However, new Facebook is pretty presumptuous,  and appears to think that we are living in rainbow marshmallow fantasyland, where everyone is super close and super friendly.

Examples

(The top suggestions are friend or fan suggestions, and those are fine, they make sense.)

The “you haven’t talked to that person from your English class who you didn’t actually interact with socially in high school” messages.

On a related note…

I do not need to reconnect with these people.  If I want to reconnect with someone on Facebook, Facebook, I will take care of that on my own.

So Facebook, come on.  Are you not getting that a large portion of the people I’m connected to are from a previous time period in my life?  Sure, we can be “friends” on Facebook but we aren’t going to be chitty-chatty all of the time.  In fact, it is likely we won’t connect at all, save the occasional birthday message or a comment on the same wall post/status update.

The “someone you connected to signed up, added some friends and then disappeared and is not helping our revenue” messages.

Oh Facebook. First of all, why don’t YOU make Facebook better for the mystery girl? Writing on her wall is probably not going to be a Facebook game-changer for her.  And the FB user with “only” 17 friends?  Why assume that this person wants to connect with so many others on your site?  If I was only connected on Facebook with the people I see and talk to on a regular basis, it would be maybe 35-40 people. 

People will use your website in different ways, maybe not everyone cares to connect with people who are just acquaintances or just coworkers but people they see as ACTUAL friends.

Anyway, that’s my rant for today, I’ve been seeing these messages for a while now and think that Facebook’s presumption is a bit much.

(Oh also, Facebook, please move the birthdays up near the suggestions box, thanks.)

What do you think of the new Facebook changes, particularly these new “suggestions?”

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I have been married for nearly 3 years.  My anniversary is coming up in a few weeks.

In addition, we are moving into another apartment, and so things I have been meaning to do for a while are now being done, especially when it means not carrying extraneous things to a new apartment.

Luckily, I had looked online to see options for donating my wedding dress to a charity.  I paid quite a bit to have it cleaned right after the wedding, but not boxed up, as I knew I would not keep it.  The charity I located was Brides Against Breast Cancer.  BABC holds gown sales across the United States, where gowns are sold at a discounted rate to brides in need of a dress.  This initiative and the money made supports Making Memories, whose mission “is to grant wishes, including memory-making events, for metastatic breast cancer patients, while continuing to support, educate and increase resource awareness.”  I was immediately drawn to this for two reasons.  First, I love the idea of the dress going to someone else to be used for their wedding; the idea of someone else having the kind of day I had in that dress makes me so happy.  Second, the money is going to such a good place.  Unfortunately, not all of those who get breast cancer survive it, and the money raised here goes to grant a wish to someone without a lot of time left, whether it be a vacation with family or a wedding dress for their own wedding. 

As you can see below, I had a lot of fun in the dress.  I packed it up this morning, along with the crinoline that I wore underneath, as well as another dress purchased for an event years ago that I knew I would never wear again.  (BABC also takes special-occasion dresses to sell at their events to mothers of the bride/groom, bridesmaids, etc.)  It didn’t hurt to see the wedding dress go, I have pictures like this one to remind me of that day, and my own memories and what it meant to me, my husband, and our families and friends.  It is my hope that my dress will contribute to good memories for others.

My dress originally came with a white sash instead of the black one you see in the picture, and I gave that sash to my grandmother who turned it into the ring pillow.  I still have the pillow, in addition to my veil, so I haven’t given everything up.  I find it hard to understand why people keep dresses, especially when they are in boxes that you cannot open for fear of ruining the seal.  Are you ever going to wear it again?  Probably not. 

If you have been a bride, what did you do with your dress?  Do you have any other dresses that you no longer wear that could be donated to Brides Against Breast Cancer & Making Memories?

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I was surprised yesterday to visit GourmetLibrary.com, one of the latest ventures of Gary Vaynerchuk and Wine Library, and not immediately find links to Twitter, Facebook, etc.  (A link to Twitter has since been added, as you can see on the screenshot from this morning.  No tweets so far yet though, not even an introduction.)

I was surprised that the site was even launched without those things in place.  I can’t be the only person who immediately looks for ways to connect to online shops or brands that I’m potentially interested in buying things from, whether it is subscribing to a feed about sales or connecting on Twitter or Facebook.  How many other people who follow @WineLibrary, who follow @garyvee, clicked on the site yesterday and then had no way to connect?  It seems like a major miss, especially surprising to me given who is behind it.  I am connected to a few Wine Library employees that I met at a Tweetup there a few months ago, and they are all great.

There are 114 followers (as of now) on the GL Twitter account, but I would imagine that number would already be so much bigger if there had been prominent callouts to connect on the site BEFORE it was announced.  I know that there is a massive amount of promotion that the site will get through the thousands of people watching Wine Library TV, so maybe this isn’t seen as such a big deal to the people behind GL.

Bringing it back to my story at the top, this is definitely the place to connect with potential cheese (etc.) shoppers!  If I had an online retail business, I would be all over this.

Update: I pulled the first screenshot this morning, now it is nearly 7pm and Facebook has been added as well:

Watching these things go up now makes me think that perhaps they saw the miss with these items as well.  What do you think?

Update, the day after.  Look who’s tweeting up a storm!

I am happy to see this engagement but still think that I made a valid point by wondering why this wasn’t all in place before launch.

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I had a wonderful time with Airdrie over Skype and she’s already sent me new eyeliners to try out, which has been fun.  I look forward to being on the show again to discuss them.

The episode can be found here.  I highly recommend subscribing to the show in iTunes.

Thanks again to Airdrie (and her husband Derek for the technical assist).

Posted via email from Jamie Sanford’s posterous

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- Finish the 4 books I have sitting around and review them on the blog
- Write about “who doesn’t get it.”
- Change WP theme and get new header/etc going.

Posted via email from Jamie Sanford’s posterous

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I’ll let the tweets tell this story.

This tweet was followed by a DM from @ComcastSteve where he asked for my home number to try and locate me an appropriate cable box that I could pick up.  I sent another DM back with my phone number.

@ComcastSteve responded to me within minutes.  He was super pleasant and helpful.  I responded by giving him positive love online with happy tweets and a Facebook status update:

From where I’m standing, Comcast is doing a GREAT job handling online customer service.  I told everyone I know that I was so excited about having gotten such a quick and helpful response.

However, I had spent the previous 4 days or so complaining because the customer service I received over the phone and the 2 times I drove to the physical location was nowhere near as good as what @ComcastSteve gave me in 5 minutes.  Does this leave me happy? Yes.  However, it’s a bigger problem that the majority of the Comcast customer service team are not this interested in ensuring customer satisfaction.

I personally think that @ComcastSteve should be leading training sessions for the Comcast reps who answer the phone, at the very least.

What would you have Comcast do to improve this situation?

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Full set of photos is here on Flickr.

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I’m so glad to have attended last week’s tweetup at Wine Library! Organized by Eva Abreu, there were about 25-30 people in attendance.  The Wine Library tweeps were wonderful hosts, we had great wine to taste, watched Gary Vaynerchuk tape an episode of Wine Library TV, and mingled.

Full set of photos is here on Flickr, I’ve noted those photos to ID everyone as best as I could – please let me know if I missed you!

@garyvee doing his thing.

Mingling and drinking some vino.

Eventually the party moved into @garyvee’s office for some live UStreaming and interesting discussion.

Eva’s post about the event, containing the list of attendees, is here.  It was great to meet everyone and I hope to see you at a future tweetup!

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Whole set is here on Flickr.

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