Prentiss Riddle's dashboard

Prentiss Riddle marked one of Amy Muller's replies in Get Satisfaction as useful. Amy Muller replied to the problem "Can't find a company but when I try to add it, its domain is taken".

A comment on the problem "Can't find a company but when I try to add it, its domain is taken" in Get Satisfaction:

Thanks. So my immediate problem is solved, but any hypothetical bugs or UX issues which contributed in my confusion are still outstanding. I'll leave it to you to decide whether this case is closed. – Prentiss Riddle, on November 17, 2009 20:37

A comment on the problem "Can't find a company but when I try to add it, its domain is taken" in Get Satisfaction:

Hm, maybe I am misremembering the sequence of events, but it seems to me that I got the "domain name is taken" message when I first tried to create it. In other words, from your reply it appears that I successfully created the community while receiving the message that the domain was taken and the community couldn't be created.

Or not. Could be user error on my part and I somehow hit "create" twice then got confused by error messages that resulted. – Prentiss Riddle, on November 17, 2009 20:35

Prentiss Riddle reported a problem in Get Satisfaction on November 16, 2009 15:48:

Can't find a company but when I try to add it, its domain is taken

I want to give some praise to MacBookAdapter.com. When I try to look them up by domain name or words like "macbook adapter" they're not found, but when I try to add them I'm told that the domain name is taken.

What gives? Can companies reserve their domains and then make themselves invisible to avoid criticism? If so, that seems like it voids the whole point of GetSatisfaction from the point of view of consumers; at a minimum your system should explain that that's what happened.

And if that's not what's going on, then this seems like a bug.

I love GetSatisfaction, btw.

Prentiss Riddle marked one of Todd's replies in Fluid as useful. Todd replied to the problem "GMail opens in Fluid and browser". Prentiss Riddle and 3 other people think it's one of the best replies.

A comment on the question "Fluid apps open in new Firefox tab when logging in" in Fluid:

Thanks, Todd, your solution worked for me. I just wanted to let you know that I had the same problem. I'm a new user of Fluid and I got bumped over to Firefox with the default rules for Gmail that came with 0.9.6. Is Gmail a moving target or something? – Prentiss Riddle, on October 20, 2009 14:46

Todd's reply to "Fluid apps open in new Firefox tab when logging in" was just promoted to the most useful! Prentiss Riddle and 2 other people think it's one of the best replies.

Sounds like you need to configure your URL Pattern whitelist. See the page lnked below for instructions/details. I dont know why this would have suddenly changed for you...

http://groups.google.com/group/fluida...

Prentiss Riddle reported a problem in TwitPic on September 19, 2009 13:05:

TwitPic comment results in unwanted Twitter post

The TwitPic comment form appropriately warns me if my comment will be sent as a DM to the poster of a photo. I wish this were optional but at least there's a warning.

But I was very unpleasantly surprised when I discovered that my comment also appeared in my Twitter stream, with no warning. This is unacceptable.

There are so many reasons why this is a bad idea. I may leave a comment which only makes sense in the context of a photo, or is even offensive out of context; I may prefer to use my Twitter stream for a specific purpose unrelated to the topic of my comment; or I may be careful about the volume of my tweets and not want to clutter my Twitter stream with every comment.

The posting of TwitPic comments to a user's Twitter stream should be strictly opt-in on a per-comment basis.

Prentiss Riddle reported a problem in Canon on September 08, 2009 23:16:

Canon ImageRunner printer line has abandoned Mac OS X

I just learned, the hard way, that the Canon ImageRunner printer line does not support Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard. See:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.j...

Canon, pretty please, could you make it a priority to support Macs again?

Prentiss Riddle replied on July 22, 2009 01:07 to the problem "Too hard to find info on where the offset money goes" in Brighter Planet:

Ian, thanks so much for the forthright reply. It speaks very highly to the credibility of Brighter Planet.

