In Seth Godin’s “The Dip”, he makes the argument that being well rounded is overrated. At first glance this sounds odd. At a young age, we’re conditioned to be good at everything.

At least I was.

Learn to run faster.
Study your times tables over and over.
Practice your piano to become the best.
Stop playing so many video games. You’ll never get a job doing that.

Basically it’s about diversifying our talents. But is this really a good thing? Do you really care if your optometrist sucks at bowling? Or that your web designer can’t make sense of a balance sheet?

Now don’t get me wrong. I certainly don’t fault my parents for all the opportunities they provided for me. In fact, I am very grateful that they sacrificed so much for their children. The thing is, while it’s good to have a variety of skills, you need to establish which skills are your strongest and make them shine. Be remarkable with those ones. It’s good to have skills in other areas (after all we’re human and we do have a variety of interests) there’s no reason why all of them have to be at the same top level.

Up until recently a lot of the annual mutual fund reports I was getting were on an opt-out basis. Meaning, if I no longer wished to receive any of the clunky 50+ page annual reports, I’d need to contact the company directly and explicitly choose to opt-out. That’s why it was so refreshing today when I received a tiny mailer asking if I’d like to opt-in instead. No reply? Easy you’ll be automatically opting out.

The thing is, this is the way it should have always been. Aside from the obvious environmental benefit of wasting less paper, the company also saves money by not having to print a whole bunch of reports which would have mostly been skimmed (at best) and recycled anyway.

It’s a no brainer that when you given a choice of whether to receive an electronic version or physical version of mailings, you should, in most cases, choose the latter. Now if only we had some sort of solution to get rid of paper/physical coupons completely, now then that would be gravy.

Until then, sites like Save.ca will undoubtedly continue to entertain us with their Bathroom Tissue coupons.

This morning I received a message from one of my Facebook groups alerting me that they’ll be deleting their group that they’ve had for a year and a half. Not a big deal right? What if this group used Facebook as their exclusive platform for alerting members of upcoming events and information sessions? What if there were over 100 people registered for this group?

To replace the soon to be deleted Facebook group, they proposed that everyone switch to another social networking platform. Isn’t this kind of inconvenient for well, everyone?

Not only will I have to go through the motions of registering with the new platform but what about the process of having to reconnect with members? Isn’t this a whole lot of work just for the convenience of the company?

I can’t help but feel this is really horrible customer service. Why should the customer have to go out of their way to continue their membership with the group. Didn’t they opt in once already? What if instead of forcing people to sign up for another social network, they included a one click email list subscription process. One click. Done. Keep your customers in the loop without forcing them to jump through a million hoops.

If something as simple as that was done, I would have subscribed. For me, the hassle of having to sign up the other social network definitely outweighs the benefits that I get out of the group. It’s too bad really.

My colleague and I managed to get to the Supermarket around 5:30pm and noticed immediately that the venue was significantly smaller than the other TorCamp venues (like MaRS, Toronto Board of Trade). We found a couple of seats (it was still early) and managed to keep our seats for the entire evening. By the time the event was about to start, the Supermarket pretty much filled to capacity. So unless you were able to get a seat inside the room with the screen, you weren’t going to see much at all this evening.

The RGB from the projector was a bit off so there were moments that made viewing the screen difficult. There were also a lot of sound distractions coming from both people talking loudly and the sound of the wok from the open kitchen. That said, there were plenty of kick ass demos this evening that definitely delivered!

Roy Perira, Refresh Partners
Refresh Analytics: Social Networking Engagement Metrics

Launched in May/08, this app is a different way of doing analytics. It’s a REST based API that allows you to take social metrics data and put it on your website. By taking advantage of the Facebook API, they are able to provide and gather information about two main metrics: social influencers and virality (eg. how many new users does one new user bring to an application). With plenty of charts and detailed summaries of demographic info, I can see how this app would be very useful for marketers.

Chris Gurney
Blueprint Requirements Center

Based on eclipse, this app allows one to capture and elicit requirements through an easy to use interface. Chris first showed us how to enter a workflow and steps and inserting branching logic. He did a brief demo of the screen editor and showed us how they attach directly to processes. The ease of use of the application to create a visual story board and the ability to generate documentation and export out to other applications makes this seem like an ideal tool for business analysts.

Ali Asaria, Well.ca
Web -> Jabber Chat for your Site That’s better than Meebo and GTalk

By the time of this presentation, the RGB of the projector was finally balanced. Ali presented a tool that they’ve created over in their well.ca labs. We’re all familiar with instant messaging through web browsers but most of them aren’t that good. His solution is a chat system that is simple, reliable, doesn’t use AJAX and that can be embedded in a website. I think it’s something that my employer could use to integrate with our website, since we use jabber/iChat/Bonjour in the office.

