Vanessa Fox. Nude.

In these days of social networking and graphs and patterns and things, what’s the best way to connect with great people? Well, I’ve twittered, I’ve Facebooked, I’ve LinkedIned (that can’t possibly be a verb, right?) but it told me something about how I’m limited to sending messages to a maximum of 200 people and then was making me manually add each contact to the message so I gave up. I’ve even sent a few actual personal emails. I haven’t tried talking to anyone in person, but is that even still done these days? Surely IM has replaced voice exchange by now?

Anyway, I am now trying the blogging method of personal contact as a great social experiment. I’ll report back later on which method yielded me the best results.

There’s this awesome real estate site based out of Seattle you may have heard of, zillow.com, that is looking for a great in-house SEO to help guide strategy and implementation. If that sounds like you, email me. And if you’re a a great Java dev looking for a full-time position in either Seattle or San Francisco, or looking for a contracting gig from anywhere, also email me. Or, you know, Facebook me or er, LinkedIn me. Or something. I’m pretty easy to find. vanessa at vanessafoxnude dot com.

How do you make contact with people these days? The other day, someone tracked me down by sending me a Flickr message. And I’ve gotten Facebook messages as responses to my Twitters. And Twitters as a response to my Facebook status. And text message seems to be pretty reliable. What’s the most random way you’ve been talking to people?

A while back, I ranted about the difficulties of shopping in ways other than those involving browsers and mice. I may have implied that online shopping was a utopian shopping dream, full of kittens and ice cream and crispy potatoes. Although not all together like in a pie or something. The joy of browsing through pictures while sitting on your couch drinking a cosmo and then having those pictures show up real size at your door mere days later cannot be underestimated. Particularly if someone else makes you the cosmo.

However. There is more to a site than the clicking and the buying and the showing up at your door in a large box that you then have to find a way to get rid of and maybe that way involves “borrowing” a truck and tying super crappy knots and being a bad ass tool having type person with a plastic knife.

I moved recently, so I’ve been looking stuff up online and shopping and doing the kinds of things one could never ever dream of doing from one’s couch in the 80s. I love technology and the future. But I digress. I’ve noticed just a few things, particularly from sites that also run brick and mortar businesses, that bring sprinkles of rain into my utopian dream of sunshine and rainbows. Like when you order cornbread and there are kernels of corn in it. And you have to eat around them. You still enjoy the cornbread, but it could have been so much better.

Little tips that brick and mortar businesses could use to improve their web sites
I started building web sites in 1995. Back then, the web was very non-commercial and most businesses had to be convinced that they even needed a web site. Oh how things have changed. But in some cases, it seems the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Some businesses that are very strong offline use their sites primarily for ecommerce. Ecommerce is obviously a fantastic invention and I cannot tell you the despair I feel when I go to a site only to find that you can’t actually BUY anything on it. You can only look at things you could buy if only you weren’t wearing pajamas and slippers and weren’t so lazy that you could get into your car and fight traffic and stand in line and I’m tired just thinking about all of it. So, I am a strong proponent of ecommerce.

But if your business is not web only and has an offline presence as well, you’ve got to consider all those visitors who aren’t going to the site to buy things, but for other reasons. And you should think of your visitors as customers of your business and not just the online division.

1. Don’t make me guess where you’re located.
Don’t hide that “store locator” link in tiny type in the footer of the page. Why are you trying to keep me out of your store? I know that in some companies, the online division is measured on how much revenue it brings in and perhaps you are trying to trick people into thinking your stores are somehow no longer available and the only shopping option is on the site, but that is not the way. We still know the stores exist. Really. If the issue really is that you are trying to get customers to buy online rather than in-store to meet numbers projections, change the metrics used in success measurement. Make a convincing case for tracking how you drive people to the physical stores.

If the issue is that the store locator option doesn’t go well with the online shopping menu options, there are lots of ways make it both easy to find and non-obtrusive. But I think mostly it’s not these things, it’s just that the designer is focused on thinking of visitors who are coming to buy and forget that sometimes, people are coming for other things.

2. Give me lots of data about you.
I needed to go to a particular store the other day and was wondering when they closed. So, I went on the site and found the store locator link pretty easily. But instead of store hours, I got this message that each location may have different hours, so to call them up and see. Really? Do your stores change their hours that often that you can’t put a process in place to keep the site updated? I’d also like to know your return policy and things like that. And since I’m wishing, why not give me inventory numbers so I know if you even have what I need in stock before I get there. It’s the age of technology! Let’s mash up your inventory system and your web site and call it web 2.0 reloaded!

