Hair On Fire

Privacy. It's not just for breakfast anymore.

2013-01-04T11:36:00.000-07:00

Excuse the dated reference from an old Orange Juice publicity campaign from the 70's (80's?). I'm dating myself.

Fred Wilson just wrote a piece called Feature Friday: Privacy and brought up some great points that I wanted to respond to. He posed some questions about "the emergence of privacy as the defining feature of the next breakaway app on the social internet. What does this mean for where we are and where we are going? Is open social out and closed private in?".

I'd love to see more people care about privacy. I have young children who are growing up as digital natives, and I really don't want them to make oversharing mistakes that will haunt them the rest of their lives. Concerns about privacy were a big part of the motivation behind building Glassboard http://www.glassboard.com. We wanted a place where we could make sure our conversations stayed between us.

But to answer Fred's questions specifically - "what does this mean for where we are and where we are going?". People are just starting to understand that putting content on the internet is akin to a permanent face tattoo. There is no hiding from it, and your reputation will be defined by it (think Mike Tyson). We are just starting to hear the stories of children who are bullied to death because of their online activities. That's where we are. We are at the early stages of understanding the permanence of our actions and the impact of Mark Zuckerberg's Frictionless Sharing. We have a long way to go. The good news is that there is promise that we will find the right balance of what to share online and what not to - or at least be sensitive of where we share, but its going to take a while. People don't yet know there are places were you can have private conversations, but they exist, and eventually will make their way into the mainstream.

Fred's second question asks, "Is open social out and closed private in?". Privacy is always 'in', it just depends on which way the pendulum of public opinion is swinging. Right now privacy is getting some additional mindshare as an unfortunate response to some tragic incidents that have forced the topic to the forefront. But as a central value proposition for apps? It should also be noted that 'privacy' and 'public' work against each other. If I have a small group and I want to keep it private, i'm not going to tell anyone. So yes, privacy is "in", but you might not hear about it.

Mobile First: Getting things done when you're doing something else

2012-10-05T14:55:00.001-06:00

What does it mean for your product or service to be mobile first?

Loosely defined, 'mobile first' means that the experience was designed for the mobile phone first, and not for your computer. To appreciate the differences between the computer and smartphone (since these days they are both essentially computers), let's think about how you use your mobile phone. I’ll start with a list of a few things I did today. I’d wager many of you did the same or similar things:

I checked the weather to see if I would need a coat.
While waiting for the microwave to cook my oatmeal, I scanned the subject lines of emails in case there was something I needed to pay attention to.
I checked my schedule for the day
I got a text from my Mom. Sent her a text back with a picture of the kids.
I answered a few emails.
I checked Facebook & ‘liked’ a friend’s status, then looked at trending topics on Twitter.

and then I arrived at work.

Insert speech here about hyper connected world, etc, etc. What’s important to note about this example is that I did these simple tasks without disrupting my daily routine. I woke up, ate breakfast, got the kids to school and went to work just as usual. I was also able to do these additional things because my phone was close and it was easy to do. Thus exposing one of the key differences in the mobile phone experience. With a mobile phone, anytime I pick it up to do something, i’m in the middle of doing something else. I’m distracted, impatient, and have just enough time to execute one small task before i need to turn my focus back to what I was doing before, like eating my oatmeal.

If you’re designing software for the desktop or web, you don’t have to take these considerations into account, people who are working in front of their computers are sitting still and focused (relatively speaking). Computer users can take on difficult tasks that require concentration. That’s not what people are looking to do on mobile phones. I rarely spend more than 1-2 minutes on my phone at a time. Many times I have less than 10 seconds, and for some tasks, that's plenty.

There are other factors to consider in a mobile first product focus, like taking advantage of technologies like the camera, the GPS or the accelerometer, and other tactile considerations as people use their fingers instead of mice, but those will be the topics of another blog post.
Mobile first products and services need to be simple, intuitive, fast and allow me to do whatever it is that I need to do in the time it takes for me to wait for an elevator.

