An Bui, Spelled An With 1 N

I spent 15 minutes talking to Michael Martinez today, a luxury I hadn’t had in a long time. We caught up a bit – we talked about my professional progress and the use of various social media applications, including Twitter.

Michael also gave me two pieces of unsolicited advice:

Advice #1 from Michael Martinez:

Blog more often than once every two weeks.

I got scolded. Perhaps that wasn’t Michael’s intention, but that was the communication I got loud and clear. My current boss once gave me feedback: “Communication happens at the receiver.” I can be as clear and unambiguous as possible, but the communication really happens when someone receives the message I’ve put forth. No message put forth? No communication, because I dropped the ball. I took took Michael’s feedback as a scolding, because I needed a kick in the pants. In trying to manage my time and life better, I’ve allowed things to slip, such as this blog. I haven’t been on Twitter as much either, which leads to this vague, disconnected feeling.

Between various applications I use to manage my time and life, I’ve also found I’ve added some analog to my life.

The short list of applications includes:

• Jott which I use to send myself SMS and email reminders in an effort to keep myself together
• Xobni which gets me more excited about my work email than I deserve to be
• RescueTime which provides analytics about the applications in which I spend the most time on a weekly basis
• Whrrl which tells me where to go for dinner. Because I’m that decisive.

The short list of analog includes:

• Moleskine Notebook for the times it’s not polite to Jott
• Multicolored Gel Pens because they’re pretty and provide a quick visual way to convey an additional layer of information. You know you love color-coding!
• Sticky Notes, for the notes I want to ensure stay on my desk.
• MyLackey.com because I rather do something else other than pick up dry cleaning.

The glue that keeps it all together for me is coffee. Even after twelve glorious hours of sleep, I jones so badly, I still have my giant coffee of the morning.

So I’m back in the saddle. That means Advice #2 is another post for another time.

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A few days ago I did a good thing - I downloaded Xobni and made Outlook something I’d want to use. Generally, I find Outlook slow, sluggish, and great at hiding my messages. We’ll pretend that folders to organize emails don’t exist in my reality.

Outlook with Xobni is still slow and sluggish. The benefit of Xobni is that my messages become magically unhidden! I spend less time in Outlook looking for things, which cuts down the number of actions I’m taking inside of Outlook, which minimizes loading time for opening emails and ultimately, saves me time.

I use Gmail. I love Gmail. I use and love Gmail because it’s email made stupid easy. I have zillion MB’s of storage. My email box is my own personal index that I can take a Google Search bar and find the relevant emails that I’m looking for. Using Outlook made me wish I could just forward all email to Gmail.

So Why Use Outlook?

Business. It’s just business. The company email goes to the Outlook, and Xobni makes the Outlook like Gmail on crack. Not only does Xobni thread email conversations, it also pulls out the attachments, and provides analytics around email exchange frequency and time of day these email exchanges happen. Xobni also includes social connectivity information for your contacts. Hence Gmail on crack.

I’d like to thank Chris Apollo Lynn and Marie Williams for hooking me up with Xobni. You guys rock! How did I hear about the Xobni? Via my current favorite microblogging app, Twitter.

It All Goes Back to Twitter

Twitter and Xobni have gotten it right in so many ways. Twitter makes expressing yourself stupid easy. Some might think just stupid, but really, it’s stupid easy. It’s so simple, you really aren’t missing anything. There’s only so much complexity that 140 characters can hold. Xobni approaches the stupid easy a little differently - it’s only fairly intuitive and the sluggishness coupled with my impatience creates a different experience from that high energy, zippy thoughts flying around on Twitter. Xobni’s strength comes from enabling you to find the messages you need easily.

I’ve got 4 Xobni invites left - leave me a comment or send me an email with a funny story about email and I’ll pay them forward. Or as always, tweet @anwith1n

Of the multiple Google Maps and Twitter mashups out there for Super Tuesday, the one that got me thinking was the one from Google and Twitter especially given the question asked by Valleywag, “but what about Jaiku?”

What about Jaiku?

For those not in the know, Jaiku positions itself as “an activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones.” Jaiku, Ltd. was founded in February, 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland, and was aquired by Google in fall 2007. Jaiku’s service is very similar to Twitter’s.

So why the mashup with Twitter and Google, not Jaiku and Google?

Valleywag theorizes: “What this tells us: Jaiku, which has a much smaller and more European user base than Twitter, isn’t really doing it for Google…” Perhaps. Perhaps this is true. The question is - why?

An Bui’s Theory on Jaiku’s User Base:

1. Jaiku’s userbase is more European because it started in Finland. I’ll analogize to the correlation between Facebook’s userbase and education level. Facebook’s userbase tends to have a higher education level because Facebook started out of Harvard. Also, Super Tuesday is about US politics. The number of Europeans who care to report about US politics is probably not as high as the number of Americans who care to report about US politics.

2. Jaiku’s userbase is smaller because it’s in closed beta. You need an invitation to join. I don’t have one. I’d like to get one, but haven’t, hence no review about Jaiku yet. I’m interested in getting one though, if anyone wants to invite me.
I think the mashup for Super Tuesday paired Twitter and Google because Jaiku’s userbase wasn’t the target market. That the Jaiku userbase is smaller is an immaterial fact. A Super Tuesday mashup could have served as an opportunity to sign up more users for Jaiku. To say that Jaiku isn’t really doing it for Google is a leap of logic I’m not comfortable making.

**update** Check out Vanessa Fox and her post on search engine land about the Web and 2008 Elections, which addresses not just the mashup, but also videos, trends, and use of SEO.

On an unrelated note - Happy Mardi Gras everyone!

I had dinner the other night with one of Pelago’s talented developers. Pelago is the company that has brought us Whrrl, a geotargeted social networking online and mobile application that enables people to share real-world adventures and discover places, events, and people through the eyes of others in their social networks.

I reached out to Jason Crawford and asked him simply, Why Pelago? Why Whrrl?

Pelago and Whrrl offer Jason the following opportunities:

• A great product in the consumer space;
• Great people with whom to work;
• Interesting technological challenges;
• Personal career growth potential;
• Pelago’s strong future business opportunities.

Meeting Jason enabled me to put a face to the company. In addition to his reasons for joining Pelago, he shared with me the fact that Whrrl hasn’t changed all that much from the original product vision. I’m interested to see if this holds over time. Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, discusses the number of companies in which he invested that underwent complete or partial transformations between the time they took venture capital and the time they exited the business. The numbers suggest that Pelago may transform, but at this time it’s too early to say.

The Pelago team constantly challenges itself to improve Whrrl by adding new cool features and added functionality to benefit Whrrl’s users. The user interface is intuitive and the map allows you to see clusters of social network validated points of interest. If your phone is on the list of phones that support Whrrl, you can go to m.whrrl.com/getit to download the mobile application. The Pelago team is working on bringing us additional cities and increasing the number of phones compatible with the mobile application.

Whrrl has been in public beta since 10/23/2007, so if you haven’t tried it, it’s not too late to join the party. RSVP to the “Whrrl Focus Group – wanna free drink?” through Facebook.

Join Whrrl. Add me as a friend, or become my fan. We can even find somewhere to get coffee in Seattle.