San Francisco Archive

When you ride the subway, have you ever thought, “boy I’d like to get her on my Twitter”. Or what about, “his tush belongs on my Facebook”. Perhaps, “She would be a great friend for my feed”. But the problem is that it’s hard to go up to someone and tell them about your interests and desires on a train.

There’s a new service that will help you reveal your interests in a man or a woman named SubwayCrush. The service currently serves NYC, London, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. The idea is simple…find someone on the train you are interested in, write up the person’s specs on SubwayCrush and then the person might just answer. Naturally the more people who know about, and use, SubwayCrush, the better chance you have for a match.

You can view all “crushes” by city or by type (e.g m4w, m4m, w4m, w4w). You must enter the rail line you were on when you found your crush — this helps narrow down who it might be. I hear stories all the time about people finding love on the subway. I did a search for “hot male entrepreneur who also runs a tech blog” on a few of the subway lines in NYC but I came up empty.

I am guessing at some point they will add the ability to post photos – which might be a bit creepy. They should also add the ability to signup for alerts based on location and/or subway line.

The service was created by NY-based Lolz.

If you are as old as I am, you might remember the days of Fedex’ing comps back and forth from designer/agency to client for approvals. The process was long and expensive and, many times, took some of the “oomph” out of the team waiting for either a signoff or feedback on more items to change.

In these current times, a variety of applications have appeared to make website and document reviews easier. There’s ProofHQ based in the UK, ConceptShare out of Canada, and Argentinian-based ColaabFlow.

A new feedback application has hit the private beta scene recently named Notable. Notable describes their service as, “Quickly and easily give feedback on design, content, and code on any page of a website or application without leaving your browser. Notable helps your team collaborate through visual feedback on screenshots, via a chaos-free process so that everyone can express their opinion.”

There is also a browser plugin which allows you to bring any webpage into Notable for group review and annotation. This can be helpful when analyzing the competition with your team. I like how they build permissions into the system which allow for certain team members to see the designs at certain times. Notable also offers a historical dashboard which can be used to “remember” decisions from previous reviews.

Monthly plans range from $44-119 and Notable offers a free account which is limited to three users and one workspace.

Also…have a look at our CreationFlow, ProofHQ and ConceptShare coverage.

Yesterday I made my way from the WWDC to Kara’s Cupcakes and then to the Twitter HQ. The woman at Kara’s Cupcakes remembered the person who bought cupcakes and then got on the suggested user list (I am told she is no longer on the list).

My video experience is posted below – I left out the piece from inside their office. I spoke with a couple of Twitter employees who told me that you can’t get on the list by delivering cupcakes. Apparently you either get on the list if you are an “editor’s pick” or if you get a big boost in “velocity” which means that you get massive followers in a short time.

Tomorrow I will explain why I think that having default lists on any service is a good thing – except when they are used the way Twitter (and to a big extent Friendfeed) are using the lists. I have put some of my thoughts in the video below.

Thanks to everyone who participated in my fun posts over the past week!
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Yesterday I asked for some help identifying the proper cupcake to take with me when I visit the Twitter HQ next week. In case you are new to this blog mini-series, I am attempting to get on the Twitter default list (otherwise known as the suggested user list). What we know is that cupcakes work and now I know that the previously used cupcakes come from Kara’s Cupcakes. I am also looking forward to meeting Kara and learning about her special cupcakes!

On the other hand, last night I had dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. While waiting for my food to arrive, I took a walk over to their cheesecake display and filmed the video below. After checking out how sweet the cakes looked, I am now wondering if a thick slice of one of the cakes in the video might actually work better. Perhaps these cakes would get not only me on the default list but another user of my choosing! Like a cupcake is equal to one default list user and a cheesecake slice is worth one plus a friend?

Any input is greatly appreciated!

I will be in San Francisco this weekend and Monday and would love to get a meetup (known forthwith as CNup) scheduled. We could either do a brunch on Saturday morning or a more traditional meetup on Monday evening. I am working on getting valley superstar startup blogger Louis Gray to attend in his new sweet ride (1 mile rides will be available for $20).