Balance

2012-08-27T10:34:00.002-06:00

"Balance" in a general sense is a concept, just as infinity isn't a number. Its just a temporary state. To achieve it you need to assume that everything else stands still, which never really happens.

Glassboard 2.0 launches

2012-05-15T22:13:00.001-06:00

Its fun building software. Its fun during the planning phases when you set the overall goals of what you want to do, choose what use cases you want to solve, and try to position yourself in a future market where you can solve problems that others can't.

Its fun getting into the development process, to sweat the details of user experience and design, as well as the tradeoffs in functionality. Its fun to find the balance between time, scope and resource.

Then there is the launch. Arguably the most stressful part of the process, when you tell your story and try to sell others on the unique capabilities of your solution. If you're successful, you'll tell your story well, and it will inspire others to use your product and tell their friends.

But all of that aside, the best part about making software is delighting users with new experiences. Giving them new ways to do things, or making it easier/better to do something they'd done before. And doing it in such a way that is intuitive, fast, easy on the eyes and that does as expected. The ultimate success is to deliver utility and value through your software, and I think we've done that today.

Glassboard launched today. Ever since we delivered 1.0 the team has been hard at work to listen (both to the users and the data) and quickly iterate on the product. We all knew that 1.0 was just a stepping stone, a foot in the door and very much a work in progress.

Glassboard 2.0 completes what we had wanted to do in the beginning, to give people ways to stay connected as a group and to communicate and share in an environment with secure, well defined borders and a known audience. Boards in Glassboard aren't echo chambers, they are persistant dialogs. They are places where you can ask questions, discuss, make decisions and move on. They are trusted spaces. Boards perpetuate the intimacy of your relationships with other members, an intimacy that gets lost in pubic social networks.

I couldn't be more proud of Glassboard. We put our proverbial heart and soul into it. The team deserves 100% of the credit here. They are all wonderful people, consummate professionals, and delivered a fantastic piece of software. Its an honor to work with every one of them.

Revelstoke | Selkirk Tangiers 2011

2012-02-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

Soundtrack from Mucca Pazza (http://mucca-pazza.org). Filmed at Selkirk Tangiers Heli (http://www.selkirk-tangiers.com/) & Revelstoke (http://www.revelstokemountainresort.com/)

Cinemagr.am

2012-02-10T16:33:00.001-07:00

See it 'live' - http://cinemagr.am/show/12038

Must... stay... current...

2012-01-05T10:04:00.003-07:00

Got a note from Amazon telling me that they were going to drop my RSS feed from the Kindle library if I didn't post more. So here you are Amazon. I'm posting.

Here's what the letter looked like.

Why Instagram is successful

2011-11-15T18:00:00.000-07:00

"That transformed the way I looked at photography—from trying to replicate reality into taking a scene and creating some kind of interpretation of its mood" - Kevin Systrom

Read more

Technology means never getting lost again

2011-10-05T00:42:00.001-06:00

When I was about 9, my family went on a three day camping trip in the mountains. I don't remember the area or who we were with, but there were a few family friends in tow; it was a simple point to point trip and the plan was to camp along the way. As luck would have it, we got lost on the first day. After bumbling around in the woods for a bit, we eventually found our way, but in the process of doing so we'd covered something like 12 miles. It was probably less, but at the time it felt like 100. It was significant to me for a few reasons: for one, i'd never walked that far in my life, and secondly, it was an exercise in trying not to absolutely lose it to the fear of being lost in the woods forever. Of course that would never happen even in the most dire circumstances, but for a tired, scared 9 year old, it seemed like a definite possibility. But what's surprising was that it wasn't the only time we'd been temporarily 'confused' as to our whereabouts. It seemed to happen quite frequently whenever we went somewhere new. It was just one of those things that happened, and as terrifying as it was, it was part of the process of discovering new adventures and experiences.

