Grand Central (of nothing new, unfortunately)

I got a voice mail this afternoon through my web-based GrandCentral account - as both a forwarded call to my cell with options to accept and record the call, or forward to voice mail. Anyone remember Grand Central? Google acquired them on July 4, 2007 for rumored $50M.

Apparently, nothing has happened with them since? That's a pity. Google immediately stopped giving out new accounts, so unless you had one ... uh, over a year ago, you're still outta luck.

That's a shame. This really seemed like the future of the phone.

Go China Go! (or, Wesley Chan, I mean)

I stopped blogging recently, falling victim to the Twitteritis that has plagued the (non-micro) blogosphere. That is, microblogging--the satisfaction of crafting zen-like, haiku-like, Internet posts to my, eh... 88 subscribers--ruined my appetite to craft anything longer.

But tonight I got an email from a dot-com that just deserves the full treatment. Kudos, that is.

There's an International component: they're Chinese.

Yes, as the Olympics unfold, TIVO's on hold and I'm blogging about a Chinese dot-com, distracted by virtual customer service. Guess I'm just a persona at heart (knuck, knuck).

So, I bought a bike mount to hold the random GPS devices I'm working with in my current gig. I found it on the web - it holds basically anything (a contraption of various screw vices with foam pads). But I ended up ordering it FOR NINE DOLLARS from a completely fly-by-night-looking website. I'm old enough to remember clearly fearing giving my credit card to just any website. This site reminded me of exactly those days as I caved and thought to myself: "Well, my anti-identity theft tools are in place... I think."

So just today I commented to a friend at work, something about ordering it a few weeks ago... but from a Chinese website (rolled my eyes). "We'll see what happens."

I received this email tonight.

It reminds me so much of a true small business--of my father's wholesale flower shop, that we launched from our garage when I was in the 2nd grade. I actually stood in the driveway and welcomed people (real, actual, professional florists... wow) as they parked and walked up to our house. It was a big deal.

Man, is this email over the top or what?

From: "info.usa@virtualvillage.com"

Date: August 13, 2008 7:04:27 PM MDT

To: justapersona...

Subject: Virtual Village Notice - item 72476736 : arriving soon

Dear Andy,

Further to your purchase from Virtual Village I just wanted to thank you for your order.

It was shipped by airmail on Aug 3 2008 7:00AM and though we can’t control the post, shipping usually takes 14 to 21 days so your parcel should arrive soon! (If you chose FedEx it should have arrived by now).

I’d also like to introduce myself; I’m Wesley, your account manager and you can contact me at WChan@virtualvillage.com.

I’d love you to visit us again and to try and tempt you I’ve set up a promo on our website! Visit www.virtualvillage.com, choose an item and enter M3Q4F3X7Y when checking out for 25% off any product!

The promo runs until the end of this month so don’t hang about!

Kind regards

Wesley Chan

Your Personal Account Manager

Virtual Village USA

Please tell us if there’s a problem you need solving BEFORE you leave feedback. We’ve 2 goals: to ensure YOU’RE 100% satisfied and that WE get great feedback. If you have any issues, contact gethelp@virtualvillage.com and we promise to treat your request as TOP PRIORITY

-----

This email was sent using ChannelAdvisor marketplace management software.

Visit us at http://www.channeladvisor.com

Forget olympic high diving.

This little email, from this little company, suddenly makes me a fan. This is what business was supposed to be. This is what dot-coms were meant to be.

14-21 days? Are you kidding? I'm leaving the olympics on hold. I'm emailing Wesley to see if I can help out. Surely we can do better on the shipping.

Health Insurance Confusion: Usability 101

It's open enrollment with my insurance provider this month, and as I wade through documentation sections regarding healthcare topics, I'm struck by a simple change that would make this much easier.

Not that they haven't tried to make it easy. I have print material, online web pages, PDFs, and almost a dozen flash videos with voice, chapters, etc. Each is professionally produced.

And each makes the same one, simple mistake.

For any healthcare topic, there will be a section explaining what it means (such as "Annual Deductible"). And then, there are subsections for each policy. There are dozens of policies, so the bulk of space taken up (of print, video, or voice content) regards the 11 policies that don't pertain to me.

Worse, for every topic, I need to wade through these similarly-named policies and re-discover which one is mine. (High Deductible PPO Standard Plan vs. Health Net High Deductible PPO Standard plan, for example.) Actually, my plan name isn't even mentioned in several of these, and I have no idea why.

