Twitter for Those Left Behind
Posted on May 30, 2008
Filed Under Internet & Technology, Life | 2 Comments
You either get Twitter or you don’t.
Those that don’t will typically post comments like this one I just caught on FriendFeed:
Do people even really use twitter? I guess I mean in the sense that you actually accomplish some goal, or connect with people you physically know or work with?
Yes, Twitter is a lot of noise and useless crap. But it can be very, very useful. Here’s my story:
We found out last Thursday afternoon that Eric had to go to Bogota, Colombia on Monday for a 2-day work assignment. Now I’m sure there are a lot of really nice people in Colombia, but until this week all I cared to know about the South American country was that Americans shouldn’t travel there.
From an active US Government travel advisory.
The incidence of kidnapping in Colombia has diminished significantly from its peak at the beginning of this decade. Nevertheless, terrorist groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN) and other criminal organizations continue to kidnap and hold civilians for ransom or as political bargaining chips. No one is immune from kidnapping on the basis of occupation, nationality, or other factors. The FARC continue to hold three U.S. government contractors, having captured them when their plane crashed in a remote region of the country in February 2003. In January 2008, the FARC kidnapped six Colombian tourists from a beach on the Pacific coast in Chocó Department. Although the U.S. government places the highest priority on the safe recovery of kidnapped Americans, it is U.S. policy not to make concessions to or strike deals with kidnappers. Consequently, the U.S. government’s ability to assist kidnapping victims is limited.
Gee, have a nice trip dear.
Eric was assured he’d have a driver and that he’d be in “safe” areas other times. Still, I was very nervous about this trip.
Eric started using Twitter a few weeks ago. Remembering the story of the man who was saved from an Egyptian jail thanks to Twitter, I asked Eric to be sure to tweet as often as he could. Armed with m.twitter.com and a Twitter client on his laptop, that’s exactly what he did. Throughout the few days he was gone, in between some short phone calls, I was able to check his Twitter page and be assured he was okay. I’m sure tweets like, “Waiting in hotel lobby for colleagues before heading to office” weren’t very exciting to his other 54 followers, but it meant a whole lot to me.
In fact, he didn’t have to call and wake the kids at 5:30 am yesterday when his plane landed at JFK. I was already up and saw it on Twitter.
Apple Plays a Little Dirty with 10.5.3
Posted on May 28, 2008
Filed Under Macintosh | 6 Comments
How does Apple get away with these things when no one else can?
When you update to Mac OS X 10.5.3, if you own an iPhone you can now sync your Google contacts to Address Book:
If, like me, you don’t own an iPhone:
What would folks say if Microsoft had features in Windows that didn’t require a PDA or phone, but only worked if the OS could tell that the user was using a Windows Mobile device? Wouldn’t go over too well is my guess. This is no different.
If I can sync Address Book with Yahoo, I should be able to sync it with Google regardless of whether or not I own an iPhone.
Much love for CRMFusion
Posted on May 21, 2008
Filed Under Nonprofit, Salesforce | 2 Comments
This morning I was in Salesforce creating some new Dashboard views. Lately, I’ve become addicted to the Dashboard. I’m having so much fun creating all different ways of looking at our data.
Warning…the rest of this post won’t make a lot of sense unless you’re familiar with Salesforce.
In the process of creating a dashboard component, I realized that about 150 donations this fiscal year were not allocated to the right fund (a custom field on our opportunities/donation object).
We use the Opportunity Contact Role object to link individuals to donations. I also found a bunch of donations (200 give or take) where the contact role was properly set to “Donor” but the Primary flag was not checked. Without that primary flag, any report that looks for “Primary Contact” (so a report run on Donations alone without the contact role object) would not find an individual name attached to the donation. It’s a bit of a bother to use both the primary flag and set that primary donor to “Donor” but it works well when we do.
Without CRMFusion’s Demand Tools, my choices to correct these problems would have been:
- Individually edit each donation record in the browser. Ugh. No. Way.
