Here's an extract from the Yuku tags FAQ by Michelle:

"It is up to users to create meaningful tags though."

I couldn't agree more.

So, if a user was interested in the US TV Show "American Idol", for instance, and wanted to tag their post accordingly, then that's the tag they'd use, right?

Wrong! Michelle has looked at the Yuku implementation before stating categorically that:

"Tags are meant to be single word entities."

Michelle, you missed the bit where you should have said:

"Our implementation only allows single word entities, unlike all the other sites using words or phrases."

So you can use the terms 'American' and 'Idol' which won't really aid a visitor or you can use a specially made up word of 'AmericanIdol'. Let's hope the users are seasoned Yuku veterans, eh?

Maybe Reg was too busy playing Wikipedia Edit Tag to code it properly...

Posted by Captain Blue at 5:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been doing some editing over on Wikipedia since February this year. I started doing some edits to the existing ezboard entry firstly to remove the unsubstantiated bits and bobs and then to remove the advertising spin being applied to it by various ezboard staff and one user in particular calling himself "Regimemachine".

I then realised that Yuku didn't have its own entry, so I started one off. So conscious was I that it had to be unbiased and verifiable, that once I'd posted the original version another user wrote:

"Is this Spam? Looks like spam."

But that was not to be the case, with the usual suspects trying to turn it into some form of advertisement for Yuku complete with unsubstantiated claims for user numbers and the like.

Now, bear in mind that Wikipedia states:

"Wikipedia is not an advertising service. Promotional articles about yourself, your friends, your company or products; or articles written as part of a marketing or promotional campaign, may be deleted in accordance with our deletion policies. For more information, see Wikipedia:Spam."

and

"Encyclopedic content must be verifiable."

you'd think that ezboard, Inc. wouldn't have anything to complain about. But this is ezboard, so their employee writes amongst other things:

"See the discussion page. Every other software lists features. We have the right to do the same.) "

Er, no, you don't, actually. If ezboard felt that other software entries were biased or advertising, they should dispute those articles' contents. But no, instead of that, they decide to complain about me and claim I'm being biased.

"Regimemachine" - or "Reg" as I'll call him from now on - seems upset that I've been using his made-up surname 'James' as I'd wrongly assumed that the name he uses on Yuku and elsewhere ("Brian James") might be his real name, but it's not. Maybe he has something to hide?

He's then used the mighty power of the Internet (or Google...) to try to dig a little deeper about me and then proudly spouts some more inaccurate information he's managed to come up with. Ah well.

I am clearly - in his eyes at least - a nasty piece of work, unlike himself. After all, he's a thoroughly nice chap, I'm sure. And the following hyperlinks are clearly misleading and inaccurate:

http://www.last.fm/user/regimemachine/ - which shows his "made-up" name of Brian James and a domain name he uses...

http://www.regimemachine.com/ - a domain name that's registered so as to hide the identity of the registrant (much like http://www.ezboardsucks.com). Not much to see there ... now. Instead, try seeing what used to be there.

http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:www.regimemachine.com - take a look at Google's cached copies of some of the content that was there. Oh dear! That must all be mistake, surely? Well it appears he too is on Technorati.

http://technorati.com/profile/regimemachine - oh dear, oh dear! Surely that "regimemachine" can't be our Reg? OK, so he too calls himself Brian James, but that must be coincedental? He lays claim to three blogs there: regimemachine.com, fuckthisporn.com and stopliving.com. I wouldn't click through to stopliving.com if I were you unless you want to see some somewhat dodgy photographs...

Mind you, given the extent to which ezboard read this blog and act to try to hide what I mention here, I doubt it'll be long before those sites and links either disappear or have the content replaced with fluffy kittens.

Posted by Captain Blue at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, ezboard has been caught out blaming its woes on "Smalltalk" from Cincom again.

Back in March 2006, Cincom's James Robertson posted a blog entry entitled "Correcting a Misconception" following which Robert Labatt seemed to have back-tracked somewhat on blaming Smalltalk and instead blaming "...[ezboard's] bad software design that happens to use Smalltalk...".

So things were smoothed over ... until ezboard went and did it again, accusing Smalltalk of being "obsolete". They went further:

"The current program has many bugs that can't be fixed because each time the developers try to fix them, it causes something else to break. That seems to be the nature of Smalltalk."

So it's not a developer issue, it's a platform issue.

Cincom's James Robertson has posted a response here which makes interesting reading:

"Instead, they wrote their own server from scratch. They didn't use a database on the back end, instead serializing objects to disk. Those two early decisions came back to haunt them in a big way - we actually spoke to them about dealing with them inside Smalltalk...

