*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Already on Twitter?  Follow Me

Twitter is hard to explain to those that aren’t using it.  Even I was skeptical about how much I would use it at first. For a long time I have avoided sites like MySpace and Facebook but I’ve always had a blog, a cell phone, and email.  Those three items made me feel connected.  If I had something to say, I’d blog it.  If someone wanted to reach me electronically they could send a text message or email.  Lastly they could just call me.  Little did I realize how disconnected I was until later on.  It took Twitter to really show me how disconnected I was.  After becoming a Twitter fan I started to spread the word.  Some people I convinced to start using it.  Others are still holding out.  Maybe this will be enough to put them over the edge.

Not Until They Use It

I remember when I first told Alan Stevens about Twitter.Com.  He reluctantly joined and said “oh great, another social networking site”.  It wasn’t long until he started to see Twitter’s potential though.  Alan’s first tweet was on Oct. 25th at 11:04 PM.  About a day later he said this and as we can see he was starting to get it and work his way through it.

I met Alan at the TechEd conference in Orlando, FL earlier in in June.  We met up again at DevLink in Nashville, TN and we talked a lot in the speaker’s room as a matter of fact.  After Alan joined Twitter I started to get to know him better.  I think his major break through with Twitter came about a month later. 

By the way, for those of you that aren’t computer programmers, TDD stands for test driven development.  It is a methodology that developers should use to test their code, but a lot don’t.  Alan’s point is that until people use it, they won’t get it.  I guess he was doing some self retrospection at that moment.

The Twitter Battle

A few weeks ago I found myself in a battle of sorts.  It was a Friday night and several of us were hanging out the night before a conference.  Twitter kept dominating the conversation.  It was amazing at how much more stuff I knew that was going on around me just because of Twitter.  During the conversation I picked my phone up and tweeted (the action for posting to twitter) that I was down the street from the hotel hanging with a few fellow speakers.  In literally 1-2 minutes later my phone rang.  It was Alan Stevens who was also speaking at the conference.  “Dude where are you guys at?”, he said.  I told him and within a few minutes later Alan and another speaker Michael Neel showed up to join us.  Wow.  Name me another medium that connects people that way so quickly.

Once Alan and Michael got there (both twitterholics), the conversation was twitter, twitter, twitter.  Doug Turnure finally caved and said he would give it another go.  A few days ago he posted this to his blog:

After a lengthy discussion, and Keith’s *value prop* on it, I’m twittering again. I haven’t decided whether to thank Keith or yell at him about it. But it’s a lot of fun, especially when you’re at an event and trying to find people.

Doug was at Mix08, a large Microsoft conference in Vegas, when he wrote that.  Are you starting to see the connections now?  Twitter is about “What you are doing”.  For me Twitter is about what I am thinking, or what I am reading, or what I think about given a certain topic.  Sometimes I post links I find interesting.  Sometimes Twitter is conversational if someone posts something that is controversial.  Sometimes it is about replying to friends with one liners (cough cough, @RossCode and @mjeaton).  It is what you make out of it in a sense. 

How Twitter Has Changed

My Twitterversary (the anniversary date you joined Twitter) will be on May 18th of this year.  I can’t believe it has been almost a year.  Since I joined Twitter it has evolved into a lot of things.  There are desktop applications like Witty Twitter which is an open source project several of us contribute to.  I even made a simple one click install of it so anyone that wants to install it can. Click the link below (it will install Witty Twitter and keep itself up to date on your machine).

http://keithelder.net/software/witty/witty.application (requires .Net 3.0 BTW!)

Having a single URL people can go to to use Twitter has proven very handy in getting people to adopt it.  There are also mobile applications like Tiny Twitter for Windows Mobile and even spin off sites like http://tffratio.com which allows users to track their friend-follower ratio.  A couple of my Tweeps (friends you follow on twitter) came up with it and started it.  We haven’t seen the end yet, more sites and ideas are popping up everywhere.

