Organizer for Gmail | OtherInbox.

what is the reason every merchant should not offer email as an option for receipts?

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UPS, and many others, are even worse, asking for separate fields for Street Address1, Street Address2, etc. Google Maps do it, why would not the CRM which has entering of addresses as a major, and common, use case?

What is merely annoying when entering your own profile, becomes truly distracting in a CRM system. I will settle for correcting the system on the rare occasions it gets the address wrong.

This seemed like such a no-brainer that three years I thought of building a service to do just that, providing an address verification widget to those who needed it. And then I thought, “c’mon, everyone will have this implemented as soon as they realize how annoying entering addresses field-by-field is.” Go figure.

To the survey, Batman! Without being a UX expert (and pretending I have not dealt with them over the years) I can tell right away – Verizon does not care about my feedback, and never did.

Verizon Customer Service Survey

1. Why are you asking me about Live Chat? I did not come to use the Live chat. I came to do something on the website and Live Chat is mitigating a failure of the site. If the site did its job I would not be even using the chat. If Verizon cared about my experience, that’s what they would ask about. Ask me about the experience, not a feature. 

Sidebar: I can see the meeting that drove this decision. “But we are chat division, we cannot be held accountable for the overall experience. This is to make us – live chat customer support – better.” said their manager in an important meeting. Other people in the room, most of whom probably live so far out of the city that FiOS is not available, nod sagely. Everyone in that room has built their careers by defending and growing their turf, not by thinking of their eventual customers’ experience with Verizon.

2. I have no idea. How does this question possibly add a value to me? I already told Verizon the service was poor or excellent. In my case the chat people are always well-meaning but useless. I would not recommend the chat service because to use it is to admit the website has already failed. I would recommend my friends use this service like the would use a fire extinguisher – a painful last resort that will add to the damage but might prevent a bigger loss. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. So why ask this? Because Verizon does not care about your time or getting useful data. They care about TPS reports.

3. I am on a website!!!! That’s clearly my preferred method. It is not any of the choices. And I cannot stand when you require me to answer a question. Are you seriously telling me that my feedback is useless without this answer? An answer to a question you could not even provide adequate choices for? Right… Remind myself again - Verizon does not care about your time or getting useful data. They care about TPS reports.

4. The only useful field on the survey. Maybe it should be the one required field. And the first one. Why not invite the user to tell you how they feel? That would tell me Verizon is willing to read what I write and think about it. But I know they won’t. They will relegate my survey submission to a disgruntled pile, find a way to exclude my ratings from their overall numbers and move on.

To summarize – if you have to give you users a survey, heed the lessons of Verizon. Ask the users in a manner that respects their time and opinion, else your monthly payment from these users will suddenly become $60 less.

If you liked this post, read the first one I wrote on “how not to do surveys“.

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• Online surveys – how not to do them (www.fridnet.com/slava)

Klout seems to think that by giving access to product and marketing companies to provide samples or early access to whoever they consider “influencers” in their field, they would occupy a niche that is currently driven by intuition of marketers about the influence of specific people and heuristics – such as professional stature of someone in the field.

Klout Perks (beta)

This approach makes sense if you believe that a lot influencers are not the people you would traditionally think of. Personally, I am not sure there are enough people who are influential but are flying under the radar to make it worth while, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

Perhaps this is just the low-hanging fruit they are picking first. I could imagine that if you could more accurately identify not just the influencers, but people generally interested in some topics, that would make marketers a lot more interested. Again, this assumes existing techniques are worse at these predictions than klout would be.