Fast forward a few years. (Ok maybe 30) The other day I was on my bike, on a new trail i'd never riden before, and it finally dawned on me that there really is no excuse for getting lost anymore. There are simply too many ways to figure out where you are. At any point during the ride I could have pulled out my phone and used the map application to pinpoint my location. If I didn't have a cell signal, I had my GPS on my wrist and within a button press or two I could get my GPS coords (not really that helpful) or just take a look at how far away I was from the pre-loaded route. In preparation for the ride, I'd also taken the same route file that I loaded into my watch and uploaded it to Google earth, so I could get a better sense of what the trail looked like, and more importantly, what the surrounding area looked like. I knew there would be climbs & descents, but reading a route description pales in comparison to a 3D rendering of the topology.

So from the phone to the GPS device to just the memory of what the trail would look like from Google Earth, I had no concern about losing my way, nor did the thought even cross my mind. Knowing where I am is something I take for granted now.

I know the technology has been around for years, but its never been easier than it is today to preview, track and record your whereabouts. Gone are the days of orienteering, i'll never buy a compass or topo map again. Score one for technology. Technology has really become a means to an end. The end of getting lost.

And so it begins....

2011-01-03T08:27:00.004-07:00

Another year is here, begging the question, "what have you done for me lately?"

Resolutions are bunk. They are drunk, empty promises on New Year's Eve. Resolutions have no teeth, the very word is mealy. Not as strong as a "decision" or as concrete as a "vote", it represents a hollow resolve of unfilled wants.

I made a resolution this year to blog more. Let's see how that shakes out. :)

Quark & TapLynx Webinar

2010-09-07T14:48:00.002-06:00

Following our recent announcement with Quark - we're putting together a webinar to talk through using the Quark Publishing System (QPS) and to quickly create branded iPhone and iPad applications with TapLynx.

Here's the information - hope you can join!

Automatically Publish News to the iPhone and iPad

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Session 1: 10am ET | 8am MT | 7am PT Register to attend this session.
Session 2: 12pm ET | 10am MDT | 9am PDT Register to attend this session.

iPad News Apps

2010-04-11T12:19:00.001-06:00

A screen by screen comparison of the first round of iPad apps from USA Today, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg, BBC, AP, Reuters, NPR - focusing on interaction models, advertising and editorial.

iPad News Apps

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Skiing Valhalla

2010-03-20T23:27:00.006-06:00

Finally got a minute to string together some clips from Skiing last month. The outfit was Valhalla Powdercats outside Nelson, BC. Good fun - runs are relatively short, but great steeps and trees. Vid best played at Youtube (720p)

Dachis SBS2010, SXSW & Communitellegence

2010-03-19T17:57:00.008-06:00

Last week I got a chance to do a bit of travelling on rather short notice - first to NYC and then Austin, TX for a few conferences on social media.

Its always good to get on the road and talk to people - this trip was especially interesting as I got to have open and honest dialogs with the people who are implementing the social media & collaboration strategies within their organizations. To hear their challenges and roadblocks, no matter whether they are culture changing challenges or small provincial roadblocks is always eye opening and helpful. There is no better way to learn.

Communitelligence
The first stop was NYC to lead a panel on the Future of Intranets at Communitelligence. This Communitelligence conference was primarily geared towards marketing communications professionals who build, run and maintain corporate intranets. Most of the presentations were from companies talking about and showing off what they were building, the goals they were trying to reach and the challenges they faced. Think "support group for folks on the bleeding edge of technology who carry the burden of educating and cheer-leading other employees within their organizations about the value of using their newly minted portals which everyone discounted years ago when they were first introduced and useless" and you'll start to feel their pain.

Leading panels is always fun as you're not in the hot seat, you just need to keep the conversation going and find clever ways to cut off long winded questions (or responses) without sounding like a, uh, inconsiderate person. Being in Corporate Development is the perfect role for any panel emcee, since the nature of the job is to know just enough to be dangerous about just about everything. So along with my panelists, Christy Hahn from Nationwide and Patrick Durando from McGraw-Hill, we had a great conversation ranging everywhere from mobile to real time collaboration and everywhere in between. Judging from the sheer number of questions from the audience, there are some really interesting features/functions that everyone is excited to implement, but we have a lot to figure out as these new technologies are put into practice.

