Disqus - Latest Comments for tobin

Re: Designing for Social Traction

EricFriedman — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:22:21 -0000

My pleasure.

Re: Designing for Social Traction

tobin — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:18:39 -0000

That was a great deck, thanks for sharing!

Re: If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

tobin — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 13:55:43 -0000

I think this is a brilliant idea. I run an event in NYC that brings out 150+ and it's largely centered around the audience and their participation via mobile devices. We've been using large displays (projected or on plasma TVs) to provide real-time feedback to the attendees. As you've pointed out it promotes participation, even from the shiest of attendees. For us the screens has brought about engagement of about 90% of our attendees.

When you have open discussions and people are encouraged to participate it's important to provide feedback so that everyone feels they've contributed to the experience. Not only does it help individuals, but the discussion as a whole. The great thing about twitter is how accepted it is and how it encourages not only engagement, but discovery.

Re: Tech people can't sell

tobin — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:02:25 -0000

I completely agree!

I'm a coder and I often find the challenge of selling & pitching very frustrating. I haven't done any official pitches or marketing endeavors outside of my direct social circle, but it's painfully clear that finding someone to counter the technical side for marketing, PR, and sales is important.

I hope I can make Thursday's presentation or that there is a video of it somewhere after the fact.

T.

Re: Are Your "Invite A Friend" Emails Ending Up In The Junk Folder?

vincell1 — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 06:36:01 -0000

hello tobin
I am also facing the some of the issues that you are. I totally agree with maxkalehoff, my site, like any social web 2.0 site lives and dies of email. Our emails have domain keys, spf records, sender ids, and domain stamping... we use all the feedback loops we can get on.. hotmail snds has us on green.............but we face a serious issue of throttling from them... I have been unsuccessful in getting a responce from them... Can you pls tell me how you are contacting them and how often do they respond to you.
PS - pls let me know of yahoo responces to you as well -- they always send me a generic canned responce that points me to their postmaster help pages.

Thanks
vince

Re: Momofuku Ko - Worth it

tobin — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:45:40 -0000

I love Momofuku!

Chikalicious (http://www.chikalicious.com/) is a great dessert spot to hit after momofuku. Although they don't have an online reservation system, the treats are delicious and the pairings are also on point.

Although not the point of your post, if you like momofuku another good alternative is Soba Koh on 5th and 2nd Ave. It's a small place and most of the time you can see them actually making the noodles fresh in a special room at the front of the house.

Re: Are Your "Invite A Friend" Emails Ending Up In The Junk Folder?

tobin — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:21:34 -0000

Good white paper, however I was hoping to see some more detail from a technical provider. I looked into Return Path for my service, however since I am bootstrapping the product I was hesitant on the pricing. Instead I choose to do some technical tweaking to make sure I'm doing all that I can to avoid the spam filters.

First I made sure my DNS and MX records were set up properly:

1) Made sure my mail host was a valid A record. I originally made the mistake of setting up the host as a CNAME.
2) Made sure my MX record is set to the full host name of my mail host (which is set up as a A record)
3) Made sure I can do a reverse lookup of my mail hosts IP address. (This will be important for setting up SPF/Sender ID records)
4) Set up SPF/SenderID information as a TXT record. (http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch9/spf.html)

I was able to verify everything with the DNS record was set up by using http://www.dnsstuff.com/. Making sure there were no warnings or errors before contacting support for any of the email services (such as Ouriel pointed out). If you contact any of the major email inbox services before making sure the DNS is properly configured, you will most likely be declined. I was able to contact Yahoo, MSN, and AOL to make sure I was not on their black list. I was even surprised to see that Yahoo and MSN validate the information you send then (especially the opt out functionality on your service).

Another test to do is to run a self "audit" against Spam Assassin. I sent myself an email from my web application and copied the raw message (including headers) to a text file and run it against spam assassin's command line test. All my emails had a score of 0... the lower the score the better. A score of 5 or more means that your email will most likely get filtered out by any spam filter. I've also been told that anything 3 or higher is bad too. But it's a good idea to see what may be triggering other email services from declining your email.

After I tested out my emails in spam assassin, I tried testing it out across other services. I initially was using Email Reach (http://www.emailreach.com). I think it's a great service, but it's still a young/small company. So if you find issues/bugs with their product, you will need to have patience with their customer service. It's a cheap product for what it does. It will test delivery of your email to a large list of email providers, ISPs, and even email clients. The reports are pretty comprehensive too.

I think it's best to contact the big webmails AFTER you've done all this.

I personally would have liked to gone with a solution such as Return Path, however I think for someone who's trying to do this on a modest dime (read personal income) there are a lot of things you can do to better your odds of successful delivery.

T.

Re: iPhone SDK Tomorrow

tobin — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:59:41 -0000

Test comment