Cvander:

Great week in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 expo. Some final thoughts.

I’m in California enjoying San Francisco and the surrounding cities. This week is the web 2.0 expo.

Since I haven’t been writing much this days in the blog, I did a short video:

In the office we’re fans of twitter, so for fun we developed something with the API to test it out.

Twittnot is an aggregator of tweets where you let us know what you’re #not doing. To be part of it just send a message to twitter with the hashtag #NOT (#NO in spanish) to be included in our periodic updates. If you want your messages to be included faster, follow @twittnot.

In the last few weeks we’re getting all sort of tweets. Some people share affirmations, others challenges for the future and the mix in between english and spanish tweets has been fun.

We’re still testing and learning from this experiment. And we also have other ideas for our next twitter mashup. Maybe some extra tools for managing your followers or maybe some analytics magic. Stay tuned for updates and don’t hesitate to send your feedback.

After a few days using it, FriendFeed is becoming a great tool for me. Following pictures, links, facebook status and other stuff in a single feed makes a lot of sense. I’m also looking forward for the AIR app.

But, the main content in FriendFeed is twitter and I’m already dealing with that trough twitterific and im.

So, how about a filter where I chose wich services I want to follow from my Friends? I’d love to filter all those tweets away. Marilink is also requesting something similar.

Somebody asked me in Miami if I was some sort of a FOWA fan, since he saw me also in London. I had a great time in London last year, but It was even better this new edition in Miami.

From the conferences, I really enjoyed the great presentation by Cal Henderson, the energy from Emily Boyd, the challenges of Blaine Cook and the inspiration by Gary Vaynerchuk. And it was also great to hear Kathy Sierra and Matt Mullenweg again.

The networking was great both in the conference area and the night party and breakfast (I left early so, I missed the beach party on saturday afternoon). And from that networking, I really enjoyed spending a lot of time with several developers and entrepreneurs from Latinamerica that joined the event traveling from their countries or sharing their stories from the life in Miami.

I also wrote a longer review in spanish about the event. If you missed, check the coverage by cNet and pictures in flickr.

In the office, we are big fans of pownce. It’s our main tool to communicate, coordinate tasks and share knowledge to handle our web projects. It’s a great tool since we’re not always in the office and work at different hours.

We had tried several tools: email-lists, Basecamp, Google Docs and a Wiki. They’re good, but we were always lacking something. Then twitter appeared on scene, and our way to communicate changed.

Since Twitter was the first tool in the market, everybody in the office started using it with a big group of contacts. It’s still a great tool and we’re always using it, but it’s not the tool for corporate usage. So we needed to try other choices being available Jaiku, Pownce and even the Prologue template for Wordpress.

Pownce has been the best so far.

Good things about Pownce:

• You can arrange groups in Pownce in order to communicate in private to only certain contacts. We’re handling conversations between 4 recipients.
• Sending files (mostly screenshots that were sent trough email messages before) it’s a great add-on. We also send a lot of links since the tool provides a way to distinguish them.
• Every message has it’s own reply option so you can follow a single conversation. The only trouble with this is that this ends up in a two-persons conversation.
• Pownce has its own Adobe Air client for your desktop so there aren’t any API limits, what causes some problems for example in third party clients of twitter.
• Pownce doesn’t have so many users, so we haven’t experience troubles with the service so far.
• You can filter messages from private ones, public ones and also group messages, so it’s easy to navigate trough the information.
• The mobile version is clean and easy to use. We tested it on a Nokia phone and in the iPhone.

Points where we would like to see some improvement

• We need to search. How about a built-in search engine? This is mostly for the private messages, or even a way to send all this information to our email account where gmail will take care of the searching.
• Replies in Pownce are good, but you need them to be viewed by all the group members.
• Also, @user_narme should be identified as direct replies, the way twitter is working.
• How about marking messages as favorites? We have stars to rate messages, but then, you can’t filter them by votes. Having tags or any other way to mark messages will be also a great feature.
• When you share an image trough Pownce, you get a preview of it in the website, but this feature is not working in the AIR client.
• Email notifications work in a way that we still don’t understand. Some of the messages are missing and you don’t get the group conversations, just direct messages. We would like to get an email for every message with the contents.
• Feeds from conversations will be a great addition to the service, and better yet if they are private feeds with a key to save the info in our feed reader

Pownce offers a Pro account that will get rid of the advertising (there’s only some basic adds in the client and in the website). They also offer more capacity to send files. But just with the free service we’re more than fine.

