March 2006 Archives

A preview of the banking class tomorrow.

A new forum for Sproutit.

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at the Social Software Blog (who I hear might be making a guest appearance on this blog soon) recently pointed us to the Moonwatcher Blog, which is the personal blog of Charlie Wood, who also formed an interesting company called Spanning Partners. Both sites are dedicated to covering the emergence of RSS in the Enterprise.

Its true, RSS as a technology is starting to creep into even big enterprise company’s plans. So how does RSS in the Enterprise relate to Management by Feeds?

RSS is a technology. It’s a way of publishing information. To use RSS, you need tools like Mailroom, Basecamp, and Spanning Salesforce to expose the data inside your company through RSS. Management by Feeds is how you use those feeds to make better decisions in less time.

Spanning Partners looks to be doing some important work in helping companies who have already spent the money to deploy big enterprise apps make information from those apps available through RSS. If you use Salesforce, in particular, its worth a look.

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.â€? – Mark Twain

We’ll see how true that is after “More About� is fully implemented.

But seriously:

“Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you wish.â€? – Twain

Aah, is that the real advantage of “More About?�

Well actually, after much thought, I think this properly describes the new addition:

“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.â€? – Mr. T again

Can’t wait to see it in action!

AAAAHAHGHAGHAGAGHAGGH!!!!

It took a few months, but it is finally here. The bird flu ‘H5N1’ has come to our country. They found a dead swan carrying the flu about 80 miles south of Prague.

You can always count on the BBC to let us know first. Read more here

You can even see a map of the spread of the bird flu.

I recently picked up word of Mapable a recent startup from the Dallas area. After trying it out, my best explanation of it is a cross between 37signals’ Campfire and Jambo. You can create a chat room that different people can join and you can see where they are in the world, via the use of the big GoogleMap in the middle.

I did encounter a slightly better experience than I did with Riya a few days ago. I was able to login and set up an account, but a lot of the UI needs work in order to work with Safari. Alignments of text and pictures was off kilter. I wasn’t even able to post a comment using Safari (isn’t chatting the crux of it all?). ouch!

SO, I used Firefox as my backup, again. I created a chat room that you should visit. I am curious to see where you are writing from, and how well it works. Just click on the link below. They don’t have ‘invites’ yet.

BigActTest @ Mapable.com

Chris was interviewed at DEMO by Kathy Brooks for her I of Innovation podcast. He talks about loving what you do, moving to Prague and even quotes “You’ve Got Mail”! Give it a listen.

Just a few reasons why we chose Prague.

My uncle, an avid Harley guy who now lives in Florida, sent me this picture. Thinking young, outside the box, and never giving up. These are today’s lessons.

Charles’s post on MoreAbout points up an interesting question in this new “Web 2.0” world. As more and more services and tools to share information come on the scene, privacy starts to become an issue.

We blog, or post comments to blogs or contribute to forums or bulletin boards. What we write is thereupon indexed by services like Technorati. We attach a feed to our site, share photographs (with a service like Flickr), or audio or video. We leave signed reviews on Amazon or IMDB. Each time we take any of these actions, we share information about ourselves with the public. Because oftentimes when we use these services we seem to be alone, we are sometimes surprised to find out that, in reality, we have been engaged in publishing, and we have publish information that under other circumstances we would never consciously divulge.

Our anonymity starts to dissolve, to be replaced, if not with our real selves, at least with a persona who has our name and shares our email address and many other bits of information we had previously considered private, or at most, belonging only to ourselves and a certain designated recipient or recipients.

Now, the reason I’m discoursing on this is not to indulge in some amateur sociology. It’s a direct response to Charles’s announcement of MoreAbout. With MoreAbout, we are bringing together information on your email history with the recipient, your work history with the recipient using Basecamp and your photo. None of these three pieces of information can be said to be accidental. When you send a Mailroom user an email, you mean to (presumably). It’s very hard to accidentally collaborate on a project with a fellow Basecamp user. And as far as I can tell it is thoroughly impossible to upload a photo or image to Gravatar if you really don’t want to.

But, what if we brought together additional information into the MoreAbout function? What if your recent blog posts, your recent comments online, tags from Technorati, reviews from Amazon and IMDB and other freely available but not as yet consolidated information were also offered up to any Mailroom user you sent an email to? (Conversely, as a Mailroom user the same information would be available to you about others who write in to you via your Mailroom account?)

On the one hand, as a you could really get a great idea who the person was who was writing you; you could sell or serve or work with this person better because you know more about him or her as a person. As a sender, you could count on better service or cooperation and, on the personal side, you would achieve that human connection that is frequently the motivation for providing that information, for sticking yourself out there, in the first place.

On the other hand, although this information was not extorted from you, perhaps you did not realize how having it all brought together in one place and provided to another person would make you feel. Perhaps it would feel like an invasion of privacy, in spirit if not in fact.

Although we do not currently have any plans to add this sort of information to MoreAbout, it is a possibility. It seems like it could be a tremendously useful innovation. But it seems fraught as well. So instead of guessing and either taking an informed chance that you’d like it and finding out later that you hated it, or making an equally uninformed guess that you’d hate it and never finding out that you would have loved using it, we’re just going to ask you to join the discussion.