"...they decided to go with a full rewrite in something else, and a general blasting of our product as a way of making excuses. There's no reason for them to do that." [emphasis added]

Yes there is: it's an attempt to deflect criticism away from ezboard to someone else, a not uncommon response.

And this will almost certainly be true:

"Just look at what they say instead: fixing bugs creates other ones. That has nothing to do with Smalltalk (or any other language, for that matter) - it has to do with whatever process they use to develop code. If that's happening to them now, I guarantee that it will happen to them in the future, without regard to what development/deployment platform they end up using."

I wonder if ezboard's development failings - and indeed, past security issues - continue to plague them now? Certainly there are more bugs in Yuku than an entomologist's study cases. And as for security, well, even ezboard's CEO Blog, written using WordPress, is two builds out of date, with all the security issues that entails...

Posted by Captain Blue at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Dear Rob,

I've written an open letter to you over on my WordPress Blog. The post in question is here:

http://wp.bluescrap.com/2006/07/24/an-open-letter-to-robert-labatt-ceo-ezboard-inc/

I'll look forward to your reply soonest.

Yours sincerely,

Richard

Posted by Captain Blue at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm intrigued. An "Important Announcement" has appeared at the top of ezboard communities that the board administrators can choose to show as they see fit. It reads:

"Important ezAnnouncement: Meet your ezboard friends on Yuku and check out their profiles. You'll be amazed with what you can do with the new Yuku profiles. Click here to get your ezboard account into Yuku now!"

Now unless you've been a regular visitor to the ezboard Help [sic] Forums or your community administrator has been keeping you up to date with developments with Yuku originally leaked out by ezboard, you'd probably be wondering what on earth this is all about.

If you go to ezboard's "Important Announcements" forum, you won't see any announcement as to what Yuku is. Only if you go to your Control Center will you see an image inviting you to migrate to Yuku. Or perhaps, you'd need to know about the ezboard CEO's WordPress Blog. That's not a separate post in "Important Announcements", by the way.

So let's look at this announcement again. No clue as to what Yuku is or that ezboards will all be closed down having been forced to migrate to Yuku. No, it's all about user profiles.

If you take a look at Robert Labatt's Yuku profile page you'll see it's a MySpace clone: take a look at Tom Anderson's MySpace profile. Tom Anderson is MySpace's co-founder.

Note that Yuku has copied MySpace in that new registrants to MySpace have Tom added to their friends and as I reported here, Yuku does the same with Labatt and up to nine others. Of course, that's where the comparison ends. Whilst Tom has, at the time of writing, 92,950,935 friends, Rob can only muster 2,282...

So it's clear the direction Yuku is headed. After seeing how well MySpace has done since it started in 2003, ezboard wants a piece of that action by trying to reinvent itself as a MySpace clone. Three years too late...

Maybe that's why the Yuku development emphasis was all about profile pages first, sub-domains next and now finally on message boards?

Posted by Captain Blue at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Or, "Why is ezboard So Expensive?"

For those of you wondering about the cost of running a Gold ezboard Community, you might like to have a look at some information from various sources.

ezboard reveals its headline pricing on this page. Now, ezboard's 12 month rates are only available to existing boards renewing so we'll take their basic rate for starters.

This, they say, is $6 per month for 10,000 "Visits/Month". Except it's not. If you read on, you'll see it's actually page views which is much, much different to visits. For instance, to post a message on an ezboard, you'll probably have bookmarked the board home page, so you'll go there (1), then click into the forum you want to post in (2) then compose a new thread (3), then confirm and publish it (4). Four page views as an absolute minimum. Of course, as a Gold Community owner, you don't get access to the actual logs or 'proper' web stats., just the information ezboard chooses to give you.

Let's have a look at an ezboard Gold Community. Let's take for instance the NikeTalk board mentioned in Robert Labatt's Yuku blorum.

Opera tells me that the NikeTalk home page is 15,672 bytes with inline elements of 24,724 bytes which I assume means a total size of 40,396 bytes (39kb). Now NikeTalk is a very popular message board, so I'm just using their home page size as an example.

So if another ezboard with a similar design gets those 10,000 page views a month, the amount of bandwidth consumed will be 10,000 x 39kb = 381MB of bandwidth for which the board owners would pay their $6.

For $10 a month with ezboard, that community gets 25,000 page views, or 952MB of bandwidth (or put another way, less than 1GB of monthly bandwidth). All non-standard images for headers, buttons, etc. and any photos the community wanted to use would have to be stored elsewhere, of course, because ezboard provides a massive zero bytes of storage space. Oh and if the community grew well, they'd notice that after 20 pages of threads, old ones would simply be pruned by ezboard.

