Disruptive Conversations

Are you interested in how you can service customer requests across all the different communication channels they might use? Do you want to give your customers a choice in the way they interact with you? Rather than requiring them to call in to a customer service phone number, do you want to let them send you a text message? Or an IM? Or use Twitter?

If so, you may be interested in a free webinar I am giving tomorrow, Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 11:00 am US Eastern time titled "Unified Self-Service: Creating multi-channel communications apps using Voxeo tools". You can register for free.

I'll be talking about this concept we call "Unified Self-Service" where you can create a single application that interacts with customers across multiple communication channel (but not necessarily using the exact same user interface). It's a topic I blog about on Voxeo's site and mention in our various presentations.

Perhaps obviously to long-time readers, I have an interest in the "social" side of the communication, particularly as we talk about "Social CRM" and engaging with customers through social channels. You can naturally expect to hear me talk about that tomorrow as well.

Registration is free... and if you can't attend, the session will be archived for later viewing from our Developer Jam Session page (and if you register, we'll let you know when the archive is posted).

It's a fun topic... and I'm looking forward to the conversation we'll have tomorrow.

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As a writer, I have an admittedly sentimental attachment to the ancient world of typewriters. I own several... in fact I went through a phase where I thought it would be a cool idea to "collect" them... and accumulated 4 or 5 from various antique stores and yard sales before I confronted the reality that they are very heavy and there is just no easy way to display them, especially in a smaller house.

Still, though, there is something appealing about the old keys... the clicking sound... the ability to type text without batteries or any kind of power source...

Not that I want to return to those days, mind you. After several decades of word processing I think my brain is rather wired into typing text and then editing it later, rather than assembling it on paper or in your brain and typing it all out without errors. And I don't miss whiteout...

Anyway, I was amused to read on Mashable this morning that someone has a kit to turn your typewriter into a USB keyboard. You can apparently buy converted typewriters directly from usbtypewriter.com ... or you can buy a kit to convert your own. The site has step-by-step pictures of how to convert your typewriter.

Of course, as Gizmodo adds with snark... this means you can type even slower on your iPad... :-)

I don't know that I'll do this... although I'm thinking that I have a small Underwood Portable that might be perfect for this... but it's fun to see that someone has done this!

What do you think? Going to convert one of your old typewriters?

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Today, June 1, is the final day of Diaspora's funding drive over on Kickstarter. I love the exquisite irony of the graphic I've included on the right side of this post... "This product will only be funded if at least $10,000 is pledged by Tuesday Jun 1, 11:59pm EDT." .... given that the four guys are closing in on $200K in pledges!

As I wrote about before, the promise of Diaspora is an exciting one for advocates of the "open Internet". There are many challenges that they face in building a distributed, decentralized social network. There are some aspects of privacy and security that can be easier in a centralized model... but for our own long-term future, it's great to have some folks out there looking at this issue.

I wish the Diaspora team all the best with their work and will certainly be watching and looking at how I can help. Already, their concepts and ideas have increased the discussion about what we want the "social networking" part of the Internet to look like. They may not succeed... but if not they will certainly help us all in their trying. And in the best case, we'll have a new service to use that will let us have a bit more control.

Will they hit $200,000 in pledges today? 14 hours left... it doesn't matter, really... they've already received way more than they ever expected!

P.S. And yes, in full disclosure I should state that I am one of those 6000+ backers.

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