3. Give me the same deal if I buy online, call, or go into you store.
I am dealing with a company, not with the the online storefront or the physical storefront or the floating-on-the-clouds-you-can-only-get-to-us-if-you-own-an-air-balloon storefront. I’m buying something from your company. Why could I find the discounted price for that monitor on the web site, but when I called, the rep on the phone had no clue what I was talking about?

Airlines are particularly bad with this. They not only have different fares online than on the phone, but they charge you extra to book elsewhere than online. In that case, I get that they are trying to save money on telephone agents, and I suppose if you are trying to transition to an online-only business model, more power to you, but it can make it difficult for me, the consumer, to do business with you, the company. For instance, in the case of airlines, I can’t use the value of an unused ticket online, but if I call to use the credit, I can’t get the online price. That makes entirely no sense.

And why have some of your merchandise be web only? You don’t have enough room in your stores for it or it’s not quite good enough to make the physical floor space cut? I’m suspicious.

4. Make returns easy.
Take some of the risk out of shopping online. Going back to the I’m doing business with your company, not your online division mantra, let me return my online purchases at the store.

5. Let me contact you.
If I’m in the physical store, I can talk to an actual physical person. I’m spending just as much money online as I would be at the store. And yet when I click the contact us link, I get an email address. So, I’m supposed to formulate my question in an email, wait for a response, ask a follow up, and so on, until maybe in a week or two, I’m ready to buy. In most cases, there is a phone number somewhere, but it’s like a treasure hunt to find it. As fun as treasure hunts are, I’m more in the mood to give you money for stuff that you’re selling. Let me do that. In fact, put your phone number at the bottom (or top) of every page just to make it easy. Believe me, I’m much less likely to abandon the purchasing process if I can just glance over at your number when I need it.

6. Please God, don’t put all your products in Flash.
Right. This one really doesn’t have anything to do with a brick and mortar business, but how can I send the link to that perfect shoe around to all my friends and see if they too think it’s perfect or if I am simply caught up in a shoe-buying frenzy that comes from the easy click of a button if I have to say, go to this one page and then click this and then that and then scroll in the tiny little box in the middle and then eventually you’ll see this shoe, it’s got these checkers and … That’s just not good for anyone.

7. Make sure the web site works.
This is really for all ecommerce sites too, but since I’m ranting, I may as well throw it in. It doesn’t matter how well optimized the site is for search engines or how many backlinks it has or have pretty and usable the site is. If the customer gets to the end of the purchase process and the billing doesn’t work or the shopping cart errors out and the customer can’t actually buy anything, well… it’s possible that if that customer has spent all this time comparing items and researching and placing them into her cart and then when she clicks buy, her cart empties or the site won’t actually ever take her credit card, she might just fire up her blog and post a rant about it. Just sayin’.

I guest hosted with Danny Sullivan on the Daily Searchcast this morning and while I was supposed to let Danny rant, I was a bad cohost and did some ranting of my own.

But, really, I couldn’t help it. There’s word that Google is funding this project to bring all of your social networks together in a magical moment of joy and light. Dude. I keep asking for that. I’m not currently holding my breath. I never won those contests you did when you were a kid down at the public pool about who could stay underwater longest. I already know it’s not me.

The point being that Facebook has potential in that I can go there and add apps and manage a lot of stuff. But I still have to update my status on Facebook and Twitter (in Facebook) separately. And I can read Pownce within Facebook, but I can’t update from there. And Jaiku is cool because it shows every time I update Flickr, this blog, or Twitter, but I can’t seem to add the Pownce feed and of course, there’s nothing there for Facebook.

The big conundrum is that I have to update my status in multiple places. I tried twitterfeed, which I can use to update Twitter every time I update Pownce, but it didn’t work all that well. It did update Twitter, but it did it in this weird duplicate way with parts of it cut off. So, that experiment wasn’t quite the success I was hoping for.

Here’s what my update looked like on Pownce:

And here’s how twitterfeed updated Twitter:

Huh.