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• What is your social media influence? An interview with Klout (maloneyonmarketing.com)
• You may have Online Influence, but do you have any Klout? (thelearningzone.co.za)
• In Defense of Klout Measurement (socialmediaobserver.wordpress.com)
• Digital Influence Recalibrated, Part 1: Klout’s measurement spectrum (thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com)

I am sure it is hard to scale rapidly to 500 million people like facebook, or 5 billion visitors like Google, but PayPal has been stable forever. How hard can it be for an “internet-scale” company to actually scale to perform. It takes so long to login or to go through the three steps of sending money to someone that I constantly switch windows – and eventually time out because I forget I was in a middle of a transaction. Sure I am impatient, but that’s because Google taught me what proper response times are supposed to be – and it is not 15 or 30 seconds per click.

Clean up your act PayPal. You have had an incredible market all to yourself for a long time, and people are gunning for you now – and they will not make users spend a minute trying to send someone money.

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• How To Use Serve, American Express’ PayPal Clone (AXP) (businessinsider.com)
• PayPal Doubles Fees, Forgets to Tell Customers (blogs.sitepoint.com)
• Google Payment VP/Former PayPal Exec Osama Bedier On eCommerce: Major Change Is Coming (techcrunch.com)

I get asked to answer a lot of online surveys, and usually ignore them. Once in a while a product I like will ask me to fill out a survey – and I will agree. Most of the time I regret that decision and abandon the process somewhere, because the marketers are just being rude:

1. You are being rude to me – when you are asking too much personal information. I am eager to help improve your product or service, but not to the point of exposing my financial and personal history. If you would not feel comfortable asking your decidedly weird rich uncle for this information until you see his will – do not ask me.
2. You are being rude to me when your questions suck. Questions are hard to understand and scales do not make sense. Please remember – I am not playing sudoku or solving the Times puzzle. I am not interested in thinking hard so *you* get something out of it. The amount of time and money you spend designing the questions shows. Lack of the time shows even more. It is rude to waste my time because you could not bother thinking of phrasing questions that make sense.
3. You are being rude to me when you do not tell me where I am in the process. Today’s example, from American Express, did not have a progress bar. I did not know if I was almost done or not even close. Eventually, I just closed the window. It is rude to waste other people’s time.

I think the “weird rich uncle” is a good test subject. Do not send your customers anything you would not do to your rich uncle. Customers are fickle, and their good intentions do not last very long if you try to actively exploit them.

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Image via Wikipedia

I was at a meeting with a potential customer once, where we discussed moving forward with a social portal project. Their process – despite having some great people (!!) – compels them to spend months and years discussing how things would be done, if there were to be done, assuming they should be done. Or something like that; what they were unable to do is actually move forward. For 18 months. At the same time, we can read about Groupon‘s enterprise architecture here.

We spoke with Ryan Miller and Chris Bland from Groupon about how the company has managed to scale its business so quickly and with such agility. Rather than relying on its own complex internal systems infrastructure, Groupon uses tools like Salesforce.com and Amazon EC2 and S3 to keep the site powered and deals flowing.

A company barely existed 18 months ago! And then I went back to this letter to Enterprise Architecture I saw yesterday:

Actually, we’re still burned from the last time you did that to us, when you told us that “multichannel integration” would give us all the competitive advantage that we needed. It didn’t give us anything very much, but we suppose you got some “cool” bits or architecture. Anyway, once bitten, twice shy.

But even more surprising than all this was the discovery that even if we agreed to everything you want, we will then have to face an Architectural Council who have the power to overturn everything and send us back to the drawing board. Considering the constitution of this “council” is anyone who has a view on anything, we’ve heard on the grapevine pretty much no decisions get made ever. Apparently you all argue for hours over definitions of things such as TOGAFs and whether your “strategic” statements are correct or not. Its all so very ivory tower. Herds of elephants must have been destroyed in the process.

There is a lot in the post that I do not like, but it is hard to argue with the feeling most enterprise architecture teams inspire in their business users and IT colleagues. This reflection prompted a thought,

what if that is the true meaning of Enterprise Architecture – something that lets the company scale as fast as possible with minimal costs. Period. Everything else is a red herring.

One organization had a series of meetings, and another went from start-up to a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees in hundreds of locations – all in a same interval it took Earth do 1.5 orbits around its star.

