I didn’t get a chance to write anything on my actual birthday because I was too busy goofing off with my mom, who was in town visiting. We went on a tour of Stanford, admired the view from the top of Hoover Tower, went up to Skyline Drive for an even better view, tried a new Korean restaurant in downtown Palo Alto, and celebrated with a little gelato.

The great northern California weather has allowed me to stay active and fit. I picked up tennis again after not really playing since high school. I’ve been running the last 7 weeks following the Couch to 5k app. I learned how to play badminton with a group of friends from work, and most recently have been honing my billiards skills at work thanks to our new pool table, which I helped pick out.

I could go on and on about the other great people, places, and things I’ve experienced over the past year, but I’ll save that for the five weddings I’m attending this summer. I’ve really progressed as a programmer, but I’ll save that for another post as well.

Writing this is a renewed personal commitment to publish more meaningful content. Next year or in ten years, the only thing I’ll really care about remembering about my 25th birthday is spending time with my mom, staying active, and helping bring a dozen people clean water.

I first moved away from home when I was 16 to enroll in a residential high school situated on a college campus. The classes were harder, the independence was greater, and the likelihood of a college scholarship was higher. It was like going to college. No one could believe I was leaving my incredible home high school and all the friends I had grown up with. I enjoyed my quasi-college lifestyle and knew everyone else would, too.

When I moved away to college, it was no big deal. I was used to the distance from home but not the distance between friends at different universities. As much as everyone loved college (as I expected), they knew there would be a next step or phase. After my senior year, I took a job with a big company in a big city like I told myself I wouldn’t. I had outgrown campus and the small town that bound it.

I wasn’t alone. Nearly everyone moved to Chicago. Anyone who didn’t came up on weekends. Though the distance wasn’t great, going home became harder. Winter was hard. Work was dissatisfying at best. While I still loved the city, I knew I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t go.

I packed up my high school dorm in under an hour. I moved myself out of my college dorm down 8 flights of stairs. I had myself packed and moving to Chicago when my transmission dropped on the northwest side of I-465. I took one car-full to Menlo Park with my Mom. Like ripping off a band-aid, moving quickly hurts less.

So here I am in my third apartment in 12 months. I haven’t lived in the same residence for more than 2 years in the last 10 years. My friends are starting to have weddings, buy homes and have babies. I haven’t perfected my pitch to convince them to move here with me, but I’m not sure I’m supposed to.

I really like California after 10 months. I haven’t figured everything out which keeps me moving.

I started looking into laundry services and buying a washer and dryer. Services charge based on pounds of laundry, never giving any meaningful estimates. Compact washer and dryer sets I could hook up to my faucet would need to be used for 3 years before I broke even for the amount of laundry I do. Financially speaking, pay-per-load laundry machines make sense. The pain point is how you have to pay to use them.

The only place you can get $7 in quarters without a dirty look is a bank branch. While banks have invested more and more into their ATMs and websites so you don’t need a branch, laundry machines still expect quarters. The only innovation I’ve seen with laundry machines are cheap credit card imitations that allow you to “deposit” money via an ATM-like terminal. This just provides another middle man in the process of paying for laundry.

Why isn’t anyone removing the friction of paying for laundry?

Answer: there’s no ubiquitous solution that can compete with quarters. NFC payments would be ideal. You could even wire it up so an app would tell you when your load is done. NFC depends on hardware. For even a small apartment complex, you would have to bank on every tenant, now and in the future, having this ability.

What about solving this on the app layer?

Everyone has an app phone these days. Well, anyone paying over a certain rent threshold should have an app phone. Make an app that says, “I am here. Deliver this payment. Make this machine do its thing. Let me know when it’s done.” Perhaps as a fallback you have some sort of terminal in case the customer doesn’t have an app phone. Resorting to the app layer for mechanical tasks such as laundry hinges on “six nines”.

Assumed Cost

Doing laundry has a cost based on the water used, electricity used, and the wear and tear of the machines. I am blindly assuming that’s what increases the price to wash a load. One way to remove the friction of paying for laundry in an apartment building setting is to bundle it in with rent. My current apartment already bundles water, electricity, and heat into the rent. What’s stopping them from calculating the assumed cost of laundry, adding it on top, and making this an even more attractive place to live?

Going back to the spreadsheet calculations, raising the cost of a wash load by a quarter translates to $1 more a month for a modest amount of laundry. That’s $12 per year. If new tenants signed leases for $25 more than the last tenant, the building owner would make more profit than outsourcing it to whomever operates the coin-payment laundry machines. No one sweats $13 when it comes to the price of rent. Weighing the price of an apartment happens on the scale of hundreds of dollars. By including the cost of “in-house” laundry in the rent price, a landlord stands to make more money.