Dachis Social Business Summit #SBS2010
My second stop was a one day adjunct conference to SXSW called the Dachis Social Business Summit. The goal of the conference was to share tactical advice on social media strategy - and to give us perspective we heard from some of the social media pioneers from Comcast, KFC, Intuit to tell us how they are going about it. There were other speakers as well - from vendors to social media analysts and marketers, there were 16 speakers in total.

Some of the interesting takeaways from the day: Charlene Li continues to be an oracle in this space - she has a fantastic way of breaking down all that's happening into digestible morsels, and a way of helping us all see into the future a bit. Plus she's just a great presenter.

There were a few talks that referenced the value and power of motivating and encouraging the top 1% of your communities. Jackie Huba told a fantastic story about the Discovery Education Network that should be taught in any social media seminar. Frank Eliason (@comcastcares), another great presenter, told some really impactful stories about his experience leading the charge at Comcast - and the importance of personalization in support and how "social media will guide your organization if you use if you use it effectively". Seems to be working at Comcast. All in all, it was a fantastic experience, very well put together and a great lineup.

Last but not least, SXSW.
Now before I go off on a rant about how SXSW has obviously jumped the shark, I have to disclose that i'm way to old and uncool to try to pull off 5 sleepless days and nights in Austin, so this all may just be sour grapes. I don't own skinny jeans, don't have a faux-hawk, no longer write code, and next time I have to wait in lines like that there'd better be a mermaid or stuffed mouse at the other end to take pics with my kids and make their YEAR. If you need it spelled out I was not that impressed with SXSW. I think its a great place to network (i.e. stalk people on foursquare) and embrace the geek vibe, but the sessions were mostly useless and i'm not one to go out until 8:00am, if I even make it to midnight. So I think I missed out on the true benefits of the conference. So be it. Next year i'll send younger people. On the plus side, I did actually meet a bunch of the folks I wanted to meet - and had some conversations that I wouldn't normally have. So that was good. And I got this weird 'stalker' badge in foursquare, but i'm not sure what that means?

Your self selected collective

2010-02-11T09:19:00.006-07:00

Google Buzz - Day #2. Not limited by 140 chars, there's the potential of writing a longer post (as i've seen others do) but there is a place for blogging, and its not in buzz. Buzz still feels like a place to share links, pics, whatever with your people.

Interesting to go through the "do I follow back" question yet again. In Twitter, I paid attention to that, I don't want to go through that time suck again.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was some way to select which audience/community you might affiliate with? Then if buzz would allow me to post messages direct to that community... (Facebook does it, Social Sites does it)

But more importantly, I think there should be more effort towards encouraging like-minded audiences to aggregate into the same community - I don't want to be invited to 18 different groups for the latest cause-du-jour, as having a fragmented audience defeats the purpose of having a collective voice. If there was only one "I bet we can find a million people to support ...blah...." group instead of two, you'd get to your goal twice as easy...

Anyway, it will be interesting to see the list of people who 'follow' me grows over time. I'm going to guess that once this initial frenzy calms down - the discovery process for new people will be an interesting one. Imagine doing a google search and not only getting back a list of links, but also a list of the Google profiles of people associated with that link?

I'm going to guess thats not far off.

TapLynx. iPad. Get your app on.

2010-01-27T17:44:00.003-07:00

Loving the iPad announcement today and all the buzz around it. Here's the best news - TapLynx creates iPad apps - right out of the box.

And we're already reviewing the iPad SDK to see what else we can do.

This is going to be fun.

"If you're not on the iPhone, you don't exist"

2010-01-21T08:31:00.008-07:00

I've been getting some feedback recently over some comments I made at Digital Hollywood @ CES that sounded like a mandate for companies to get on the iPhone. Our friends over at Cult of Mac called it out, but the story was then picked up by others...