- Use the Salesforce provided data loader to download all the donation records, fix the fields using Excel and re-upload the corrections. Do able. But no.
The reality? In Demand Tools I used the “Mass Change” module to:
Find the opportunity records where the donation name contains the fund and change the “Fund” field to the correct value. We have strict naming rules on our donation records so every donation to that fund had it in the name. Easy.
Find all opportunity contact role records where Primary = false and Role = donor and change them so Primary = true.
Each change literally took 30 seconds to effect hundreds of records, and you get a restore file in case you make a mistake.
When I’ve attended nonprofit Salesforce user group meetings, I’m always surprised at the number of organizations that don’t know about this great tool…or the fact that the company matches the Salesforce nonprofit grant!
It’s a Windows-only desktop application, but it runs just fine in VMWare Fusion or Parallels.
Convio Case Study of C3
Posted on May 18, 2008
Filed Under Nonprofit | Leave a Comment
Flavors of the month
Posted on May 18, 2008
Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment
I’ve been reading all the noise about Google Friend Connect and Facebook from an amused distance.
Google Friend Connect is very similar to something like Yahoo’s MyBlogLog where website publishers (someone like me) can build an instant community around their blog, right on their blog. Widgetized social networks, if you will.
I get that Google isn’t actually retaining any Facebook data so that whole thing around Facebook blocking access is kind of silly. Let’s say that “Jill’s Curly Hair Blog” has Friend Connect on it, and my Facebook friend Mary joins that network. It will only impact me as Mary’s friend if I join the site too. Then I’ll be able to say, “Oh! Hey, my friend Mary is here.” Otherwise, the fact that Mary and I are Facebook friends remains between Mary and me. If my Facebook friend Pete joins “Bob’s Muscle Cars Rule” blog, my life (and my data) won’t change, other than my seeing that fact in a news stream on Facebook or on Pete’s profile.
I never joined MyBlogLog because I can’t see the practical utility of it. Either for my site or as a participant on someone else’s. If there is a thread that interests me and I want to be a part of that conversation, I do so by either leaving a comment or blogging about it knowing that the pingback will leave a trail. But ongoing “membership” on someone’s personal blog? Not so much. Especially if it depends on the sites/communities I care about also belonging to MyBlogLog or Friend Connect.
That’s why I like FriendFeed, Twitter, del.icio.us, Google Reader shared feeds, etc. If someone likes what I have to say, they’ll build community around it by sharing it to places that people go to see what people they care about are sharing. They don’t necessarily need to make a commitment to my site and turn over their avatar to appear in a little window for my site to be part of the global conversation.
Sure, the larger more well-known sites have hundreds of members, but when I click around MyBlogLog it doesn’t take long to see that the vast majority of sites have so few members it looks a little pitiful.
I would much rather see the ability to search Facebook friends to see common friends on Twitter or FriendFeed, than to see on a blog I’m visiting which of my friends also reads the same blog. The web is fractured enough. We need more aggregation and filtering, and less mini communities that will only make the small blog publisher feel more out of the loop when their numbers don’t stack up.
I guess I’m just waiting for all this to solve a unique problem, rather than just exist to compete for attention within the tech blogging echo chamber. I want to see Google pay more attention to making their own Gmail contact data more usable for their users than worrying about connecting users to Facebook data.
I’m also hoping that video comments on blogs die a quick and painful death.
I love well-produced online video as much as anyone else. The best talking head videos are that way because people work hard to make sure the sound and lighting are good, and they know what they’re going to say before they open their mouths.
When I’m scanning a comment thread, I have absolutely no desire to see what someone has to say on the subject sitting there in their pajamas, mumbling into their webcam in a dimly lit room with some sort of strange feedback buzz over it all. I don’t need to hear them fumble for words…um, I think…you know…um, like…
If I’m reading a blog and my family is nearby, I’m not going to click on a video comment that may or may not have language on it that I don’t want my children to hear. I may be in a public place. I may already have headphones on because I’m listening to something else and I’m not going to stop iTunes just to hang on their every word waiting for them to say something profound. Sorry.
