Helpful Links in Customer Email
I rarely see innovative UI in automated email. Props to Ticketmaster for this one. Def will be keeping this in mind when formatting support emails henceforth.
As extending the browser becomes much simpler with tools like Jetpack and Ubiquity from Mozilla, expect to see a burst of innovation making your browser a productivity enhancer. Turning users into software engineers with intuitive tools is something Microsoft Office did well (Word, Excel macros). Mozilla is taking this to another level.
I’m sure this is not a new thing, but I thought this was a pretty slick move that I came up with today:
var even_row = 0;
for (var i=0; i < items.length; i++) {
html += “<li class=’r”+even_row+”’>”;
html += items[0];
html += “</li>”;
even_row = 1 - even_row;
};
I don’t think I’ve ever realized the sugar that is the x=0, 1-x series before.
Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry: Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech via http://bit.ly/alzOM via Nav, CC, and Jenny (lots of people sent this amazing vid to me)
Brilliant Customer Service - Value of Real Name and Face
I just saw this on a Tumblr help page: the real, full name of the community ambassador / customer service leader, his photo, and email address. Real names and faces always make for a smoother support flow because you understand there is actual a person trying to help you. Love it!
Keep Your Gmail Inbox Clean With “Send and Archive” Button
You can turn on this button in the Settings > Labs tab. I’ve been using it for a day and it has drastically decreased my Inbox count. It makes sense: when you’ve responded, you’ve taken action, so there should no longer be a need for the thread to be in your focus. GTD ftw
“Twitter presents their audience with a challenge - if you don’t like what we’ve done, you have every means to make it better for free, so don’t complain, do something. The creation and use of platforms is an admission that no company has a lock on innovation, but we all can benefit quickly by aligning ourselves with the innovation stack.”
More Greg: “Twitter chose wisely in that they have used the platform to export all interface innovation (the most mutable and therefore, costly part of every web application).”
Had not thought about this angle, but really insightful. In a way, I would say MySpace has done the same. Facebook has not.
(via betaworks)
Great point by Greg, agreed.
Have to disagree about Facebook—they are taking this “outsourcing” to an even greater extreme than Twitter or Myspace with FB Connect, with which they are essentially just giving away the social graph and privacy controls they have built. Where they are headed is beyond Myspace: instead of having to go to a URL on the host domain, you can go to any app (with any design, any UI) and see the full names, faces, and actions of your friends.
This means, if you wanted to, you could build a full Twitter or Myspace that used Facebook Connect for the relationship / friendship model. Quite crazy and an interesting strategy, considering that this social graph is the source of all of Facebook’s value. Umair would approve of the radical openness, I think. I wonder if Rafer’s premonitions about imminent lockdown of connect will hold? I just don’t see it happening, given that is is not a spam channel, to be exploited like News Feed was, but rather a leasing of contextual data.
Another important part of the “lease” granted by Twitter, FB, and Myspace is the namespace, which I was discussing Andy earlier today. I wonder whether the Twitter / Myspace model is better than Facebook. With Twitter and Myspace, there is a global namespace, meaning that searching “kortina” will return the same thing for anyone conducting this search. Terms map one-to-one with entities.
As Navajeet recently pointed out to me, Facebook is the only company with search intelligent enough to show me my friend when I type “Jason Omara” vs. the popular actor with the same name. The global namespace seems more lucrative to the person in control of the namespace, but the contextual namespace is far more interesting.
