Today is mother’s day and we gave my mom-in-law gift cards – and, as usual, she was thrilled! She has a very interesting gift-giving policy, which it has taken me about three years to finally begin to appreciate. Today I saw the light.

For every holiday, my mom-in-law tells all of us exactly what she wants as a gift. Not just an idea or a suggestion; no, she is expecting to get exactly the gift she has asked for no more, no less. If she doesn’t get it, she isn’t even that nice about it, and I’ve come to realize that this policy has existed in my husband’s family for a long time and is seen as a rule. At first, I disliked it because I felt like it took everything that was personal and heartfelt out of selecting and giving gifts, not to mention fun. I mean, how many different ways are there to dress up an envelope containing a few pieces of symbolic plastic? Now, as I begin to accumulate well-intended clutter, I am beginning to see things from the other side more clearly.

Take Easter for example, where people often give cute bunny rabbit stuffed animals. Easter comes every year, without fail, and if someone gives me a stuffed bunny every year and I’m on of those insane people who feels like they can’t throw anything away (read: my mom-in-law) then I am going to end up storing a lot of bunnies in my guest bedroom closet.

We’ve come into a culture of choice – where people like me can afford to buy their own luxury items and would prefer to do so. The best gifts I can think of are ones that are perishable like flowers, chocolates, food, and drink. Another great gift is experiences (movie/concert tickets, bed and breakfast gift certificates). These are the things that I don’t tend to splurge on as much as I should with my hectic schedule.

So what does this mean? Why have we changed so much?

This morning was like Christmas morning. I went to bed last night, but plenty of other people around the office were up all night working on the final touches of the latest and greatest version of Whrrl. I’ve settled in at my desk this morning and played with the new features, and I am so excited to tell all my friends to come on back and check it out all over again.

Don’t miss these new details:

Quick and easy ways to indicate you have been to a place/event, or want to go. If someone says “I want to go to Red Door” and you view this note in your feed, you can indicate you also want to go in two clicks. From place detail pages, it is just one click.

7 new metro areas covered in that drop down menu on your profile page: Miami, Kansas City, Portland, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Columbus, and Denver

Tons of event data – movies, concerts, and more – as was mentioned in a press release earlier this week. I’m going to try and check out an event at the Seattle Public Library this afternoon for a little while, and maybe also go to a tasting at the Seattle Art Museum. I used to have to get the newspaper and go through it for worthwhile events, this is SO much better.

Disclaimer: I work for Pelago, the makers of Whrrl, so I am pretty proudly biased. Also, any opinions expressed in this blog are mine only and are not necessarily endorsed by Pelago. Check out the official Pelago blog

This was going to be a meta-post about my own blog, and why I am so bad at keeping it up to date. Last night we cooked dinner with some friends and I made a comment that anyone who wanted their blog to be significant to the blogosphere had better be posting a least once a day, if not multiple times a day. I made this comment without a lot of thought, but then came to thinking “is that really true?”

What do we expect from the blogs we follow on a daily basis. For that matter, what is our expectation on status updates (micro-blogging) via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc?

On Whrrl, the product of the company I work for, I tend to update my status multiple times a day (often whenever I check in at a new location). This makes sense to me – I want to contextualize the other piece of information I am sharing about where I am. For example, if I check in at the office I am likely to update my status to “Danielle is whrrking” or if I check in at Purple Wine Bar I’m likely to say something like “Danielle is tipping back a great glass of claret”. On Facebook, I update my status a couple of times each week on average. Although I check my Facebook profile for messages and updates nearly daily I don’t remember to update my status unless I see someone else post an interesting status. Rarely do I go to Facebook explicitly to update my status – in fact I would say I never do.

Twitter is somewhere I text/go explicitly to update my status and answer the question “what are you doing right now?” because that is the point of the service (although people are using it for micro-blogging and posting links and whatnot now). It isn’t hard to post an update to Twitter, sending a text to the shortcode is probably the easiest text command I use on my low-tech phone. Offer my “tweets” will come in sporadic bursts, maybe 6 in a day and then radio silence for the rest of the week. I don’t feel much of a need to space them out though – I feel like it is expected that I will lifestream on Twitter in a way I don’t do on Facebook or Whrrl.

This all culminates into the obnoxious noise that is my FriendFeed, loaded with so much crap even I don’t want to read it. Who wants to see the long list of articles I’ve shared, changes I’ve made to profiles, status updates in multiple locations (which become annoying duplicate/cross posts when viewed in FriendFeed). It is just overload – and then on top of monitoring FriendFeed (which I’m not doing regularly, btw) I have email, GoogleReader, and stupid voicemail (for those people still stuck in the stone age, like my parents).

The thing is, sometimes I will have moments of “oh man, I should just disconnect all of this” but it isn’t just an “online-life” anymore – it is my connection to people in the real world. Disconnecting online really does hinder my ability to keep in touch with my real world friends. Sounds like they have me hooked. I think this bodes well for Whrrl, but I’ve still got to figure out to manage all this information in my life. I can’t wait for 5 years from now, with all the technology being developed around solving this problem.

If you actually update your status on LinkedIn I’d be interested to hear about what kind of things you write there. So far, I’ve been a bit baffled about how to use that feature in that context.

Today Google announced that they are giving the KML file format, originally developed by startup Keyhole who Google acquired, for geophysical data (maps) to the Open Geospatial Consortium.

I am curious to hear how different businesses intend to take advantage of this open standard – it seems like there must be a business opportunity here for services *other than Google maps* to do great things for consumers with user-generated mapping, especially now that the format will be so much more portable from one place to another. For example, a user of Gmaps could create a map there and then upload it somewhere else. Combine this with services that track where you are via GPS and there becomes an event more compelling story for what users might want to do with their location data as a timeline for their lives.

