Dopp Juice

Twitter is addictive for a lot of reasons.

• You can do it from your cell phone.
• You’re required to be brief (140 characters max).
• You can stay aware of what’s going on in lots of peoples’ lives with very little time investment.
• You can customize your experience by using 3rd party apps that meet your quirky specific needs.

Email, on the other hand, isn’t impressing me so much these days. Why? Because its etiquette is outdated. The following behaviors are still considered rude in the land of email:

• Not responding
• Taking more than 24 hours to respond
• Expecting an immediate response
• Not responding to every point in an email
• Responding to a long email with a very brief email
• Not including friendly small talk at the beginning and end of a message

Email is still trying to be a cross between phone calls and handwritten letters, and we don’t need that anymore. We need to replace Email Culture with a new set of tools and etiquette that helps us convey information and strengthen relationships in less time.

Twitter is showing us how it’s done, other social networking websites aren’t far behind, and SMS text messaging has exploded like a pack of Mentos in a bottle of Diet Coke. We’re craving lightweight communication and embracing it however we can. But there’s one lingering problem: Email is still our default form of communication. I might favor Twitter above all else, but I can only use Twitter to talk to other Twitter users. Email, on the other hand, is still the center of everyone’s universe.

So that’s why I’m calling you out, Email. It’s time to change.

• We want email clients that visually cue us to write shorter messages.
• We want really short emails to show up our cell phones as text messages.
• We want threaded message views that take Gmail’s interface a step further and look like iChat.
• We want the same freedom and flexibility that we’ve always had with email, but with tools that reward us for being brief.
• We want long messages to be special again.
• We want guilt-free communication.
• We want to be able to respond to more quickly, and therefore, to respond more.

What’s it gonna take to make this happen?

Tags: change, email, twitter

As promised, I hit the Engage.com-sponsored Love 2.0 party last night and asserted my peaceful protests about their website’s rigid category structure. I met the CEO, the Project Manager, the Front End Developer, and the Art Director. They were all very friendly and tolerant toward the tall queer trouble-maker in the black wig, and I was impressed with how amenable they were to my concerns about their dating service.

The question was: Why can’t I be bisexual on your website?

The answers were along these lines (with my reactions in italics)…

• That was a database decision. We made it possible for you to be straight or gay, but bisexuality requires searching the entire database, and that’s a big load on the servers.
  • Good news! Enterprise-level databases and servers are capable of handling full searches now! Really…
• You can! You’re free to switch back and forth! You can be one way one week and another the next!
  • That’s great that you allow people to be fluid about their identities (really, that’s important, and i’m glad you’re doing it). But I’m not excited about dividing my time into “straight weeks” and “gay weeks.” I want to represent myself on your site consistently and honestly, and not have to make a decision on which group of people is allowed to court me at a time.
• We thought about it, and we’d still like to do it, but it’s just going to require so much code to make it work. It’s very complicated.
  • I hear ya. It’s hard. That’s rough. I believe in you, though. You can do whatever you want to do. You have the tools.
• It’s a matter of release dates and product management. We’ve got so much going on, and we’re working on making the site better all the time. We just haven’t been able to get that piece in place.
  • I totally understand. I’m a project manager myself. I know this stuff gets messy. You can’t get it all done at once. So… are you working on it?
    
• I agree, it’s important, and we want to be the kind of site that welcomes everybody. We should have that done by the end of the year, and we hope you’ll come back when the site is more open.
  • Fantastic! Thanks! I’ll keep an eye out for the changes! It’s been great talking to you. I look forward to becoming your biggest fan.
    

Seriously, they’ve been really good about this. I’ve had several follow up email exchanges with the people I met at the party, scheming what an ideal site could function like, and discussing the pros and cons of organizational styles. Their VP also responded to my original email, stating she agrees with my point and that they would do their best to get it right.

I’m excited about Engage because they’re merging new ideas about connections with models people are already comfortable with. By the way they’ve responded to my noise, I can tell they sincerely care about making their community happy. They’ve just got some growing to do.

Tags: bisexuality, customer service, dating sites, engage.com

Dear Vista,

It was all worth it. Despite what you may hear me say to other people, I really don’t regret a day of our time together. From the moment I picked you out at Circuit City — you clean black HP Slimline, you — to this moment, right now, 12 days later, where I’m burning my data to disk so I can leave you for good… I want you to know it was all worth it. I wouldn’t trade our time together for all the Macs in the world.

