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Stocking Up...

by Ron Daly

This week is Hurricane Preparedness Week. Here in Virginia, an area that is commonly soaked by the weather systems that push up from the Gulf, we have a Tax Exempt holiday in which we are allowed to purchase certain items tax free (see the .pdf of items here). 

I think this is great, and not just because I love deals. It's great to have a kit prepared for ill weather, especially for situations in which you might not have power or communication for a while. Some of the things on our tax exempt list: 

Can I See Your ID?

by Ron Daly

When you work in online services, issues of trust and reliability are on the forefront of any discussion you have about your product and how it will be perceived by users. E-mail marketing, for example, suffers from the perception that messages sent won't make it to the inbox. DigitalMailer's spent nine years getting white listed by the largest ISPs in the world, so we can answer most critics with a high rate of delivery and a set of standards and best practices that keep words like SPAM out of our vocabulary. 

Ebay, Amazon, Netflix, - they all had to take into account that they'd be doing business behind a curtain. When you buy from someone online, whether they're the vendor or they're acting as a middle-man, they would need to establish privacy regulations and a level of dependability in their services. 

What if the system worked both ways? 

Sorry, Twitter - Rob's Just Not That Into You.

by Ron Daly 

Believe it or not, this blog will be one year old this month. One of our first posts came from COO/CIO Rob Banker, who was extolling the virtues of Twitter (click here to read). He signed up for an account and started Tweeting. 

And then, one day, he disappeared. 

Apparently, he wasn't the only one. It seems Twitter is having trouble keeping users. According to eMarketer, Twitter only retains about 40% of new users/followers (click here). To get further insight as to why Rob walked away from the popular mini-blogging site, we asked him some questions about his exodus from Twitter and social media altogether. 

So, why aren't you on Twitter anymore?

Simple... Signal to noise ratio. And this was before the mainstream explosion on Twitter. I was following a few dozen Twitter feeds of people in tech and a few other industries as well as a few friends. The quality of information wasn't worth the time. I don't fault the writers so much, 140 characters isn't enough to say anything particularly useful. Unless you're writing haiku.

What do you think of the mainstreaming of Twitter (and social media in general)?

Feels like 1995 all over again. Everyone had to have a homepage. They didn't know why, but they had to have it. I fell for it too. I spent a week long vacation creating a website. There's seven days I can't get back. It was a good education, but ultimately the site served no value for the company. It was just too soon. Being an early adopter isn't necessarily a good thing.