I had one of those terrible and all-too-typical experiences yesterday. I had to call a customer service number. I called, struggling with the voice-activated answering system, cursing vociferously in hopes of triggering some sort of special mechanism to connect me directly to a real person. Finally my turn in the phone queue came and - of course, this is always how the story goes - the customer service rep was able to pull up my account information, verify it, answer my question, mail me the necessary paperwork (seriously, in 2011) and tell me to have a nice day. I waited on hold for about 20 minutes; talking to someone took about four minutes.
As I sat on hold, an automated voice reminded me that there were many things I could do if I went to the organization's website instead. Alas, not in my case. The website had some forms and an FAQ, sure, but much to my chagrin, I had to call the toll-free number.
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This post is part of a series brought to you by GoToAssist.
I may have a bias towards online help desks as opposed to phone-based ones; I live on the Web, not on the phone. And it may be that as we conduct more and more business and e-commerce online, the toll-free number and the customer service hotline will fade away. But how far away from an online-only - or even predominantly online - customer service world are we?
Pretty far. Most companies do still rely on the phone for customer service, even if they have a website. But there are a number of tools that are moving the help desk online - from collecting simple feedback to more complicated troubleshooting.
Forums: Forums are probably one of the oldest ways of communicating with users online, and as always, the usefulness of a forum for customer service depends on the level of activity there - from CSRs and from other users. There are several companies that offer Web services to set up public and private forums - for user feedback and inquiries - including Uservoice.
Customer Service Apps: One of the benefits of using third-party services to help manage the online help desk is the ability to tap into a number of new apps. These allow customer service reps to answer questions and fulfill support tickets while mobile. (See Klint Flinley's recent post 6 Help Desk and Customer Service Apps for the iPad.) The customer support software-as-a-service company ZenDesk offers an iPad app, for example, that gives agents the ability to manage their entire ticket workflow from the iPad by editing tickets, assigning them to different agents and tagging entries. Other companies offer remote access to users' computers, so as to help assist them directly with problems on their machines.
Social Media: Despite the buzz about social media, the vast majority of companies do not yet use social media to help with customer service efforts. But that's changing, in no small part because customers are demanding it. Gartner predicts that within five years, social media will replace phone call centers in more than 40% of the top 1,000 companies.
Clearly customer support is moving online. Having been on hold far too long, I can't wait.
Moleskine, the traditional maker of high-end notepads, released an iPad app last week that brings its distinctive, black and historically famous notebook to the realm of digital applications.
??Basically, it is a note-taking application that is customizable and can be used with a stylus. Like physical Moleskines, writing interfaces come in plain (no lines), lined or squared; you can also change the color themes and add pictures. Tied to this is the ability to use Facebook and Twitter from the app and geotag all your posts.
??The app that Moleskine has come up with fits in with how they think of themselves - the professional note-taker's notepad. Yet, the execution leaves a touch to be desired.
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Navigation of the app is not intuitive. Moleskine does provide handy sketches of how to get around but they are cluttered and hard to distinguish when going from the help section to the actual functional application.
For instance, trying to switch between the iPad keyboard when writing and back to the stylus can be a confusing process. You switch to the settings page (which can be flipped from behind the note taking page), press the stylus setting buttons that seem like they should work and then flipp back to the note page. It is kind of like using a pen that you know has ink in it but will not write, and when it does write it's not where or how you wanted it to come out.
??There are other note-taking applications on the market that do as well as Moleskine. Evernote is a lot of reporters' favorite tool because, from a smartphone, it can record video and upload it to the Web, store pictures, capture articles from the Internet for later reading (Read-It-Later style) and is cloud-accessible from any device.
HTC's upcoming tablets, the Flyer and the Evo View, have stylus applications called Notes and Sketchbook that allow audio recording while taking notes with a stylus and can be synced with Evernote. Moleskine, despite its features and slick interface does not yet match up to these other applications.
As different Internet-connected devices become scattered around your home - laptop, smartphone, iPad, netbook, Internet TV box, and more - it's useful to have apps that connect them together and sync data when necessary. Below we look at 5 products that do this. Ultimately, they help you take control of your multiple devices!
