Four minutes.

Maybe I was lucky. Maybe it’s because I’m “Chris Brogan” and blah-di-blah. But I don’t think so. I think Rackspace knew that Twitter is just as viable a place as any other to field customer complaints.

I am full on thrilled. They dropped me an email another 10 minutes later. In the email, they said, “We tried to call you, but got a recording saying the number wasn’t in service.” (I changed my number recently.)

Three different types of outreach in the first 10 minutes.

Oh, and the site came up pretty darned fast.

I’m fully sold on who I’d choose if I needed mission-critical support for a heavy traffic site. I’d use Rackspace cloud.

No, this isn’t a sponsored post. Rackspace does host me gratis, but I am FULLY supportive of them now that they just saved my bacon. 10 minutes? Seriously? This is who I’ll recommend to my clients.

Hello Nick,

I understand that you may have questions about the recent actions taken on your Google Account. We understand and respect your concerns about your account.

Our specialists performed a thorough investigation of your account ID: nick.saber@gmail.com. It appeared that your account was compromised on 08/01, and an unauthorized charge of $490.30 was attempted in your Google Checkout Account. For security purposes, we suspended this account to prevent additional activity and charges.

We’d also like to assure you that the security and confidentiality of your personal information, including your credit card number, is our highest priority. Your information is securely stored on our servers, and won’t be shared with anyone except under the very limited circumstances described
in our Privacy Policy at http://checkout.google.com/files/buyerprivacy.html. To learn more about
the security of your account and personal information, please visit http://checkout.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=29075.

We also understand your concerns regarding your account security. It is difficult to determine the exact nature of your account compromise. Please see below for useful information on safeguarding yourself online.

The rest of the letter reminds us not to fall into phishing scams, etc. Good advice.

But wow. Couldn’t this have started with an email saying, “Looks like someone was messing with your account. We shut it down to investigate.” Seems a little backwards to make Nick sweat for a day and change, only to reveal that someone tried to rip him off, and THAT’S why they shut him down.

Special note: Matt Cutts came by with lots of information once this story broke, and I’m grateful for that. Note to ALL companies: if you don’t have a respected face person like Matt out there, think about it. It does help.

What’s your take? How would you have handled it, if you were Google?

Lastly, I’m going to talk about this a bit more in my next newsletter, so if you’re not already subscribed, hop in!

By 10, I’d called my boss and asked for a new laptop. By 3PM, I had it in hand. Tonight, when I had a moment, I pulled out my external storage drive, plugged it into the shiny new Mac, and turned it on.

It took an hour to restore everything to the last good save (a week old, but not horrible).

Because of the way these last several weeks have gone, I’ve learned a few things that I want to share. This might prove useful to you in a few ways: one, if your computer dies. Two, because this is the way I think things will move in the future.

Life in the Clouds

SEVERAL of my most used applications exist as web applications that I can reach via a browser:

• Gmail for email.
• Google Calendar for appointments.
• Google Reader for news.
• Evernote for notes.
• BatchBook for contact management.
• Flickr for photos.
• Blip.tv for movies.
• Google Docs for documents.
• Picnik for photo editing.
• del.icio.us for bookmarking.

It turns out that most of the apps I use in a given day exist on the web. But here are some exceptions that I would need if I had to rebuild another computer from scratch. (Note: this is a Mac list).

• TextWrangler – for complex text editing and text scripts
  
• Cyberduck – for FTP
  
• Adium – for IM client
  
• Skitch – for screenshots
  
• Keynote – for presentations
  
• Firefox – web browser
  
• Evernote – the desktop app side
  

The rest are all good to have, but I could live with just those and the built-in apps that come with a Mac.

Takeaways

What I’ve learned over the past month is that I can do lots of stuff on the web from any browser (have to remember that firefox bookmark sync addon – what’s it called?). I’ve learned that backups are important, and not to go more than a few days between them. I’ve learned that Time Machine for the Mac is a really powerful backup tool.

How about you? What’s your experience been in this regard? Are you doing any of this differently?