Kosta Zabashta, Dr. Project, University of Toronto
Integrating IRC With Software Development Portals

For those not familiar with the Dr. Project it’s basically code that is forked from Trac. What his solution does is integrate IRC chats and logs with the Dr. Project system. Some of the key features he showed was the ability to query a Dr. Project Ticket with IRC and search IRC logs all within Dr. Project. I can see this being useful for those that use IRC in a lot of their day to day work.

Jesse Brown, Bitstrips
BITSTRIPS 1.2: why everyone should make comics

Debuted at SXSW 2008, this comic strip creation tool is the first strip creation tool that gives you a lot of creative freedom to make very unique cartoon characters. This definitely looked very cool and I will definitely be giving it a try.

Dave Coleman, SpreedNews
Spreed News: A Better Way of Reading your News on the Go

Spreed News solves the problem of information overload and two specific issues: Space and Time. By only displaying up to 5 words at a time and playing like a slideshow, this app allows you to gain more than just surface knowledge of articles. It actually allows you to read news in a much faster way. As you begin to read faster, you can change the speed of the text being output. Very cool.

Jevon MacDonald, Firestoker/StartupNorth
VC Rant

Jevon’s rant was about how startups will eventually save venture capital in Canada. He also emphasized the need for more good startups to be started through communities and for funders to connect with these great startups.

Conclusion

There were supposed to be 3 more ignite presentations but those never happened for whatever reason. Aside from some of the technical glitches that plagued some of the presentations, overall I had a good time. Best of all, I felt very inspired!

[ad]

On July 8, 2008 I attended my second Facebook Camp Toronto event. I had missed the first one because I didn’t know it existed and the 3rd one due to a prior commitment at work.

My friend and I arrived at the MaRS Centre about 15 minutes before the event and didn’t see the usual registration table set up nor did we see any sort of signage indicating that FacebookCampToronto4 was happening. After verifying that we had actually arrived on the correct date, we walked into the lower hall, found a couple of seats and sat down. I think the whole thing could have been a lot smoother as we weren’t the only ones who looked a little confused wandering into the hall. I guess when they say registration is at 6:00 pm, they mean it.

At 6:30 Colin Smillie took to the podium and did a quick introduction and provided some interesting statistics on the current state of Facebook:

After the intro, he handed the microphone over to Facebook’s Rebecca Sawyer to discuss how to successfully market one’s applications effectively through Facebook’s ad system. For those not familiar with Facebook’s ads, they are placed in two key areas: a user’s new feed (integrated with organic stories) and in the left hand column which appears on all Facebook pages.

After a brief case study discussing the successful promotion of the Sumo Khan application through Facebook Ads, she immediately went into discussing the best practices for creating successful ads:

1. Harness social actions
This can be done by creating ads that have a social action that appears as the headline in the ad. For example “Your friend John Smith has added this application”. This is effective because we rely on what our friends do and can be easily influenced by them. When purchasing ads, you should definitely have ads that target social actions.

2. Target your exact audience
The Facebook ad platform allows one to target based on a variety of key filters (eg. country, location, state, age, gender, college, political views, movies, books, etc). Included in the platform is a targeting tool which provides metrics on what demographic installs your ads. This is useful as it allows you to fine tune your ads. In general, targeting ads to smaller, more specific groups of users should result in higher click-throughs.

3. Writing an Effective Ad
The ad writing platform looks really simple to use. It allows you to easily enter a title, body, and image for your ad with full preview capabilities so that you can see what it’ll look like as you create it. The key point that Rebecca made was your ad has to be catchy and properly branded regardless of whether it’s image based or text based.

4. Create Multiple Ads
The idea here is very simple and self explanatory. Creating multiple ads makes sense to see what works and what doesn’t.

5. Optimize
Included with the platform is an Insights tool which provides real time statistics on impressions, and clicks your advertisements are receiving. Again, the higher the click-through rate, the more successful your ads are.

Rebecca did an excellent QA and handled questions quite well. Aside from an inappropriate question being asked by a disgruntled heckler, most of the questions were on topic and useful for the community.

Andrew Cherwenka of Trapeze was up next. He talked a lot about the growing developer community and a bit about the soon to be released “new” profile page.

I stayed briefly for the Praized demo by Sebastien Provencher but due to a prior engagement I had to leave shortly after.

All in all it was an alright FacebookCampToronto. The lack of registration and signage at the beginning could have been improved, but overall from what I saw everything else went really well.

[ad]