Some of these apps have been suggested to us by the company founders we've interviewed for our product innovation series. These are people who are themselves building innovative apps, so their tips are worth heeding. We'd love to know which apps you use to connect or sync devices in your home, so tell us in the comments.
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Dropbox
With so many devices being used in a modern home nowadays, an app that syncs your files is a must-have. Dropbox does exactly that. It's a favorite app of Instapaper creator Marco Arment, who told us that "anything that synchronizes between computers well is a huge time saver and a huge frustration saver."
Indeed Arment considers Dropbox to be "much, much better than iDisk ever was" (referring to Apple's online file hosting service) and he thinks that "Apple should just buy Dropbox, it's that good."
Veebeam
Jim Lanzone, co-founder and CEO of Clicker, uses a product called Veebeam to connect his computer or iPad to a big screen TV wirelessly. Veebeam has the functionality of an alpha product, according to Lanzone. "But the freedom I feel," he told us, "to be able to bring up a browser, navigate to a website to watch it on my big screen in HD, has been liberating - and I could see the future when I did that."
Camera A
Camera A is a photo app for the iPad that was recommended to us by John Borthwick, co-founder of Betaworks (the company behind Bit.ly, TweetDeck and more). When used with an iPhone app called Camera B, it connects your iPad and iPhone together by bluetooth or wifi and allows you to take photos.
Borthwick told us that it re-defines boundaries for what the iPad is, as the iPad doesn't actually have a camera.
Vuze
Vuze is a P2P client that enables you to find TV shows and movies available on the Internet. But its usefulness as a web app extends to enabling you to stream that content from your computer to a variety of devices: iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV, PS3, Xbox 360, PSP, and TiVo.
As I noted in a recent open thread about Internet TV, I use Vuze to stream TV shows or movies to my Sony Playstation 3 (which is connected to my TV).
Rdio
Rdio is the new online (and offline) music service from the founders of Skype. One of its defining features is its ability to sync music across different devices. So if you want to listen to music offline on your mobile phone, you can save it there and sync back to Rdio when you're online again. It's all done in the cloud, so there's no physical connection necessary.
Clicker's Jim Lanzone is a fan of Rdio. "I still use Pandora and I love the new genre channel that they've launched," he told us, "but I think Rdio has a lot of great personalization and sharing features."
Tell Us What Apps You Use to Connect Your Devices
The five we've mentioned are of course a small sample of apps that connect or sync your devices. Let us know which apps you use and like, in the comments!
Earlier this week we looked at the upcoming launch of Google TV. It's slated for this fall (U.S.) and will be integrated into a new line of Sony Internet TVs. Meanwhile a Swedish company has just launched its own Internet TV, built on top of Google's open source Android Operating System.
The company is called People of Lava and its new line of Internet TVs is called Scandinavia (in the same way that Sony has a line of TVs called 'Bravia'). With the tagline "Window to the World," the Scandanavia comes in 3 sizes: 42", 47" and 55". The new product was unveiled this week at the IFA consumer electronics trade show in Berlin.
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Firstly, to clarify that Google TV is a software product built on Android. It will be integrated into televisions (like the Sony Internet TV) and set-top boxes. It appears that People of Lava plans to integrate Google TV into its TVs too, but for now it has gotten a jump on Sony by building its own Android-based Internet TV software.
The People of Lava TV will come pre-loaded with applications, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, email client and a web browser. The browser is custom built, based on Webkit (the foundation of many modern web browsers, including Safari and Chrome). The company says that it will launch a "People of Lava App Store," but no time frame has been given. Also included in the TV package is a wireless keyboard with a pointer/mouse.
Right now the TVs are only available to purchase in Sweden.
How Will it Compare to Sony Internet TV?
It will be interesting to see how this fares against the Sony line when that's released in the fall, as Sony has the benefit of having the official Google TV software integrated from the get-go. Sony is also of course a well established TV manufacturing brand, whereas People of Lava is relatively unknown.
People of Lava is clearly trying to get a jump on Google's anointed partner Sony and establish a name for itself in Internet TVs. However it's likely to be short-lived glory, as Sony's offering will surely be more advanced due to the inclusion of Google TV. So the question will become: how fast can People of Lava iterate to compete?