Tagging

Recently at the Mix 08 conference (which I didn’t attend) I was following key notes as they happened and knew where friends were hanging out and which sessions they were going to.  How?  Hashtags.org.  A Twitter hash tag is a pound sign in front of a noun.  Like #mix08 or #food and so on.  Hastags.Org organizes all the things people twitter about into one place.  I doubt we see many more #mix08 tags since #mix08 is now a thing of the past.  What is interesting about the Mix08 tags is how it spiked and then disappeared a few days later.

Not Enough Reasons?

I’ve already given anyone with a sense of curiosity enough reasons to give Twitter a try.  However, I know there are those of you that are holding out.  For those of you, I give you the best video I have found that explains Twitter.  Just remember that no matter how much stuff you read about it, you won’t get it UNTIL you start using it. 

To get started with Twitter create an account at http://www.twitter.com. 

How many times as consumers have we seen stupid things on web sites that make us go, huh?  The web is still full of useless clicks, forms, terms and conditions we never read, and countless choices with the ever changing landscape of custom interfaces that force us to re-learn each and every time we visit a site.  Here we are in 2008 and we still have to go through hoops and hurdles to use the web on a daily basis.  Gone are the days of blink tags and scrolling marques but other things exist today that still get in the way. 

Don’t You Know Who I Am?

The other day I was on the UPS web site trying to lookup a tracking number for my Rock Band bass drum pedal that broke last week.   It had been over a week and it still hadn’t arrived.  I searched for the email that had my tracking number in it and then typed in http://www.ups.com into my browser.  What seemed like a simple task took a lot more thinking and time than it should have.  My first roadblock was the entry page into the site.  I was greeted with “Select Your Country” within this gigantic map.  I stared at it for a bit trying to figure out what the intended action I was supposed to take.  Was I suppose to click on my location (which would have been the simplest thing) or was there a form tucked away somewhere?.  UPS isn’t the only company in the world that does this.  Visit http://www.fedex.com and you get this:

Or http://www.asus.com and you get this:

One can visit numerous large international companies and more times than not an entry page asking you to enter your location will be presented.  None of them will be the same either.  Each one will do things differently.  Again, coming back to the point about having to re-learn each web site when you visit it. 

This is the first action I shouldn’t have had to take to lookup my tracking number.  The simplest thing that could have been done is for UPS to lookup my IP address I was coming from and figure it out for me.  The less choices the better.  I hate having to go through this step, it slows the whole process down.  To make matters worse, some sites don’t store the selection forcing the end user to reselect it again on the next visit.  An example of IP lookups is Google’s Analytics, a site statistics service they provide.  It uses IP addresses to lookup locations of users as they browse web sites configured with analytics (this is one of them).  For example, here are the locations of people that have visited this blog from Mississippi this month.

It is great we can determine IP locations but the heart of the problem lies with the HTTP protocol.  HTTP is the protocol browsers and web servers speak.  Think of it as a conversation.  A web browser sends information to the server (IP address, language, etc).  A programmer can then look at those values and make intelligent decisions like, oh, I see you accept the language English so I’ll send text back in English.  While operating systems are setup and configured to specify country either based on time zones or other means this information is never set to the web server.  This information could be passed to the web server so fundamental things like asking a person their country could be solved.  IP Address lookups are reliable but there are millions of users that use AOL for example that relay Internet traffic through proxies coming from the US.  The use of proxies throws a loop in IP Address lookups.  The HTTP protocol doesn’t help the web developers to solve this problem and there are no 100% guaranteed ways to lookup this information.  This is just one example in my opinion as to why the web is flawed and guess who suffers?  We do. 

You Know I Didn’t Really Read That Right?

To continue down the path of looking up a simple tracking number, after I selected the country I was presented with this in the middle of the screen somewhere.  At least UPS recognizes the fact the majority of times people visit their site they want to look up a tracking number (which could have been put on the first page I visit, but I digress):

Don’t you love it when lawyers at really large companies get a hold of web sites and pollute them with legal speak?  I have no idea the statistics but I would guess only a few percent of people actually read those “Terms and Conditions”.  Let’s punish the masses is what this says to me.   How many times are we going to be subjected to this whereby a lawyer comes up with the idea that if he has the web developers put a check box on the web site it will keep people from doing wrong or that it will make them suddenly have a change of heart.

Oh no, there is a check box on this web page, I better not do this.