I needed to know the truth, and this was the only way.

I’d heard them talking about you. Everyone. Your friends were all calling you sleek, cool, and elegant. Friendly. Easy. My friends were calling you clumsy, arrogant, and greedy. A poser. Sleazy. I needed to know for myself.

I needed to know what it felt like to boot up to your pretty gradients and rich colors, to see how you organized things, to see if you really did learn a thing or two from your intelligent hipster cousin, the Mac. I needed to see for myself that you missed the boat. That you force Yahoo! Search in your toolbar instead of Google. That you boot up with more crap programs than I know how to clear away. That your “Arcade Games” folder actually takes the metaphor so far as to charge me each time I want to play them.

Have you learned nothing about how to treat people?

I was hopeful. I opened up IE 7, your teenage son who’s had a lot of growing up to do over these years, and I really thought for a minute that maybe you were on the right track.

But it turned out, I just needed to see for myself that you still make HTML-constrained images look pixelated and terrible, and that you force your kind Uncle Firefox to behave that way when he’s in your house, too. I needed to viscerally experience that you’re still politically opposed to anti-aliasing. And I’m not sure if I was relieved or appalled to learn that there is one browser that can now show beauty on your system. Only one. And it’s Safari. Did it sneak in the back door when you weren’t looking? Are you being infiltrated against your will? Should I feel sorry for you?

Oh, Vista. You try so hard. And I think maybe we could have been friends. But my Mac came back to me today, after its all-expense-paid vacation to the repair spa, and you know where my heart belongs. You know I could never really love you. And you know that I would have been happier if I’d bought a Mac Mini and run parallels to test my websites on you. You know it would have cost about the same. And you know that if it weren’t for the majority of Internet users being sucked into your monopoly and forced by goaded ignorance into viewing my websites in Internet Explorer, I’d forget you existed altogether.

You know it’s not me, it’s you.

And you know we’re not going to be friends after this.

But also I want you to know it was worth it. Because now the doubt in my mind is gone, and I know the truth: You’re still not ready for me.

Until we meet again…

Sarah

p.s. In case my prose here was too flowery to sink into your cluttered head, here’s all you really need to know: I’M LEAVING YOU FOR YOUR COUSIN.

Tags: microsoft vista, vista sucks

I just got a snazzy little digital camera for Christmas. It’s 12 megapixels, it fits in my pocket, and it takes beautiful pictures. There’s only one problem: out of the box it makes loud beeping noises every time I press a button. And much to my dismay, the “OFF” switch for this is NOT quite so intuitive to find (hint: clicking the “MENU” button isn’t going to bring you there, and the instruction manual hides the answer). But after many wincing minutes of “Okay, I think we’re gonna need to return this damned thing,” I finally mashed enough buttons that I ran into it.

So if you’re trying to enjoy your brand new toy and find yourself fighting with the same problem, I bring you… THE SOLUTION!

1. Click the “HOME” button once or twice until you see a menu.
2. Use the Right arrow key to scroll all the end of the list, where you’ll find “SETTINGS”
3. Click the Middle button to select “MAIN SETTINGS”
4. Use the Right arrow key to select the first option: “BEEP”.
5. Click the Middle button to toggle the options for this setting.
6. Use the Down arrow key to find “OFF” and select it with the middle button.
7. Click the “HOME” button again to get back to taking pictures.

All better!

Tags: camera, gifts, sony, sony cybershot, sony dsc-w200, sound effects

Beth Kanter (the heavyweight champion in getting technology into the hands of nonprofits) points out some new research to us today. Well, actually it’s more like a sneak preview of new research — which, of course, is even better.

The research shows us that large nonprofits are adopting social media more readily than Fortune 500 companies. They define social media as online video, blogging, social networking, podcasting, message boards, and wikis; and they also note that nonprofits are monitoring their reputation on the web more carefully than businesses are.

It makes perfect sense. Utilizing social media is an inexpensive and trust-driven way to reach lots of people. I hope awareness of how to use these tools effectively is also trickling down to the smaller nonprofits — the ones who need it the most.

You can download the four-page executive summary from UMass Dartmouth.

Tags: nonprofits, Research, social media

Take a look at Lifehacker’s post today on the Top Ten Google Products You Forgot About. The Monster is alive and well. And here’s one I hadn’t heard about (which is blowing my mind particularly fiercely at this moment):

Googe Page Creator!