Here’s an explicit example from Southwest Airlines today:

For #VetsDay2011, we are giving @iava $1 per drink sold onboard our planes today (up to $50k)!  Details here:  http://t.co/iuVw8Pwu

November 11, 2011 9:00 AM via CoTweetReplyRetweetFavorite

@SouthwestAir

Southwest Airlines

Donating $50,000 to the IAVA is very commendable. Just do it. Basing this act of charity on drink sales and capping it is a cheap act after doing some quick math.

Southwest’s inflight menu sells energy drinks for $3 and booze for $5. One could easily assume there’s at least a $1 margin of profit per drink. They have more than 3,400 daily departures. Their fleet consists of only Boeing 737 jets which seat about 180 people. (If you’ve flown with them, you’ll remember they have boarding groups A, B, and C numbered 1 through 60.) If they have 3,400 flights with 180 passengers trying to sell 50,000 drinks, less than 13 drinks per flight need to be purchased to meet the cap.

That’s less than 7% of passengers per flight that need to buy something for them to meet their cap. It’s not a goal of how much they’d like to raise, it’s a cap on how much they are willing to donate. Either donate all of your profits from drink sales for one day, or cut a check for $50k. Give whatever amount you are comfortable giving. It sounds cheap to put a cap on what you’ll give. Make meaningful donations.

If you’re going to make donations based on passive social media actions, make sure they are meaningful. This summer Wendy’s offered to donate 50₵ for each retweet.

RT for a good cause. Each retweet sends 50¢ to help kids in foster care. #TreatItFwd

June 15, 2011 3:13 PM via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Wendys

Wendy’s

Again, the math fails the sentiment, and they’re implicitly capping their donation. Twitter published the most retweeted tweets of 2010 but didn’t give any metrics for what each little dude represented. There are 90 of them for the #1 retweeted tweet. If they represent 1,000 people, that’s 90,000 RTs. If Wendy’s took this into account when “pricing” their RT donation, they set their cap at $45,000. Even if they were retweeted 900,000 times that’s less than half a million dollars that’s not going to bankrupt a company with a market cap of $2 billion.

Being a cynic, Wendy’s also may have noticed that Twitter doesn’t give an exact number of retweets. After it reaches 100 RTs, it just says “100+” so no one has any way of keeping them honest. (Even the API returns “100+” as the retweet_count)

Fifty cents a RT isn’t meaningful. Write a check for $45,000 and tweet about how others can contribute what they are comfortable giving. I guarantee that approach will raise more money than passively hoping your tweet goes viral.

Corporations don’t have to put explicit and implicit caps on their donations when relying on others to meet their “goal”. Take notice of how Charity Water and Movember are empowering individuals to raise more for a cause than a single corporation’s campaign could. Corporations should use their social media following to make meaningful donations, not cap their charity.

Update

Twitter announced today that the most retweeted Tweet of 2011 was from Wendy’s. It was not the one mentioned above (it came in 2nd), but one exactly like it sent a week before. The announcement states they raised $50,000 which means the two Tweets combined for 100,000 retweets. (That makes my math above pretty accurate.)

Wendy’s Tweet is also notable because it was a Promoted Tweet, part of a Twitter advertising campaign that Wendy’s ran in June to celebrate Father’s Day.

What wasn’t apparent until now is that Wendy’s paid to make their tweet go viral. According to this Quora post by an ex-PMM at Twitter, that costs between 20c and $5. If you assume they were on the lowest end of this and only had 50,000 retweets from their campaign, they spent $10,000 (50,000 x .2) to donate $50,000 instead of just donating $60,000 in the beginning. Sounds like a successful campaign to me.

When I first joined, I needed my precious @indiana.edu email address. I was friending and being friended by anyone related to the 8th floor of Briscoe Shoemaker in the Northwest neighborhood of Indiana University for 2005–2006 and any combination of those keywords. No one knew what they were doing. Friending attractive strangers was encouraged and the norm.

Now, I’m still friends with some attractive strangers and have grown my social network to include distant family members who are reportedly related. The dynamic of friending someone on Facebook has changed. The consequences of using Facebook have evolved as well. I should know well being employed by a company that provides products and services to regain online privacy and build an online reputation.