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The people who sign up for the Lincoln promotion aren’t handing over their credit-card numbers: they won’t automatically start getting billed when the promotion expires in 2012. And they’ll also learn that if you’re not a subscriber, you get shown offers for a free subscription.

via Lincoln offers free access to the NYT | Felix Salmon | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters.com.

Would not the lesson of Salon.com be of preeminent value here? They started out as a free service supported by advertising, moved behind a paywall similar to one NYT is trying to implement, had a nice twist on the pay-per-article approach and now seem to have switched to an NPR-like model of user donations and appreciation (plus display advertising). Does not seem to be working out too well for them, but of course NYT is a much bigger brand with a much bigger (longer? deeper?) reach.

The nice twist Salon.com had, as I recall, was that you could have an advertising-free membership, but you could also get a daily pass by watching a 30 second video ad. I really thought that was a great idea. Seemed very fair to me, at least. The Lincoln move for NYT seems very similar, and I hope it works for them. Personally, I believe it will mostly work for brand association and recall, especially if they keep telling me that the daily dose of NYT will be brought to me Lincoln.

I am not sure what it means, for me personally, to be among the 200,000 most heavy users of nytimes.com. Does not feel like an achievement, but if that gets me a “free pass”, I guess that’s good for something.

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I liked the beginning:

They gave her The Device when she was only 2 years old. It sent signals along the optic nerve that swiftly transported her brain to an alternate universe—a captivating other world. By the time she was 7 she would smuggle it into school and engage it secretly under her desk. By 15 the visions of The Device—a girl entering a ballroom, a man dying on the battlefield—seemed more real than her actual adolescent life. She would sit with it, motionless, oblivious to everything around her, for hours on end. Its addictive grip was so great that she often stayed up half the night, unable to put it down.

When she grew up, The Device dominated her house: no room was free from it, no activity, not even eating or defecating, was carried on without its aid. Even when she made love it was the images of The Device that filled her mind. Psychologists showed that she literally could not disengage from it—if The Device could reach the optic nerve, she would automatically and inescapably be in its grip. Neuroscientists demonstrated that large portions of her brain, parts that had once been devoted to understanding the real world, had been co-opted by The Device.

A tale of the dystopian technological future? No, just autobiography. The Device is, of course, the printed book and I’ve been its willing victim all my life.

via Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Will the digital revolution really change us? – By Alison Gopnik – Slate Magazine.

I just really like these two paragraphs, but then added some more ramblings below…

Firstly, all “greatest danger to our civilization ever” writings remind me a discussion before the “Device” was even invented. From “Phaedrus“:

“…you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

At some point I really have to wonder – so what if these things, devices and technologies, change us? Is not change the constant and stability an aberration? Seeking to preserve what we are only grasping to understand – incompletely and painfully naively as the past state of our existence seems doomed to failure – and for what? Is the seeking to preserve, catalog, keep from disappearing just a knee-jerk reaction for a people who are lost in their own world, and are afraid to lose what little grasp of reality they (I?) hold? I think at this point few people hold to any kind of optimistic promise of technology – to make our lives better, easier; yet we reap its benefits all the time. Technology has fulfilled much of its promises, but what people earn for has never been technology or its abilities. I think “experts” are confused too – conflating ease of accepting today’s technology as a given with transformation or change of some abstract human nature.

I happen to think that, by and large, human nature is immutable, or at least extremely slowly d/evolving. If it were not – we would not be able to relate to Gilgamesh or Noah, care about D’Artagnan and Luke Skywalker, and have any reaction whatsoever to Scarlett O’Hara and Snooky. And if so – then being able to call out Facebook or Skype for ruining the civilization is a little simplistic and pessimistic not about technology, but humans themselves.