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I should state that I know Michelle Riggen-Ransom (marketing goddess) and Adam Darowski (UX prince) through meetings at various social events, like SXSW, the occasional Tweet-up, etc. When you know the people who make the things you’re using, there’s a whole sense that everything could be customized or something. When I talk to Mario Sundar at LinkedIn, I feel the same kind of thing: like they care about their user base. Well, with BatchBlue, they are passionate about their customer base.

Things I Like

In the fun category, I like the little touches they’ve thrown in. I went to upload my latest LinkedIn database into BatchBook and combine it with my Gmail accounts. That ends up being around 6,200 contacts (boiled back down with dupes to 4760). When I uploaded the CSV file, here’s what I got:

Yep, the little touches like that are great.

Because I can tag things lots of ways, it means I can sort them lots of ways:

I further like that I can upload pictures for contacts, should I want a visual reminder of who they are:

But what’s coolest is the list feature.

Messaging Distinct Sets of People

Here’s where BatchBlue does something that most of my contact systems do not. Plaxo shares a lot of features with BatchBook, and it has one over on BatchBook insofar as user data on there updates when the other contacts change their information. Meaning, if you’re connected to someone on Plaxo, and that someone changes jobs, phone numbers, email addresses, your files are updated right away. Okay, cool.

Try messaging more than one person on Plaxo. Ditto LinkedIn. Ditto Facebook.

Grueling.

BatchBook has lists. For every one of the tags you assign a contact, you can sort those tags into lists, then download those lists into distinct addressable groups. So, for instance, if I want to email all the people I know who are related to PodCamp, I can. If I want to message everyone in the Boston area, I can. If I want to message people I’ve labeled as “mediamakers,” I can.

That’s the clever bit.

A Quick Note About SuperTags

They also have this feature called Super Tags. Basically, you can add all kinds of other fields and metadata around certain tags, such that you collect even more useful, sortable data on different kinds of contacts. I haven’t dug into that yet, but judging by the way Michelle and Adam talk about it all the time, I suspect that’s a cool feature and that I’m missing out.

In the End

I recommend BatchBook for the list sorting ability, for the tagging and slicing ability, for the Super Tags (though I’m not 100% clever on them yet), and if you have no other form of client relationship management software, this would be a great lightweight tool. I’m not using their todos or several other parts of the software, but that’s okay. I think it’s worth it for what I’m getting. Hey, I’m not a DBA, and this is a whole lot better for me to manage than a spreadsheet.

If you check it out, I’d be interested to know your take.

BatchBlue Software’s BatchBook might be just right for you.

Some of the changes in 2.0 target ease of use, and this is probably where I’ve complained a bit about certain Zoho apps in the past. I’ll tell you that I used it while on a conference call to doodle out what you see below, and it worked super easy and intuitively.

Zoho also allows you to embed the presentation on another site after you publish it (like SlideShare), and has about a dozen features that I didn’t cover here. If you’re in the world of presentations, this might be worth considering as a free, flexible offering. The closest similar product online is Google Docs and their presentation software, but I tell you, Zoho’s product works, looks, and feels better.

Good job, Zoho.

Zoho Show.

See a bigger picture here:

• A.viary is a hardcore photo editing app, kind of like Photoshop without the price tag and disk install. But it’s way cooler than that. It’s a whole lot of really interesting editing abilities and a whole community of people doing their own thing with the tools that makes this one a great choice. Note: it’s still in an invite-only beta period (when does that end, guys?), but maybe I can score you a few invites, if you’re interested. Let me know in the comments, and I’ll ask the team.

• Picnik is a lightweight photo editing tool that gets me through pretty much all of my needs right now. I use it about twice a day, and have found that it does most everything I need from a photo editor. It’s not really good with batch-based activities, but if you’re into editing things one at a time, this is for you.

• Skitch (the bonus round) acts as a screen capture and annotation tool. It’s super easy to use, has just enough tools to be useful but not so many that you feel bloated and misunderstood. I use it to do lots of odd jobs on capture screens and little images from web pages. Definitely good to have.

More and more, I’m choosing tools and applications that live in the cloud. Why? Because after dropping my laptop the other day and losing every on-disk application, I realized that there are lots of benefits to having my data and my tools available from anywhere there’s a web browser. There are some exceptions, of course, but when I find great web tools, I want to share them.

What about you? What are you using on the web that’s cool?