So what is spam – @Ed_Dale ?

“Chris, there is only one definition of spam — unsolicited email”

Nope, not really. That’s your definition. Spam is a repeated bombardment of essentially unwanted information. Go watch the python sketch that gives it it’s name. I’m sure it’s on youtube.

Eg: “We’ve got SPAM, egg and SPAM, SPAM SPAM sausage and SPAM, SPAM SPAM….” (well I’m sure you get the idea).

The folks in the restaurant in the skit actually did “opt in” by walking in the door. They agreed to some level of interaction with the business. What then happened was the proprietor took advantage of that relationship in an attempt, perhaps, to offload a surplus of SPAM by putting it in every dish.

So I’d argue your definition of spam, in the first instance.

Secondly, the “just opt out” argument. I’m happy to join your mailing list. I’ll even follow your recommendations, Ed, to “go here and sign up, hey, don’t actually buy anything, but take the free information”. Now I’m not an idiot, and I can understand you’re marketing there, but the cumulative result is 20 of you then bombarding me with crap about the latest product launch.

The point was, with the latest version of that, mass control, people are sick and tired (I imagine) of all the nonsensical hype of “hey, this is a great product. You know what, I haven’t actually bought it, but I’m getting paid to say so” messages. We know how the product launch formula works, we’ve seen it a lot (high volume) were’ familiar’ (read, resistant). Hmm, high volume of requests to do something we’re resistant to? Sure sounds like SPAM to me, and certainly abuse of the relasionship.

I know you’re big on relationship, Ed, and I get that – and you also talk about the dangers of abusing it – so please don’t complain when someone calls you out for doing just that. I unsubscribed from your list, and also no longer follow you on twitter.

I’m sure it won’t make a dent in your sales And I don’t bear you any grudges. I love your work, and I love your material. If I want to read your tweets now and keep in touch, there’s always the RSS version of your twitter feed, and that’s far, far less intrusive on my life, and I can choose to read it whenever I want.

THAT, in my opinion, is the power of twitter: Your public feed is availble by RSS for me to read, even though I *don’t* follow you, whenever I want, in a format I want (google reader).

Originally posted as a comment by Rich on The Tubbynerd using Disqus.

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Unlike most thing that sound too good to be true, this one isn’t. There are no catches, and you don’t have to serve ads on your website.

Go check it out. It really is free, as in beer.

I want Sandy, and you will too!

(Notice, This post describes the now-defunct “I want Sandy”.  Sandy was taken off line as of December 19th, 2008.  Another victim of the web 2.0 bubble.  You know, where a useful service people have come to rely on is ripped out from under you without warning.  I’m looking at you, twitter!)

If you haven’t met Sandy yet, let me introduce you. You can thank me later.

Sandy lives at iwantsandy.com. This is a short guide on how to put Sandy to work for you.

Sandy is your free personal assistant, alert service and your new best friend. Although Sandy works great over email and SMS, today we’re going to focus specifically on integrating her with twitter.

Far from being just another dull, run-of-the-mill calendar service, Sandy is a powerful, flexible life management system. Team her up with twitter, and you’ll quickly find her to be the best thing to happen to you in a long, long time.

Introduce yourself to Sandy and let’s get started.

Visit her website and click on the red “sign up” section on the webpage. I won’t insult your intelligence by walking you through the signup process.

At the end of it, Sandy will send you an email. In that message will be a link to a unique email address that you can use to add things to your calendar. Click on that link and send Sandy a message like “remember to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed”. This will activate your account and you can move on to setting up twitter.

From the iwantsandy.com webpage, click on the “Settings” tab and find the “twitter” configuration.

From there you can see that you need to visit Sandy’s twitter page.

Assuming that you already have a twitter account, start following Sandy and make sure that you also set “notifications” to “on”. This presumes that you have already set up SMS alerts inside twitter, which is the subject of an entirely seperate post.

Once you’ve done that, Sandy will automatically start following you as well. Flip back to the iwantsandy.com page under the twitter settings and enter your twitter username in the box provided. Sandy will send you a direct message on twitter with an authentication code. Once you have that, make sure you enter it and check the box to turn “twitter reminders” on and hit “save”.

And that’s it. Sandy is now hooked up to twitter and you can not only receive her reminders over twitter directly to your phone, but you can twitter entries for Sandy to add to your schedule. Try it. From your favorite twitter client (eg: twitterific, twitbin, twitterfox, etc.) or even your cell phone, send a tweet like this:

d s remember to eat more vegetables
d s remind me to go jogging tomorrow at 6pm
d s remember 5th november gunpowder, treason and plot

You can even get fancy and tag your entries:

d s remember Rich’s birthday july 29 @birthday @yearly
d s remind me to install ubuntu linux on my laptop @todo
d s remember cute girl at bar’s phone number is 123456789

There are plenty of examples on iwantsandy.com so I won’t repeat them here. If you’re sending them via twitter, just make sure that you start with “d s” eg: send a direct message to the user called “s”. If you’re sending Sandy instructions via email, you can ignore the “d s” part.

One last thing – make sure that your timezone and date format is correct. Under “Settings” click “Dates & Times” and set them correctly for your timezone and date format.

Once you’ve met Sandy, you’ll wonder how you ever did without her.

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