I, of course, am extremely partial to this version of Skywalker – who might invent the next “Device”:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0

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• Review of Alone Together by Sherry Turkle (fredbortz.scienceblog.com)
• Stephen Colbert Asks Sherry Turkle: What Is There To Live For Without Latest iPhone?! (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)

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Image by mrflip via Flickr

Thought this was interesting: Digital Swarm Behavior

In general, I keep waiting for a new set of paradigms for “everyone to be talking about” to emerge.

The candidates I hear about are:

• “social graph”, as in “facebook rules the social graph”
• “big data” – alright, this one is pretty much a common phrase by now
• “internet scale” – common in tech circles, but I think will make a jump into mainstream reporting soon

I also liked how the article was written, especially when compared to something like Is Your Enterprise Socially-Networked or Just Your Employees which was nearly incomprehensible, and pretty boring when actually parsed.

The latter was just… lame. And what’s up with capitalizing all Your Words In A Title?

ps. I am not sure what it is today with all the “” this and CAP that for me. apologies.

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- from a Colleague’s conference abstract

With all the talk about customer/user experience, businesses sometimes forget that ALL interactions matter, and that friction built in any phase of the transaction will slow down the momentum. Having 1-click shopping experience is great, but not when there is no way to reset a password and complete a sale in the time already mentally allotted for it.

Recently, for example, I was about to buy shoes from Zappoes.com, since I figured it would be easiest for me for to just reorder the last pair of shoes I bought there. With as many account we have nowadays, and different security requirements, I could not remember the password and had to request a reset. A common enough occurrence, I suppose. I find it strange that Zappoes can get shoes to me, if I could order them, faster than they got the password reset email to my Inbox. Like many consumers, I am willing to wait 5 or 10 minutes for such an email, but when it does not arrive – I am forced (forced, I tell you!) to go to Plan B. In this case Amazon won the day. It took me a few extra clicks to locate my desired pair of shoes – but at least I could get in and buy.

So a kind reminder to online merchants – I suspect you lose a sale for every 10 minutes password reset is not done. And every such lost sale is totally unnecessary. If you are not sure how long your site takes to reset a password – go and test it now, do not put it off till tomorrow when more of your sales are going to Amazon, which is one site users do remember their passwords.

One issue that I ran into was leveraging Expeditor’s Accounts API. I wanted to use that API, but I kept getting NullPointerExceptions when processing an account update. I think the documentation could be improved a bit in this area.

via Socialize Me: Lotus Connections Notifications Plugin for Sametime.

Database Architect will be responsible for evaluating the architecture of the Air Force Weather Weapon System with respect to minimizing data access times, expanding data storage from the Terabyte range to the Petabyte range, ensuring high availability (>99%) while minimizing overall cost.

Optimum database design is required to enable operational forecasters in functional and regional forecast centers worldwide to acquire and process both sensed and gridded forecast information from deterministic and ensemble prediction systems and create a forecaster modified layer for specific weather parameters in near real time.

New database architecture must also enable rapid and high-volume web-based hosting, collection, and dissemination of data subsets and post-processed files that include gridded data, text, and common visualization formats as well as KML (Google Earth)-compatible files. Database architect must be experienced with standard data sharing practices such as Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and SOAP based approaches.

I like the bit about keeping the costs down too – it is high time architects took business and finance objectives as requirements – not bureaucratic obstacles.

This one is very simple, a google doc spreadsheet parsed in using a DataViewer widget sending data to a NavTeq widget.

IBM’s Lotus Greenhouse is really great for trying these things, BTW, and the team’s YouTube channel ItsMashtastic is great for an idea or an example.

Sent to a [SYNTHETIC-WORLDS] mailing list:

A main goal of the synthetic worlds initiative at Indiana University is to develop large games as research environments. To test some ideas, we have prepared a browser-based game of kingdoms, trade, diplomacy, and warfare in the stone age. The world is called Greenland and it enters open beta today. We invite those interested in such things to help us by testing the environment and contributing reactions and criticism to the forums.