Would the addition of Web-wide information about a sender to the MoreAbout function on Mailroom be a good idea or a bad one? How useful would it be? Would anyone’s privacy be illegitimately invaded? If so, would an “opt out” take care of that issue or would it just be a band-aid on a bullet hole?

Rest assured, we can’t be the only ones who have thought of this. Someone is going to start putting this information together. Maybe they already have. But whether we’re developers or customers, senders or receivers, business people or customers, we’re going to have to do what we’ve done countless times in our history. We’re going to have to define for ourselves what is public and what is private. If we don’t, someone else will do it for us. And I don’t like the sound of that.

A listen to some new features we added to Mailroom.

Have you ever had that experience where every time you email a company, they act like it’s the first time they’ve ever heard of you? It’s especially frustrating when you have a technical issue to resolve and you have to re-explain your problem every single time you contact the company.

This happens because most business have a problem of context. They receive so many emails that they can’t possibly remember everyone. After a while, every message seems to come from just another faceless user. We wanted to help with that and that’s why today I am excited to announce a new feature we’ve just deployed called “More About”.

I was rather impressed at DEMO as the team from Riya got up on stage and proceeded to use their gratuitous baby demonstration, so I put my business card in their beta fishbowl, and waited to get an invite. Well, the invite came with some very explicit instructions. Especially in regard to bloggers. Take a look for yourselves.

I go to the prescribed link, riya.com/groundTruth to find this message:

WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN”T USE MY BROWSER!!! Any web company should know some basic facts about internet users.

1. 3 browsers come to mind (IE, Firefox, Safari) one of which, really sucks.
2. A greater percentage of Mac users are online vs. Windows users
3. Your first customers should be the loudest and easiest to reach, a.k.a. fanatics

Simple formula: Mac user = fanatic

It really is that simple. Apple has a monopoly on customer evangelists. It is part of the culture and is in our blood. Why on earth would you not want to target the lowest hanging fruit on the tree. Here I am …. pick me!!! Of course, you are saying, “Just use Firefox instead. You do have Firefox, right?” Of course, I have Firefox. I will eventually get around to it. But, Riya made my life harder. I wanted to kick the tires on the new photo search and see for myself. In fact, I would have been a great tester and provided you with feedback.

Instead, “you lost me at hello.”

I’ve been meaning to link to this for a while:

43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero

This series of articles has some interesting tips and tricks on how to stay on top of your email. Of course, if you have a team answering email or if you answer a lot of sales and support, Mailroom can make your life much easier also.

Anytime a customer writes you an email, it is a gift. An enormous gift. And the sad thing is, most companies just throw it away.

Think about the type of person who sends feedback email to companies: This person cares enough about you and your company to form an opinion about you. They are also vocal enough to want share their opinion with others once they have formed it.

In other words, anyone who sends you an email is a prime candidate to become a passionate user. One of those all important customers who will tell everyone else they know about you, if only you can get them to become passionate enough about your product or service.

What’s more, by sending you an email, this person has given you an opportunity to change them from an interested opinionated person into a passionate user. All you need to do is write them back.

People become passionate about something when they form a personal connection with it somehow. And, there is no better way to form a personal connection with a person than to become friends with them. It’s amazing but true: a simple, personal, authentic note from someone at your company is often all it takes to convince someone that you are “good people” and worth their time.

So if simply writing back can do so much for your business, why do so throw this tremendous opportunity away?

It’s quite simple, really: many companies view email as a support cost rather than a sales tool. It’s easy to understand this attitude when you think about the hundreds of emails even a small business can receive everyday. Complaint, questions, comments. It’s hard to imagine sometimes how all of this work can really help close a sale.

To really get the most out of your customer email, you have to begin by thinking about it as part of your marketing, not your support costs. Like any other marketing program, you have to be prepared to invest a little time and money into it. Most importantly, you have to develop a system to help you get through it.

For starters, you can get some technology to help you. Mailroom is designed for this very thing. Mailroom makes it easy for your entire group to share your incoming customer email. It can also save you time by suggesting replies based on your past responses.

Even with technology, though, your email will always need a little human touch. Be sure to budget ample time for someone on your team to devote to answering your email. Better yet, have everyone pitch in so no one has to answer too many emails. Not only will that keep everyone in your business closer to your customers, it will keep allow each email to get the time it deserves.

However you do it, remember: if you want to create passionate users, you can start simply by answering your email. Make it a priority. Treat your email like a sales tool. You will be amazed at how many of those people you connect with will return the favor by bringing many more customers to your door.

Today I am going to explain two principles about using technology in your business and then recommend one product you really need to use.

The first principle is that when it comes to using new technology in a business, your biggest challenge is not the technology, it is your people. Software like Mailroom can make the people in your business way more productive, but to get these advantages they must become less productive for a time while they learn how to use the new technology. Its hard to imagine productivity gains down the road when you feel the pressure to get work done now. If you don’t overcome this, people in your business simply will never adopt your new technology.

The key to solving this problem is to get fast results. Focus on adopting simple tools one at a time. Make sure people see productivity gains from each new tool within a day of effort or less and they’ll be much more likely to want to go along.