Now compare that with, say, DreamHost's $9.95 a month plan. Quite apart from the 20GB of storage (which increases weekly by 160MB), you also get 1TB of bandwidth per month (again growing by 8GB a week). Add an open-source or free message board system and you're away.

Sorry, let me just read that again ... yes, with DreamHost you get 1,024 times as much monthly bandwidth as you get at ezboard.

Yes but wait. ezboard is having to recoup all those startup costs it had when Labatt and his chums at Labrador Ventures took over (we'll obviously have to ignore DreamHost's startup costs). What startup costs? Well, according to an article from Sean Foote at Labrador Ventures (he's a Partner there and is also on the board of directors of ezboard, Inc., so he should know), he quotes Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc,'s CEO as saying:

"When we went to rebuild EZboard, we went with open standards and open source code for some applications and our startup costs were maybe $1,000, not including man hours ... drastically less than the hundreds of thousands of dollars the company had originally spent."

[emphasis added]

Yes, but what about all those servers - surely they must cost a bundle? Well Sean Foote says:

"Though hardware remains the largest expense for companies such as EZboard, servers now cost just $1000, rather than the $10,000 per piece of equipment they commanded in 1999."

Ah but what about all that bandwidth cost? Again, Sean Foote notes that:

"...bandwidth costs are down significantly..."

which probably explains why companies like DreamHost are offering 1,024 times the bandwidth for the same price as ezboard charges.

Now think again about Labatt's "rubber ducky" post in his CEO WordPress Blog. Then consider his claim that in September last year they had 500,000 communities growing at 6,000 communities per month. Now re-acquaint yourself with ezboard's charges per Gold community (not forgetting that non-Gold boards and trial Gold boards all carry paid-for advertising).

I'll leave you with a quote from Robert Labatt:

"Today favors not the first-time entrepreneur or the big VC fund, but the serial entrepreneur or early stage investor who, with a couple hundred thousand dollars or a couple million from well-off friends, can finance a company himself," says Labatt. "It's do-it-yourself entrepreneurship."

Posted by Captain Blue at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Have a little look here:

"Registrant:
ezboard Inc
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400x255

Domain Name: YUKUSUCKS.COM

Administrative Contact:
Labatt, Robert robertlabatt@ezboardcorp.com
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400x255

Technical Contact:
Labatt, Robert robertlabatt@ezboardcorp.com
564 Market Street
705
San Francisco, CA 94104
US
415 773 0400x255

Record expires on 02-16-2007
Record created on 02-16-2006

Domain servers in listed order:
NS0.DIRECTNIC.COM 204.251.10.100
NS1.DIRECTNIC.COM 206.251.177.2"

Even ezboard knows that Yuku sucks :) Mind you, they haven't decided where to point it. I also noticed today that someone has gone and registered the domain name ezboardsucks.com but that's currently pointing to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard

As the domain has been registered throught one of those proxy registration companies, it (probably) can't be traced. I'm a tad concerned, though, that the registrant could point it at one of my blogs or indeed at Sleazyboard and then ezboard would have another go at screaming "litigation" at my ISP like they did before. There's no way of telling if ezboard, Inc. themselves have registered it: certainly Googling brings up references to ezboard, Inc. having had it once before.

Posted by Captain Blue at 8:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Or:

"ezboard staff need some friends..."

When you first register on MySpace, a profile, Tom, is automatically added to your list of "friends".

Not wanting to be outdone, ezboard, Inc. has decided that new registrations automatically have 10 profiles added to their "Friends" page (although from having a terribly slow nose around it might have come down to 5 now...). These people are some of/all the developers and staff at Yuku - including Robert Labatt - who obviously need to feel loved...

Posted by Captain Blue at 7:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Just as I'd finished writing a piece about Labatt's WordPress Blog updates, along comes another. Be careful clicking that link, by the way..

This one, however, made me laugh out loud. Why?

Well, the subject is about visitors to web sites and forums and their anonymity or otherwise and it links to another great article on A List Apart. The latter notes recent attempts at using Wikipedia for other means, much as I touched on earlier.

Which, of course, is ironic given ezboard's history both in terms of its use of Wikipedia and for ezboard's attempts to access certain message boards (private and public) anonymously (and yes, before the faux-legal letters start coming in, I can back that up, publicly if desired...).

But what is also ironic is that that update by Labatt contains a hidden link back to Yuku's stats. (provided by Mint) so that each time that blog entry is loaded, it appears to be tracked so ezboard can monitor who read it.

Here's a partial source listing for the part of the entry before (and including) the link to the A List Apart article.
Download Text File (you'll need to view the text file or source code)

Of course, it could just be a bad cut and paste job: note the screen resolution, etc.

Posted by Captain Blue at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)