After hundreds of blog posts and thousands of tweets, it is clear I’m not afraid of sharing online. In fact, I really enjoy it which is why I try so many new social apps and services. If I’ve noticed anything in the past few years, it’s that every new social play experiments with maximizing reach while trying to control privacy. Many services have turned to asynchronous relationships, where you can follow or friend someone without them reciprocating, and now Facebook allows you to use their service in this way. Plenty of people will make this out to be a move against Twitter, but I think it more importantly removes the confusion between having a ‘Page’ as an individual and using your individual account as a ‘Page.’

You can now subscribe to me on Facebook. I’ve been posting updates to ‘the public’ for a while assuming they were easily discoverable. Now, they’ll be conveniently delivered to your News Feed.

This allows me to treat Facebook somewhat like Twitter (I’m not ready to connect the two). I can choose to maintain friendships with people I actually consider to be friends without cutting off access to what someone might have found interesting by being my friend.

Allowing others to subscribe to the content you share on Facebook, allows you to evaluate the friendships you truly value. It increases engagement with the site (and ads from a business perspective). It also should be a wakeup call to people who have or are approaching maxing out the 5,000 friend limit to rethink what a friend really is. Relationships on Facebook should become more meaningful because of this.

I will be actively de-friending people on Facebook so that I can take in more of the updates and news from people I care about instead of relying on Facebook to filter, silo, and group it for me. Please don’t take it personally. I’m not hard to contact. I approach Twitter the same way and keep up with about 600 businesses and individuals (a little less than twice the number of Facebook friends I kept before this announcement).

To simplify how I’ll use social networks, as they are today, going forward:

• Facebook: You don’t need to ask to crash on my couch.
• LinkedIn: We’ve worked together, or I would like to work with you.
• Twitter: I’m following you because you are interesting, not because someone told me you were interesting.
• foursquare: I’m not going to be creeped out if you find me here.
• Phone: You are more important than a Facebook friend or you don’t know me.

So you post how to cheat the restaurant you bought a groupon with? And apparently your proud of this and it looks like you might even be soliciting businesses to hire you for web work? Your a crook and a thief and a liar. Why not post how to short a bartender(when he is real busy) by showing him a $20 then handing him a $10?? Your just a dishonest a-hole. No wonder you need the internet to find friends. You look like a douchbag anyway…

It looks like Jiffison is a made up name, but I replied to the email address provided — cliffjiffison@yahoo.com. If he or anyone else would like to have a constructive conversation about any of the material I post, please feel free to contact me.

Mobile Banking

In this same magical world where someone can go from the street to a seat in a matter of seconds thanks to a magnetized piece of plastic, there also exist wirelessly networked handheld computers that fit in your pocket. They, too, have the ability to communicate with the highly complicated financial networks and can almost instantly show recent purchases to customers. Most times, they show more detailed and legible information than the pieces of paper printed by the vending machines.

Math Proofs

The paper receipt and mobile banking receipt can not be proven to be equal without some other valid piece of information to tie them together. Trusting the validity of the financial networks and authenticity of the mobile banking receipt, you can prove you bought n+1 tickets without n tickets or a paper receipt.

For example, I buy two tickets with a credit card from the vending machine and receive three pieces of paper: two tickets and a paper receipt. One ticket and the receipt are lost. A mobile banking receipt is produced for the amount of two tickets. If that receipt and the ticket that was not lost are presented, it should be accepted as Proof-of-Payment.

On Caltrain, this is not the case. Keep your 19th century paper scraps and avoid $250 citations (or make the guy from out of town take the fall).

This all started when I calculated it costs $12.50 to empty each trash can each week from my apartment complex. I was being billed $25 per month for trash, and there are eight units with four 64 gallon trash cans for our complex. Since the trash is picked up weekly, $25 times 8 units divided by 4 cans divided by 4 weeks per month meant it costs $12.50 for a mechanical arm to empty a trash can.

According to the 2010 census, there are 32,026 people in Menlo Park, CA. If a trash truck can empty 4 cans in 10 minutes consistently for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 52 weeks, each truck would earn $624,000 while servicing less than 12,500 properties assuming each has 4 cans. At that rate, three (3) trucks could service all of Menlo Park. Sure California is expensive and whatever, but either that math doesn’t add up, or picking up trash is more profitable than founding a startup in Silicon Valley in a bubble.

I emailed my landlord for some sort of explanation. She directed me to Conservice. Conservice couldn’t actually tell me the total trash bill for our complex. Everyone is fine with the fact they have no idea how much our utilities are and that tenants are being billed unfounded amounts. I have no idea how this is legal. Since I had a 4 month lease, I decided to move instead of fight it.

Another resident billed by Conservice who wishes not to be named but has done a lot more homework on this than I had the following to contribute (paraphrased by me).

