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If you spend much time on Facebook and don’t want to switch tabs of your browser too many times, Fmail brings Gmail straight to your facebook account.

It works really well and all your folders and contacts are properly imported. Unfortunately you loose all the ajax features you are used to.

If you want to try it out, just search for Fmail on Facebook. You are also prompted to match your Gmail contacts with your Facebook friends, something I find very useful.

Check it out and leave your comments here. Do you like this approach or you prefer to use the original GMail?

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Technorati Tags: facebook, Fmail, gmail, luca filigheddu

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A couple of days ago I noticed Jeff Pulver was putting together a new conference in the field of social communications. 

Today he announced it officially: The Social Communications Summit will take place in New York next February 10-11 and he’s looking for talented and passionate speakers to bring their experience and standpoint of the current status of the intersection of IP Communications with Social Networks.

Deadline for the submission of speaking proposals is Dec 5th, so please get in touch with Jeff if you want to be part of this event.

This latest news confirms that February and March are going to be very hot for the IP Communications industry, starting with ITEXPO East in Miami on Febr 2nd to 4th, going through  this new event by Jeff in New York and ending with the second edition of eComm by Lee Dryburgh in San Francisco.

I like being part of this!

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Technorati Tags: jeff pulver, luca filigheddu, New York City, Social Media, the social communications summit

Lee Dryburgh, man behind the eComm conferences, hosts a private dinner for everyone involved in this space, a sort of kick-off meeting for the upcoming eComm Conference taking place on March 3-5 2009 at the San Francisco Airport Marriot.

Only 80 seats are available and 50 are taken already. If you want to attend, please get in touch with Lee through the eComm Facebook group.

The aim of the dinner is to simply be a light-weight social-networking
gathering of those interested in emerging communications. By
light-weight I mean zero organisation except for lets meet at this
time and place for dinner. The hotel informs me that the charge for
the three course meal including two alcoholic beverages will be 75.00
USD/head. It’s cash only but the hotel have informed me they can
provide individual receipts.

The room is booked for 7pm.

Unfortunately I cannot make it this time (next trip to the Bay Area should be in January), but I wish all the friends and colleagues attending a pleasant and enjoyable time together.

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Technorati Tags: dinner, ecomm, lee dryburgh, luca filigheddu

I’m a Linkedin power user and I’ve been using it effectively during the past two years in order to talk directly to top levels executives of companies which could be potential customers of my company.

One of the services they provide is InMail, an easy way to send a direct message to a contact which is not directly connected to you.

I never sent spam, of course, but personal emails to try to engage a potential customer and discuss about the benefits of this or that product we provide. Private, personal, friendly messages.

That said, the worst answer you can get is shown in the box above. It’s not a reply, it’s not a “I’m not interested, thanks”, it’s something like people who hang up as soon as they hear your voice on the phone or people who close the door as soon as they see you outside.

This is not a polite way to use a great and powerful service as Linkedin is. I fortunately received just five of these out of over hundreds InMails sent so far. My recommendation, if you receive an InMail which is not interesting for you, reply to the message or ignore it, but not “decline” it, unless it is really spam. But I bet no one sends spam over Linkedin since it’s a “protected” and trusted environment.

My two cents

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Technorati Tags: Customer, inmail, linkedin, luca filigheddu, Message

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A couple of days ago I blogged about Qwitter, a service which informs you when someone quit following you on Twitter.

In the last week I received five emails, where Qwitter informed me about people no more following me.

You know what? All of them started “following” me just not long ago, maybe “waiting” for me to follow them back. Since this hasn’t happened, they unfollowed me. The point is that their only aim was to increse their followers’ number, without really caring of my tweets. Their only aim was to catch my attention and to make me follow them back.

Unfortunately, as stated many times, I follow people I really care about. If you follow me but I don’t think I can be interested in what you write on twitter (with all my respect, of course) I will never follow you back. At the same time, if I follow you it’s because: 1) we know each other personally (well, in that case I would appreciate if you follow me as well) - 2) I care about your thoughts and I don’t care if you follow me back.

It’s great how Qwitter gives me a confirmation about this bad behavior by “marketing-only” twitter accounts. Here is an example for all, Mr iphone reviews unfollowed me after just a couple of days he started (on October 21st) following me, “much interested” in my thoughts and opinions:

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In a period when everyone is talking about financial meltdown, crisis, layoffs and how to deal with the upcoming bad times, it’s very important not to forget that customers are the “food” for any company.

While many startups don’t have customers yet so they face other types of problems, well extablished businesses can face a significant contraction of their sales because of a general feeling of “fear” by their customers. This feeling is due to different reasons: will your company be alive tomorrow? is your product essential for my life or is it better to save money to pass the winter?

One of the most important (and priority) ways to handle this situation is to create a direct line with your customers in order to make them comfortable while buying from you. This is essential and strategic for the future of any company because customers need to hear you, need to hear your voice and to be reassured they can trust you and keep buying your products and services.