The second principle I want to talk about is documentation. If you have more than two or three people in your team, documenting some of the most common procedures and plans in your company is one of the best things you can do for your business. I can’t tell you how much time I have saved when hiring new people or bringing someone onto a project for the first time by simply being able to point them to some documentation and say “read this.” It saves both that person and me hours of back and forth, free us to spend our time on the meaty, more interesting parts of their job.

The perfect tool for this kind documentation is something called a Wiki. Wikis are tools that make it easy to build websites in a small team. If you’ve never used a wiki, you can go here for a little more information.

We use wikis at Sproutit to document everything from server deployment processes to marketing plans. People who get to know us often remark at how well organized we are. We are spread all over the world, yet everyone on our team generally has a good idea of what we are here for and where we are going next. All thanks to our wiki.

Anyway, the point is that wikis are obviously important, but in the past they’ve been pretty difficult to adopt. Most wikis have to be setup on your own server, which is both complicated and expensive. Hosted wiki services such as JotSpot don’t take any setup, but they come with so many features they are not easy enough to learn.

So, finally, my recommendation. Stikipad is a hosted wiki solution that appears to be built on the excellent open-source Instiki wiki package. The greatest strength of Instiki and Stikipad both is that they are both very easy to use and simple to learn. Stikipad goes beyond Instiki, adding better user management tools, a Word-like WYSIWYG writing environment, and it’s hosted so you can get up and running in no time flat. All the while remaining simple to learn and use.

Of course, Stikipad supports RSS feeds also that you can add to your feed reader for that sweet Management by Feeds love.

If you want to save time and keep your team in sync, use a wiki. If you ever hope to get your team to adopt wikis, use a service that is quick to setup, easy to learn, and delivers results fast.

In other words, go get a Stikipad account today. It’s good for you. (And it’s free too!)

“If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep you mouth shut.” —Albert Einstein

It is interesting that no where in the equation is K, which stands for Killing Time. There is time for play and adventure in a successful life if each moment is used to its fullest. A good day has a healthy dose of work, play, and sleep (of which I am not sure the Sproutit guys get enough). The Z part of the equation is also very useful. Let success stand on its own without the unnecessary declaration of the fact. Others will get it when they experience how useful the solution is.

The final segment with Josh WIlliams.

If you do web design, you’ve probably run into these scripts floating around the web that can round the corners of a box on your web page using only JavaScript and CSS. One of the best known just recently ran across my desk again, its called NiftyCube.

We use some rounded corners in Mailroom, so naturally I wanted to take a look at this tool. Maybe it could make our pages load faster. Sadly, it won’t help us because Javascript-based rounded corners suck. Here is why:

I mentioned in a post a few days ago that I have 43 feeds in my Newsreader just dedicated to Sprout. Ken Yarmosh asked where I came up with those feeds and how we keep them organized. Chris answered that question. But then I thought maybe a few specifics about what feeds I use for Sproutit might be helpful to others wondering how they can use feeds in their business.

So here is a summary of the feeds I have for Sproutit:

Sproutit Internal – 17 feeds – These are feeds only shared by members of our team. I want to know about pretty much everything, so I subscribe to almost all of them.

• 1 feed for our CampaignMonitor account to keep track of how many people have signed up for our newsletter mailing list.
• 6 feeds from our website to keep up on new blog posts, comments and trackbacks to both the Big Act blog, our Newsroom, and a forthcoming Mailroom blog.
• One feed for Basecamp feed. We have 13 projects right now in Basecamp. These projects act like “internal” blogs so people can post updates on different projects. We even have projects for our Investors to log into and our board. Aside from Mailroom, this is probably our most used webapp.
• One feed for our wiki. Our wiki has our marketing plan, policies, guidelines, notes on how to administer our server and how to work with our code.
• One feed for Collaboa, our source code manager. Here we track bugs, planned features, and code changes.
• 2 feeds for Mailroom. Of course, all of our support, contact, and other shared email is done through Mailroom. The best part is, this is all in my newsreader, so my personal email inbox stays clutter free. I love it!
• 1 feed for our del.icio.us bookmarks. We use this to bookmark interesting pages among our team, informally.
• 3 feeds sundry other blogs we have used over time that now get updated rarely if at all.
• 1 feed from the prototype of our Super Sekret Second Product.

Sproutit External – 23 feeds – These are feeds that help me find out what others (especially our customers) are saying about us.

• 5 Technorati feeds. One for each different blog and some ‘ego’ keywords and such.
• 2 Google feeds. One for Google News another for the Google Blog Search
• 1 del.icio.us tag search feed.
• 1 furl feed.
• 2 MSN search and News feeds.
• 2 Yahoo Search feeds
• 1 Icerocket search feed
• 1 Feedster search feed.
• 1 Topix.net feed.
• 1 Feedsfarm feed
• 1 Blogdigger search feed
• 1 Plazoo search feed
• 1 Blogmarks tag feed
• 1 LookSmart search feed.
• 1 WiredNews search feed.
• 1 blogg.de tag feed.