Did I check the box?  Yes, because I had to or I couldn’t look up my information. Did I agree to it?  Hell no. Did I read it?  Nope.  I could care less what it says.  The sad truth about it is UPS could change those terms and conditions at any time without my knowledge and based on how the original terms were worded one could be bound to them.

Imagine If….

I think I may start putting these types of things into my blog.  Every time someone visits my web site I’m going to present them with a screen asking for their country location.  And then I am going to present them with a terms and condition before they can fully enter the site.  I think my terms and conditions will read something like.

I hereby agree to these terms and conditions of this web site and understand this is a binding contract between the web site owner and myself.  I understand by posting a comment to the blog the web site owner reserves the right to collect 50% of my annual salary payable in monthly installments.  I also understand any comments added to the site considered by the web site owner not to be of a praising manner will be considered a defamation of character of the web site owner resulting in a fine of $1,000.00.  Lastly I agree these terms and conditions can be altered by the web site owner at anytime and any newly published terms will also be a binding agreement.

Today marks a momentus occasion for the Internet.  Today a brand new web site launched that has been in the making for several years.  The name:  QUIZZLE.

About Quizzle.Com

Quizzle is a unique site powered by Quicken Loans that allows users to manage their biggest asset, their home.  There are tons of features built into Quizzle to help users manage their budgets, access their finance as well as view their free credit report twice a year.  That’s right, for free!  Quizzle pays the cost for you as apart of the service. 

What does Quizzle really do?  Wanna know your credit score?  Quizzle it.  Wanna keep track of your budget?  Quizzle it.  Wanna get an estimate on how much your home is worth right now for free!?  Quizzle it.  Wanna know if you are in the right mortgage with interest rates falling or rising?  Quizzle it.  Not sure if you have enough money in your rainy day fund?  Quizzle it. 

Quizzle brings all of this together and more into one central location to help you better keep track of your finances.  Best of all it is free!  You just have to sign up.  Here is a sample of what your Quizzle might look like.

How Quizzle Works

Budgets and Your Free Credit Report

Managing your expenses and budget is a synch with Quizzle.  Once you sign up on the site, Quizzle uses your credit report to assist in calculating your budget.  Don’t worry about your credit being pulled.  Quizzle does not impact your credit score.  It isn’t against the rules to pull your own credit so don’t worry!

Since Quizzle already knows your mortgage payment and other debts collected from your credit report, your budget information is automatically updated.  Just fill in the rest of your expenses like utilities and you have a complete picture of where you stand.  The end result is no more guessing and no more spending countless hours at your local bank trying to figure out what you should do with your home equity to plan for your kids college.  The best part is, every six months Quizzle emails you when you qualify for an updated credit report.  Simply visit the web site to get your free credit report and watch Quizzle go to work.

What’s Your Home Worth?

How much equity do you have in your home right now?  How much is your home worth after purchasing it a few years ago?  With Quizzle this information is at your finger tips.  Using Quizzle’s automated home value appraiser you can get an automated home value amount without the need to call an appraiser.  Best of all, by calculating your debt, equity, and other factors, Quizzle automatically tells you the top recommendations based on these factors for refinancing, purchasing a new home, or using your home equity line to pay off debt.

Countless Other Features

There are countless other features that Quizzle provides, the best thing you can do is just see it for yourself.

Quizzle Blog

Did you know Quizzle has a blog?  To keep up to date with Quizzle’s new features, announcements, best practices for managing your finances and so on, don’t forget to visit the Quizzle Blog and add it to your daily RSS Feed Reader of choice.  Ann-Marie will keep you up-to-date on what is happening with interest rates, the federal reserve, how to get out of debt and how to be a millionaire by the time you are 65.  She’s way smarter than me when it comes to this stuff so be sure to make it apart of your daily blog reading.

What Are You Waiting For?

Quizzle is going to change the way you look at your finances.  Head to http://www.quizzle.com to get started and sign up.  Go ahead, QUIZZLE!!!!!!!

Several months ago Hanselman wrote an article about moving his family over to Google Apps.  Even before that one of my fellow team members had moved his email to Google Apps.  Keeping all of this in the back of my mind I started to think about doing the same.  A few weeks ago I decided to give it a try and today I just moved my wife’s domain over as well.  I’m sure you are wondering why so let’s explore that among other things.