That’s right. Google created a full-featured WYSIWYG editor that allows you to build entire websites just by filling in the blanks. It’s free, the hosting is included (your URL is http://your_google_id.googlepages.com), and unlike most webpage builders, it appears to have some pretty decent quality and reliability behind it.

I have two (contradictory) gut-reaction responses:

• “WTF?!”
• “It’s about damned time!”

Check it out and tell me what you think.  I’m crossing my fingers, hoping this will solve the age-old “I have no money and I need a pretty website right now — what do I do?” quandry and make the world a better place.

You may have noticed that my last post was about having a full plate. You may have also noticed that my last post was nearly three weeks ago. These are not coincidental. They are quite related.

But while I have a few free moments on “Indigenous People’s Day” (or “Columbus Day,” if you live in a less rebelliously liberal part of the United States), I’d like to give a quick summary of my recent technodrama and its unexpected happy endings.

First, Gmail. I posted awhile ago about getting locked out of my gmail account. Fortunately, I received some very valuable feedback from a reader who has now become a very valuable friend to me (yay for broken tools creating new connections!) and was creatively persistent with Google. Forty-two days after the incident, I finally received an apology from them, along with instructions on how to now access to my account. My Gmail account is alive again! The irony is that I had forty days and forty nights to completely detach from it and pronounce it dead. It feels sort of like a zombie now. (A zombie that wants to eat my brains.)

Second, the Treo. Have I told you about the physical health of my beloved Palm-driven cell phone? Let me put it this way: every single person on my web development team has been threatening for more than six months now to steal it from me and destroy it so I will be forced to get a new one.

More specifically, the antennae is held on by a paperclip. That paperclip is held on by green electrical tape. The earpiece has broken off. The holder for the stylus is so loosened that I’ve now lost three of them and have given up on carrying one. The front face plate has separated from the back of the machine and is being held on by a single loose screw (and the paperclipped antennae, when it happens to be attached). The RAM is so overloaded that it takes 5-10 seconds to load the dialing screen when I’m ready to make a phone call.

BUT IT WORKS FINE! I DON’T SEE WHAT ALL THE FUSS IS ABOUT!

The laughable part is that I’m paying for full insurance on the machine (which is all of $6 a month), and I could have claimed it for repairs or replacement a long time ago, given its condition… even without my coworkers first stealing it from me and throwing it into the bay.

The camel’s back broke yesterday, though, when I dropped the machine on the pavement and cracked the front face plate. Now it took four fingers clutching the machine from three different sides to hold its pieces together well enough to get a signal. It still worked — no, really, IT STILL WORKED! — but okay, yeah, it was probably time to take advantage of the insurance.

This morning, I did a final hot-sync with my computer to back up the data… which turned out to be quite an undertaking because the hot-sync port is mostly broken, too. The task required propping the machine halfway up on the edge of a notebook and weighting down the cradle port with a pair of heavy metal scissors, stepping back, and holding my breath for ten minutes, praying that the precarious sculpture wouldn’t move before the sync was complete. It took a few tries to get it right.

Then I walked into the Sprint Repair Center at 4th and Folsom, slapped my busted Treo down on the counter, and announced, “My Treo is exploding in on itself and eating its own brain. I have insurance. What are my options?” The man ran some diagnostics (which amounted to dismantling the tape and paper clip and watching it fall apart in his hands like some kind of gag gift), and returned with a concerned look on his face.

“We can’t repair this for you,” he said apologetically.

“Oh,” I said with disappointment. “But I have insurance…”

He interrupted me. “We’ll have to replace it for you.”

“I am TOTALLY OKAY with you replacing it for me,” I reassured him. “COMPLETELY FINE WITH IT. But, um, how long will it take? Do I need to go without a phone for a few days?”

He pulled out a new Treo and handed it to me. It was already connected to my phone number. “Here you go,” he said.

“That’s it? I don’t need to sign anything? Or pay a deductible?”

“Nope. That’s it. If you’d like, you can wait ten minutes and I’ll transfer your contacts.”

“No, that’s fine, I have it synced on my computer,” I said.

And I ran home gleefully, laughing and skipping in puddles and dreaming about all the beautiful ways this new phone will fall apart on me over the next year.

Ah, beginnings!