OK, that’s only 40 feeds. Since I last wrote I have actually dropped three feeds that we no longer use. In a few days, I plan to add a few more from our new forum. This is the great thing about feeds; you can add and remove feeds easily in a news reader to get just the information you want to do your job right now.

I hope these are helpful to you. A lot of the tools we use in our business, like Basecamp and Mailroom, can apply to almost any business. Maybe you can use them in your own!

How are you using feeds to run your business? Write your story on your blog, tag it ‘imanagebyfeeds’ and we’ll link to it from our blog here.

More with Josh Williams.

Imagine to my surprise when I saw a comment by Ken Yarmosh on Charles’ posting Management by feed asking about how he keeps up on his 43 feeds. There are various ways of doing it as he mentions in his question.

Are you using internal blogs, have you partnered with a third party RSS provider, or built something yourself?

Yesterday I talked about using NetNewWire as my feed reader which, allows the user to create smart lists and groups. This has been very handy due to the ability to drag and drop (as you should expect from Ranchero Software). But, this is still a desktop app.

So, what options are available online?

I have looked at a couple of options, but one that I have recently been testing (still in its alpha stage) is FrankenFeed, one of the tools from the Big IN Japan toolbox. (I also post my podcast using PodServe, too). This allows you to mash together multiple feeds into a single feed. I like to stay on top of news, so I have created a feed that has several news feeds in it, such as CNet, NewsVine, and Wired.

There are several more options, but that is just one. Every one of us needs to find something that won’t interrupt our workflow and allow us to create as we see fit.

Peter says he loves Management by Feeds because he can learn about new changes and new bug fixes as soon as they happen. There is nothing like an informed support person to make your customers exceedingly happy.

As Chris said yesterday, he loves Management by Feeds because while he is out on the road meeting investors, arranging our move back to the States, and doing his podcast, he can stay on top of all the news happening in the office. It’s like he is still here.

Shanti loves Management by Feeds because he doesn’t have a manager standing over his shoulder, breathing down his neck while he tries to work. He can focus on coding, knowing that we will all know what he’s up to whenever he checks in some code and it shows up in our feedreaders.

I love Management by Feeds because we have a team of 12 people spread all over the world and I need to know what all of them are doing. I might spend my whole day on the phone or IM with people, but thanks for feeds, I don’t generally have to interrupt them unless we have something important to talk about or I just want to be social. (happens occasionally)

No one likes having to give or listen to long drawn out reports. Everyone loves conversation, debate, and getting things done. Management by Feeds makes work more fun.

Looking at our visitor stats today based on location. It looks like we still have some room to grow because there are still a few places in the world where no one has ever visited our site. Here are a few of the countries that we still need to reach:

• Mongolia
• The great Republic of Turkmenistan
• Bolivia
• Côte d’Ivoire
• Belarus (practically our neighbors, too!)

We have Europe and North America pretty well covered, though Montana is looking a little sparse.

ABout a week ago I was attending one of the best events of the year in the tech community. SXSW. Part of the allure of the event is the diverse background of the participants. Techies, software and hardware gurus, business development, and venture capitalists. Each and every one of them asking the same question? “So, what do you do?” Needless to say my elevator pitch has gotten quite refined.

But, what about the details?

I don’t sweat it anymore. Even if I only get to my computer once a day (that feels like suffocation to a web-app company owner) I feel ‘in-the-loop’ even when I am 1,007 miles away from my closest colleague (that is the distance from Austin, TX to Phoenix, AZ). How? It may sound trite, but RSS feeds.

Being a mac user I have become very fond of using NetNewsWire, now owned by Newsgator Technologies. I know that I don’t need to explain what it does, technically. However, the content that I have subscribed to allows me to be kept current on the decisions of my co-founders, updates in support issues, our development cycle, and my favorite, our sales figures.

Even when my co-founders are 5,523 miles away, their latest thoughts allow me to answer the question, “So, what do you do?” with daily precision.

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In fact, I am writing this from Dallas, TX and just learned that 3 more accounts were opened. Gotta love RSS!

Interview with Design guru and Rails explorer, Josh Williams.

Ken Yarmosh has an excellent post today about bringing Web 2.0 technologies to the mainstream. It’s true. RSS may seem world changing, but it won’t be as long as only 11% of users know what it is.

So what will it take to take technologies like RSS mainstream? Well, they need a killer app, for one thing. And blogs aren’t it. Sorry.

A killer app must solve a specific, major problem in a way that affects most people in the market. It must be so compelling that everyone will want it, even if it is new and “risky”.

The problem with blogs is that they solve a problem the majority of users never knew they had. Sure, for a select few, the global conversation enabled by RSS and blogs is life changing. But, as Shel Israel points out, the blogger lifestyle isn’t for everyone. In fact, for most people, spending their days trying to stay on top of a global conversation is not appealing at all.

So, back to the drawing board. What could take RSS mainstream? How about Business Management?

Think about this: every company thrives on the flow of information. Most of us spend the first hour or two of our day checking website, reading email reports, and hanging around the water cooler to catch up on all the important information flowing through our business.