I am staying in downtown San Francisco but am willing to travel for best results. So if you are interested in meeting, shooting some startup videos and rapping about other tech blogs, leave your thoughts on local and preferred time in the comments.

Also – should you decide to place an order with my startup, bring your business cards with you to the CNup and grab a cool bonus 20% extra cards for your order.

When I was a young kid trying to make a buck, I quickly learned that the most important thing I offered was my service. I actually got more business just by providing great customer service and that made me just continue to increase the service I provided. Whether it was selling newspapers, coding HTML for a client, buying millions of dollars in media or processing business cards, service has always been my differentiator. When I work with startups, I stress the importance of providing the best possible support at all times.

I’ve heard stories about how tough it is to actually get any help from Twitter’s customer service but until recently I haven’t had a need to contact them for help. In January, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone heralded their great support department on the Twitter blog so I was certainly hoping for a quick resolution to my issue.

Here’s an overview of my issue and why I’ve contacted support for help. I am having an issue with my @cloudcontacts account. For some reason, I can’t get the account to work correctly. Half of the time when I load twitter.com, I get a login box which won’t let me login. However if I just refresh the page enough times (never the same number), eventually it lets me in. Direct messages never show up correctly, and when people try to access the page for the @cloudcontacts account, they too get a "That page doesn’t exist!" message but if you refresh that page, you eventually get the account too (although today the account seems to not show up as many times as I refresh). I can’t reset the password because it gets stuck in this "no account/yes account" problem. I’ve tried to create a new @cloudcontacts account – the registration page says it’s available, but on submission, it says it’s taken.

I went ahead and submitted an issue ticket (which was hell because they want you to be logged in which as you can see above only works on random loads). I received a quick auto-reply with a message about passwords but nothing about what happens next. I replied to that message asking for additional help but heard nothing back. This week I submitted another ticket with more specific details about the issue after the research I did. This time I didn’t receive a password auto-reply, instead, I received the following reply:

Your request has been received, and is being reviewed by our support staff. Twitter Support is currently experiencing a backlog: in some cases, it may be 5 to 7 business days before you receive a reply. Problems and issues will be investigated first, followed by general requests and questions.

Does this mean I will receive any help? My issue is certainly a "problem" and not a general request or question. Based on the people who emailed me after my first tweet about the issue, the answer is "who knows". Orli Yakuel of the popular Go2Web20 directory has a good post about the (lack of) support that Twitter provides. She’s waiting over a month as are countless others pleading for help.

I’ve tried twittering/messaging to the Twitter founders but they haven’t replied either.

Here’s a company that is in their honeymoon period where blogs and mainstream media can’t get enough of the service (more on that later). Twitter has raised $55 million dollars in funding. If there is a backlog of support issues as the auto-reply states, why not take a tiny bit of cash, hire 10-20 support people for a week, and get the backlog resolved? I am willing to bet that the majority of support issues would take minutes to resolve or answer and more customers would be satisfied.

Let’s forget about the customer for a minute and think about if we were working at Twitter. How great would it be to get the queue cleared out so we don’t have to see a backlog everyday and could focus on the product?

The interesting thing here is that Twitter is heralded as this great platform for providing customer service with major companies like Zappos, Dell, Comcast, Mosso and JetBlue using the service for support. Yet the underlying platform company doesn’t provide the same level of support for the companies who use their platform.

I am sharing this long story for one reason: for you to take a moment and think about the support you provide on your web applications. Are you making sure each and everyday that your customers are satisfied with the support you provide?

My hope is that the issue listed above is resolved expeditiously so I can use the account to communicate with my customers and during the SXSW festival. I will report back once the issue is resolved.

We have a winner for the free full ticket to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco at the end of March. We are a media sponsor and were given a ticket to give away. Unlike the others who force you to tweet or say how great a product is, ours was a simple contact entry form. And boy did we receive entries — the most for any sweeps we’ve run!

With that said, the winner is:

Deanna R from Buffalo, New York

If for some reason Deanna cannot fulfill the duties of winner, then the alternate winner is Rajiv D from San Francisco. I will be in contact with Deanna shortly to confirm her attendance.

A few of you asked about covering the event as press for CN and I will follow up with ya’all in the coming week. Thanks to everyone who participated!