A Path to Success

Career Advice '08 - A presentation on Dan Pink's new book - Lessig-style

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Eventbrite - Alex says try it you'll like it

I have not done a product review before, but I think I'll start off with our event management system. Eventbrite is the system we use at NewPath to advertise our events to our mailing list of 500+ folks. I must admit, they have gone a long way from the initial email exchange I had with one of their founders, Julia. I wanted an evite replacement, and, finally after 2 years I think they've satisfied all my event management needs, and more.

I found the system in April 2006 when I was registering for another event that was using Mollyguard, the old name for Eventbrite. Here's the email I sent to Dan Pink when I found this system:

from Alex Sirota <[email protected]> to Dan Pink <[email protected]> date Thu, Apr 6, 2006 at 11:26 AM subject da bomb mailed-by gmail.com

Finally an alternative, and a good one, to Evite

 

http://www.mollyguard.com/findevents?keywords=toronto

 

Watch these guys eat Evite's lunch... A web 2.0 version of evite is MUCH needed for folks like me... :)

The system has evolved into a fully capable event management system. Here's what I particularly like about Eventbrite.

1. Very quick and easy UI to setup and run an event, without ads.

2. Integrates with PayPal very cleanly with lots of ticketing options (free, complementary, etc).

3. Lots of customization options including advertising your event on their portal, your own website and look & feel options.

4. Most importantly, the list management features allow you to easily view who's opened, clicked, ignored, registered, not registered for your event. You can then resent invites to subsets of the invites. And best of all, if folks register for your event off the invite list you can continue to put them into your main invitation list. This is key to growing the invitation lists. Multiple lists are supported of course.

Using a system like Eventbrite guarantees that you will save time and effort from tracking who's coming to what, who's paid and who has not. You can do analysis on a longer term basis to find out who comes to your events regularly.

I give it 5 out of 5 Alex's.

ps. If you sign up with the NewPath affiliate link we'll get a little kick back from EventBrite, and you'll get some karma points. Go ahead -- try it.

Awesome SSL/lock icon details

When you double click on the lock icon in the bottom right corner of a Firefox 3 window, a really, really useful SSL certificate screen comes up (click on the image above to zoom it). It is written in plain language and assures you of the site's security, whether you've visited it before and whether cookies are stored on your computer. All in a day's work to make the Internet more open, from the Mozilla folks. Thank you Mozilla for making the Internet a friendly place, for all!

Open TLDs + AwesomeBar = Revolution?

There is a revolution going on in regards to labels, tags and naming on the Internet. I am not sure if you've noticed it or not, but a higher degree of usability is slowly creeping into the Internet. Here's what I mean:

Recently I saw one of my colleagues using her web browser in the following way:

1. She goes to the search pane in IE.
2. She searches Google with the domain name of the website.
3. She clicks the 1st result.

No bookmarks, no address bar, just search as navigation. I asked her if she does this for every website. She answered "Why yes, of course. How else would I find what I am looking for?"

As you can imagine, this behaviour floored me because I know that there are oh so many ways to go to a website. It seems that humans are best at finding the shortest-path solution, and for my colleague this means Google. It's no surprise then that Firefox's search box yields over 60M dollars in revenue every year. This is how the Mozilla Corporation gets paid and how the Mozilla Foundation runs the huge project that is Firefox. We like taking short cuts.

The Firefox development community is quite smart too. They've introduced a nifty new feature in the new Firefox 3 web browser called "AwesomeBar" The address bar in Firefox is now a mini-Google for your history/bookmarks/links you've visited in the past. And it searches not only parts of the hyperlink text but also the Title of the page to see what's the most relevant page to serve up to you, as-you-type. Most frequently visited links go to the top. Did you forget the link? Just type the topic into the address bar and you'll most likely find it, even if the URL is the usual nonsense. Awesome, huh?

Now think of the implications of that type of technology advancement with the recent ICANN announcement. With the new top-level domain name restriction lift, it is possible that domain names with very obvious, easy to remember names may very well come to light. Websites with the .you and .me extension may very well come to life. Website domains like face.book and you.tube and just about any other phrase like i.love.you and government.of.canada may start to prevail.

I think that means that it will be even more important to match the content, design and naming towards our audience so that they find the information they need without even barely thinking. If we present the right thing at the right time to our audiences they will be delighted, so we have to start thinking this way every time we design or redesign any web site or system. All design it seems is moving to an easier, more lightweight, and to-the-point way of doing things.