Obviously, a website would fail if it didn't clarify after login what content is relevant to the user. Imagine, post login, presenting everything as a PDF, where 90% of what's in the PDF is not actually available to the user. Well, if you are going to mail something to me you know who I am, so isn't that basically like I've logged in?

Such a pity, too. Really nice Flash video production, and so thoughtlessly designed.

Photo Diving Insanity (it's a good thing)

Anyone who enjoyed the PhotoSynth demo will like this.

The HardRock Cafe's website has utilized some flavor of it via the emerging SilverLight technologies from Microsoft. (Fyi - the FireFox plugin for Slverlight on the Mac worked flawlessly for me.) This is way cool.

Try it:

- On the HardRock Cafe Memorabilia page...

- Go to "Beetles" (left nav)

- Look for the letters - a picture letters that were mailed

- Go to the envelope

- Look at the stamp

...no, really LOOK at the stamp.

(No, it's not a real stamp.)

Is it just me, or does this smell like Paul Allen?

Spock.com: Identity and Reputation (village gossip 2.0?)

A friend emailed me this morning from Japan that he found his name in a crime report. It's someone else. His name is fairly unique, and as he returns to the US after a decade abroad, he is facing the common ex-pat issues of not having any "official record." This really hurts as one engages potential employers, mortgage lenders, etc. This crime report, indexed by the search engines and easy to find, of course calls to question whether this life history he's explained checks out.

I'm suggesting he set himself up on Spock.com, a site that seems promising for two things:

A.) verification from both peers and search engine spider algorithms of bio/resume details, and

B.) finding this verification info easily, as it gets trusted placement in Google, Yahoo, etc.

An active netizen these days may of course feel this is no big deal: my Linked-in and twitter are all indexed and prominently placed in search results for my name or "handles." As well, the promise of the "Social Web" is that sense can be made of my different profiles on different sites, and complete bios of all our publicly-accessible identities can be constructed automatically (yes, disquieting for some); SocialThing is an example.

But in reality, it's still a lot of work to make sense of aliases, handles, name variations, relocations, and especially if you have a slightly common name. Besides, how useful is it to read my chatter on Facebook or Twitter; sometimes you just want to make sense of if this is the guy in the crime report, the author of this book, etc. This is exactly what Spock set out to solve, using social networking features. People who know you confirm the accuracy or inaccuracy of details. It's one of my favorite examples of supporting both the infiniteness of the World Wide Web, and simultaneously, the smallness of a village.

I remember the first day I used Yahoo.com (vintage). I was astonished when I searched for (and found easily) a person I hadn't talked to in a while, but knew in Denver. That it (this Internet thing...) had such precision was fantastic. Of course as the Web has grown, so has the difficulty of repeating that simple search / result.

Spock is an eloquent solution for an accurate bio on the web. It has both the credibility of not having come exclusively from people (easy to fake), nor the incompleteness and errors that algorithms alone can construct. I also find it's alias and tag system more promising than the simple Linked-In resume-on-the-web formula (which is great for that other sort of purpose).

Caveate: Spock.com is in Beta, and was in Beta last April when I first learned of it. Sometime last fall they completely lost my profile, so I've started over from scratch. Since my full, legal name has been a ridiculously complicated story, I'll give them some slack. Hopefully their technical woes are past, and this will come out of Beta soon.

Anti-Social, Un-Networking Tools (stealth-wired)

Google's chat client ganined an "Invisible" mode last week. I can see you, you can't see me, but I can initiate a chat with you if I need.
(You can send me an email, if *you* need.)

I've spent some time recently thinking through the basic communication model, and had to cheer when I saw this.

I really think we should start seeing increased "MOOD SUPPORT" since, well, who really wants to be available to everyone at every moment. It's more than an "invisible" mode in chat - it's dialing down the noise of all social media, flexibly.

So, what's this mean for Metcalfe's Law? Maybe it's a question worth considering. There's clearly a distinction to be made between the value of increasing servers and websites versus increasing users; however, the value of the Internet is increasingly bolstered by people and an immediacy of participation. Help forum communities and flickr are both examples. So is Google's algorithm. As we add layers of "my contacts" into the value proposition of the Web itself, I wonder if the "social" layer we're collectively sculpting will see a backlash, or what that might look like.

"Feed Me" (the houseplant twittered...)

This is fantastic!



The Twitter blog explains it... I have nothing to add (but gasps of awe).

My father, once a wholesale florist, would have surely wired both greenhouses to support 100's of these (if his son didn't beat him to it).