if(is_geek)... » MyFrontSteps

Another New Spokesmonster Video

Jeffery Read — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 04:22:15 +0000

No one seems quite sure which episode this is, but here it is:

Excellent work Michael and Nicole!! I think it could have used a little more of Dave’s vocal stylings though

Monitor and Manage Your Rep With StepRep

Jeffery Read — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 04:01:37 +0000

I work with an amazing group of people. The project I am working on is called MyFrontSteps which is a social media application for getting and sharing Trusted Referrals to service providers in your area. We’re working on some pretty challenging stuff and, even though we are progressing rapidly, we are not quite to the point where we have anything public-beta worthy. Our colleagues at the far end of the building, the StepRep team, have reached their public beta and it is really impressive!

Whereas the side of the project I work on is focused on dealing with home owners, StepRep is a tool for Online Reputation Management, primarily targeted at the service providers that our system will help you recommend to your friends. Of course, it isn’t just people in the home improvement or real estate industries that have online reputations they need to manage. In fact, software developers and hardcore geeks have online reputations! I have an online reputation! That’s why I signed up for the beta at http://steprep.myfrontsteps.com. I know that I am a little biased by the fact that I work with the people that developed all of this, but I am very impressed with what they have done. From a technical standpoint there is a lot going on that even I find overwhelming and a little “magical”.

My Personal StepRep Widget

Jeffery Read

The main purpose of StepRep is to allow you to see what people are saying about you and your business on the Internet. This includes anywhere and everywhere that someone might be talking about you. StepRep presents you with this information and allows you to categorize the items as good or bad. The good ones are things that you can use to convince new people that you are the right choice for the work they need done. You can even place these items into a widget that can be slapped on your company website, your personal blog – anywhere you want to trumpet your achievements and build your reputation. As for the items you think reflect poorly on you, well, obviously you wouldn’t want to put them in your widget, but you can see where past customers might not have been completely satisfied and do something to change their mind. Flip them to a positive and then slap them in your widget for all to see.

I won’t even try to discuss anything about how StepRep does what it does so well. Honestly, this is because I don’t understand a lot of it. The team working on it are very smart and very skilled at what they do. Starting with the next development sprint my team is going to be working closely with that team as we bring the two systems together to help service providers reach a wider audience through the friends of their customers and to help home owners find the best service providers through people they trust. It’s going to be very exciting and I am hoping that I’ll be able to learn a few things about how StepRep works.

One last thing I want to mention is how much I love the design work that was done for the StepRep site. I got to see some preliminary designs for the MyFrontSteps site today as well and they blew me away. Marie-Louise has really done an awesome job. This is something I really love about working at VendAsta. I work with people who are very skilled at designing for the web and for maximum usability. The wireframing, mockups and designs that I have seen done in my short time there have amazed me. I came to VendAsta from a company that had plenty of graphic designers in the Marketing department. They were all firmly rooted in the world of print advertising. There were some definite growing pains going on as they started to embrace the new world of web design. Now I am working with people who understand the web and the best practices for developing rich, engaging applications for the web. It’s freaking awesome!

Facebook Delivers a Painful End to the MFS Sprint 1

Jeffery Read — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 04:02:50 +0000

The MyFrontSteps team at VendAsta is wrapping up our first sprint right now. The final three days are devoted to testing and bug-fixing our Facebook application, Homebook. As the Scrum Master for the team, this means that I get to triage the bugs as they come in, schedule the meetings required to close out the sprint and schedule the planning meetings for the next sprint. This is all in addition to working on fixing my own share of the bugs. While this might sound like a lot to have going on at once, and I’ll admit it has been a hectic couple of days, I am really not finding it all that bad. Compared to what I had been dealing with prior to VendAsta, namely fighting tooth and nail to get anyone to test anything so it could be released, this is a dream. A certain amount of stress and craziness is completely easy to handle when it is accompanied by actual productivity and real results.

This morning, however, was nearly intolerable for the whole team. Here we are struggling to get our application tested thoroughly and polished up for the end of sprint when Facebook starts pulling all kinds of crazy shit on us. Random logouts. Messages about account maintenance. Warnings about trying to set FBML for inactive accounts. We ended up with a decent number of new bugs filed that weren’t bugs at all. It was just Facebook having a seizure! Of course, once we figured out that there were some issues on the Facebook side of things we relaxed a bit. Still, it made for a rather exhausting day!

Owing to this exhaustion, Episode 3 of Roger’s Wars will not be hitting the ether this evening. It’ll be here soon enough, though!

Spokesmonster III: Connecting To Your Customers (And Their Friends)…with StepRep.

Jeffery Read — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 04:36:30 +0000

The third Spokesmonster video has been posted to YouTube! With an ever-expanding cast of characters, the saga of the often misunderstood Spokesmonster and his quest to enhance his reputation continues! More excellent work from Michael and his team of talented voice actors: Dave, Nicole and Rachel! Check it out!