While the quote is fairly sensationalist, the point i'm trying to get across is that we (the collective 'we') aren't going to spend less time on mobile phones / tablets / mobile internet devices - so if you want to be in front of your customers/audience, you need to be on mobile, starting with the iPhone. Its really that simple. iPhone has the audience and the methods to allow you to effectively get your brand, your content, your game, your whatever in front of your audience.

We aren't going to see less of our mobile phones. This is not a pendulum like public opinion. Our mobile phones, like other techological improvements before it are going to be more ubiquitous (and hopefully more useful), until we reach the law of diminishing returns, and phone manufacturers realize that no matter how many bells, buzzers and text messages you send me, i'm still not going to send my Christmas thank you letters until Easter, even if the phone writes them for me. But, uh, that might be another story entirely.

NewsGator buys Tomoye!

2010-01-21T00:44:00.002-07:00

Big news at NewsGator - we've aquired a Canadian company, Tomoye, a well known player in the space of Enterprise Social Computing. Fantastic. Details here

Digital Hollywood @ CES 2010

2010-01-10T10:17:00.005-07:00

I had the pleasure of participating on a Digital Hollywood Panel at CES last week, titled "iPhone Apps – Change Agents – App Breakthroughs, Video, Games, Mobile Engagement and Advertising". It was a good panel, well organized and represented by Fandango, ESPN, FISHLABS, Freeverse and myself. Since the session was not recorded, I thought I might share some of the Q&A from the event.

·         How do you make money with applications?

There are three primary ways to make money in the iPhone - charging for applications, advertising and charging for premium content. Which method you use depends a lot on the content and your audience. Here are a few examples:

For Variety & All Things Digital, they are primarily serving news, so they have chosen advertising as their method of choice.

For STRATFOR, a publisher of global intelligence for fortune 500 CEOs, they are using Apple's in-app purchasing to allow their audience to purchase a monthly subscription to their content on the phone.

For Discovery News & Ad Age, the content is free, but they are charging people for the application.

Short answer: how you monetize your app will depend on your audience and your content.

·         How do you differentiate an app in today’s world? How is this likely to change?

Our perspective is that differentiation comes from the content - the app is just a window frame. Having said that there has been significant work that we've done to handle content appropriately - so that you can take advantage of the iPhone experience, including swiping, zooming, etc. But that's not really the question - the real question is, "since there are a dozen other skiball apps, hollywood news apps, sport scores apps, how do you get your app noticed?

Currently the majority of people still 'discover' new apps via the app store home page in iTunes. The second main source for discovery is from friends. Very soon we'll start to see the viral loops kick in (just as we saw with widgets) and app developers will think of new ways to get users to pass apps to other users quickly and easily...

·         What will define a successful app in the future?

As it has in the past. ROI.

·         Most apps now are consumer focused, do you have thoughts on what enterprise apps might look like?

Were currently working on an iPhone application which is a companion to our enterprise product, Social Sites, extracting just the essentials for the iPhone experience - the activity stream, contact information, etc. The overarching theme for any mobile application is that the experience has to be appropriate for the device. Regardless of what it is you are delivering on the phone, be it a game, a report or a message - its important to remember that you aren't on a computer (although people like to call it that) - you are on a device that fills in gaps while you're traveling, commuting, or just have a few minutes to kill. Mobile devices are best at keeping the conversation fluid.

Its Good to Give

2009-12-20T08:14:00.001-07:00

It's Good to Give from Chris Dealy on Vimeo.

... or else

TapLynx put to the test

2009-10-14T01:19:00.006-06:00

We've been promoting how easy it is to use our iPhone Application framework - TapLynx - and how anyone can do it without writing any code. So I thought I might give it a try and see if the framework lives up to the promise.

I don't code but I can stumble my way around Photoshop, and there is a Mac laptop that we use for testing that already has Xcode on it. How hard can it be? As it turns out, its a bit more involved than our widget framework, but not by much.... oddly enough most of the difficulty comes from getting set up with Apple which was a bit of a surprise given how elegant their interfaces are.