To enter Greenland, go to http://greenlandgame.com/ and choose the Mercator server (the other two servers are closed for internal testing).You will need a code to register for the server; it is GLOPENACCESS.

If you have questions or problems, please contact our community manager Matt Falk at mfalk@umail.iu.edu.

Thank you.

--
Edward Castronova
Associate Professor of Telecommunications
Indiana University

Suddenly, New York looks pretty good.

In case you just want to go straight into the visualization, click here – http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/house-prices-to-income-ratio

No matter, I thought, surely wordpress uses the database password() function and I could just get a new password hash, insert it into the DB, and be good again. To PhpMyAdmin we go… and Wrong! WordPress does not use the function, probably with good reason.

Ok… what now? How about I reverse-engineer the hash function, include a call to it in one of theme designs and get a new hash in whatever way the hash is computed. Then, I can insert it into the database… Yeah – in what other ways could I try to scratch my left ear with my right foot?

Finally I remember something painfully obvious – I do not need to hash anything, just return “true” from some function called checkPassword or VerifyPassword – there is always one somewhere. Indeed, CheckPassword() function does this:
function CheckPassword($password, $stored_hash)
{
$hash = $this->crypt_private($password, $stored_hash);
if ($hash[0] == '*')
$hash = crypt($password, $stored_hash);

return $hash == $stored_hash;
}

comment out the last line and replace it with return true;

Now, just save the file, reload the page, and  login with a random password. Change the password to something I think I will remember, and change the code back…

And this is why I host my own instance of wordpress :)

I am trying to figure out how best to use the “deals” feature, and it would be really great if I could surface emails/notes from people involved in the deal without having to make 10 clicks. It was not even obvious to me that I could assign these to deals until I tried to change the email… At the very least, I should be able to drag an email/note to the “deal” that is already shown on the right side of the screen. Ideally, I would like to be able to add notes/emails from inside the deals – also with drag-n-drop…

Offtopic: Interestingly (for me) – I have immediately begun to expect that companies follow twitter and therefore will just pick up the resultant twit and comment on the blog. It’s all the fault of the GetSatisfaction.com team.

It’s gotten to the point that if I can’t interact with content, I don’t want to consume it. When I read books, I underline certain passages so I can blog about them later. If I were reading on a connected device, I’d simply reblog on tumblr and be done. I don’t think I’m unusual in this regard but I do think I’m in the leading edge of behavior and that more and more people will feel this way.A VC, Dec 2008

Ditto. Take a look at books left over from old (100+ years) writers, scientists, people. They are full of notes on the margins. This type of interaction with text only stopped recently, perhaps because a lot of content consumption went one-way — magazines, newspapers, TV. An old notebook of my grandmother’s I recently found has pages written out from books she borrowed and found insightful but did not own to write directly in. My big hope is that next version of Kindle would provide some kind of a solution. It is possible that other readers already provide these capabilities and I am just unaware of them…

I see a lot of people also blogging as they read through a book – something this type of functionality would facilitate. Does the world really need people to post half-formed thoughts the moment they get an urge to share them? Probably not, but we already do (reading this post qualifies), so making this sharing easier is not going to make things worse, but perhaps encourage those for whom current means are too convoluted or complicated to participate in the discussion.

Finally – I just think it is cool, and is another round of evolution in web mashups and in letting people share their informatin how they want it, where they want it.

No. I wanted to think through, by typing, what it was that has kept me from blogging for a better part of 4 years. It was not lack of source material – certainly these times have an overabundance of that. There is an issue of time, of course. It is pretty obvious that to build a readership, posts need to come with regularity that is well-known to journalists, but not easy to maintain on IT guys’ schedule. It is also recommended to stick to a particular topic or set of topics in which one has expertise or strong convictions. That approach was lacking as well. I like to think by typing, and I am certainly not going to be maintaining 5 different blogs for a carefully segmented presentation of my world views.