But the issue goes beyond updating in multiple places. It’s not really that hard. Even I’m not that lazy (mostly). I more wonder if people really want to know about the boring minutiae of my life in not only one place, but three! Surely it was boring enough the first time. And I suppose that’s part of why I’m having trouble with social networks. I’m using them wrong. I need to just pick one and stick with it. Then all my woes would disappear like my cats’ food three seconds after I feed them. (I know, dumb analogy but I feel that the blog hasn’t had enough cats lately. Every blog can use more cats.) So far, people have been going with the social network where they have the most friends, but I suppose what we really need is interoperability, so that if I’m on Facebook, my news feed tells me when you’ve updated your MySpace page and you can still add me as a LiveJournal friend so I can see your protected entries.

Or maybe I’ll just keep boring you all over the internet.

I’m currently sitting on my couch writing this blog entry. My cats are sleeping. They might write a blog entry later if they learn how to type and craft sentences, but most likely, they’ll just continue to sleep. I’m drinking a diet coke. I might have some potato chips later.

Now to figure out the best way to get that updated in all my profiles…. Anyone have a good API for LinkedIn? Surely my network over there needs to know about my cats too…

Facebook is apparently the next big thing, even though it’s not exactly new or next, but it is a thing so at least the hype is partially accurate. My feelings towards Facebook are the same as my feelings towards most social networking sites. I want to like it, I mostly like it. I want a way to stay connected and my laziness combined with my inability to be offline make social networking seem like it should be perfect. But I don’t entirely like it. It’s like walking the shores of Lake Michigan when what you really want is the Pacific ocean. Close, but still not quite right.

But I have been attempting to use Facebook (although I have been doing an exceptionally poor job of it) and I have a few questions.

1. What if I don’t have a college email address?
Can I really just not tell you where I went to school? I need an email address? Are you purposely telling those of us who went to college before the days of email that we’re too old to use the site?

2. Seriously, how do you find your friends exactly?
Possibly I haven’t done a good job of figuring this out, but shouldn’t it be easy? I type a name into the search box and I get thousands of people with that name. And I can try to filter by network, but it doesn’t look all that simple. Can’t I just type some keywords about the person, like where they live and where they work? Maybe their favorite movie or type of donut?

3. What the hell is poking?
Just there to make me feel unhip, right?

4. We hooked up?
There’s nothing wrong with “we hooked up” as a concept, but the options on how you met someone leave a little to be desired. I feel as though there are some major categories missing. Where’s “met at the supermarket, looking at spring vegetables”? And Facebook, I will let you in on a little secret. I have been admitting that I’ve met many of my friends online for years. And most of the people on Facebook are also online and are using Facebook to talk to their friends online. So, they are likely OK with admitting they’ve sometimes met this way. In fact, I could use a whole subsection of “met online” options. You probably want options other than only “that craigslist casual encounters section”, but “on a forum”, “through blogging”, and “on [fill in the blank] social networking site” are a good start.

Mostly I want to just be able to type in whatever I want, but there’s not a text field available to me. Possibly once I choose “met randomly” I can add details? But that makes no sense as it makes all my friendships look like haphazard collisions when I was wandering around drunk one night. And maybe some of my friendships starting out that way (I have been to a lot of search conferences, after all), but not all of them.

5. Can’t you partner up with Flickr?
I get it. It’s cool that you can tag your pictures with people’s names and then they get notified when someone comments. But I am keeping track of too many things already. I can’t deal with storing my pictures in multiple locations. Can’t I just upload my Flickr feed and have some handy API for mapping my Facebook friends to my Flickr permissions and tags? I see that there are now a bunch of add-on apps for Flickr. But which one (if any) does what I want?

6. Why do you keep showing me random things?
For instance, it looks like I can see events from anyone in my network. My network is Seattle. It doesn’t help me much to go to an events page where I see events from everyone in Seattle. It may briefly make me feel popular until I realize I’m not actually invited to any of these things. I’m looking at the first event listed for me. It’s called “my birthday dinner”. However, it appears to be missing the person who set up the event so I can’t even tell whose birthday I’m missing. I suppose there may be some value in posting public events for your network. Like maybe if you’re in a band and you want to let everyone in Seattle know where you’re playing. The implementation could just use a little more thought. I’m also shown “6 of 55,656 people” in my network. Maybe this all would be more useful if I had a network other than this giant city full of people with whom the only thing I have in common is, well, the giant city.

Maybe if I used the APIs and add-ons and things, I could get Facebook to do exactly what I wanted. But I don’t want to build a social networking site. I just want to use one. Is that so much to ask?