This not only takes a lot of time, but its very inefficient. Informal communication networks and fixed reporting systems are unreliable. When an important event happens in a business, the news may or may not get to the right person. It all depends on who’s at work they day, their priorities, and so on.

Now enter RSS. Imagine if every software system in your business published an RSS feed. Imagine if every important project in your company had its own blog. Imagine hundreds of feeds running through your business that you can subscribe to selectively. Imagine having immediate, reliable notification of important events going all the way up the management chain as soon as they occur. Now that’s life changing!

This kind of information flow is possible even today. I’m the CEO of a small team. We have 12 people spread all over the world working on different parts of the business literally 24 hours a day. Thanks to the 43 Sprout-related feeds I have in my newsreader, I know almost immediately when something important happens anywhere at anytime. And no one has to stop what they are doing to come and tell me.

It feels great to know what is going on in the business. What’s even better though, is that when a problem comes up that I need to deal with, I’m generally already well informed. It isn’t just me either. Our whole team works like this, which means that we can make better decisions, faster, and with less effort than we could without our feed readers.

As RSS feeds begin to appear in more and more business software and as more and more businesses learn the power of “Management by Feed”, eventually this is going to reach a tipping point. And that is when you will finally start to see RSS both understood and adopted by the masses.

Mainstream is just around the corner for Web 2.0 technologies. We just need to find the right killer apps.

UPDATE: Peter and I talked about this quite a bit more after I first posted this. We are going to write some more posts in the coming days outlining some of the ways Management by Feed has helped Sproutit.

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Sproutit builds web apps for small business. Our new service Mailroom can do wonders for your sales and support email. (And yes, it has RSS feeds.)

Today is March 20th. To some that day is just like any other day. For me and a few select individuals, this day has changed the world forever. Birthdays.

Today is indeed my birthday; 28 years ago in Webster, TX (now within the city limits of Houston). But, did you know that one of my childhood heros, Mister Rogers, shares the same birthday? You bet. World changers and history makers are we.

Now, being from Texas also means that I am loud and proud. This year, Texas and I share the fortune of being ‘The Great Twenty-Eight’ (Texas was the 28th state in the union). So, this is my year to be the new-and-improved Great 28.

When will they understand? A new era of business has begun and the SBA needs to get onboard.

Every business keeps records – customer contacts, order history, support logs, inventory, you name it. If you’ve ever had the task of building a database to manage these records, you know what a headache it can be.

Very soon our friends a Smallthought will launch DabbleDB, a web-based database, that will change all that.

I’ve been playing with Dabble for a few months now and I have to say that I’m really impressed by it. Dabble has all the things we look for in a business web app. It works great in teams, its easy to get started (signup takes 5 minutes), and its affordable.

What impressed me most about Dabble, though, is how fast you can create new databases. Most database apps, like FileMaker or Access, require a lot of setup before you can start really using them with your data. First you design your fields, then your views, then your logic. It can take days.

With Dabble, it’s much simpler. You simply add new fields as you need them. Dabble will take care of ensuring they are the the format and linked together properly. Adding views on your data is just as simple. One click to add a field here, another click to add a field there and you are done.

I was able to setup a new contact database for Sproutit, for example, in about 15 minutes. FileMaker or Access would have taken a few hours at least.

Like all other database products, Dabble is easiest to use once you’ve seen someone else use it too. Thankfully, Smallthought has posted a great demo movie of Dabble to give you a taste of what it can do.

If you want to keep better records for your business, but you aren’t ready to invest a few days trying to setup a database, then let Dabble do it for you. We have here at Sproutit and we love it.

Check out the dabble demo and signup for their launch announcement list

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Sproutit builds web apps for small business. Our new service Mailroom can do wonders for your sales and support email.

Matthew Stibbe, the “Writter-in-Chief” at Articulate Marketing and blogger at Bad Language has written a handy introduction to business blogging at Bcentral, a Microsoft site for U.K. small businesses.

Most of The Big Act’s readers may already be pretty experienced in this increasingly common aspect of business communications, but some may not. And it’s not a bad page to pass off to introduce new employees or associates to the process of business blogging.

Derek Featherstone is one of the most knowledgeable CSS/XHTML and web accessibility experts I know. He helped us fix a nasty bug with our CSS when Mailroom first launched and he’s going to be doing some exciting accessibility-related things with us later on down the line.

JadedPixel is the company that is building what looks to be a very usable web-store called Shopify. Just the sort of hosted, easy-to-use, web-based business software we love around here.

Derek will be speaking at the next OGRE meeting, sponsored by JadedPixel, in Ontario. If you are in the area, I definitely recommend you check it out.

Full information

Why? Because yesterday we upgraded some infrastructure behind Mailroom and it took us that long to make sure everything was working just right.

This is the reason why you should use web-based software to run your business whenever possible. Now its our job to pull long nights to keep your technology running, not yours.

Among the updates we made to Mailroom in the last week was a small but important one: Reply and Close.

Normally, when you reply to a message, Mailroom will take it off your needs attention page for 2 days. If you don’t hear back from the person by then, Mailroom will bring the email back to your needs attention page so you can follow up with the person. It’s a great little feature to help you make sure you stay in close contact with your customers.

