Srcasm

When I am ready to head out for the night to the local watering hole or the amazing place that reminds me of my fraternity house basement, I send a quick message to Twitter to let people know where I’m going.  I have the policy that if I post it to Twitter, it’s open to anyone and that includes coming to hang out and grab a beer or dinner with friends.

One thing I’ve begun to realize though is that some people won’t come out unless I directly invite them.  Whether it’s that they feel that they are unwelcomed or they would like a personal, “Hey, I’m thinking about you and I would enjoy your company,” is up in the air.  I guess it differs for each person.

One thing is clear, we may be leaving people out of our lives by using services like Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook to blast out invites to hang out instead of the more traditional methods like telephones, email or SMS messages.  What do you think?  Are we losing touch with our humanity?  Do we feel that we no longer need to communicate in a one-on-one world with micro-blogging and one-to-many services?  Should we be focusing on those closer to us by sending them personal invitations or notes instead of expecting them to check the large flood of information that’s contained on the internet?

When I used to receive 10-20 voicemail messages per day from the office, it was a complete pain in the arse to go through them each hour to make sure I wasn’t missing something important.  When the server room was down?  ”Sorry, didn’t get that memo,” was not a viable solution.  So I looked at a service called Simulscribe.  I fell in love with the service immediately.  It was simple — Sign up, redirect voicemail to their phone number and never check my voicemail again.  How do they do it?  It’s simple, as PhoneTag (previously Simulscribe) shows you:

I wasn’t too skeptical of whether or not a service like this could take off.  To my amazement, I was not the only person out there that valued their time and didn’t want to waste 30 minutes per day listening to messages (most of which were junk) when they could be working, on the golf course or simply taking a relaxing bubble bath.  Today, PhoneTag has been written about in The New York Times, Forbes and even NPR (Radio?  What’s that?).

Yeah, it may not be free anymore but I still highly recommend their service to anyone that cares about how they spend 1/16th of their work day.  It’s a lot of time to be spending with a phone pressed against your ear and it can really hurt your neck.  You wouldn’t want to get hurt by listening to voicemail, right?  That’d be embarrassing.

As Bart and I were walking into a networking/mobile information event, I started talking about an idea I had. People have done something very similar to this in the past but I think there are a few key steps missing in the process.

Virtual/connected business cards

The idea is simple, instead of handing out a card that has your name, phone numbers, emails, web sites, address, and more on it, why not hand out a Moo card with a short set of directions (Send a text to 84782273 (VIRTCARD) with:) and then a unique username (SRCASM). That’s it. When you meet someone new (and they best have a cell phone), you simple either tell them these steps (and save the environment) or hand them a tiny set of instructions. They can text that at their earliest convenience and be hooked up.

Now, this is where it gets a little better. After sending that text message, a few things happen…

• If the person sending the text has an account:
  • Your information is added to their online account (this includes all of your social networking links, email, contact info and any other information you wish to provide), AND
  • They then receive a text message with your pertinent immediate contact info such as name, phone number and email address, AND
  • They receive a text message with a vCard (or whatever compatible format works for their specific phone) attachment to add your info directly to their address book.
• If the person sending the text does not have an account already:
  • They receive a text message with your pertinent immediate contact info such as name, phone number and email address, AND
  • Next, they receive a text message with a vCard (or whatever compatible format works for their specific phone) attachment to add your info directly to their address book, AND
  • Finally, they get a specific activation ID that can be used on the web site later to both activate a new, free account, for them and with your info already included in their profile.

There is so much more that could be added to this service, I am only beginning to scratch the surface. Tie it in with Brightkite for location specific info, Twitter for updates of the people you know and add it into my aggregated address book idea for even more contact power!

Today it seems like there is a never-ending supply of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), contact relationship sites (Plaxo and Salesforce), email address books (Gmail and Yahoo) but what about when I need to reach Alex from my cell phone and I forgot to put his number in? What if I never even had Alex’s number? What if he’s available via IM right now and doesn’t want phone calls? These are all great questions and I think I have an idea or a solution…

Aggregated address book system

On the top level, it’s simply a way of pulling in contacts from all over the globe. Bring your friends from Facebook (with their IM name, email and phone numbers), your business contacts from LinkedIn (with their title, company, email and website) and your main homeboys from Gmail (with their emails, phone numbers and whatever else you’d like to include) and pull them all together into one simple, online and offline-capable address book. Add the ability access this service via SMS or WAP site and you have yourself an always-on address book system

To sweeten the deal, add the ability to not only have presence detection (such as if the person is on Gtalk, AIM, Yahoo Messenger or simple available via text message) but also allow masked-communication with users. This could use a service like Jajah to connect the two parties.

On top of these amazing features (which are already out there, they just need to be mashed together), offer both natural language search (i.e. call Joe Schmoe at home) as well as opt-in and opt-out communication methods. For example, say I am “friends” with Joe on Twitter. Twitter knows that Joe’s phone number is 555-1337 (this would take some work with Twitter to allow this in their API with an opt-in option) but I don’t know that Joe’s number is that. I text 232665 (ADBOOK) or visit m.addbook.com from my mobile and type in “call Joe Schmoe’s mobile”. Within seconds, Joe Schmoe is notified that I’d like to get in touch with him. He can simply reply to a text message with Y or N as to whether he’d like to talk and voila, with a Y response, Joe and I are connected (neither of us know the other’s phone number).

See how helpful that could be? Now get out there, and someone, set this up as I have a lot of contacts I’d like to reach.

StatShorts.com - Keep the community informed

I think we’ve all learned over the past couple of weeks, with Twitter being down, the importance of notifying the customers with what’s going on. This idea stemmed from a few things, GetSatisfaction (with their communication to the end-user and the need for status pages (like status.twitter.com). Simply put, status pages that are both replicated and hosted around the globe. Take a server in the US, one in Europe and on in APAC and replicate the sites and databases and allow companies and/or organizations to get sub-domains off of the main site.

These “company status pages” would take their information from a multitude of sources. During setup, the company could choose accounts to follow on Twitter, Friendfeed and any other information source (even SMS based). These accounts could be owners, evangelists or employees of the company. Anytime the company status page needs to be updated, it can be done from anywhere on the world wide web or beyond. Say Twitter is having issues? Alex Payne can text to 47783 (ISSUE) with an update to the world.

Because these status pages are both replicated and hosted around the world, there is very little chance of the users being unable to access these very important status pages. Twitter can have twitter.statshorts.com reserved just for them.