Why?

IMAP, How Do I Love Thee, Let Me Count The Ways
I have to be honest and say that I would have never considered switching to Google Apps if Gmail only supported POP3.  When I first started using a computer I realized the benefit of IMAP early on and never looked back.  POP3 for lack of better words was dead to me.  It wasn’t until recent though that Gmail started supporting IMAP.  IMAP has always made sense for me because it was more versatile than POP3.  I’ve always kept my email on the server instead of “popping” it down locally because it provided the most flexibility allowing me to view and read email from a client, web, shell (ssh), and or mobile device. 

The nice thing about IMAP is if an email is read let’s say on a mobile phone and is moved to a folder, when viewed on another client that action is automatically reflected.  This cuts down on reading email twice and simplifies things.  IMAP support also means the server backs up the email and email can be pre-processed before it gets to the client.  Let’s say for example you have a mobile hand held device and are subscribed to 10 mailing lists.  Imagine the amount of email those lists would generate on your phone thereby cluttering up your Inbox.  With IMAP and a technique in the Unix world known as “Procmail”, this becomes really simple.  A simple procmail rule can process an incoming message and automatically take an action to move it to a specified folder on the server.  This means that if your Outlook or Thunderbird isn’t running email is still sorted.  Note:  For those that are using Gmail, when you create a “Filter” this is essentially the same thing as a procmail rule.

With IMAP support in place for Gmail, awesome spam filtering, 6GBs of email, web-based email and mobile phone support (IMAP and web-based mobile email) it was time to revisit the thought of switching to Google Apps.

Gmail’s IMAP Support

Now that we’ve established my dying love for IMAP how does Gmail’s IMAP support stack up?  The short answer is very good and enough to make me switch.  Before jumping ship and switching to Google Apps I started playing with my standard Gmail account I’ve had for years in Outlook using IMAP.  For years I’ve been using Courier-IMAP and there are a few quirks using it with Outlook.  For one, when you delete an item in Outlook, Outlook doesn’t move it to the Trash folder automatically.  It merely marks it for deletion.  I really really really don’t like this behavior and if you search the Internet you’ll find others don’t as well.  However, it is the way it is. 

Using Gmail’s IMAP I noticed immediately when I deleted an email in Outlook it disappeared from the Inbox.  Ah, the proper behavior!   But, where did the email go?  This is where things start to depart from the normal IMAP server.  To understand what is happening you have have to understand how Gmail works.  Gmail works on a labeling.  Email that makes it into the “Inbox” is actually labeled “Inbox” but really lives in another folder commonly referred to as the archive.  As a matter of fact, all email in Gmail lives in one gigantic archive.  This is why when a Gmail POP3 account initially connects it downloads ALL of the mail you have ever received (unless you tell it not too when you enable the feature). 

If you are logged into Gmail and click on a label on the left side you are not viewing a folder but rather a pre-defined search.  When labels are clicked Gmail is simply searching your archive for the labeled emails.  Thus the concept of folders within Gmail doesn’t exist.  This is important to understand since IMAP email is based on folders and the ability to organize email into folders.  To bring us back full circle, when an email is “archived” within Gmail or deleted from Outlook using IMAP the “Inbox” label is merely removed.   The email is still in the archive.  For example I just searched my email for the word comment.  You can see the word “Inbox” beside these emails because they are in my Inbox currently.

From within Outlook if I deleted one of these emails it would be removed from the Inbox because the label is removed on the server.  However it is not moved to the “Deleted Items” or “Trash” folder as with a normal IMAP server.  Let’s take a quick look at both interfaces and try to find the common threads.  Here is my current IMAP folder structure as seen within Outlook:

Here is how it looks within GMail.

The bottom line is labels in Gmail are merely folders in IMAP but there are some differences in how each interface handles mail.  Here they are.

Deleting Mail in Gmail
When deleting email within Gmail the default behavior is to move the item to the “Trash” folder. 

