EduGlu Sandbox

Twipport? Suppitter? Neither of them really work (ok, neither of them even slightly work!) so I’m afraid I had to go with the verbose title.

Anyway, I’ve been really impressed during the week at how twitter is being used by companies and individuals as a form of information-gathering and support for their products. Leading the way has been @flocker the Flock twitter presence.

I was `lucky’ enough to have my work PC upgraded to Vista a couple of months ago, and as I’m sure you can image everything has just gone marvellously; there has been a new challenge to conquer almost everyday before I can get on with work! Anyway, one of the issues I’ve had is not being able to upgrade to the new version of Flock which is based on the fantastic Firefox 3. Everytime Flock launches it just crashed immediately. I tweeted this and @Flocker replied that they were aware of the problem and that I should wait for a beta2 version. The beta 2 is now out and it hasn’t resolved the issue for me. I’m having discussions with @Flocker via twitter about how we can resolve it. Great support! (or PASS, as american bloggers everywhere seem to be saying at the moment - where did this come from?)

Another (non-vista) problem I’ve been having is with the redesigned delicious. For some reason whenever I visited the site and tried to view my network, search by a tag etc I always got a message that I’d been barred for too much activity. LIES!

I fired off a message (like they ask) to Yahoo! explaining the issue and after a day or so got an automated message back basically saying `your problem, nothing to do with us. leave us alone we’re busy becoming obsolete’. Yesterday it came to me that perhaps the issue was being caused by my beloved Shareaholic add-on; it does after all seem to call on delicious consistently and tell me how many times any page has been added. I disabled the add-on and hey presto delicious works! I tweeted this to let others know who may be having the same problem

and it seems the developer was listening! He tweeted back to me and now I’m helping him out with a fix! Great stuff!

All of this comes as `brands’ are beginning to take twitter more seriously as a two-way comms channel. Jeremiah Owyang has a couple of great posts on this: Why Brands Are Unsuccessful in Twitter and Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter.

I’ve been working with the guys at Open2.net and Steve Bannister, a Senior Developer here at the OU to do some cool stuff with the OU twitter profile (more to come on this soon!).

I’m not sure that we can offer the same type of support as Flock and Shareaholic are though. We had a discussion about `customer support’ issues when the OU entered Facebook and the decision was reached that the OU has dedicated channels and employees for such things. Our external presences should point people towards these channels rather than seek to provide advice that 1) might be wrong and 2) is not recorded in the way that OU records its interactions with students.

However, I do get twitter alerts for mentions of OU projects OpenLearn and Socialearn, so perhaps there are opportunities to be more proactive here?

Share This