Tretakoff Musings

Even URL shortening can tell how the paper feels about their story. As seen on Twitter, following the Marin Independent-Journal. I shall refrain from comment on their reporting and dovetailing with this accidental editorial. ;-)

Well, looks like the new layout is not glitch free yet. Got the webcam in there, but now the mere act of sending a tweet has caused the entire layout to be locked for editing. Sigh. Had to temporarily remove the Twitter and Yelp modules; looking for a solution to add them back in. Stay tuned...

Yep, 2009 brings a new look to the old Tretakoff Musings. First, answering some of your complaints, I've eliminated a lot of the slow widgets that were making page loads a beast. Second, I've moved to the 21st century with CSS instead of kludgy HTML. Finally, I've shifted hosting of the blog over to Blogger's hosted BlogSpot domain, to enable easier editing. Special thanks to the folks at InfoCreek for the gorgeous Aspire theme . It took some serious hours of monkeying around with it for a non-HTML pro like myself to make it just right, but I'm pretty happy with the result. I hope you are, too! I still need to add back in links for my fellow bloggers, but hey, I couldn't wait forever to post this. Of course, with migration comes a bit of pain. First, while the old RSS feed at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TretakoffMusings should continue to work, if it does not, please update your RSS feeds to point at http://tretakoff.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default instead. ...

Disclaimer: I am in the business of helping loyalty programs thrive. With all of the loyalty programs out there, it seems bizarre that so many companies still use physical cards. There's good reason, of course: the barcode on the card is read by the point of sale system (POS). But the average American's wallet only has 6-8 slots, total: after license, credit cards, ATM cards, and the other essentials, there is rarely room for another. If you have an iPhone, you might be in luck. A new free application, called WalletZero , allows you to simply enter in the number on your loyalty card. If it's a card that features a barcode, it generates it on the large iPhone screen, allowing it to be scanned right off the screen at POS. The app knows many of the most common programs, and even allows you to enter ones for those that are not necessarily barcoded. Lots good about this app, but definitely some improvements could help. First, it relies on the developer to add more programs; I...

One of the interesting side effects of brands using social networking to communicate with their customers are the humanization of the formerly faceless brands. As NASA found by using Twitter to let the Mars Rover communicate with interested parties, people form an emotional attachment to what were formerly cold and lifeless objects. But what happens when those are brands, come to life? The results are fascinating. Take a look at the "tweets" today, left. That's a conversation between, ostensibly, Southwest Airlines and JetBlue . Both are active on Twitter, letting folks know of new routes, delays, and new features. Both are typical of Twitter, representing themselves as the brand, not as individuals of that brand. Thus, to the follower, while you "know" there's a human behind it, the brand is the voice. For that reason, the voice tends to be reflective of the brand: SouthwestAir is fun loving, chipper, and relentlessly upbeat; JetBlue is suave, slightly amu...