better
- get a dashboard that shows me what's new with people in my social networks
- organize the dashboard based on some heuristics on what social networks are more important than others (e.g. ex-Excite people, current co-workers, etc.)
- default and customizable alerts to notify me
- when it's been a long time since I communicated with someone
- when something about those people or their company has changed
- a single place to view and edit some basic info on a person (e.g. notes)
- all based on an understanding of my social networks (e.g. declared social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter and implicit social networks like email)
Build a personal relationship manager on LinkedIn... maybe
I’ve always wanted some simple ‘personal relationship manager’, i.e. the problem is that I’ve got friends and acquaintances I want to keep up with - but I am lousy at reminding myself to follow-up when I don’t see them regularly. I want a way to:
Obama '08 for iPhone
Hot off the press - an iPhone app to accelerate the Obama ‘08 campaign!
Thanks to my friend (and open source guru) Raven Zachary, I had the privilege of beta testing the new Obama ‘08 for iPhone application. The idea, the potential and the implementation is tremendous - create grassroots opportunities to participate at the ’edge’ of the internet. In other words, let people participate in the campaign from their perspective, instead of uploading their data to a central place or getting anonymous instructions from a central place.
How specifically? The key feature is that this iPhone app looks at your address book, sorts your contacts by battle-ground states, presents you with those people and then keeps track of whether you’ve called those people. As the help says:
As you make calls, you can keep organized by updating the status of your contacts.I love this idea because it allows me to help in a more hands-on way, but without having to deal with trade-offs like being a parent and employed vs. spending five weeks in a battleground state. Your privacy is important: no personal data or contacts will be uploaded or stored. Only the total number of calls you make is uploaded anonymously.
Additionally, it serves as a nice central place for me to find out more about the campaign.
Kudos to Raven and his team!
Down To The Desktop Or Up Into The Clouds
I think that my recent purchase of the iPhone has tipped the balance in quandry I’ve had.
It goes something like this: I’ve wanted a better tool to manage my professional relationships (something I’ve been thinking of as a personal CRM). As a result, I’ve been looking for what Mac apps fill that niche - and there are some nice candidates (e.g. Contactizer, Daylite, even Crm4Mac). At the same time, I see web-based solutions as well (and here’s the ‘in the clouds’ part), such as Highrise, Etelos, even a customized SugarCRM.
Unfortunately, none of these has the right set of features - which would have closed the deal and locked me in (either as a source of recurring revenue for the SaaS solutions or as a grateful customer for a Mac app)
At the same time, it’s itched my concern about whether to committee further ‘down’ into my local box with a Mac app or ‘up’ into the clouds with a web app.
All that leads to this - now that I’ve used my iPhone for a few days, and I’m successful at doing some of my basic tasks on it (e.g. reading blogs, web pages, email) it’s tipped the balance ‘up ot the clouds’. In other words, with no clear feature leader, I will make a solution work that’s an SaaS so that I can use it on my iPhone whereever and when ever I want.
Seperately, I’ll blog about what I really want in a Personal CRM.