Of course, you don’t want look at all your email over and over again every two days. That is why you can close it. When you close a conversation, you are telling Mailroom that you don’t expect to hear anything more from your customer. Mailroom won’t bring these conversations back to your Needs Attention page unless you get another email from the person.

When we first launched, there was no easy way to reply to a conversation and mark it closed at the same time. You had to reply, then wait a few days for Mailroom to bring it back to your Needs Attention page, and then close it.

But no more.

We’ve added a handy dandy “Reply and Close” button to our standard reply box. If you reply to an email and you don’t expect to hear back from the person, click on this button instead and Mailroom will never bring it back to your Needs Attention page again!

(This is a post about Mailroom: our easy-to-use service for managing your sales and support email. Try it out for yourself here.)

Hello Everybody:

My name is Curt Hopkins and I’m the new Director of Marketing here at Sproutit. I just wanted to introduce myself and let you know what I’m here for.

Prior to Sproutit, I dallied in saving the world, leading the creation of the multilingual anonymous blogging wiki, BlogSafer.org.

I am also the founding director of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, which is devoted to identifying and addressing threatened bloggers and threats to bloggers.

You can also get a big load of my personal gibberish by tuning into my personal blog, Morpheme Tales. Though frankly, why would you?

More on point, I think Sproutit is an exciting company with a shiny future, a great first product, Mailroom, and a bunch of equally excellent new products in the wings.

I will be helping out with efforts to connect with you, whether you are customers, potential customers, fellow app creators, or just interested in the use and future of web-based applications in business.

In the immediate future, we’ll be making improvements to the blog and podcast and expanding the content. We will also be bringing in guest bloggers to give you additional points of view on important issues, not to mention a break from our voices.

If you have suggestions, requests or criticisms of the product, the company or the blog, drop them in the comments or fire off an email to me.

Our database upgrade was successful and Mailroom is available again. We are still upgrading our email receiver, so new email may not be received for the next hour or so.

-Your Friendly Mailroom Maintenance Team

A quick chat with David Panos from Pluck at SXSW.

Mailroom will be down tonight for about 90 minutes sometime between 12am and 8am EST as we do some scheduled maintenance. If you have any questions, please email us at support@sproutit.com.

The International Herald Tribune had an interesting article about the theme of the upcoming CeBIT conference:

Throughout the week in Hannover, Germany, companies at the world’s most highly attended tech trade fair will pitch their latest and greatest communications wares at Cebit. But to hear it from some of Germany’s largest companies, the killer application for interoffice communications, from the boardroom to the mailroom, is – drum roll, please – e-mail. (from E-mail: Still a killer app? – Technology – International Herald Tribune)

The article goes on to say that for all the talk of IMs, RSS, Blogs, and Podcasts, Email is still the biggest way people use the web. This is why it is so important for you to be able to connect with your customers effectively using Email. Do a newsletter (we are working on ours…), offer your blog by email using Rssfwd, and use Mailroom is provide your customers prompt, personal responses.

Microsoft today announced that its launching the Web’s Largest Advertising Network. They are running ads on all of their new Windows Live services including Windows Live Office. Advertisers include JC Penny, Coca Cola, and Monster Worldwide.

Excuse me, but when is the last time you were working on your contacts or email and suddenly felt like shopping online at JC Penny?

As I’ve said many times before but the real innovation at Overture/Google was to make ads useful. Well placed ads next to search results help you find what you are looking for. Why do you think Google makes so much money on ads placed directly next to search results while most people who run those same ads on their blogs make almost nothing?

The customer is in charge. Simply showing an ad does not a business model make.

I’m sure you folks at Microsoft are really smart. Maybe one of you could explain to me why you think this will work. This looks like 90’s Internet bubble thinking to me.

Almost all of our email addresses go through Google Gmail (which then feeds into Mailroom where we handle all of our support and sales email). Today, Gmail was unavailable via POP for about 4 hours. Serious disruption to our workflow.

Guess what we heard from Google…Nothing. Nada. Even on their forums where customers go to ask about this sort of thing, not a peep was heard from the Google peeps.

I could never get away with that. But then again, I’m small. Every customer matters to me. Think about it.

Nik from TechCrunch loves Mailroom:

There are a couple of key points with this solution, the first is better email management and in turn better customer management. The second is faster responses which will save you time and overall better customer service. There is a key value proposition here for small businesses who can use the free account to find out just how much hassle it saves them. Getting setup with Mailroom is simple and the pricing is reasonable considering the time being saved in having not only a hosted email solution, but one that saves you time and enables you to serve your own customers better.

(Read the rest of Mailroom Manages Small business Mail)

Thanks for using Mailroom Nik!

A quick chat with SXSW Interactive demonstrator, Charles Ribaudo from Jambo Networks.

It’s funny. Doing the most basic things in Rails are really simple. If you’ve seen the intro to rails demo video, you know what I’m talking about. But, scaffolding is really only about 1% of the magic of Rails.

The funny thing is… the scaffolding in the video is what drew many of us to the upstart framework in the first place. It just made things look so easy.

Of course, it was also the scaffolding that confused many of the initial critics of RoR.