With some of the features of searching, private feeds and more email tools, that pro account will be more valuable. And they could also think about a corporate pro account or something.

There are some posts comparing twitter with other tools, which ends up with bad comments to other players. But they’re different and that’s what we needed. So far, Pownce is the most corporate oriented tool and that’s a great market with a clear business model. Since we became good fans, we’re waiting for improvements and a true Pro account.

After a year out, I am back to my beloved country. But rather than enjoying Antigua, the Lake or taking a break to hang out with my friends and family, I am going to spend some time chatting with university students.

The agenda is USAC on Friday 22th (9:30am and 4:00pm), UPanamericana on Saturday 23th (8:00am), Galileo on Monday 25th (9:10am and 6:10pm), UFM on Tuesday 26th (10:00am) and also URL that day (12:10pm and 5:30pm).

I will be speaking about Internet trends and how to open new doors for your career with them.

The event is part of the activities of Exponet 2008, organized by Prensa Libre.

To finish next week I will be heading to Miami to enjoy the first FOWA and their Beach Party (yes, I am still missing Brasil). We already have some names for the passes to join us in the event.

Uma saudação desde São Paulo, uma gigantesca metrópole que está recebendo pela primeira vez o Campus Party no Parque Ibirapuera, ou Bienal, como melhor se conhece. Graças à equipe de Windows Live eu vim passar uma semana no Campus, onde pude contrastar interessantes diferenças entre o mercado de Espanha e o de Brasil. E sem dúvida, encantado de conhecer este pais tão latino americano e tão especial, onde a alegria predomina e vem socializar, aprender e compartir.

The last paragraph was translated with the help of my friend Anna. I was basically telling about my first trip to Brazil to participate in the Brazilian Campus Party here in Sao Paulo. I had the chance to be a Campusero in the Spanish Edition of Campus Party in Valencia twice already. It is a great event to meet people involved in development, design, blogs, videogames and other computer and internet stuff. And we’re talking about heavy users so watching their habits and enjoying all the user content that populates flickr, twitter, youtube and tons of other websites is amazing.

If you want to learn more about Campus Party in Brazil, check the posts in spanish from Eduardo in Alt1040, Manu in Gizmologia, Carolina and Juan from Clipset and also the work from the Pixel and Dixel team (they are also updating the official Spanish blog). Laneros is also broadcasting live for the colombian community where the Campus is heading next. And if you want to follow all the information for the event, check the great aggregator fromo Blogblogs.

So, I’m going from Madrid to Guatemala in a few weeks and I had an open return ticket. But when I tried to use it, it seems like it only lasts for a year, and that time is gone, so, there goes some bucks that I won’t see again. Don’t you hate the small print conditions?

Next step, look up for cheap tickets, and for that you can always rely on the good Orbitz. I found a good ticket going through Ireland and the US (that’s quite a loop). They won’t take my Guatemalan credit card (VISA is worldwide, but cards are local after all), so the next choice was to try with the one from Spain. That didn’t work either, since the connection with the bank wasn’t working.

Finally I payed with a US debit card from an account in Miami. And there it was, ticket ready, now it was just about waiting for the date and hit the airport, right?

Well…guess what…I got an email the next day from Orbitz letting me know that my flight has old-fashion-paper-wasting-tickets. And they’re on an envelope on the way to my billing address.

So now, my plane ticket for a flight from Madrid to Guatemala is in Miami. Aren’t the online services convenient?

Another story of how sometimes it becomes inconvenient to use some online reservation systems.

I used to bought train tickets in the Spanish Renfe online system. They even sent you an SMS message with your booking number and you’re ready to go.

Well, they upgraded their system and now when you book online, as a last step you get a webpage to print the boarding pass. And now to get on board, it’s mandatory to show it. My only trouble was that I didn’t have a printer, so I had a pending visit to an internet coffee shop.

So, I went to one of those coin operated internet places where you get the chance to remember good old times with Internet Explorer and Windows Server… something… haha…
I accessed my email account to check for the order confirmation and there was no link to the boarding pass, and they insisted that the email wasn’t a travel document.
I went to Renfe website to try to generate the boarding pass again, but I couldn’t find the option.Just some nice advertising about the new machines to print your passes in the stations that will be available in Barcelona soon. I printed the email and showed up in the station.

They did let me take the train, but I got a warning that next time I might not be that lucky and could miss the train. I did try and it seems like they forgot to be more nice to their paying customers.