The great promise of the internet is here. OK, maybe not here here, but we’re standing at the dawn of a new age, only moments from the time when the internet transforms once again, and finally becomes a seamless connection of people and information, woven together like tapestry, like music.

Or not.

It’s looking more like we’re on the cusp of of that Number 9 song by the Beatles, everything going off in separate directions, clanging, banging, never quite in sync, random words that just don’t make sense. The Beatles could have written that song today just by taking a snapshot of twitters.

I’ve missed all that
It makes me a few days late
Compared with, like, wow
And weird stuff like that

The idea of social networking is a great one. We have an online profile. We interact with people who are all over the world. We exchange ideas about music, art, politics, technology, our favorite cocktails, Britney Spears. We do this on blogs, forums, Facebook, MySpace. We tell our friends what music we’re listening to in our instant messaging status. We share our pictures. We vote stories up or down so the rest of us don’t have to bother with the boring stuff.

But keeping up with our friends and people whose views interest us has become an effort in stalking. I will read your blog and follow your twitters and skim my favorite forums to find your posts. I’ll connect with you on LinkedIn and be your LiveJournal friend. I can get Google Alerts that tell me when your name comes up on someone’s site. I feel as though I should have separate folders in Bloglines for every person I know with RSS feeds that follow their every online move.

But what about the woven tapestry, the seamless conections? My dream is this. I’d like a service that consolidates all of my online profiles into one handy stalkers-are-us site.

Adding all my social networking profiles
I want to add all the sites I’m on, with a quick status page that shows the current activity on each. Did I recently write a note on Facebook? Add pictures to Flickr? Digg a story? Give me a snapshot.

Adding all the communities I post on
I’d like to list all the blogs and forums I post at so again, I can have a status page with links. It could automatically generate a list of recently posted items from everywhere around the web. How cool would that be?

Pushing or pulling a status message
Enough with the status messages already. I mean really. We put our status in IM, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal. I want to put my status message in one place and then choose which services get updated with it. And maybe I do want separate status messages for different services, so let me both push a status message out to multiple services as well as pull individual status messages into this magic new consolidated profile system.

What I’m doing right now
Some of the latest services are all about what’s going on right now this very minute. It seems like minutia, but I think it’s just a way to feel a sense of community. We’re not all hanging out in person, but by sharing what we’re doing, it’s as though we are. So, let me choose what I want to share. I could share the music I’m currently listening to, the forums I’m currently reading, even what I’m doing (”writing a blog post”). And of course, this would have to be opt-in. Maybe I don’t want you to know when I visit the When Will Nsync Reunite discussion forum. So, I’ll just keep that private.

A list of everything else
Sometimes I want to buy someone a gift. But I’m not sure what to get them. So, I check for an Amazon wish list. But lots of people come up with the same name. Or I can’t find them. I want the universal stalker profile system to list things like the Amazon wish list too. Does iTunes have a wish list? Can you share what you’re reading on Amazon? If not, you should be able to, and I want that here too. I want to include links to any reviews I’ve done of books, movies, restaurants, vacations. (Not that I actually do this, because you know, that would take non-laziness, but maybe you write reviews on those review sites and I want to read them!)

Learning abilities
I want to add all my various profiles, but I want the service to learn from that and from time to time, I want it to list the other places it thinks I am online so I can either say, yep, that’s me; show that too. Make it easy for me.

Lots of control over who sees what
LiveJournal does a pretty good job of this. You can get really granular with who views posts. If I have a post that only is viewable by three people, I would only want those three people to see that link in my magic stalker profile too. Twitter needs to work on this. Maybe I want to send a quick message to a group of people, rather than the whole world. Let me do it!

It’s a magic, perfect world!
With a magic stalker service such as this, I could add all my friends and have a consolidated status page to see what’s going on with all of them. But this is impossible, right? All of these services would have to agree and that would never happen. Well, maybe not, but I can dream. I know that these services all live on page views, but I don’t think my magic new service would hurt that. In fact, it might increase page views. I might not check 10 forums every day to see who’s posting, but if I checked my friend status page and see some interesting posts, I’ll click over and check them out. If you’ve just added some pictures on Flickr or Facebook, I’ll head on over to see them.

Really, this would make my life so much easier. If someone out there could just get going on this, I would greatly appreciate it. And feel free to use the name Stalkers Are Us. stalkersareus.com is already taken, but stalkrsareus.com is still available, and you know that missing “e” will get you some extra venture capital, so it’s a better domain name all around.