Many of these critics, who didn’t take a hard enough look at Rails, thought its magic lay in the scaffolding. Silly detractors, scaffolding is for kids!

Note for non-techies: scaffolding is basically throw-away code that helps you rapidly prototype the functionality of an app.

The Magic of Rails != Its Nifty Scaffolding Feature

Once you spend a good amount of time developing a complex Rails application, you see first-hand that scaffolding is just a very, very tiny part of the framework.

Much has been written about this before, but the beauty of Rails lies in abstracting away the dull, boring parts of coding and development … allowing you to focus on the good stuff—fixing bugs and adding features!

Another great thing about Rails is that you can follow the rabbit hole just about as far down as you’d like.

There’s always something new on the horizon, such as integration tests and Selenium (JavaScript-powered, browser-based) acceptance testing.

That magic feeling …. of actually loving to code!

Really digging into Rails makes me feel like I did back when I first learned Java for the first time. PHP never made me feel that way.

With Rails, that loving, magic feeling I used to have for programming is back! Yeah, baby.

OK, I know its a tired subject. But this just happened and I thought it was interesting:

Launch at DEMO Cost: almost $30,000 increase in traffic for two days following: 100% Cost per % increase: $300

Brief mention on Signal vs. Noise blog Cost: $0 increase in traffic for two days following: 50% Cost per % increase: $0

We got a lot more out of demo than just an increase in traffic, but still, interesting how much impact a single mention on a blog like SvN (unsolicited) can have compared to an event that took months of planning and lots of dollars.

After attending a panel on “how to start and hold a web conference” I had a brief moment to meet with the Williams from Blinksale. I started poking around their site and saw this. We got an honorable mention. I was particularly glad to hear that they really liked using Mailroom for their own small business, FirewheelDesign. That absolutely made my day!

If anything makes your day, it is hearing feedback from customers. Not to boast, but good things happen in Texas…

Dori Smith – the contrarian

11:58

counter arguments for AJAX and what to watch out for when using it.

11:59

Accessibility and usability. Those not using JavaScript, will they get anything. Those with it turned off (server side folks afraid of security). Will pages and apps still work. Those using browsers without JavaScripting. Must plan for all occurrences.

12:01

Must meet user expectations. Back button, bookmark a page, etc…

12:04

Toolkits: beware of those kits made by one or two folks. May not be around in a few years.

Dylan interjects that subversion (SVN) did not exist 5 years ago, so finding code will be much easier now.

12:05

Cross browser & cross platform testing and usage. Find a toolkit that supports multiple browsers and platforms. Yahoo’s dev stuff is very clear what is and is not supported. They list those which are fully supported, partially supported and not supported and what should be expected when used. (Good point I think).

12:08

Her personal pet peeves – “Hi, i am here to save you from the horrible stuff you have been using.” Mainly from business marketing folks (the suits). And the super geeks from a PHP background, usually.

12:11

Big confusion amongst JAVA and JAVAScript. Two different languages. Although JAVA Script was named by marketing folks because of the popularity of JAVA a few years back.

12:13

Must make items usable and user friendly. Should be a very small learning curve for your users.

11:42

Dylan is doing a code sample. First browser sniff (check which browser is being used). Interesting debate about UI. e.g. using the back button. Should one go back a page, go back one UI section, back to the last site.

11:45

JSON RPC – call back function. Very handy for fraud on sites, (PayPal spammers).

Request limits in html (2 per page). Can be got around by using fake domains. a.sproutit.com, b.sproutit.com, c.sproutit.com etc..

11:48

investing in a ToolKit. Will be a learning curve, so pick with one and stick to it.

11:51

ToolKits

• Prototype: Ruby
• Mochkit: Python
• Zimbra: Java
• YUI (Yahoo): PHP
• Dojo: JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, etc…

See Dylan’s slides Here

Hosted by David Humphries.

Jesse James Garrett (Adaptive Path), Dylan Schriemann , Dori Smith – panel

10:35

Jesse begins. The story of the coinage of AJAX. Only days before a meeting he coined the term but used Google Maps as a demo of what AJAX can do.

It is coming. I am just running around like crazy trying to meet folks and figure out where I am at. So, later tonight I will make sure to update you all via podcast. “I am here in Austin…Living the Dream. Until next time, ciao.”

Yesterday at 4:10pm EST, a major power failure at our hosting facility caused our servers to lose their network access unexpectedly. Mailroom was unavailable for about an hour, but no data was lost.

Our home page was down for a bit longer-about 11 hours actually-so if you tried to signup for a new account, that is why you could not access it.

We apologize for this downtime. We are looking at ways we can avoiding this in the future.

PS. Interesting side note: During the outage, we got a mention on the SvN blog, firewheel blog, and several people I’ve emailed over the last few weeks finally decided to check us out. Of course, no one could get to our site. Talk about Murphy’s Law!

The folks at “37signals” mentioned Sproutit Mailroom today:

Took a look at this nice review of SproutIt. Jason said, “Def a cool product. really nice idea. very niche and very useful.” (from Fly on the wall (week of March 10) – Signal vs. Noise)

I’ve been looking at their new product Campfire as well. It’s an interesting approach to chat. I’m exploring ways we can use it to better connect with our customers.