A couple of years ago, the new launch from Webwalks, a universal inbox, news aggregator, password manager and kitchen sink-type application would have caught my eye. I'd rush out to try it, merging my multiple accounts under its one roof then wait to see how well my life improved, how much time I saved. But today, I'm more ambivalent about these sorts of applications. The concept of a universal inbox for tracking everything under the sun now leaves me cold.
That's not to say that merging of social networks with the inbox in and of itself is a bad idea - Google Buzz, Xobni, and Outlook's new social connector all offer innovative ways to augment the inbox experience. But there's a key difference between these apps and those promising a "universal inbox" - they come to you, in the inbox you already know and love.
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The Sad State of the Universal Inbox
The idea of a universal inbox is smart. On paper, that is. In our "information overloaded" modern age, messages come at us left and right from multiple email accounts, instant messaging programs, SMS on our mobile phones and from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And yet, none of the "universal inbox" applications have ever really taken off.
We've seen some worthy contenders though. Fuser, NutshellMail and Inbox2, for example, all merge messages from multiple platforms into one unified service. The more clever of these programs provide a way to make Facebook the interface you use to check your mail instead of forcing you into some new web service. However, even that option hasn't attracted a large following.
Inbox2's Facebook app "emailstream" only has 245 active users. NutshellMail's does a little better with just over 5400 users. But when you think of the hundreds of millions of registered users on Facebook (400 million at the last count), these numbers aren't even a drop in a bucket - they're more like a grain of sand on a long stretch of beach.
The sites' web destinations do a little better, but only a service called OtherInbox is doing well, with 67,000+ visitors last month. NutshellMail seems to be hanging in there, too - even growing its traffic a bit lately - and yet it attracted just under 24,000 uniques last month (according to Compete - not always the best source of statistics but good enough for this quick glance). An article on Digg's homepage often get more hits than that! And it's an understatement to say these numbers fall short of the millions who routinely log into online email accounts from Gmail, Hotmail and the like.
So what's wrong? Why aren't these services more popular?
People Want to Use Their Own Inbox, Not Some 3rd-Party Service
The answer to that question has its roots in what people expect from an email application. Email services from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and yes, even AOL, among others are designed from the ground-up to provide that company's vision of the best messaging experience. The applications are feature-rich with advanced options like POP3 and IMAP support, forwarding, filters, labels, auto-replies, vacation responders, spam filters and more.
Third-party aggregation-type applications don't always have the same feature set. Plus, they typically have their own very un-email like interface - the applications tend to treat your email like activity streams on a social network, not critical messages that need to be filed, forwarded, replied to, or turned into tasks and calendar appointments. The exception here seems to be OtherInbox - they offer a real inbox complete with calendar tie-ins, stars for saving messages, spam filters and other typical email features. Not surprisingly, they're the one doing the best out of all the other inbox applications listed here. However, they're not really a "universal" inbox. They don't claim to merge all your messaging services into one - they simply help you better sort and organize your mail. So, really, they don't count.
Socializing as an Inbox Layer
A better solution to the merging of messaging and social is, interestingly enough, exactly what Google has just launched with Buzz. Sure, that service has gotten off to a rough start with bugs, missing features and of course, the privacy issues, but the concept is solid. In Buzz, social networking becomes an additional layer to your inbox - one click and the display changes to a stream of social activity; click again and you're back to your email. Important "social" messages (those you created, commented on or liked in Buzz) grab your attention by re-appearing in your inbox proper.
Other companies have similar ideas about socializing email. Xobni, for example, offers a plugin for Outlook that extracts social information about your contacts (among many other things). Microsoft, too, is just now launching its social layer for Outlook - the Social Connector which optionally lets you integrate LinkedIn and soon Facebook and MySpace into your inbox.
These programs all have a better shot at unifying the inbox to create a truly universal email application. They provide you with your "real" inbox and all its features while layering it with a social element. You don't have to migrate to a new service entirely. Meanwhile the standalone universal inbox applications available today probably won't last. They would be better off developing their service into a plugin or add-on for the webmail and desktop programs that people use today instead of trying to convince people to start checking their email elsewhere.