So here's how it went-

1) Got my Apple account.
Any app developer needs to get an account as a registered Apple developer, and you'll need to join the iPhone developer program for $99/yr (standard program will do). If you sign up as an individual, signup is immediate, and you'll be accepted into the program as soon as your credit card clears. If you are a company, there are forms to fill out, you need proof of your business, and if you get stuck you'll be dialing an 800 number in Scotland. It takes a few weeks.

2) Got a copy of the TapLynx SDK. Free download, easy.

3) Made an app & built it.
For those of you who are ventureing into Xcode for the first time (like I did), there is a getting started guide on the NewsGator wiki. All I did was to follow the 'getting started' section to get set up, then followed the instructions in this aptly named doc "Where to get RSS content from your favorite sources", which helped me grab some RSS feeds from my blog, youtube, twitter, picasa accounts and threw them together into the configuration file. It was surprisingly easy. Then spent some time in Photoshop making a splash screen, icons, and built the app. I felt quite proud of my 45 minute investment thus far.

4) Loaded it on the iPhone
This is where I had to pay a little more attention. Apple makes it easy for you to get your app running in the simulator, and even to load the app onto a device that is teathered to your computer. When you'd like send the app to someone so they can also try it out - its called an 'ad-hoc build' and it takes several steps, but these steps are very well laid out in the iPhone developer portal.

4a - create your development provisioning profile (login)
4b - register the UDIDs (login) for any external iPhone/iTouch you want to send your application to (or skip this if you're only going to load onto a tethered device)
4c - Finally, follow the directions for creating an 'ad-hoc' distribution

So i'm now a few hours into my app (I re-did my splash screen & icon again) and i've managed to spit out a zip file with my app and a mobileprovision file that I can send to my friends and neighbors to graciously offered to look at the Frankenstein I created. After some quick feedback from them, (most said "keep your day job") I was ready to upload my app to Apple.

5. Uploaded to Apple
This process is pretty straightforward, quite frankly it was more effort to put together an ad-hoc distribution than it was to upload to Apple. But there were a few gotchas I ran into regarding having the right icon sizes & screenshots - see this doc on iPhone graphicsfor more detail on what Apple needs to accept your app.

Then I waited. Apple says that 95% of all apps are accepted within 14 days. That's a pretty safe timeframe for planning purposes but it seemed to take forever. Secretly i'm kind of glad that it takes 14 days to approve for a few reasons:

1) I'll never have to do it again. The configuration file that I filled out that determines look/feel/content in the app lives online. I can make as many changes as i'd like without having to re-upload my app. That alone is worth the price of admission in my book.

2) the longer it takes other apps to get in, the more chance I have to get noticed amongst the other apps already in there. :)

When Apple says your app is "in Review" there is nothing you can do but wait. There is no visibility into the process, which may be by design, but is likely because they are slammed & don't have time to get into a discussion with developers about their apps. Decisions are swift and App store selections are binary. You either get in or you don't. If your app gets rejected, you start over at the back of the line. So having all the flexibility of changing whatever I want whenever I want is pretty nice.

All in all, the process of building the app was fun. It was really easy - and I'm happy to report that the framework does live up to its promises. I didn't write a stitch of code, and it was quick to put together. Brent did a fantastic job.

Want to check it out? Follow this link to download the app to your iPhone or iPod Touch. Let me know what you think!

Mobile = Web 1.0 (all over again?)

2009-10-08T00:13:00.004-06:00

The Software Business Online conference was last week in San Diego (Software Business Online - Sept 29, 2009) - I had the honor of presenting NewsGator's iPhone Framework, TapLynx, to a few hundred entrepreneurs, vcs & business development folks. The title of the presentation was actually "How Branded iPhone Applications Can Increase Your Audience Size and Produce Revenue", or "Why you should take a closer look at TapLynx" for short :).

One of the core points I was trying to make in the presentation is that the current mobile market is facing a lot of the same market dynamics that we saw 15 years ago when the web was getting started: there are/were lots of devices getting online (data plans on phones are relatively new), technology getting simpler (anyone remember trying to establish a PPP connection on a dial up modem?), and ultimately every company needed a website, much like the rampant demand for mobile applications now. Last May there were 35,000 apps in the app store, now five months later, there are 85,000. We can only hope to continue on the same trajectory.