Prentiss Riddle replied on July 19, 2009 14:27 to the problem "Deleting fairly purchased e-books is wrong" in Amazon.com:

Here's what would have been my problem report (thanks, GetSatisfaction, for making it easy to find matching issues!):

I'm told that Amazon has deleted books from customers' Kindles after purchase. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/tec...

(Ironically, one of the books involved was "1984.")

How can any book lover possibly consider buying from Amazon without confidence that purchases are final?

This has convinced me to avoid the Kindle and gives me doubts about purchasing other digital downloads from Amazon.

Prentiss Riddle started following the problem "Deleting fairly purchased e-books is wrong" in Amazon.com.

Prentiss Riddle reported a problem in Brighter Planet on July 19, 2009 14:05:

Too hard to find info on where the offset money goes

Beta test report from a potential member:

It's very hard to find information on where the offset money goes. What looks to me like the obvious place (the "carbon offsets" tab) is about your membership packages. I finally found information by digging through your knowledge base until I stumbled into your "portfolio," a term which makes sense in retrospect but which never would have occurred to me in advance.

As a prospective member, the most important thing to me is knowing that my offset contributions go to effective projects. If I don't immediately get a story about your accomplishments I start to have doubts, and if I still can't figure out where the money goes after a couple of clicks I might easily conclude that you're fraudulent.

What's more, tracking my footprint and feeling guilty is the stick. Feeling like I'm making a difference is the carrot.

In short, from my perspective you have both a usability problem and a marketing problem. Your projects certainly need to be findable and in my opinion they should be front and center.

A comment on the question "How do I know I can trust you with my email password?" in BackupMy:

Damon, thanks for the quick and honest reply.

Of course it raises the question of why I trust my email provider in the first place. Are there models for establishing trust in other loosely regulated industries? The old-industry way would be to identify your distinguished executives and board, to build a big fancy building, and otherwise to try to look "respectable." In the Enron-Madoff era that's not a convincing formula even if you had the capital for it. I'm not sure what the "web 2.0" way would be.

I realize I'm drifting into philosophical territory here. These aren't problems a young company can solve by itself, but they're problems the field as a whole certainly needs to address.

Thanks again. – Prentiss Riddle, on July 17, 2009 16:49

Prentiss Riddle marked one of Damon Cali's replies in BackupMy as useful. Damon Cali replied to the question "How do I know I can trust you with my email password?".

Prentiss Riddle asked a question in BackupMy on July 15, 2009 18:23:

How do I know I can trust you with my email password?

You guys have been reading my mind! I love the cloud but I worry about my data. I'm glad to see someone is well on the way to solving the problem.

My question: nowadays an email password would be all an identity thief needs to impersonate me at an online retailer and could be a big first step toward cleaning out my bank account. It's a much bigger deal than SSN/birthdate/mother's maiden name ever was. How do I know that I can trust you with my email password?

Prentiss Riddle replied on July 02, 2009 21:29 to the question "Why does my simple Mailer workflow result in "nothing happened"?" in tarpipe:

Kevin and Bruno, thanks. I added another textinput box to provide some input to the body and it's working now.

I'm using this plus Gmail filters to alert myself about crucial email by SMS. The thing Tarpipe will do that Gmail filters won't is to strip the message body.

Prentiss Riddle asked a question in tarpipe on April 03, 2009 14:55:

Why does my simple Mailer workflow result in "nothing happened"?

Count me as another vote for end-user documentation -- probably I'm missing something easy that I could solve for myself if there were a manual... :-)

I've set up a simple workflow (titled "Mail decoder to Mailer") that should accept an incoming message through the Mail Decoder and pipe its subject line to the Mailer. The "To" address for the Mailer is supplied by a Text Input widget. My goal is to forward email to my mobile phone, stripping the body and keeping just the subject line.

When I try it, the only result is a "nothing happened/not completed" message in my Tarpipe activity log.

Is there something I'm failing to understand about how the Mail Decoder and Mailer should work? Or is there a bug of some kind?

Thanks! I'm a big admirer of Tarpipe and hope I can figure out how to make this work.