Today has been the Day of Location-Based Reporting at ReadWriteWeb, and what better way to help you end your tedious work week than by showing you this entirely speculative infographic that's recently been making the rounds in our back channels.
Now, since the Commander in Chief has admitted to not even being a Twitter user, we can also safely assume he's not big into Foursquare, either. But what if he were? What if he had the freedom to complain about bad restaurant service, gossip about his colleagues and get a hard-earned "Bender" badge just like the rest of us? Would the maps of his checkins look something like these, perhaps?
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Featuring humorous - if fictional - anecdotes and tips from the POTUS, this graphic also blends real info about hotspots the First Family has hit up in four major U.S. cities.
Perhaps one day, we'll be able to talk Obama (or one of his predecessors) into sharing the minutiae of his nightlife with the public. How do you think the Secret Service would feel about that?
Click the image below to see the full version, and let us know what you think in the comments.
The piece was inspired by the Foursquare-integrating BlackBook Guides (iTunes link), a set of cultural guides to major cities, featuring restaurants, nightlife, travel, fashion and entertainment.
Being a technology blogger is like having a license for an around-the-clock gadget and Web addiction.
No one expects you to leave your house during the day. You're allowed to spend the majority of your life in front of a glowing screen, and flipping out over WiFi issues is par for the course. And you're never far from the Web, since your mobile is always in hand when you have to leave your laptop behind for some incomprehensible reason.
But even with such a license in hand, I have to make a case for periodically disconnecting. What do you think?
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More and more, I am trying to set aside unplugged hours and even days for Internet-free, mobile-free, "Luddite time." Time for asking a stranger for directions, time for talking to the people you're with rather than the people you "follow," time for interacting with the world around you in ways that don't include clicking, scrolling or downloading. Time that's increasingly being destroyed by smart phones, "super" phones and what ever "super duper" devices are in the pipeline.
Sitting in front of these glowing screens (as most of us do) for around eight hours a day for work and additional hours for leisure can't be good for us as living, breathing organisms. Have you ever spent the whole day absorbed in the web - the rabbit holes of YouTube, the breadcrumb trails of Wikipedia, the party line of Twitter and the bottomless virtual library of blog posts - to find yourself startled by actual human interaction, in a strange and unrestul intellectual state. With enough consecutive days of online-only living, you might realize you're making more connections between online entities and content, but you're losing opportunities to have fresh, original thought or observations about your own world.
I'm not saying that the Internet makes you stupid. I am saying that, if left to run wild across the vast territories of the Web, your mind can turn into a laboratory hamster, frantically pulling levers and running in wheels while his environment remains essentially static and his motivations essentially artificial.
Another detriment to a constantly wired life is that you're not truly present with the folks around you every day, and you begin to forget how polite, normal people communicate. You become too easily distracted by notifications from your mobile, glazing over and tuning out to parse your RSS feeds while real conversations are going on without you. And being accustomed to ignoring your surroundings in favor of your online life numbs you to the fact that often, your friends are doing the same to you. If you've ever sat through a dinner with your significant other or a group of geek friends as you all happily tapped away on your mobiles, you know this is true. And while being able to buck conventional table manners and geek out together is a wonderful thing, aren't you cheating yourself out of valuable face-to-face interaction by doing so?
And very often, an preoccupation with the Web leads to a total loss of perspective. If you have ever stayed awake until 2 or 3 in the morning entrenched in a furious debate on Scoble's FriendFeed over something that the entire world had completely forgotten 12 hours later (guilty!), you have definitely lost perspective. Not typically the most empathetic people, we begin to give more attention and emotion to minor tech events (Google Wave, anyone?) than to major world events. If it didn't trend on Twitter and hit Digg's front page, we tend to not notice or care. Although the social web can occasionally be used as a power for good, notably through efforts such as those carried out during the Iranian election/debacle or on World Aids Day, this circle is notoriously self-obsessed and navel-gazing to the obfuscation of much more important matters.
