Archive for February, 2010

So we cracked the first milestone. Thank you all for joining our Facebook Fan Page, thank you for interacting and thank you for sticking around.
This is how our trip looked like:

What we want to do in our fan page is to talk to you and let you talk to us. Facebook is a venue that allows having fun and that’s where we’ll experiment together with you. We hope you’ll enjoy, share and participate and invite your friends to join too!

Not that we needed any saving, but we live in a crazy time and we are busy. Too busy. I’m busier now than I ever been and something tells me that I’ll get even busier. The list of things that I want to accomplish is far greater than the number of open slots I can fit in my calendar. Kids, clients, work, marketing, dinner, dishes, family, lunch, more, more, more… not necessarily in this order.

Back to Google again.

After being successfully married for long enough, I’ve learned one thing: Communication is key to retain your household sanity and the most controversial issue is time. Mainly the time that we lack.

We run our entire online life on Google Apps. Standard Edition. Free. The company email, calendar, contacts, documents to name the least. It syncs to our macs, blackberrys, iPhone, iPod, PC, etc. Works very well. and it’s free, did I already mention?

Ever since my wife managed to hook the Google calendar to her iPhone our life changed…

Her work stuff? there’s a calendar for that.

Dr. appointments? there’s a calendar for that.

Son’s helping class’s parent list? there’s a calendar for that.

Family stuff? there’s a calendar for that too.

And then we found that with one click we can add the entire Jewish holidays to our calendar not to mention your favorite team’s schedule… and all our contacts’ birthdays… and Valentines too.

Can you imagine how I felt when I heard her say “well we can’t do it next week since you have that PSU bowl game”… I’m in love all over again.  Seriously.

Instead of forgetting dates, events, appointments and etc. we have a built in expectations management system.

And it’s easy. It’s not like we both sit all day and update the calendar. It became a natural action: Two moms meet in the park and discuss the prospects of a playdate… iPhones out and done. All that while avoiding potential scheduling conflicts with my calendar as well as that important Lions game. There’s an app for that- calendar. And the one with the Google logo on it just works better- it’s connected to everybody’s pocket.

Yes, calendars have been here for as long as we remember, what’s the big deal?

Google made it easy to tact excessively and not fell guilty about it. It’s the good kind of execs where more is more. It’s free and easy to add another calendar when you need it, and keep it forever (and hide it to prevent clatter). Why not.

And the pre canned content. Birthdays, holidays, games, full moon dates, whatever – it’s there. Did I mention easy? They just made it easy.

If it’s good for the daily battlefield of a modern family, it’s good for the rest of the world.

Facebook introduced today their new home page view. Search is much more prominent located at the middle of the top banner and it’s significantly wider.

According to Facebook the new design improves the following:

Pages also adopted the new look and feel.

Update No. 1 as I’ll keep drilling into the new interface.

The old interface was disorganized, hard to navigate and slow. This new interface is simple, easy to use, and  looks almost nice (sorry I was never a big fan of uniform… yet I appreciate Facebooks new elegance vs. the anarchy and abuse that My Space tolerates.

For organizations and organizations the new interface is actually good news. The cleaner look helps the visitors to focus on the content and personally I feel more invited to participate in the conversation.