Default settings in Gmail state that any email placed in that folder will be permanently removed in 30 days.  Typically users will delete email from vendors and other third parties they know they aren’t going to keep around.  This keeps things neat and doesn’t eat up as much space.

Deleting Email in Outlook
When deleting email in Outlook using IMAP it is not moved to the “Trash” folder, the label of “Inbox” as previously stated is simply removed.  Let’s look at where it really goes though.  Notice in the Outlook screen shot above there are a set of folders underneath the [Gmail] folder.  These are the same ones seen at the top of Gmail.  As explained above if you deleted an email from within the Gmail interface, that email would be found in the “Trash” folder.  If you really wanted to keep the email you must drag and drop it into the “All Mail” folder above.  This folder is the archive.  Any email that is archived within the web interface is placed here so if you are searching for email, this is the folder you are going to use most of the time with IMAP.  Note:  If you click on “All Mail” from Outlook and you have a lot of email, prepare to wait while all of your email comes down.  This is why it is wise to label email ( or create folders within Outlook) as you process it.

As you can see there are several differences in how real IMAP servers work and how Gmail works.  There are no show stoppers but for some it may be confusing.  As long as you understand what the action you take means you’ll be ok.  Just remember when you create a new IMAP folder you are actually creating a label and when you delete something from the Inbox you are actually archiving it.  If you don’t want to permanently keep the email then you’ll be wise to drag it to the [Gmail]/Trash folder.  This way it will be around in case you need it for 30 days but will then get permanently deleted.  This is important because you don’t want to just delete everything because then you’ll wind up with a bloated archive of emails you really will never use.

Migrating My Email

After playing with Gmail’s IMAP support and enjoying how it deleted email for me and provided great spam support along with a lot of space I decided to make the switch.  In literally 10 minutes I was receiving emails and setup with Google Apps.  I chose to verify my domain by uploading a file to my domain and then logged into my site’s control panel and switched the MX record to point to Google.  A few minutes later my MX record was detected and I was getting my email.  Since I didn’t sign up for the $50 premier account I didn’t have the migration tools.  How was I going to get all of my email from my server to the Google server?

The first thing I did is research a few options but I found them to be complicated.  I then setup Outlook IMAP support as instructed.  Once I had IMAP support setup on Google’s server I did a quick test to see if my theory was correct (knowing how IMAP servers work).  I took a folder from my old account and dragged and dropped it onto the new account.  Sure enough mail started moving over.  The nice thing is I only had to drag the top level folder.  Everything underneath came along for the ride.  Problem solved.

Rinse and repeat.  Although this wasn’t as slick as some other tools that allow you to check all the folders you want to move, it still worked just as well since I was going from one IMAP account to another.  Within 15-20 minutes I had copied all of my email over to Google’s server.  Today I did the same thing for Ellen and migrated her email as well. 

I think I should point out that while both of us had web based email and spam filtering the big problem was the web interface used a random port which meant it was blocked by her work as well as mine.  Now email just sits within Gmail we can access it easier then before. 

Rusty Washer

Since using Gmail there has been one thing that bit me and that was dealing with IMAP mail on my mobile device.  Apparently there is a bug with Google’s IMAP support that doesn’t render HTML email to Windows Mobile devices properly.  It isn’t a complete show stopper since Google provides a mobile interface to mail which is another perk I forgot to mention.  Supposedly Google is working on a fix but not ETA as of yet.

Should You Switch Too?

Really there is nothing for me to gain if you do or don’t.  If you own your own domain you may want to consider switching if you haven’t already.  I feel that I’m a little late to the game but I really had to test to make sure the IMAP support worked as advertised.  The standard account is the one I went with because I am not an organization needing more services an API integration.  If I run out of space then I will considering upgrading my account but until then I plan on sticking with the free account.

Jeff and I were talking about how we’d like to have a Twitter T-shirt on the way back from Codemash in the car.  I decided to find one tonight and quickly landed at http://www.reactee.com.  A few minutes later and I had my shirt on order.

Making one isn’t hard.  There are five options to select and several colors.  While I chose black as my color I thought about the light blue since that is closer to Twitter’s brand but ultimately decided the light blue was a little more feminine than I was willing to wear in public.  For those that use Paypal and Google checkout the site supports both.