Finally, being constantly online is probably fairly bad for your health. A few of the people I've spoken to tonight tell me that to distract themselves from Internet obsessions, they turn to physical activity, such as gym workouts, yoga or running. These dear souls are escaping the sedentary lifestyle to which we've all grown fairly accustomed and which most certainly has negative effects on how we look, how we feel, our metabolism and energy level and so much more. And although mobile and AR technologies are making it easier for us to get out and about while still connected, more often they act as a tether to larger, more stationary devices.
I personally want to spend many hours in 2010 offline and off my mobile. I want to do things like watch an old movie, go for a walk, have a dinner date or read an honest-to-god newspaper without checking in on Foursquare or posting an "overheard" on Twitter. Maybe it's a sign that I'm aging. Many of my contemporaries say their sole offline time is sleeping. I've certainly lived that way, too, and I spend many days now online for 14-18 hours. But I don't want every day to be like that.
What about you, dear readers? Do you currently plan for and enforce offline hours for yourself, your significant other or your family? If so, how and when do you take your breaks? Or are you a tireless defender of the Internet junkie lifestyle?
Most importantly, what do you see as the explicit benefits or detriments of being online around the clock - or of taking periodic furloughs?
Let us know your opinions and best practices in the comments.
Forget losing weight or finding the perfect life partner: All we want to do is make 2010 the biggest geek-out year ever.
The ReadWriteWeb crew have collectively planned to take over the world next year by honing our nerd super-powers. From programming in Python to building AI houses, we've resolved to be smarter, more curious, more technical and way geekier than we were last year. Read our resolutions, and definitely let us know what you plan to do to be the best geek you can be in 2010.
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The editor-in-chief himself, Mr. Richard MacManus, is known for his fascination with machine-to-machine communication via the Internet of Things. This year promises to be an interesting one at the MacManus residence if Richard's resolutions hold true.
"One of my goals for 2010," he said, "is to experiment with Internet of Things in my own house and life, using tools like Pachube and sensors. We'll see how that goes..."
We wish you lots of luck, boss! If all goes well, you'll be a prime candidate for the first episode of Geek Cribs, and we'll all be very, very jealous.
"I'm finding that the coolest ideas come out of academic institutions and enthusiast groups before they're ever thought of as business-related products. In 2010 I plan on attending more hackathons, dev camps and emerging tech conferences like SIGGRAPH."
In addition to all that conference-hopping, Dana's going to be doing some web work of her own. "Honestly, I need to revamp my personal website Villagers With Pitchforks. I haven't changed the design in years."
Alex Williams, our resident enterprise expert, is also known in certain circles as an experienced podcasting pro. His resolution is something the ReadWriteWeb team would all love to see happen.
He told us that he wants to use 2010 to "make an informative and entertaining podcast for ReadWriteWeb Enterprise that is lively, smart and fun."
What do our friendly readers think? Would you like to listen to awesome news about what companies and people are moving and shaking in the world of enterprise technology? What folks do you most want Alex to talk to, and what topics would you find most interesting? And where would you be most likely to listen to a RWW podcast? At your laptop, in your car, while walking your dogs? Let us know in the comments!
Our newest startup blogger, Chris Cameron, said he wants to use 2010 to press the flesh and put faces with names, so to speak.
"Since I'm the new kid on the block and fresh out of J-school with my M.M.C., my new year's resolution is to get acquainted with as many people as possible in the web/tech/startup industry and develop a healthy amount of sources."
As seasoned journos, it's our sworn duty to protect cub reporters from no-account rabble rousers, so we asked Chris who he specifically wanted to meet this year. He replied, "I'd love to develop some contacts from the bastions of the Web (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Digg, etc.)."
You're in good company, kid. We'd like to meet those guys, too. Just kidding! As a RWW blogger, you're sure to have Kevin Rose and Biz Stone on speed dial in no time. We wish you luck.
Another ReadWriteNoob is Abraham Hyatt, our intrepid Production Editor. He's got a full slate of resolutions this year.
He told us he wants to have more one-on-one time with "the bloggers I read every day, the people whose tweets I look forward to, the friends who surprise me with what they post."
He also said he's going to start paying attention to things outside the tech sphere and his geographical scene. "I want to change the fact that I have no idea what's changing in journalism in China."
