Love this billboard promoting Peter Walsh's organizing products and supplies.
The service and experience of flying openskies, a British Airways subsidiary, was so satisfying that we forgot to take pictures during the flight. I had been looking forward to this flight to Paris ever since reading about it in Wendy Perrin's column in Conde Naste.Our first experience was at JFK where we skipped over to the BA business and first class check-in counters instead of having to stand in the lines with the other BA passengers. The agent checking us in asked if we had flown openskies before and when we said it was our first time, she asked how we heard about the service (obviously for tracking purposes). She then told us we had the best seats on the plane.
Upon boarding, we were greeted by large seats in a bulkhead section so there was no one sitting in front of us. Lots of room! It wasn't a full flight, but I imagine the attentiveness of the flight attendants wouldn't have changed. We had great service and our flight attendant for our section gave us tips on where to go and what to eat in Paris.
The seats were comfortable, the food was fantastic and the inflight entertainment systems were so good, we didn't get enough sleep.
Return trip was about the same except we had access to the executive lounge in Orly, which was nice not to have to sit around in the main terminal. The one small downside on the return flight was that we were in a "yet-to-be-converted" cabin of an L'Avion plane (openskies merged with L'Avion earlier in the year). The seats weren't as comfortable and we lost our great bulkhead seats we had reserved.
But I'd fly them again if I'm flying out of NYC. I hope they're able to weather the economy and emerge without shutting down as it would be a shame to lose such a great airline.
I remember a few years ago putting together a market requirements document that relied heavily on streaming video to supplement other media. Thanks to Hulu it's available today...at least the infrastructure and software is there now. It's just a matter of time before we see this ala Netflix on other devices as a licensed product.
I'm sure when Facebook decided to change their user interface to stay competitive, they knew they needed to be careful not to alienate, frustrate or even annoy their millions of users. Or did they? There's been quite a groundswell of negativity toward the new design.
My personal pain came about when I was trying to help a coworker figure out how fans would upload photos to a special section called "Fan Photos". Logically, we went to the "Photos" tab, but there was no way to upload photos, just view them. We knew fans could load photos because other pages had tons of fan photos.
Were people tagging them with the page's name? Nope.
Was there a special app that allowed fans to do this? Nope.
I was so frustrated, I started mousing over and clicking all over the screen. When . . .
If you click in the text field under "Write something . . . " you get the option to add photos, links or whatever else you allow fans to post. Seriously? That makes perfect sense to the product managers, UX and QA folks who worked on this? You go to something that says "Write something . . . " to load photos.
Is it just me?
This is less a lesson on how to use Twitter for political campaigns and more one on what happens when anyone thinks they can. Let me preface this by saying I've been a long supporter of Representative Neil Abercrombie and so this is in no way a critique of him.I found Neil's Twitter account a few months ago and started following him. At first he was tweeting just like everyone else, with updates on what he's been doing, bills he was supporting and his campaign for governor of Hawaii.
Then I started to notice his tweets almost seemed to be generated by a bot. The tweets were being fed from Utterli and kept saying the same thing except it had a slightly different link URL.
So I @neilabercombie'd him to find out what was going on. I got a tweet back from @ikitajima explaining that each tweet was indeed different and had I clicked on the link I would have heard a different message from Neil on Utterli.Here are my issues with that answer and why I don't think it serves Neil or his campaign well:
- Inpersonal. By using the same exact "Aloha Everyone! It's me, Neil, reporting in." over and over, it feels like an afterthought or not worthy of the little extra effort it would take to customize each tweet. It feels very automated and cold. Not what you want to convey if you're running for a public office.
Why not try to convey a little of Neil's personality? He should've talked about how he loved seeing "The Boss" Bruce Springsteen at the inaugural concert because he loves his music.
Even if it's not him really tweeting all the time, you can provide some transparency by noting who is tweeting on his behalf at the end of each tweet. Even Britney Spears knows how to do that. - Nonintuitive. Looking at each tweet, it looks like the same one over and over again. Almost like a mistake.
Why not summarize what the link is about so people can decide if they want to click on the link or not? Are you expecting that the mystery of what may lie beyond the link will entice people to click on the link? You're not selling ad impressions. Better yet, get your message out in 140 characters, just like Obama did.
