I Want A Better Email Whitelisting Integration
Every time I register for a new online service I get a message:
Thank you for registering with example-service.com.
Please add registration@example-service.com to your whitelist page and make sure to check your bulk folder if you don’t receive the service activation email.
We have three potential problems here:
- Some people don’t know how to add an email address to a whitelist.
- One needs to copy-n-paste the email to be whitelisted, go to their email provider website, dig through the options to find the whitelisting screen and enter the email address.
- If the customer’s email service doesn’t place the spam mail in the bulk folder, but deletes it, the customer will never see the service activation email. In most cases that would mean that they won’t be able to activate their account, nor they will be able to re-register with the same email address. This is a dead-end. It exists because the whitelisting happens too late. The customer needs to whitelist the email address first and only then have example-service.com send the activation email.
Since a majority of email users use a handful of email providers, clearly this is an opportunity for someone to provide a new service that solves this problem.
This new web service routes people to the appropriate page within their webmail system to add a whitelist entry for, say, an e-commerce site they are doing business with.
A New Service To Update Address After House Moving
Many people move houses every few years or even more often. The problem is that when they move they need to remember to notify various organizations about their address change. It’s not easy to remember who needs to be notified. And sometimes it takes more than a single notification (as your requests happen to fall in the cracks). At times failing to update the address could cause losses and inconveniences.
Yes, one could pay the post office service to forward their address, but this is only a temporary solution and it doesn’t work for organizations that require you to keep your address updated not only for the mail purposes (e.g. health insurances, driver license, etc.).
I want a better domain transfer mechanism
Recently I have bought and sold a few websites and the experience of domain transfers was quite horrible.
First I acquired a site that was originally hosted by MelbourneIT, which is sold as yahoo hosting (i.e. Yahoo outsources the service to MelbourneIT). I did some research before starting the transfer, and learned that nether MelbourneIT nor Yahoo are helpful with the transfer and what one needs to do is just wait for the FOA (”Initial Authorization for Registrar Transfer”) request to expire and ICANN forcefully take over the domain and transferring it to the new registrar. In other words you need to get the authorization code for the domain name, and initiate the transfer and just wait for about a week.
I want a better legal case history search engine.
The American legal system is confusing enough to work your way through it. It would seem the least we can do is index and tag cases that have passed through the court system better so we can use them for reference. If you have something happen to you that you think is just not right, it should be just as easy as asking google to find relevant case results.
I want a better Airtravel Experience: Handling Delays
It’s not unusual that a flight gets delayed or canceled and one has to find an accommodation, while waiting for the next flight. Just recently flying home from Castlegar, BC, we had several flights canceled one after another due to weather conditions, and eventually we boarded a plane, just to be told “Sorry, this plane won’t fly today… but check with the check-in desk - we might flight tomorrow”… And so we had to find an accommodation for that night, after spending the whole day in the airport.
This particular airport is known for frequent flight delays and cancellations (locals even nicknamed their town: “Cancelegar”), yet no arrangements are made to accommodate delayed travelers, not even a free shuttle to a hotel. And of course there are no waiting facilities at the airport itself other than the usual hard benches.
Overnight storage or lockers weren’t there either…
And apparently this is a similar situation with many other airports around the world. You buy the ticket and you hope to make it to your destination, but if anything goes wrong on the airline side, you are on your own…
One things is not clear is whether this should be a responsibility of the airlines, or the municipalities on whose premises the airports are located. Or both…
I want a better FaceBook: communications
The way Facebook forces us to communicate with people just sucks. I either get an email from Facebook, telling me that I’ve a message and giving me a link to facebook’s site. Or I get an email with the actual message, but I can’t reply to it, because the From: address is set to garbage.
Obviously Facebook wants you to login and use their tools to communicate with people (and meanwhile sell you something). But I don’t want another set of tools - I already have my favorite mail program that I’m most familiar with.
At the moment I simply refuse replying to any messages coming that way and tell my friends to not message me via Facebook. Want my response - email me directly.
And that’s too bad. Facebook and other social networks could become a transparent layer connecting people and let end users choose their medium of communication, rather than forcing everybody to use their website.
At the moment I stay off Facebook, until they wake up and realize that they could do much better than they do now.
I wanna better way to interact with social network sites
It seems a bit lame to me to get an email that tells me I have email. (Those of you who subscribe to multiple social networks know what I mean.)
It would be good to have an uber social net like a gmail InBox where, with a single sign-on, I could get all of my social network stuff.
I want a better linkedin.com
Linkedin.com is a business social network, which I like because it’s not very noisy. I mainly use it as a great tool to maintain business contacts. The best part is that my contacts maintain their own records, saving my time. If someone changes their email address or job, I can easily find it the latest information with one click.
If you are on linkedin, you also know that some folks use it for marketing purposes and they have tens of thousands of contacts. These folks tend to send connection invitation to every email address they can put their hands on. And I don’t accept those invitations (my network includes only people that I’ve communicated with or met in person).
The problem is that I can’t decline those invitations in “bulk mode”, instead I have to go through each invitation and click several times before the invitation gets killed. I’ve contacted the support group a few times about this issue, but they don’t do anything about it.
Hopefully if enough people join my request, they will improve that part of the service.
Update: Jan 2008: Great news - linkedin.com just implemented that feature! Thanks to everybody who voted on the proposal!
I want a better Bike Seat
I recently started cycling a lot and my body likes most of the experience. However my toes go numb after cycling for just a bit longer than 20 minutes, the seat cuts of the blood flow.
I’ve now bought a new bike, that came with a better seat, which has an opening in its center, which is supposed to help prevent the blood circulation issues. Indeed I can cycle for longer periods of time without going numb, but not much longer. After maybe 40 minutes my toes go numb again.
So I did a research looking for a better bike seat, results of which I’ve summarized in this article: Safe Bike Seats For Men and Women. The main discovery for me was the fact that this issue may lead to an erectile dysfunction (impotence). It also affects women just as well as men (different problems though, read the article for details).
As I wrote in the article I bought a “Spongy Wonder” bike seat, which is made of two halves, and it does seem to solve the blood circulation cut-off problem of the cut off circulation. The problem is that it’s very uncomfortable. Because it doesn’t have a nose, it’s much harder to stabilize the bicycle and I’ve noticed that I now put too much strain on my arms, gripping the handle bars. So one problem has been replaced with another.
Did you experience a similar issue and found a possible solution that doesn’t introduce other problems?
I want a better search at Craigslist.com
I often use craigslist.com and it is a very useful service. It let’s me accomplish what I need, no ads and no usage charges.
The problem is its search feature. Ideally when I search to rent a place I want to narrow down the search results not only by $$-range and number of bedrooms, but most importantly “the location“. And the latter need of mine is not being satisfied.
For example if I’m looking for a place in Downtown area, I can’t just search for “downtown”, because some posters didn’t specify the location as “downtown” or they did, but misspelled it.
Because I don’t want to miss potential deals, I end up not trying to narrow the search results by location, and instead wade through lists of irrelevant posts, sometimes missing critical posts because of that.
This problem is non-specific to apartment search, but applies to all other otherwise great features of craigslist.com.
Here is how I see this problem can be fixed:
When users submit a post, in addition or instead of the free form “Location” input field add a pull-down list of suggested neighborhoods. and then allow others to narrow the search down based on one or more selections in the neighborhood list.
Once this post gains enough votes I’ll forward this entry to the craigslist management, if they won’t beat me to it.
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