What I realized, is that the few people whose blogs I actually read with any regularity where “reasonably smart guys” who put out whatever it was that they wanted to share. That’s it. Some of them I knew personally, some I did not, some I even mostly disagreed with. In all cases; however, it was something for me to think about, to talk to someone else about – and perhaps that’s what matters to me. So, I will make the fool out of myself – writing about things I know little about, as well as risking my professional growth by writing about thing I *should* know about, but perhaps do not.

I might even, seriously now, write a bit about my biggest development challenges – my kids. I am still not sure how far to go there. They will inevitably find this blog in a couple of years and I do not want them to be scarred/horrified/overly pleased.

Anyway, I probably have to write here, since my family and co-workers cannot take any more of my soliloquies.

—–

Starting point for ruminations was this – IBM Recruiting ISVs, Partners to SAAS:

Viewing the software-as-a-service market as a major new-growth industry, IBM is offering a package of services and incentives to help software companies and channel partners deploy their products as hosted applications.

IBM is looking for a wave to catch to vault it over Sungard and other, smaller, companies specializing in hosting company’s backup servers and data. It is worthwhile, I think, to look at the generalizing principle on software-as-a-service (SAAS). What are its implications from a resiliency and continuity perspective?

For starters, SAAS goes beyond the now well-understood Application Service Provider (ASP) model. ASP implies that an application, usually one which covers at least one complete business process, is hosted by a service company rather than an internal IT department. From a computing perspective there is often little difference. After all, most large and medium-sized companies today have widely distributed IT deployments and most users do not know whether the web application they are using is coming to them from a data center 3 floors above or 3 thousand miles away. So what does it matter whether someone else is running a web server instead of your organization? Better organized resiliency programs certainly take this outsourcing into account when creating plans, treating ASPs as critical vendors as much as someone else supplying financial data or iron ore might be.

SAAS is a slightly different beast. One can think of an ASP provider as an implementation of SAAS, providing that “service” in SAAS in fairly large and monolithic chunks. But it need not remain that way. What if a SAAS provider is someone like former hitbox, providing a very specialized service of web analytics, or qualys continuously searching your network for vulnerabilities. In both cases, data might be downloaded and analyzed by a tool hosted by some other 3rd party, or internally. This software service is now provided as a small part of an overall business process, and may not even be known to the business unit as a component of the process that is provided by an outside vendor. To re-use the examples of services in this paragraph, we can consider the following scenario for web analytics:

IT Department provides traffic report and analysis to all departments in the enterprise. Most likely 90% of the department could not care less about the accuracy and granularity of the results. Marketing; however, is an exception. While it carefully tracks website usage all the time, a day-long outage of analytics would not be a major problem unless it coincides with a test run of a new marketing campaign. At which point and to which internal customers should IT direct an awareness campaign of the outside vendors it is using for the moment? Once a service become part of the enterprise services, their origin becomes largely transparent to the business level consumers of the service. It is worth noting that for most services only a small number of users will have a critical need of it. How should vendors be now evaluated for reliability and contracts structured?

Previously, when a department wanted to use an ASP both that business unit and IT would be involved in the evaluation process. However, SAAS will now allow both IT and business units to go it alone. That’s where things can start falling through the planning cracks since a lot of the services may not be part of the primary impact analysis process. In our scenario Marketing may not be aware that web analytics is separate from web server maintenance, and IT may not know that its outsourced analytics service is critical to some group – in this case Marketing – 3 weeks out of the year.

Similarly to how cheap Windows and Linux servers proliferated in workgroups a few years ago, cheap and transparent services will have a huge impact on how applications and business processes are assembled and executed in the future. Different providers may even be used for similar process steps in various locations or processes across the enterprise. How should customers reconcile their needs for efficient and cost-effective services with an increasingly flexible software services environment? One way, of course, is for an organization to forbid the casual use of outside software services and require than any allowed uses go through a rigorous evaluation process for each service, with clearly identified IT and business level integration points and fully performed cost-benefit analysis. That would work to keep smaller service vendors out, but they are also the most innovative ones.