And finally, Abraham let us in on how he's keeping his finger on the pulse of technology. "I want to learn from my 5-year-old niece as she begins using the Web. I just hooked her up with her first kids browser and the way she interacts with the Web will be a hint of what's to come for all of us online in the next decade."
Add in learning how to code and blogging more, two of his other resolutions, and Abraham's got a full dance card for the rest of the year!
As for me, I plan to learn Python this year. I've realized in 2009 that it's harder to be a tech writer when you don't have a hacker-esque depth of understanding about APIs and web apps. After talking to Leah Culver, Mark Jeffrey and a bunch of other really smart programmers, I think Python is a great place to start learning about programming languages. So this year, I'm tackling a 900-page O'Reilly book, and I'm not giving up until I have a working web app of my own! Next up, Haskell.
Via Twitter, we heard from a few of our friends, including entrepreneur Renato Valdés Olmos, who pointed us to this pretty web app for those without resolutions who yearn to start small. And everyone's favorite O.G (that's "original geek" in these parts), Chris Pirillo, just couldn't resist the opportunity to get sassy. "My geekiest new year's resolution," he said, "is 2560x1600."
So, what great and glorious plans have you got for 2010? Will you be hacking your way to entrepreneurial greatness by starting your own web company? Will you be building hardware? Are you resolving to start a new career path, go to a new conference or meet a lifelong tech hero?
Like us, you've probably just come out of a tryptophan-inspired coma on a relative's couch and are jonesing for some tech news. Unfortunately, the newsmakers are likely in the same position. While we cull the tubes for Internet-related happenings, check out this panoply of sites, apps, curiosities, trends and more.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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"Somewhat" Frank Gruber Is Thankful For His New Web Project
Our good friend Frank Gruber has been working on Thankfulfor.com, a social gratitude journal.
Gruber writes that he and partner Jen Consalvo wanted to create "a forum for expressing gratitude routinely as a foundation for happiness and well-being."
Frank and Jen with Sir Richard Branson earlier this year.
"People come to the site and post what they are thankful for to their personal journal of thanks. People can also choose to send each Thankfulfor post to their social network on Twitter (each post starts with the #thankfulfor hashtag) extending the good vibes far and wide."
During the holiday season, Gruber's hosting a Gratitude Challenge for the remainder of the holiday season to encourage users around the world to spread the love. A great idea from a couple of great people!
Helping the Hungry Through YouTube Videos
Most of the Americans reading this are probably ridiculously stuffed with turkey and the associated edibles, but the good folks at YouTube recognized our annual gluttony as a great opportunity to help the less fortunate.
Using their own homepage and blog as a platform, the site asked users, a.k.a. Video Volunteers, to create videos to promote the hunger-related nonprofit of their choice. along with the organization Feeding America and special curator David Arquette, YouTube has selected three submissions on the site. Here's one we liked:
Next week, curator Morgan Freeman will kick off another round of submissions, this time focusing on human rights.
Hitwise research director Heather Dougherty writes that year after year, Thanksgiving is the peak day for Internet visits to major retail websites, outstripping Black Friday, the day after Christmas, and other traditional big shopping days. Typically, for search engines, Thanksgiving also marks a peak in user searches for major retailers.
However, yearly trends show significant drops in traffic and searches between 2007 and 2008. And, Doughtery writes, "The daily visits to the Retail 500 are down compared to last year leading up to the big holiday weekend." Check out the purple line on this graph; it represents search traffic for major retail brands leading up to the holiday, and it's measurably lower than in previous years:
Also, the orange line on this graph shows site traffic stats for the same group of retailers. It, too, shows a decline from traffic in previous years.
Take heart, online retailers! Stats for traffic coming from email marketing are actually quite robust. Are email marketers with cleverly presented bargains succeeding in these times of woe and want? This seems to be the case.
SocialVibe's Facebook App Aims to Feed Folks in Need
SocialVibe is all about helping brands and users create positive social change. In a typical SocialVibe setup, a brand "sponsors" users, who take small actions and engagements to raise money for the charity of their choice.
The new SocialVibe Facebook app involves partnerships with multiple brands and allows users to help feed the hungry through the UN World Food Programme.