Ratio utility billing systems (RUBS) take the total amount of utilities for all the residents of a property and divide it by the number of units. Utility costs become unpredictable as units are vacated and reoccupied. Also, your neighbor could take hour long hot showers and you would bear the cost. For utilities that the landlord is paying at a fixed rate (like trash), your cost can increase as residents move out and the bills are split between fewer residents. While I’ve lived here, more people have moved in and my trash bill has gone up unexplained by the landlord and Conservice.

Supposedly between Conservice and my landlord, someone should be able to tell me which utilities are master-metered, sub-metered and which utilities are billed calculated with RUBS. Neither my landlord or Conservice could tell me anything about why it costs $12.50 for a trash can to be emptied each week. Their collective answer was that California and Menlo Park are expensive.

Conservice’s whole business model is based on relieving landlords from responsibility for ANY utilities, and making tenants pay for all the utilities — even utilities that they don’t use (in the case of RUBS) since you could be out of town for an extended period, and will still end up paying your unit’s percentage of the entire utility cost. Landlords can recover some of the losses of vacant units by offsetting all the utility costs to residents, and Conservice benefits by charging landlords for this service (which is then usually passed on to residents in the form of monthly billing fees for the privilege of having to pay for all of the utilities) and by charging handling fees for accepting payments by credit and debit cards.  An interesting point on the credit and debit card payments is that Conservice uses a merchant category code of 4900 to submit Mastercard and Visa transactions.  The 4900 MCC is reserved for actual utility providers, and gives a discount which gives them and their processor a reduced, fixed transaction cost as opposed to a percentage based rate — but of course Conservice is not a utility company, and then they charge the $3.00 fee for card payments.  I have been in touch with Visa and Mastercard about Conservice’s incorrect use of the 4900 MCC, but haven’t heard anything back.  Interestingly, they post American Express transactions as “direct mail” — I don’t know how Amex charges for card acceptance, but the inconsistency between Amex vs Visa/Mastercard transactions leads me to believe that Conservice likely just picks the category that costs the least, as opposed to the MCC that actually reflects an accurate representation of what they do.

Third party billing is legal. The RUBS method and sub-metering are allowed in most places. I was already involved in one lengthy dispute with a landlord. I don’t have the energy or time to get into another one here in California.

I’m moving to a new apartment that pays for all utilities besides telecom. Each month I get a higher utility bill even though I spend less time and use less resources at my apartment. Conservice is a dark hole I don’t want to venture down. I don’t agree with how my landlord operates.

Anyone signing a new lease should ask whether their landlord uses Conservice and immediately run in fear.

Perhaps I’m sensitive about the subject because I’ve been helping design and develop a new email feature at Reputation.com. During the process, I have developed a failsafe question to ask when discussions seem to stall:

What value does this offer the user?

Is this going to add value to the products this user already pays for? Does it help them realize the value of products they haven’t purchased yet? Will this make them immediately seek an ‘unsubscribe’ link or make them want to cancel their account altogether? Is this just another email they’ll have to filter, process, and archive without caring about the content? I understand businesses’ need to sell services and products to earn a profit which in turn pays employees like me.

News flash: Universities are businesses. Unfortunately, sports programs at major universities have become businesses. Only businesses need marketing departments. Marketing is something of which I have a limited understanding because I’m usually on the consumer end of it. “Marketing” fills my mailbox and inbox with nicely printed mailers and graphic-heavy emails. I check most of my email on my iPhone over 3G because I know emails with lots of graphics typically have little value to offer me. Real human conversation happens in text over email.

This morning I received an email from the IU Athletic whatever with a subject of “Indiana Athletics Social Media Survey”. In order, I sighed, rolled my eyes, and resisted immediately deleting. If you’re using social media channels correctly and appropriately, you would never need to send an email asking users to complete a survey. Social media allows for large organizations such as universities to receive direct feedback from students, alumni, and whoever else is on that email list.

If you think SurveyMonkey is a better way to manage and measure these types of responses, you obviously haven’t tried SproutSocial. (No, I don’t get any kickbacks or gain anything by telling you what an awesome product they offer.)

What do I gain from completing this survey?

You have received this email because we would like you to participate in a survey to help us understand IU fans’ social media usage. It is a short survey and will only take you 5–7 minutes to complete, but it will help us immensely in discovering how you are using social media, and what we can do to bring IU athletics news to you more efficiently.

Nothing. Marketing hasn’t spent any time in the trenches finding out where their customers are so they are taking a shortcut with this survey. Based on their questions, they know nothing about me and are clueless about how to collect this information.