Companies which undervalue this aspect and  keep thinking of making their websites more and more self-service oriented are likely to fail and this is even more true in times like this. Giving the right answer at the right time is crucial for any business, in order to take customers and prospects and guide them straight to the end of the purchase process, preventing them to quit as soon as they face a problem.

All that said, don’t hesitate and act now: engage your customers, make them feel your are there, ready to help them to take decisions faster and to make them happy buyers. Your customers are your life: in difficult times, do everything you can to prevent them from going away.

In conclusion, I’d like to share a quote from Sitofono’s website (disclosure: Sitofono is a service from my company):

e-commerce companies have constantly to deal with this paradox: a growing number of contacts, low conversion rates and an high abandonment rate.

The lack of real time interaction between the customer and the vendor, besides being a cause of dissatisfaction of the potential customer, is, for sure, one of the main reasons of missed opportunities to close a deal in a big number of online transactions.

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Technorati Tags: Business, customer engagement, luca filigheddu, sales, Service

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In the last months I’ve been contacted by many people I’ve known/met in the past, from former calssmates or just casual friends known while I was a teenager, to people I was in touch with in the past and whose I lost all contact details and barely remember their names. All of them wanted to add me as friend on Facebook.

At the same time, I found myself doing the same. When I was a teenager I attended some “vacation-like” english language courses in the UK so that I spent more than one month with other guys and with some of them I remember I had a great time (I’m referring to about 15 to 20 years ago).

There are a few questions which lead to this behaviour and those are all about curiosity: what are those people up to now? Are they married? Do they have sons? Where do they work?  How do they look like now?

In my opinion, Facebook is becoming more and more… a, yes, “facebook”, where people finally find an effective way to stay in touch and to rediscover old friends and acquaitances. Who is not happy to think of old times?

Once there was the mail (the real one, with ink and paper), now there is Facebook. Did the questions above ever arise for you?

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It basically puts together a couple of parameters from which it calculates your “reach“, “velocity” and “social capital“. Here is adescription of these attributes, taken from their website:

Reach is a measurement of potential audience and listeners, a best estimate of the number of people that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.

Velocity merely averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence.

Social Capital: It’s essentially a measure of how influential are a twitterer’s followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer’s followers have a lot of followers themselves.

The last one in particular, Social Capital, could potentially be a very interesting way to measure if someone’s followers are just, let’s say, unknown Twitterers with a couple of followers or “important” influencers and opinion leader themselves. Unfortunately, at first sight, it’s not working very well because some users on top of the list looks like anonymous and not certainly “famous” twitterers.

In the Top 5 - Reach we found some well known names:

1) Jason Calcanis

2) Ewan Williams (Twitter’s CEO)

3) Chris Brogan

4) TechCrunch

5) Guy Kawasaki

Other famous bloggers / internet opinion leaders can be easily found in the Top 50, like Loic Le Meur (7), Robert Scoble (10), Mashable (11), Kevin Rose (14), Jeff Pulver (20). There are many others, you can take a look by yourself at this link.

Ok, what about me (I don’t consider myself a heavy Twitter user) ?

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Technorati Tags: Kevin Rose, microblogging, robert scoble, Social Media, twinfluence, twitter

What to say? Simple, smart, useful. Try it out at http://useqwitter.com. Praises to Eoghan McCabe, another smart irish entrepreneur.

BTW, take a look at the “smart” tag line at the bottom of their webpage…

Technorati Tags: luca filigheddu, McCabe, qwitter, Social Media, twitter

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Opera has been under my radar for a while and I have to say I never sticked with it completely. I tried an old version a few years ago but the latest announcement of Opera v9.6 made me download it again.

Another reason that led me to test it out is that I experienced very bad performances with Firefox 3 on my Macbook recently, which easily hits over 700MB of RAM usage after a few hours of heavy tabbed browsing.

The result? Guys, Opera 9.6 really rocks. Performances are comparable to Webkit’s and the number of advanced features available is impressive.

Like Firefox, you can add a lot of third party addons and widgets which make your browser experience even better. Highly skinnable, a light but powerful RSS reader and email/newsgroup client is integrated, too. For example, look at how the Twitter widget looks like… nothing less than other powerful clients.

Another interesting advanced feature is the support for mouse gestures. You can easily perform many common operations without leaving your mouse, by just performing some easy gestures.

In addition, for users familiar with Google Chrome, a “speed dial” with thumbnails of  the most used websites is available.

Is it enough to make you switch? I’m currently using it and have to say I’m really impressed and I regret I haven’t tried it before. And, if you have a Mac and you are looking forward to try the Google browser, it can look like Chrome too!

To get more information about the new Opera 9.6, check the changelog out at this link.

Technorati Tags: browser, luca filigheddu, opera