danielredbeard’s weblog

A month ago I started wondering if my most viewed posts on this blog, regarding Safe Eyes, had gotten the attention of Safe Eyes or their parent company. My Safe Eyes posts account for several hundred views to-date, and literally every day I see the search phrases used to find my posts. Some are very funny!

I was out on my nightly walk last night when I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. Turns out it was one of the founders of Internet Safety, parent company of Safe Eyes! He wanted to personally reach out to me about my bad Safe Eyes experiences on the Mac platform.

We talked for maybe thirty minutes where I was able to set a much more conversational tone to my posts. In the time since my posts I had also arrived at a big-picture conclusion to by brand experience: A general lack of curiosity on the part of Safe Eyes.

This is the theme that occurred over and over – I’d make my issues known to Safe Eyes on my Mac, and instead of curiosity, I heard “Well it works fine on my/our Mac(s).” I think a simple asking of deeper questions would have prevented my blog posts and ultimate removal of Safe Eyes from our Macs.

I should note that we did get some advice for solutions on at least two occasions from Safe Eyes, but the ideas were so obviously not from long-time Mac users that I just rolled my eyes. Even yesterday there was a posted reply to one of my blogs, and while the advice would be appropriate for a Mac newbie, it’s the kind of thing that a long-time Mac user knows and does already (permissions repair).

But all that aside, the reaching out of one of the founders (name escapes me) was huge. I will certainly give Safe Eyes another trial try a year from now once a few more versions have come out, and that will give the developers more time to get accustomed with the Mac.

As I’ve said before, I think Safe Eyes is a great product at its core. I think it has the potential to market itself as a resource for business owners who want to keep their employees off of Facebook or Myspace, etc. in order to keep productivity up. Until the Mac version is stable, those benefits will be for someone else, but I’m looking forward to giving Safe Eyes another shot.