2009 Software Business San Diego - Walker Fenton

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Original Twitter-ers: Church marquees

2009-09-20T00:22:00.000-06:00

Every digital innovation has an analog predecessor. Newspapers gave birth to radio, TV and the web, digital photography has replaced traditional film, snail mail has given way to e-mail & SMS, etc. Most of what we figure out in the digital world is an evolution or modification of an analog equivalent. No secret there.

Twitter also has a few analog parents but one stands out- they both consist of short messages that are used to make a statement, share news or attract attention, and whether you read them or not is based on being at the right place at the right time. The original twitter-ers/tweeters are Church marquees.

Let's start with the obvious. They are short form content. Twitter is 140 chars, Church marquees are limited only by the space on the sign and the size of the plastic letters.

They are both better served by attracting 'followers'. More twitter followers means more audience with which to share your wisdom/humor/self absorbed musings. More church followers means more people to absorb religious doctrines and fill the collection tray. Neither is better off in a vacuum.

They both use obscure shortcuts to 'link' to other content. Twitter-ers use URL shortners to point to referenced content. Church marquees use chapter & verse notation to point to specifc passages.

Whether or not you read the messaging depends on being at the right place at the right time. Depending on the number of people you follow on twitter and how active they are in a particular day, you may or may not see something that was tweeted because of the noise. Likewise with a Church marquee, you may or may not notice the marquee when you drive by...

With both, success depends on the quality of the lead. You will either pique someone's interest or you won't. Like any product slogan or tagline, there is an art in being able to communicate exactly what you want within a limited amount of space, and since there isn't really a way to do A/B testing in either medium, you'd better get it right, lest you'd prefer to tweet or preach into the ethereal, eternal bit bucket :)

Fun with Google Voice

2009-07-09T22:57:00.005-06:00

I got my Google Voice invite today, a mostly free service that gives me a new phone number and allows me to route calls to a variety of places- home/work/mobile/etc. Not one to turn down a beta invite, I signed up. First step, pick a new phone number. No pressure, right? You'll likely have this number for the rest of your life, so just pick one. Sure, I want it to be memorable. I would like it to be unique. I don't want it to spell something stupid like 'asshat'. I would like it to be in my home state so others aren't making long distance calls. Good thing Google has a way to search for the numbers that are available, right?. 30 minutes later i'm not that close to picking a number, but I found some good ones.

I started with what I thought were interesting number combinations, like searching for numbers with 6 zeros in them. Those are hard to come by, but I did find one from Delphi, In:

(765) 201-0101
I figured the area code was memorable as its sequential, as for the rest of the number, you only really have to remember its a '2' followed by lots of '01's. Cool, somewhat memorable, but I wanted to keep looking.

I then tried a bunch of random words/phrases:

(530) 426-2382
(530) IAM-BETA
Soda Springs, CA

(774) 264-8474
(774) ANG-UISH
Westport, MA

(920) 474-6635
(920) IPH-ONE5
Mapleton, WI

and then tried to get clever:

(707) 469-3277
(707) 4MY-EARS
Vacaville, CA

(530) 435-5663
(530) HEL-LOME
Gazelle, CA

and finally circling the drain:

(540) 748-8887
(540) SHU-TUUP
Louisa, VA

(775) 863-8669
(775) UNF-UNNY
Duckwater, NV

Ultimately I chose to go with the obvious. Its not my area code, I figure its a number that people will use to find me wherever I am - and hey - if they are in Verona, NJ, it will be a local call.

(973) 433-6866
(973) 4FE-NTON

Try it out - call or send me a text. Let's see how Google Voice works.

2009 Colorado Hajj

2009-06-27T10:33:00.002-06:00

Started innocent enough. Then came the weather. Seth Levine has a great write up of the adventure here, and here's the vid: