It is rare that I make a supplier decision that makes me rave with happiness. It happens, but not often. This is one of those times.

The other day I blogged about choosing a project management system and my decision to go with Teamwork instead of ProjectPlace or Basecamp. Six days later I can report that Teamwork absolutely was the right decision - not only for the application, but for the team behind it.

In terms of functionality, there are a lot of things I like about Teamwork, but the things I love the most have nothing to do with managing projects. At the bottom of every page on my Teamwork site is a button that says Feedback/Suggestions. This isn’t just a form you fill out that disappears into the ether; it’s my feedback page. Every comment I make gets logged, timed, date stamped and posted there. And underneath every comment I make is Teamwork’s response to me. These people aren’t just filing away user feedback for some future user metrics calculation or later version rollout; they’re holding themselves accountable for responding to it.

I absolutely love that; it’s a real world, real value example of the transparency we all blather on and on about but so rarely see implemented in meaningful ways.

Way more than that, when these folks say “We take it all on board… seriously” they aren’t kidding. This morning at 9:06 I made a suggestion for a new feature. By noon, Dan Mackey had not only responded to me, but implemented my request:

As a product user, I’m really not sure what more I could ask for.

Alas, not everything is as flawless as Teamwork. Late last week Teamwork’s host, Hosting 365, suffered a denial of service attack and Teamwork was down for about two hours. Since I have quickly become a dedicated Teamwork junkie and am now using it to run my entire work life, I was on the phone to Teamwork in the first ten minutes. In the two hours that followed, I got two emails and a phone call to update me on the system status. That’s customer service - and I haven’t paid these people a single euro yet.

Today I caught up on some of my far-behind blog reading and read a post from Richard Hearne on another company doing things right: Intertrade Ireland is running around trying to get bloggers to raise the profile of Seedcorn, and managing to do it without pissing off the entire internet. Seedcorn’s got €280,000 for startups who are really going for it. I think Teamwork is a fantastic application with a huge potential audience. It’s an Irish Web 2.0 company with an actual, functioning revenue model, and I think they should enter.

The only thing that would make me happier is if they’d sign their feedback responses to me with “Lurve, Teamwork.”

A few days ago, I read somewhere I can no longer find that the average person can’t efficiently manage more than three open projects. To be honest, I was very surprised by this number; I really thought it would be more than that. Most people I know who freelance seem to carry more than that at once, although I haven’t really done an official poll or anything.

However, this piece of information did encourage me to get more organised about an overview of the projects I am juggling, and so I went out in search of some project management systems because Post It Notes are just not cutting it anymore. I looked at Basecamp and Project Place but ultimately settled on Walter Wynn’s suggestion of Teamwork. (Everyone uses Basecamp, and while I’m sure there’s a reason for that and it is jolly nice, I like to throw money out of the mainstream every now and then.)

So far I am delighted with Teamwork; it’s really easy to use, it has everything I want, and when I sent in a suggestion about how they could improve their conversions from their Features Tour, I got back a very nice and responsive email right away. The later discovery that Teamwork is based right here in Cork, meaning I can go round and break their kneecaps if they go out of business and take all my projects with them, was just a nice bonus on top of a great product.

I started entering all my projects, and nobody was more surprised than me to find out that I currently have no less than 15 open gigs going. Except possibly the two clients who I had forgotten about entirely, which if nothing else points out how very, very badly I need to plug into a project management system. Also how much I need to apologise to them, pull my finger out, and deeply discount their invoices.

Even before today’s headcount and dropped client fiasco though, I had begun to grasp that this workload isn’t particularly sustainable. I mean sure, you can survive on four hours of sleep per night for a week or so, but after that you really can’t remember anything, let alone produce anything. Sleep: it does a body good.

So for the past few weeks I have been working with two entirely fabulous people I am incredibly lucky to know. I am still doing 100% of the design work, but a lot of the actual CSS and XHTMLing has gone out to my new CSS Overlord Guillermo Moreno, who quite frankly kicks ass all over town. He’s going to be a superstar when he grows up. (At this point, however, I still worry about keeping him up past his bedtime.)

My very talented friend Katherine Nolan has also been doing the heavy lifting on the e-commerce side of things. We actually met on a forum for our favourite shopping cart software almost 10 years ago, but at this point, I’m about 5 versions behind and she is much better equipped to hack sort out the cart system than I am. (She also happens to be the world’s leading expert on Coranto, which can be very handy.)

So hopefully in the next week or two, things will calm down here and some of the decks will be cleared. It is frankly very hard for me to to let go of any part of what I do because I am a complete and total control freak when it comes to work, but I couldn’t have put any of this stuff in safer hands and I’m really pleased with the work that’s come out of these projects.

So there you go: no woman is an island, and 15 projects is too many. Who knew?

It isn’t very often that you get to watch a real live-action example of true crisis PR. But when you do, it’s always instructive, and usually amusing in that “bang head against wall, wash, rinse, repeat” kind of way.

This weekend, The Planet experienced a catastrophic outage when a transformer at H1, their Houston data center, exploded, blew out the walls of the electrical room, and started a fire. The building was evacuated, the fire brigade called, and at the insistance of the fire chief, all power - including backup power - shut down.

The good news: nobody was hurt, and data on all 9,000 servers was secure. The bad news: none of the servers had any power.

I do not consider this to be a particular failing of The Planet. Catastrophes happen, even with the best of plans. While it sucks for the people affected, and we were lucky to not be on that list, at the end of the day people, not hosts, are responsible for data resiliency and catastropic backup plans. If you’re not prepared to pay for the technical know-how and costs associated with that, then you’re either not running anything mission critical (my blog: not mission critical) or you’re going to have to be prepared to suck it every now and then.

Amidst all the bitching, moaning, threats of law suits, and small contingent of cheer leading, The Planet did a lot of things right:

• Within hours, they promised updates every sixty minutes on their forum, and delivered them - even if all they had to report that there was no update.
• They let customers know very early on that their SLAs would be honoured and that refunds and credits would be calculated as soon as normal operations resumed.
• They pulled in manpower from their vendors, contractors and staff in the middle of the night on a weekend and worked for 28 straight hours to rebuild a power system virtually from scratch and manage a huge volume of support calls.

There were also some extremely odd choices made, some of which are harmful to their PR. As everyone playing along at home can guess, these failures were primarily in the area of transparency:

• NONE of these updates appeared on The Planet’s blog. Not a single word. If you were pissed off enough to hunt down and root through their customer forum, you got info. If you go to their blog, which is where you’d expect to get crisis updates, you get bupkis.
• For a particular set of legacy customers, both NS1 and NS2 nameservers were both hosted in the H1 data center. This was an example of EPIC FAIL on the part of The Planet, one which they remained basically silent about while the 3,000 customers hosed by this oversight were still without websites.
• They did not post photos of the crispy data center. Seriously, guys: pics or it didn’t happen.

But there is one more thing they didn’t do that was a complete no brainer. Let us assume that several thousand people were on the phone, screaming for their boxes to be rescued from the embers and transported to the nearest operating DC. Let us also assume that there are only a certain number of boxes The Planet can fit into the racks in Dallas. At that point, you either take the customers who make you the most money, or knowing that you’re going to lose a boatload of customers one way the other other anyway, you take the customers who are in a position to do the most damage to your reputation.

They should have located the servers that host b3ta, the world’s most awesome and snarkiest website for nerds and geeks, picked them up, put them in a car, driven them to the Dallas data centre and prayed to the gods of DNS propagation for mercy.

But they didn’t. And three days later, b3ta is still in the “hosed” camp, without a website* and instead running an emergency forum, where the punters are predictably making “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” jokes and creating graphics that will commemorate this event for far longer than The Planet’s lack of blog entries.

This is really not a group of people you want to fuck with.

I’m sad to report in a follow up to my review of the Most Awesome Phone Ever that the mobile version of The Sims 2 has proven, on extended play, to be a huge but limited pile of poo. The limitations come from the very small mobile file size of the game, which means that you are restricted to one property, a cycle of just five jobs, no clothing or decorating options, and a set number of property extensions and goods you can buy. Pretty much the only unrestricted activity is the amount of sex you can have, and hooboy, have I been having a lot.

Here’s the thing: there’s not much to do in The Sims if the number of items you can purchase is limited to 10 and you’re chained to your own property. All you can really do is go to work, come home, and go through the normal routine of trying to keep your Sim fed and in dry pants.

This leaves a rather copious amount of spare time. And the only way to make time pass more quickly in The Sims is by shagging. Literally: you shag, the screen blanks, and three hours passes by in an instant.

In a desperate effort to escape the incredible tedium of the idle suburban life, my Sim leads a complex and free wheeling existence in which she married Ben, had an affair with Lorna, divorced Ben, and married Susan but lives with Ivan. You’d think two relationships and all the sex that goes with them would be enough to keep the girl occupied, but every day she comes home from work and places a booty call to Ben, the enamoured ex who just can’t say no, simply to get the day over with sooner.

Playing this game is like an extended re-run of my 20s, except without the booze, drugs or rehab.

The most frustrating part is that there appears to be literally no way out of this existence. The Sims is a game without end; there is no goal beyond continuation of life, but in the full game play version, when you get absolutely sick of a character you just cannot stand to play any more, you can always find a way to kill them off.

The traditional method for simicide is to remove all of the smoke detectors from the house and wait for a house fire. I am, however, far more vicious and impatient than that, and my preferred method for killing annoying children and irritating spouses is to chuck them in the pool and take away the ladder.

But on the mobile version, there is no death. You can starve them, cut them off from all human contact, and leave them in a puddle of their own waste, and they’ll still get up the next day to cheerfully face a brand new morning at Guantanamo.

Suburbia is hell.

So a couple of weeks ago I lost my phone, and while I enjoyed the momentary respite afforded by having nobody ring me, this is 2008 and a girl needs a phone. Over the course of a few retail trips, I had pretty much convinced myself to drop €400 on an iPhone, mostly just because I thought I should have one. But the iPhone, for all its wonders, has one major failing: it does not come in pink.

Which more or less explains why I instead walked out of The Carphone Warehouse with a Sony Ericson W580i Walkman™ Phone that cost, after trading in an old phone and signing up for the Meteor calling plan I wanted anyway, a grand total of €29. (Please note: I also have a new number - 085 702 8212.)

It is very, very pink. The front is pink. The back is pink. Slide it open, and the rear slide panel is practically fuchsia and glitters like a Barbie disco ball. The earbuds, too, are pink, as is the mic jack.

But my absolute favourite part is when you open it up, it has little pink rhinestones in between the numbers:

This phone is, in short, every 9 year old girl’s telecommunications dream. Given that I actually was 9 years old when I got my very first Walkman back in 1981, I’m enjoying the retro flashback. Back then, they were approximately the size of a paperback, weighed as much as a small child, and used this old fashioned music recording device called a tape. If you shook or dropped it, it would skip. Nowadays, if I want to randomise my MP3 playlist on this thing, I can just shake my phone and it mixes everything up without missing a beat.

I absolutely loved it even before I found out that dude, MY PHONE HAS THE SIMS ON IT. Okay, so it’s a lightweight and kind of lame version, but whatever: Sims! I has them! On my phone!

So anyway, despite new computers, new laptops and even new houses, as far as I’m concerned this is the best 30 quid I’ve spent in a long, long time. Sadly, our love affair so far as been torrid but all too brief: the phone refuses to charge. So tomorrow we’re going back to hopefully get that sorted, which is obviously critical.

Not because I’m desperate to take anyone’s calls, but because my Sims are waiting for me.

I was greatly cheered today by the news that Dublin based Irish start-up MOLI has received $30M in funding. I was also to no small degree baffled, as neither I nor several other Irelandias on Twitter had ever heard of them when the news came through via Walter.

I hopped over to check it out, and lo my joy was unbridled. Because this - this, my friends - this is the social networking model I have been talking about for months. This is social networking for grownups.

Moli pins its colours to the mast with the post-Facebook slogan “Control your privacy.” As previously mentioned, I’m all for that. But more than that, Moli convincingly delivers what nobody else does: controlled personal networks. Moli lets you build several network channels (for example, work, friends and family) so you can present several faces to the outside world. And then Moli lets you approve new contacts to one or many of your self-defined channels.

This is marvellous. While I may be happy for my friends to see photos of me from my Saturday night at a hen party, I may be less keen for my mum to see them, and I certainly do not want my business partners and clients to see them. Moli lets me push my self-published content - photos, music, audio and blog entries - to whichever channels I select on a per item basis.

As a concept, this is every bit as fantastic as my string of instant fangirl tweets implied. In practice, it doesn’t quite live up to its potential. For a start, I was a little disappointed that Moli couldn’t check my Gmail to tell me who I know that is already a member. Looking around and trying to find anyone I might know, I also realised that there is a heavy emphasis on art, music and creative types ala VIRB. There is an outstanding range of tools for music and visuals for this crowd, but that’s less than useful to me if my business face is not the arts.

Potentially very useful for businesses, however, is the fact that Moli enables online sales and transactions for the low monthly cost of $3.99. For microbusinesses, this could be a fantastic tool ala Etsy, allowing them to get online, setup shop, and conduct sales at a nominal cost in a visually controlled environment with Paypal or Google Checkout.

And then, while I was sitting there trying to decide if sinking time into MOLI was worth it, given that I’m not an artist or a small business crafter and I have no idea how to find the people I know there, MOLI broke my heart.

For all the positioning and talk of “protecting your privacy” MOLI fails at the most basic hurdle. Because it doesn’t cloak new joins; in fact, it has to be displaying them somewhere, because within 15 minutes of joining, the spam started.

MOLI’s most “active” member, DrTom, would like me to check out his environmental webTV station and products. Lynn would like to hook me into her self-proclained “EZmoney” scheme. (I can only guess how many multitudinous levels it has.) I’m waiting for the bank transfer solicitation from Nigeria, which will surely arrive any moment now.

I am, to put it mildly, devastated. I’m about to set up a channel called Spammers and admit these new “friends” of mine while we await the next flight from the African subcontinent, but really, I’m pissed. This is a great idea, a spanking design, a pretty good UI with a few small issues, and a bastion of everything that is wrong with the internet.

Moli, you wooed me, you hooked me, and then you broke my heart.

By email.

Bitch.

Update 1 | Commenter Hawk5721 comes from a Moli IP
Update 2 | Hawk5721 is Moli.com’s Director of Customer Service

Santa didn’t quite fulfill my Christmas request for a little more toolbar space, but he did deliver something equally wonderous to my web browser for Christmas.

I’ve been a long time user of Remember the Milk, which is a great website for reminding me to do things, except for the fact I can never remember what it’s called. Aside from that, it’s utter bliss in list making - I can make separate lists for work, projects and home, and get reminders if I want them. If my husband could be bothered to join, I could nag him remind him to take out the rubbish without ever opening my mouth because you can schedule tasks to repeat, and share them with other RTM users, too. Even if it isn’t as nicely styled as something like Basecamp, the user interface is more clean and very straightforward, too, which I always appreciate.

However, I have not used it religiously because I set my web browser’s home page to the far more critical Gmail, so RTM required me to remember to open a new tab in my browser to access it. Until today:

Yee-yippee-haw. Remember the Milk now integrates with Gmail. I can create new tasks, assign them to lists, edit their due dates, and mark them as done right in my regular Gmail window. This is similar to what finally got me on the Twitter boat: it also works in Gmail and I don’t need another application - or in this case, another tab. Hurrah.

I am extremely organised but pathologically forgetful, so I’m really hoping this convergence will set me up for a more productive 2008. If Gmail could somehow remind me what day of the week it is, I’d be all set.

Also new to my Gmail is Better Gmail 2, which does nice things to your Gmail interface like showing different icons for different types of attachments, showing you your unread mail count in the tab title, and using https for more secure mail, etc. This extension is only available for Firefox, which just proves what I’ve said all along: God loves a nice API.

So with a long holiday stretch approaching, the husband out of town and nothing to do except clean the house and deal with 6,000 emails, I did what any sensible woman would do and joined Twitter.

It’s interesting, particularly in the ways its foundations are contrary to a lot of the other wildly popular social networking applications. I really like the terseness (you can only enter 140 characters per message) and the IM interface; I love things that integrate with what I have running already instead of making me use YAFA (Yet Another Feckin Application.) I can see how it would be handy as a social notepad, and lends itself to building, for example, a sidebar blog within another kind of content. (Incidentally, has anyone coined the term sideblarg yet? Because if not, I so call it.)

I also like the openness of it; anyone can click a button to follow your Tweets, and you can likewise follow anyone you’re interested in. It’s very expansive; you can even browse people’s Following lists to pick up other folks you want to follow, too.

This is exactly what I was doing, in fact, when I browsed through to Anil Dash’s Twitter page and hit my wall of Twitter understanding.

1,780 followers? On Twitter? Seriously?

With all due deference to Anil Dash, a lively thinker who throws pearls before swine on a regular basis, it is simply unfathomable to me that 1,780 people care what he had for dinner last night. (It was oxtail soup, in case you were wondering. You read it here first 1,781st.)

Now, the man is a pretty high profile web celebrity with a lot of blogshphere credibility via his work at Six Apart, Movable Type and TypePad, so I can see why people are interested in what he’s saying, what he’s thinking about and what is catching his attention. But having to wade through the inanities of family dinners, canine conversations, concert replays and descriptions of random passing tourists to find out that Anil is thinking about maybe organising a NYC tech conference is a pretty high noise to signal ratio. And I’m somehow doubting that if one day, he magically unlocks the secret of life, the universe and everything and wants to share it with the rest of us, he’ll choose to do so using Twitter.

I mean, it’s not like the guy doesn’t have a quite popular blog.

I am not, by the way, in any way knocking what Anil Dash chooses to Tweet. He’s using Twitter in exactly the right way; the constrained input of Twitter practically begs for the minutia of anyone’s life. And of those 1,780 people following, there are presumably a number who are close enough to him to care about that level of detail in Anil’s life.

It’s the other 1,680 people I’m wondering about.

For anyone ever tasked with user interface and step-through design, this is an absolute gold mine. (For anyone else, I have no doubt it’s incredibly dull. Sorry about that.) It’s a categorised collection of UI screen captures, from logins and alert messages to 404s and permissions forms - all the stuff we routinely design all over again, with varying results.

It’s the Flickrwank* of Brian Christiansen, who explains this repository by way of an oft-repeated conversation in his office:

Hey, did you see the new Staples.com homepage?

Yeah, I did. I noticed that they created a top-level tab labeled ‘Ink & Toner’.

Interesting, huh?

Yeah.

And for anyone who has ever lead a client through the UI process, that’s all he needs to say. For anyone who hasn’t, it means that people buy a ton of ink and toner online; that Staples shifts a lot of it; and that search metrics and user testing showed visitors were struggling through tiers of categories and complex searches to find this core product before the re-design.

But you don’t care. All you care about is that you can find ink and toner really, really easily at Staples.

*Not pejorative.

I noticed an interesting screenshot in Bernie Goldbach’s Flickr stream from November 29th - Trend Micro’s new browser plugin, TrendSecure, flagging Boards.ie as Undesirable.

Intrigued, I went through the whole rigmarole of digging IE out, dusting it off, installing TrendSecure, and then turning off what little security IE offers in order to enable Trend’s security browser plugin.

Apparently, sometime in the last two weeks Boards.ie has been upgraded to Threat Level Elmo: Dangerous. According to Trend, we should all

avoid this page or use considerable caution when viewing it.

Priceless. If they consider Boards to be dangerous, fuck knows how they classify PROC…