This is the body

So you got my reply to your Foursquare update – #plmkwysdt. 

Don’t take it personally, but I am checking out and I am no longer following you. There are too many interesting threads to follow and I am simply looking to cut down on meaningless information flowing into my Twitter feed.

Since I can’t receive your Foursquare updates in context and my Twitter client does not support filtering content out of my stream, I am forced to unfollow you. I really don’t need to know about trips to Lowes, Home Depot, Starbucks or the pub. Unless you ask me to join you:).  Without question, a certain segment that is online all the time are keen on the badges and the honor of being designated mayor. Consider another viewpoint. Some people you are connected to don’t need to know these details.

If you come around to this viewpoint and you stop Tweeting your Foursquare updates, PLEASE let me know and I will start following you again. After all, you do have interesting news and views to share.  It’s why I followed you in the first place!

All the best!

This morning, I read Elaine Kurtenbach’s story about the end of cheap, made in china products. For the past 20 years, many consumers have witnessed falling pricing on goods we cherish. When we learned about horrible working conditions in factories, environmental pollution and child labor abuses, a good many of us swallowed the news and simply moved on. Others created Facebook groups or online petitions. Rising costs are prompting companies to rethink the practice off off-shoring or moving to cheaper, small companies.

In the technology sector, the term commodity hardware was repeatedly beat into the vernacular of buyers, suppliers and channel partners. One company I did some consulting for, had a considerable set of headaches associated with moving partially assembled components around China. The supply chain manager and finance people were learning that cheap labor and materials get compounded by other challenges including permits, storage and shipping delays.

Now that labor is starting to organize, perhaps we will see an equalization of the true cost of off-shoring. Labor standards, good living wages and adherence to environment law will hopefully bring the world’s supply chain into order.

I for one would like to see the term commodity hardware replaced with full-cost hardware. With retailers charging safe disposal fees for older televisions, perhaps more vendors will follow. This would be a good thing. We do need to think about the full costs of anything we consume – it will help drive up better technologies and ways of getting things done.

We are continue to make changes to WhyHire.me. Some visible ones include the following:

1) when you embed links into discussion threads, wall posts or announcements, the links will be live

2) the contact request form on your external profile no longer exposes your email – it will present your visitor with a form. Click here to see a sample contact form. When the forms is submitted, you will receive the email message, but the sender will NOT get your email address…unless you you reply to them directly.

Thanks!

Many times over, WhyHire.me users ask, when will my profile show up on Google? This is a two part answer to that question.

Step 1 – Your profile settings must be set to public. When you do this, your entire profile will be viewable by anyone with your personal URL.

Go to your profile options, then click on Public.  Each and every Sunday, our software will notify Google about your profile. It will then get indexed when the Googlebot finds your pages. If you click on this file and find your WhyHire.me user name in the file, you are set to go.

How long will this take? According to Google, it can take anywhere from minutes or up to 4 weeks or longer. It will be a function of how popular your site/PURL is.  See the second steps below.

Step 2 – Keep linking your site. The Googlebot will take into account links that lead to your WhyHire.me PURL. Learn more about obtaining Trusted Links back to your site. If you commit to the program and keep blogging, Tweeting and getting good content onto your site, your WhyHire.me profile will rise in relevance.

Make no mistake, a huge segment of mobile phone users are jumping all over Foursquare. Its fun, hip and who wouldn’t want to be major of their favorite bar? Say it with me…Norm!

The only challenge with Foursquare and other check-in services and games is they generate chaffe. Chaffe is defined as “Trivial or worthless matter.” Other culprits include Farmville, Mob Boss etc…Oh My!

Let me explain. Chaffe is something that clutters your inbox, news or Twitter feed when the update is not relevant at the precise point in time. What do we do? We can set up spam filters, feed filters or simply stop subscribing…begrudgingly.

Now, imagine 100% penetration and uptake of Foursquare by all the mobile users in North America alone. If each of us checked into Starbucks on the way to work, the office, the gym, the local pub, then home….this would generate 1.5 Billion updates per day in North America alone.  Twitter is currently serving 50 Million Tweets per day. They would need to increase their already overloaded capacity by a multiple of 30 just for North America.

Since the average person follows 125 people, this translates into 635 Tweets that are simply chaffe…unless you are mobile and keen for a meet-up at the coffee shop, coming out of the office, the gym or at the pub.

Enter the phrase, context sensitive updates and tweets. Today’s developers should be building out system level preferences that let users accept updates that are in context. For me, this would mean turning on a preference to let trusted applications know I am mobile and keen for a choice meet up. I would also like a custom alert that would literally have my phone poke me, so I don’t miss out. Make no mistake, this would open privacy issues with my mobile provider…but they already know if I am out of my home.

Leave behind a comment and pile on this agenda. If we don’t get context aware applications, the shear volume of inane updates will turn us away.

Thanks to social media, people are sharing more and more apps I can use on my Blackberry. Tungle.me for collaborative scheduling and now ScanR which was embedded into Acrobat.com.

I have to tip my had to ScanR and Adobe, who quickly built it into a Mobile Phone App – I was able to take a simple photo, add comments and FAX it to a customer service department. I just pointed, clicked, added comments and entered a fax number. Text and email options are there as well – see image to the left.

This bodes well for Blackberry users – bring on the new and clever applications!