Josh at Firewheeldesign says:

If you’re going to build a product like a Blinksale, Skobee, or Sproutit’s Mailroom you’d better be ready to drink your own kool-aid (or clean your own crap off your shoes). There’s really no point to building it otherwise. (from Firewheel Design | Fueling Icon and Interface Design for Web 2.0)

We call it “eating your own dogfood” around here but the principle is the same: if you are going to sell something, you’d better make sure people in your company use it themselves. There is nothing like being your own customer to drive you to make your product or service the best it can be.

All was well in my world at SXSW. I was parking in the convention center lot, getting ready to go down and register for the conferece…then, “click”....”oh crap!”

I locked my keys and cell phone in my car. I called for a tow truck and am waiting inside as I blog about this. Heck of a way to start the conference. Never fear, it will only get better from here.

Earlier this week we hired Dan Munzert to help us around the office here in Prague. He’s a great guy who’s going to do a lot of things for us, including helping out with support.

Thankfully, we were way ahead when it came to support because we are using Mailroom. Simply by giving him an account, Dan can access and send all the of the replies we normally use for support. He can also find out every communication we’ve ever had with a customer in just two clicks. Mailroom even helps him dig into all of this information by suggesting replies and assigning emails for him.

It’s amazing how much less training you have to do when so much of the knowledge you need to do the job is available and organized in Mailroom.

How are you using Mailroom? Drop me a line if you want to talk about it, and maybe we can do an interview blog post about you and your company.

Curt Hopkins struck up a conversation with us about a month ago and we’ve been chatting ever since. Today I’m happy to announce Curt is joining us as the newest member of our team. I would say Curt is a marketing maven, he would say he’s VP of Fun. He’s probably more right than I am.

Before Sproutit, Curt started the Committee to Protect Bloggers.

Anyway, Curt has an interesting blog that you should read. He’s pretty chatty, though, so I’m sure you will hear from him on this blog also.

Welome Curt!

We had dinner with our friends as Smilebox at DEMO this year. This company was founded by a husband and wife team who had specialized in market research at Microsoft. It’s not surprising, then, that they conducted extensive customer research throughout the entire process of developing their product. They did focus groups, studies, and surveys every step of the way to tune their product.

What is astonishing, to me at least, is the quality of product they produced. Smilebox is scrapbook software. This is nothing new. What makes Smilebox remarkable is that they took such a common category of software and finally did it right. Every feature, every quirk, every aspect of Smilebox has been designed with lots of feedback from the actual people who will be using it.

Good market research can determine your business’ success.

One of the most quoted facts about Sproutit, for some reason, is that we interviewed over 30 small businesses before we decided to build Mailroom. The truth is, had we not done this research, we would have probably built an order fulfillment system for webstores. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry. Neither did anyone else, which is why we did not build it. We never would have known that, however, had we not started with those interviews.

Some people say you should start a business by building something you would need yourself. That’s definitely good advice, but make sure you also go check with plenty of other people in your target market first to make sure you are not the only one with the problem.

PS: Smilebox has a really cool intro movies, you should visit their site just to check it out.

When someone reported a bug for Nisus Writer Express, we all really wanted to fix their problem right away, but we couldn’t. We had to wait until our next update was released. Each release to the code had to go through user testing and a proper build, etc. so we rarely did releases more frequently than once a quarter.

The other night I happened to be working when someone reported a bug they found Mailroom. I immediately knew how to solve the issue, so I fixed the problem and emailed the person back within maybe 10 minutes of their report.

Three months to deliver a fix down to 10 minutes. That’s service! Think about that the next time you find some nasty bug in the software you use for your business and you have to wait for the next release to have it fixed.

All packed and ready to go to SXSW 2006.

TechCrunch today reported on Microsoft’s launch of Live Clipboard:

The core idea is a new open standard, called Live Clipboard, which allows the copy and pasting of data, including dynamic, updating data, across and between web applications and desktop applications. (from Microsoft Live Clipboard – “Wiring the Web”)

This technology could do a lot for people using web apps, especially small businesses. One of the biggest challenges with web software is that you can’t easily mix and match content like you can in some desktop apps.

A few years ago I was involved with creating a similar technology for Mac applications. To be useful, this technology must be:

1. Open source and free.
2. Very simple for developers to implement
3. Supported by all the key players.

Microsoft has done this kind of technology before. It was called OLE and it so far has failed to be widely adopted because Microsoft violated points 1 and 2. Let’s hope Ray Ozzie, the new CTO there, sees to it they don’t make the same mistake again.

We’ll definitely keep our eye on this for Mailroom.

Solution Watch just posted a great review of web-based business tools you can use to run your small business. We’re honored to have Mailroom included in the list with several others including Writely and Campfire from 37signals:

Managing a business can be quite a task. But sometimes it isn’t always about the business itself that makes it such a task, but the work you have to get through to actually work. I’m talking about email, documents, project management, timecards, and internal communications. These tasks take up a lot of valuable time that you could be using for actual work and thankfully there are services out there that can help out dramatically.

Read Getting Down to Business)