What would you do with the new KML standard if you could start a business today?

When I worked at Expeditors the arch-nemesis was UPS. Of course, the koolaid we all drank was that all our competitors were inferior, but at some point after the honeymoon period wore off I began to actually examine that claim. Of course, I quickly found the various “I hate UPS” website disgruntled employees and customers alike had created online (and didn’t find any equivalent for Expeditors), but I kept seeing ads in business periodicals suggesting UPS is solving some of the problems nearest and dearest to customers’ interests.

I picked up the April 21, 2008 edition of Forbes tonight, and on pages 14 and 15 there is a great ad. It shows a to do box piled with paper (drawn in the brown UPS white board pen of course) with a steaming cup of coffee next to it. Then it has a little post it note in the upper right hand corner (page 15) that says:

International shipping means lots of commercial invoices – in triplicate. But that paperwork could disappear when you sign up to use UPS Paperless Invoice, the industry’s first electronic commercial invoice. It’s just another way UPS simplifies international shipping.

Below that is a laptop with a steaming cup of coffee.

Even though I no longer work at Expeditors, I still have deep respect for the things they do for customers and I can’t help but wonder what they have up their sleeve to respond to solutions like this one? So much of transportation today has less to do with moving physical freight efficiently from point a to point b (a lot of companies do that, and a handful do it really well) – and much more to do with efficiently moving the documentation of that freight. I wonder if there is an opportunity for a third party software-as-a-service business to step in and offer solutions to shippers that will help them streamline the amount of paper in the international shipping process and integrate with the big transportation services companies out there.

Today I’ve been catching up with various “toys”:

RescueTime – added their data collector to another machine, so now I won’t have big gaps on the days where I work from home.

Time Machiner – sent various emails to myself in the future, and also to my husband for his birthday coming up. Haven’t sent one 5 years in the future yet, but I probably will soon.

Mint – finally sat down to take a long hard look at this product, to decide if it might be how I want to manage our household finances going forward. The idea that it is always in sync (unlike Microsoft Money) is very compelling. So far, because we are Bank of American customers in Washington State (where they merged with Seafirst but never really merged their systems) this has sucked for me so far. This isn’t Mint’s fault, of course, but highlights how hard it is to create a quick set up experience.

This has been an interesting weekend with a very strange rhythm. For example, last night I just didn’t go to bed at all – I crawled into bed at 9am this morning when Kevin’s alarm was going off to tell him we needed to go meet a friend for brunch. This isn’t because of caffeine, or even because of insanely interesting content in GoogleReader – I was reading a few books I’m working through, and then researching more about potential dog breeds that might work for us, but I wasn’t building the stuff I said I might this weekend (and still haven’t touched that). Today I was thinking I would just check RescueTime to see exactly where all that time went, but then I realized I haven’t set it up for this machine yet (doh!). Oh well, it was fun – I felt like I was pulling one of those high school “all nighters” but without the sense of urgency.

Kev and I have combined our offices into the bonus room so that we can get some exercise equipment and put it in the extra room off the master (where I used to work), which is nice since that way whether we’re staying at the house or the condo we’ll always have access to workout equipment. I love moving my desk and everything, it forces me to process and purge all the ad hoc ideas, sketches, notes, and random items that pile up on paper. Paper is the devil, and yet I can’t ever seem to get enough notebooks with just the right texture of paper or pens with just the right width of the line. I’m trying out OneNote, where I can condense a lot of the career development, reading recommendations, tons of business ideas at various levels of development, reflections on the past, and more into one place. We’ll see how that goes, I am still not convinced this will be the best tool for me. If I can hook it up with Jott then it might be better.

I’m also making a second pass through Getting Things Done by David Allen to see what else I can do to better streamline the workflow of the work and non-work information inflow that feels more like a deluge at times. I think aggregation of my email would be nice, in a different format than just mutliple inboxes in Outlook. I’m using Xobni, but so far I haven’t found that it solves this problem for me. In fact, I don’t feel like I’m getting the same experience as all those people who hyped it – I’ve minimized it. I already know I email my boss the most at work and my husband the most on my personal account, and that I need to email my long distance friends, colleagues, and casual acquaintances more regularly – but it doesn’t actually get me to the point where there is no barrier to just taking action.

The search for great tools for personal organization and time management continue.

I just was getting caught up with my other beloved new toy, Google Reader, and found out that RescueTime was part of Y Combinator day this week is funded by Y Combinator. For some reason, I had the impression RescueTime was much further along as a company – considering their product ROCKS MY WORLD and looks so polished. These guys are doing something for personal productivity and time management that is going to make a lot of us more aware of how much time we “waste” and how much value we are getting out of it. Frankly, I was actually proud to see how much work I was doing once I looked at this, it was like getting a pat on the back. I was also surprised to see that my Google Reader noshing isn’t eating up nearly as much as I had feared.

I’m a pretty picky user, I send feedback and all that, and I have had such a great experience from beginning to end using RescueTime that I have been telling everyone I can about it. From a time management perspective it is amazing, I can tag the applications I use and sites I visit with things like “work”, “email”, “news”, “social” and then I can also tell it how productive (or non-productive) each tag is.

I love graphs and charts and am a data head, so this has been love love LOVE (!!) at first sight. I can’t say enough about it, and I am sure it will only get more amazing as they continue to develop it. Even if it didn’t change a bit I think I would use it for a long time, I’ve never had a tool like this before!

They are in Seattle, just 3 owner/operators.

RescueTime Website: http://www.rescuetime.com/
RescueTime Blog: http://blog.rescuetime.com/