Age/Gender

If you can’t match my email address to a student account or season ticket holder account or process it through the internet to determine if I’m male or female and between 19 or 29, start over.

Facebook/Twitter/Follow us?

The majority of the industrialized world has Facebook and Twitter accounts. Instead of filling out this survey, I could be connecting my accounts to my season ticket holder account, and you could offer, but not force, me to follow and like you (as if my ticket renewal wasn’t enough).

Do you follow any of our other countless social media accounts?

A text input field is not the way to collect this information. How are you ever going to calculate accurate results? If you already had my Twitter account associated with my account, you could suggest other accounts for me to follow.

Scale of 1 to I’ve lost interest

Where is the study that says these kinds of surveys are effective? Needless to say, the rest of the survey delves into absurdity. It’s not worth my time, and the answers I hurriedly give aren’t worth the surveyors’ time. No value is added for either party.

I absolutely love what Tony Hsieh said this week about the use of the word “social media”, and Zappos’ policy.

You don’t go around asking, “What’s your telephone strategy?”

If you can provide value to the people who already follow and like you on Twitter and Facebook, respectfully, great. If that value attracts a larger audience, awesome. A survey, about whether or not I use these platforms, does not answer either of those questions. The survey, and thus the email, offer no value to me, an already paying customer.

Sadly, the athletic department has to fill seats and attract donors in order to put the best team on the given playing field. If the NCAA had any sense, they would allow good humans like Tom Crean to interact with his fans just like Jack and Gary. Don’t tell us if you figured out how to automate it, , but tweet to every person who checked in (across Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, etc.) at the venue you played at tonight and personally thank them for their support. Add season ticket holders to that loop, and you’ve programmed engagement.

It’s not just the athletic department that’s guilty of these emails that signal, “don’t care, archive.” There’s a terrible stigma about universities (and greek organizations while we’re at it) wanting donations down the road once alumni have managed to pay off the debt they’ve incurred supporting these institutions.

You’ll find a majority of people jumping to defend what a great institution they attended, but a very small minority, if any, will tell you about the most recent email or mailing they received because they don’t add any value.

Does this promote Indiana University? Will this make the recipient proud we are sending it to them? Why are we so in the dark about these subjects? How can we organically learn about users’ habits?

How can we make students, alumni, and season ticket holders, alike, proud of IU?

If that’s not what is about, then what is it about?

Why do I need a phone today? So people can call me.

Who? Friends, family, and strangers.

Are there better ways to communicate with friends and family? Social networks and video chat are much more engaging.

What about strangers? Email me so I can filter, manage, and keep track of our conversation more efficiently.

So why do you need a phone? I don’t. More and more, calling someone is a last resort. Some big company’s website has fallen short of allowing me to complete my desired task. Usually, it’s because I can’t find information. Ironic, right?

Part of this I can do myself, and the other part will depend on the evolution of telcos. Let’s focus on what I can do. First, stop giving out my phone number. I’ve somewhat started to do this by giving out my Google Voice number which I can check missed calls, voicemails, and text messages on my computer. Google Voice isn’t perfect though. In fact, it’s borderline unreliable.

Actually, I first need to remember that I never have to return anyone’s phone call. The only person in the world who I have no other means of contacting by phone or postal service is my great-grandmother. Everyone else I know has email, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

I don’t need a phone for business. I made a point to not include my phone number in my new work email signature. People think they need your phone number to get things done quickly. If someone is calling you, that’s not happening (from my experiences).

There are a lot of services which require a phone number, but don’t ever seem to reveal the reason they needed it in the first place. I think I can keep using my Google Voice or Skype number to fool the form validators.

My current voicemail is already very straight forward and to the point which a lot of people have complimented as “sounding professional.”

“Hi, you’ve reached Max Beatty. Sorry I couldn’t take your call. If it’s urgent, text me. Otherwise, please leave a message.”

In order to get rid of my phone number, I need to stop inviting people to leave a message. I could also reinforce that this is not my preferred way to communicate.

“Hi, you’ve reached Max Beatty. Unless you’re family, this is the worst way to contact me. Please email me at my first name at my last name dot me.”

Of course, I’ll make exceptions and call some people back. But maybe the bigger statement I’m making is that this channel of communication doesn’t work for me. Maybe I’ve been listening to too much Merlin Mann as of late, but I’m honestly sick of calling people. I rarely gain any value. I waste my time. Therefore, I no longer want to allow people to interrupt me with a phone call five years from now.

Why do you need a phone? What am I overlooking?

(Family and friends, this isn’t directed at you. Please email me for further discourse.)