Users create virtual Thanksgiving tables, choose one of three decor themes, pick food items to bring, and and invite friends. By engaging in simple, free brand interactions, users are able to furnish their and their friends' tables with turkeys, mashed potatoes, and all the traditional dishes - and best of all, each food item in the app equates to a specific number of meals the UN World Food Programme will be able to provide to hungry families and individuals.
That wraps up this year's Thanksgiving around the web. What new sites, apps, or campaigns did you notice and love this year? Tell us all about them in the comments!
Shopping is horror. The prices. The lines. The hordes of clamoring consumers - the thought of holiday shopping is, in itself, enough to make us wish for simpler days when putting coal in someone's sock was a legitimate option.
But, whether we like it or not, we can't Grinch out; so we'd better start thinking about the gift-giving season now and get it over with. And since your friends at ReadWriteWeb are huge geeks, we thought we'd amuse you with a few Internet-enabled oddities that might actually make your obligatory retail purgatory a little more bearable.
If there's anything worse than shopping for a loved one's gift, it's shopping for a loved one whose preferences, tastes, and needs are a complete mystery. Don't worry: It doesn't mean you're insensitive. You've just got your mind on other things.
The solution: For quick, decisive, and possible all-online gift-buying, coerce every potential gift recipient into signing up at Wishzilla. The creators of this site have kept the clear-cut, actionable sensibility of the gift registry while maintaining the element of surprise. Here's how it works: Users login with Facebook (or create an account) and then start bookmarking their gift wishlist all over the web. Once the list is done, it's locked. Signed, sealed, and sent to Santa. What items have been purchased and by whom remain a secret until the wrapping paper gets torn away.
Everyone wins, and no one is left feeling awkward about that good-intentioned but ill-advised sweater.
2 & 3) Customized Clothing for Him, Her, Hym, Etc.
We've recently been exposed to the wonderful world of e-spoke apparel. We actually just made up the term e-spoke as a portmanteau of electronic and bespoke; basically, there are a few sites out there that allow for high-quality and entirely customizable wearable goods; in fact, some of them are very forward-thinking, technologically.
For the dress shirt-wearer in your life, we have ShirtsMyWay, a site that lets the user completely customize their ideal of collared and cuffed perfection. Our Twitter research has shown that some folks find the site a little spendy; but seriously, a beautiful dress shirt designed to your exact specifications and measurements is worth the extra cost - which, we might add, is significantly less than most other customized apparel experiences.
And for your feminine side, we have Shoes of Prey. The URL alone takes no prisoners, and neither will your fierce creations. Heels on these completely customizable beasts only elevate the wearer a modest 3.5 inches at their highest, but the ability to branch beyond the dyed-satin-bridesmaid-shoe paradigm of shoe customization is more than enough incentive to check out this site.
If Craiglist, eBay, and Etsy had some kind of inter-website relations and made a web-baby, it would be Storenvy. In a prettily designed community setting, users can set up buyer and seller accounts. The site is a series of independent online retailers and shoppers who browser across all of those stores at once, interacting with each other by watching what notes and ratings they leave on products and stores throughout the site. Check out the social features in action here, or just set up an account and start having fun.
Better yet, get your friends to set up accounts and thus remove some of the guesswork from gifting.
5) Regretsy, the Gag Gift You Can't Resist & Will Never Live Down
Rubber chickens, whoopie cushions, every sadistic and horrifyingly cheap Secret Santa atrocity - none of it can match the horrors found on Regretsy. We actually feel pity for the people who buy or receive the Etsy-fueled inventory from this site. If you ever wondered what kinds of jewelry can be made from animal feces or exactly who makes embroidered toilet paper, you have found your web-enabled holy grail. If not, well, you're in for a good laugh and at least a few ideas for passive-aggressive office gift exchanges. Forced, semi-professional merriment will never be the same.
So there you have it, folks! You never have to leave your three-monitor array of addictive Internet connectivity to satisfy the whims of the potential gift recipients in your life. Just use these tools and a little personal judgement, and all your holiday shopping-related worries can be laid to rest.
We just hope we have a similarly good list when it comes to last-minute shopping; god knows we plan to procrastinate as long as possible, helpful tools notwithstanding.