When the Internet became widespread, everything changed. Suddenly you could answer any trivia question in less than thirty seconds. You could send a letter and receive a response to it in the same day. You could market yourself to an international audience for free. You could carry on real-time text-based conversations with anyone anywhere in the world without long-distance fees. You got carpal tunnel syndrome. You became impatient. You forgot to go outside.

When cell phones became widespread, everything changed. Suddenly “being on call” for work or family no longer meant being tethered to a landline. You could get quick roadside assistance when you got a flat tire, anywhere. You could leave personal voicemails without fear of the wrong person hearing them. You could have a conversation with anyone anywhere in the country without long-distance fees. You hated rural areas because you couldn’t get a signal. Your lover became obsessive about checking in. You became obnoxious in public.

Now, cell phones with Internet are becoming widespread, and everything is changing. Suddenly you can check your email while you are crossing the street. You can blog (and post pictures of) what you’re doing while you’re doing it, and get immediate feedback on it from friends across the planet. You no longer need to ask for directions. You can answer any trivia question in less than thirty seconds while out for dinner with friends. You can have a voice conversation with anyone anywhere in the world without long-distance fees. You get into more car accidents. You perceive a half-hour delay in communication as a sign that your friend is tired of you. You stop paying attention to what’s actually happening right next to you altogether. You justify this by saying that you can’t be expected to do everything at once.

How can I put this?

As I write this, I’m vacuuming. (Well, that’s not entirely true.)

As I write this, my home is being vacuumed, and I’m the only one home. (Well, that doesn’t feel so true, either.)

As a write this, an artificial intelligence robot is running amok in my living room, gobbling up everything in its sight. (Yes, that’s it.)

I bought an iRobot Roomba Scheduler (not an affiliate link) from Woot.com as a birthday present to myself. I set it up today and am equally impressed and entertained. It’s so cute, running around my floor going “gimme! gimme! gimme! gimme!” to all my dirt (no, it doesn’t actually have sound effects — I just feel so connected to my Roomba after the first twenty minutes that I believe we now speak the same language).

(It just found my kitchen — look at it go on the linoleum floor! How long has it been since I’ve swept over there?!)

Every creative genius has an Achilles’ heel. Housecleaning is mine. Still too stubborn to admit defeat and hire assistance for the task, I tend to just let the dirt just pile up. I can already tell that the Roomba and I are going to be great friends. This model comes with a scheduler, which means I can program it to clean every day (or less often, if I’m feeling lazy) while I’m at work. And since vacuums can’t clean under scattered laundry, this will force me to pick up more regularly, lest I anger my new AI roommate. Hey — double victory!

(Right now it’s navigating the underside of my futon, choking on electrical cords and freeing itself from the madness without crying for help.)

The other thing I’m proud of — I bought this puppy for $130 when it retails for $330. Have you heard about Woot.com yet? (If not, don’t feel bad — I just found out about it last week). It’s a geek-oriented shopping site that only sells one item per day. “One Day, One Deal” is their motto. The item is almost always super cheap and super cool. They’ve got an impressive business model:

A) Negotiate with companies for a low price on a really cool item that you can guarantee to sell a lot of in a really short period of time.

B) Build a community around a promise to provide the coolest, cheapest products on a daily basis through a really user-friendly and focused website.

C) Put non-obtrusive ads on the site.

If you’re a twitterer, you can find out about the latest buys on woot via tweets (wow, out of context, that sentence sounds really strange).

Expect a more critical review of the Roomba after I’ve played with it more. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a heckuva lot better than what I had going for me before.

David Pogue, a New York Times technology columnist (and entertaining chap), posted a great video on youtube in which he sets out to “prove” that Microsoft did not rip off Mac’s ideas when it built the new, classy Vista system. (Tech catch-up note: Vista is a new PC operating system, succeeding Windows XP, that is totally different from what the Windows user is used to getting from Microsoft. First of all, it’s prettier. Second, it’s easier for the not-so-tech-oriented to intuitively navigate and do more with. Check out the official Microsoft sales page for more info.)Being a Mac user with a knee-jerk distrust for Microsoft, I was immediately interested in the video. It promised evidence that Microsoft is truly innovative and concerned with the user experience. I was looking for reasons to like Microsoft. The video, however, was not what I expected (I’m so naive — I really should have seen this coming!). Check it out: NYT’s David Pogue on Windows VistaAnd if there was any doubt, yes, I’m still proud to be a Mac user.