Another way is for someone like IBM to step in. Salesforce is already doing something similar with its AppExchange, and I think other players are gearing up. IBM has an advantage over Salesforce and others, such as SAP or Oracle in that it has a much more independent platform. IBM can become, effectively, a guarantor of a service, whether it was developed by them or not. By providing the infrastructure, IBM can make sure the basic hosting things go well – such as service uptime, bandwidth, power, etc. Furthermore, IBM can host the same service in different configurations – critical for Marketing and delayed for other department, for example. Its market power would require service vendors to certify their products for stability and scalability, and remove the uncertainty from customers of dealing with a small and unknown entity. Organizations could then provide business rules for department to use, or at least test services, provided they comply with certain requirements – certified by IBM, and are hosted by a reliable vendor – such as IBM. At some point a need to both a certified host and certifying authority will become too strong not to produce a whole sub-industry. Currently, Accentures & Delloite’s of the world have the lead on certifying implementations (information security, for example). However, IBM already has a host of certification programs for its WebSphere Catalogue, as well as Ready for Virtualization and others relevant to organizational resiliency. Moreover, IBM has the ability the Accenture and its ilk lack of becoming insourced not only at the customer level, but vendor level as well. What that means is that vendors could develop services and solutions concentrating on their core competencies, not peripheral requirements of hosting an on-demand software service, for example.

As someone who works for a small vendor, I know that I would not very excited about having to build up a tremendous amount of infrastructure and support capabilities instead of farther developing our product. We did what we needed to do for our customers, but the less we have to do of things we have no competitive advantage in, the more value-added activities we can engage in. I am sure many other vendors feel the same way, and I think a lot of customers would be much happier if they could both easily use innovative services and have world-class hosting support to guarantee the robustness of that service.

Citi.com, Citibank.com, Citicards.com – how many different domains does one company want to provide to its customers? But at least my login will work, right? Nope. Register again. Except there are two problems, one personal, and another technical. Technical problem arises from the fact that I just get a “general error” when trying to register. My personal problem comes from the fact that “register” link takes me to another domain. Is not this exactly what all anti-phishing and identity theft literature talks about avoiding? I spent a while before I found that the URL I am being redirected to is indeed a valid Citigroup URL:

Ultimately it was for naught. Only credit cards, not citibank issued debit cards can even register for the citicards.com, presumably, because debit cards linked directly to people’s savings and checking accounts do not actually need protection afforded to credit card holders that are (most of the time) only responsible for the first $50 of fraudulent charges.

But there is a happy ending. Eager to succeed I found an old citibank credit card and successfully registered and obtained the one-time number. It took some time to find on the website – but it was there (citibank website search is truly a useless feature). The web-based generator would now allow me to set an expiration date or a credit limit to the unique number, but at least it generated the number. After 2 or 3 hours of research a trivial transaction was completed to the satisfaction of both parties.

ps. I still cannot find the generator for American Express, although I hear it exists.

Still, some things just are not perfect, for me. Recently, I noticed that I can now mark my post as “do not share.”

I think; however, that this option does not serve me all too well. More often than not I do not mind sharing the post. After all, the links I bookmark are on the public Internet already. What I do mind sharing, sometimes, are the tags, or specifically some personal tags which I do not necessarily want others to know. For example, if I am doing some research for a client project, I would like to tag relevant links I find with the project name, but am afraid to do so because I do not want to accidentally divulge priveleged information. Often a great deal can be inferred about a project based on the links I catalogue.

So, I would like del.icio.us to add private tags. Just like I can create tag bundles right now, let me mark some tags as private, which means they do not show up as tags for users other than than myself. I can then continue safely tagging items as “software” or “SocialBookmarksForNerds”, and then quietly smile with quilty pleasure when I add the “IdeasToSteal” tag as well.