I had one of those terrible and all-too-typical experiences yesterday. I had to call a customer service number. I called, struggling with the voice-activated answering system, cursing vociferously in hopes of triggering some sort of special mechanism to connect me directly to a real person. Finally my turn in the phone queue came and - of course, this is always how the story goes - the customer service rep was able to pull up my account information, verify it, answer my question, mail me the necessary paperwork (seriously, in 2011) and tell me to have a nice day. I waited on hold for about 20 minutes; talking to someone took about four minutes.
Navigation of the app is not intuitive. Moleskine does provide handy sketches of how to get around but they are cluttered and hard to distinguish when going from the help section to the actual functional application. 
As different Internet-connected devices become scattered around your home - laptop, smartphone, iPad, netbook, Internet TV box, and more - it's useful to have apps that connect them together and sync data when necessary. Below we look at 5 products that do this. Ultimately, they help you take control of your multiple devices!
Earlier this week we looked at the 
A couple of years ago, the new launch from 
Inbox2's Facebook app "
Other companies have similar ideas about socializing email. 
Today has been the 
Being a technology blogger is like having a license for an around-the-clock gadget and Web addiction.
Sitting in front of these glowing screens (as most of us do) for around eight hours a day for work and additional hours for leisure can't be good for us as living, breathing organisms. Have you ever spent the whole day absorbed in the web - the rabbit holes of YouTube, the breadcrumb trails of Wikipedia, the party line of Twitter and the bottomless virtual library of blog posts - to find yourself startled by actual human interaction, in a strange and unrestul intellectual state. With enough consecutive days of online-only living, you might realize you're making more connections between online entities and content, but you're losing opportunities to have fresh, original thought or observations about your own world.
Another detriment to a constantly wired life is that you're not truly present with the folks around you every day, and you begin to forget how polite, normal people communicate. You become too easily distracted by notifications from your mobile, glazing over and tuning out to parse your RSS feeds while real conversations are going on without you. And being accustomed to ignoring your surroundings in favor of your online life numbs you to the fact that often, your friends are doing the same to you. If you've ever sat through a dinner with your significant other or a group of geek friends as you all happily tapped away on your mobiles, you know this is true. And while being able to buck conventional table manners and geek out together is a wonderful thing, aren't you cheating yourself out of valuable face-to-face interaction by doing so?
And very often, an preoccupation with the Web leads to a total loss of perspective. If you have ever stayed awake until 2 or 3 in the morning entrenched in a furious debate on Scoble's FriendFeed over something that the entire world had completely forgotten 12 hours later (guilty!), you have definitely lost perspective. Not typically the most empathetic people, we begin to give more attention and emotion to minor tech events (Google Wave, anyone?) than to major world events. If it didn't trend on Twitter and hit Digg's front page, we tend to not notice or care. Although the social web can occasionally be used as a power for good, notably through efforts such as those carried out during the Iranian election/debacle or on World Aids Day, this circle is notoriously self-obsessed and navel-gazing to the obfuscation of much more important matters.
Finally, being constantly online is probably fairly bad for your health. A few of the people I've spoken to tonight tell me that to distract themselves from Internet obsessions, they turn to physical activity, such as gym workouts, yoga or running. These dear souls are escaping the sedentary lifestyle to which we've all grown fairly accustomed and which most certainly has negative effects on how we look, how we feel, our metabolism and energy level and so much more. And although mobile and AR technologies are making it easier for us to get out and about while still connected, more often they act as a tether to larger, more stationary devices.
Forget losing weight or finding the perfect life partner: All we want to do is make 2010 the biggest geek-out year ever.
The editor-in-chief himself, 
Our own 
Our newest startup blogger, 
Another ReadWriteNoob is 
As for 
Like us, you've probably just come out of a tryptophan-inspired coma on a relative's couch and are jonesing for some tech news. Unfortunately, the newsmakers are likely in the same position. While we cull the tubes for Internet-related happenings, check out this panoply of sites, apps, curiosities, trends and more.
Shopping is horror. The prices. The lines. The hordes of clamoring consumers - the thought of holiday shopping is, in itself, enough to make us wish for simpler days when putting coal in someone's sock was a legitimate option.