Steve Sanderson

important things

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    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:

    • 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)
    How to solve this? Up to now, I've thought about ways to augment my email, i.e. using my email history and address book. From the looks of it, Xobni does something similar with Outlook and there's chatter they may do this eventually for hosted email (e.g. gmail). However, last night I realized that (for the moment) much of what I care about could be in LinkedIn. Surely someone has solved this via a LinkedIn application... Unfortunately, no, e.g I didn't even find any way to keep notes on other people in my network. No problem, I'll write an application... but right away their stance isn't encouraging. While their wording does not encourage me to take an exploratory run at something new on LinkedIn,  I'll apply and see what happens.
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    Obama '08 for iPhone

    Hot off the press - an iPhone app to accelerate the Obama ‘08 campaign! Download Obama '08 from the App Store

    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.

     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.

    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.

    Additionally, it serves as a nice central place for me to find out more about the campaign.

    Kudos to Raven and his team!

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    Excite Reunion

    Thanks to Julie, we had a great Excite.com reunion party last night at her house. Ostensibly, it was to celebrate an old Excite comrade (Kuntay) coming to Austin to work (at least for a little while) - and it was a great reason for many of us to get back together.

    I have to say, after many years - it may be corny (but not surprising to those who know me), that I still fell privileged to have worked with such a great group of people who all shared a common purpose. For many of us, the world-changing potential of online community (now known as social media) was not just a j o b - but meant something personal.

    I’ve been fortunate to work with some of those folks since then, as well as to help create similarly rewarding groups as well. I hope that continues.