FC Software Blog

First up considering its a beta damn its stable.

I’ve not been able to find any problems with it yet even attempting to break it.  If it wasn’t for the invite only status I’d have thought this was a full blown 1.0 release.

There are however a few short comings in the client little things that could be improved or features added that aren’t currently added.

Firstly the buttons along the top its navigation effectively is lovely IF you’re using a BB with some kind of scroll wheel on the storm/storm2 they’re horribly small and if – like me – you have large fingers almost impossible to press accurately.

My suggestion for fixing this is left right motion switching.  Just like in BBM running your finger left or right across the screen cycles through the various chats. Can we not have the same for the twitter client?

Last I heard twitter were adding in Location support for tweets and users (http://blog.twitter.com/2009/08/location-location-location.html).  Now I don’t know if this came to pass but if it did then its certainly not supported by the BB client.

I don’t really have a solution to this however Ubertwitter resolves it in an interesting way.  They update the Location field with coordinates and then if you want to look at all users within say a 5 mile radius of yourself then you can do.  Its an interesting feature I’d like to see implemented – especially amusing on drunken nights out to find others making a fool of themselves – perhaps it could also be expanded to define some kind of BB user flag in there so you can perhaps say “show me all BB users within 5miles of me” leading perhaps to impromptu meets of fellow geeks/nerds and many gallons of ale….. Just a thought.

Multiple acount support is none-existant.

I have 2 accounts one for work and one for personal usage I’d like to be able to update them both while I’m out and about without having to log out log in and resync to each account manually.  Perhaps register multiple accounts and have a simple overview screen showing account name, number of new tweets, date of last tweet, number of @’s or DM’s.

Then simply clicking on that accounts icon takes you into what is currently the main page of the app.

Aside from those few things though RIM have done a superb job of the client and I think once its in final release I’ll be switching to using it full time instead of UT.

I thought I’d briefly list some of the features I’m planning for our email marketing suite this is by no means a definitive list however covers the major aspects of the system.  There’s no particular order to any of them its just as I initially wrote them down and thought of them.

• Bulk import of contacts email address/firstname/surname
• Single addition of contacts
• Multiple campaign management each campaign handling its own set of leads from the central pool
• Scheduled sending
• Create store and edit email templates & attachments to be used repeatedly within campaigns.
• Email image storage and distribution for using images embedded within emails without users having to rely on having their own web server for image hosting.
• Creation of tracking links for click through tracking etc.
• Tracking and reporting on a per campaign basis on mails sent, mails bounced, mails delivered, mails opened and links clicked through.
• Potential to tie into the FC CRM systems for both email lists and action tracking ie: receiver clicks a link goes to link website but is then  transparently also added to your companies FC CRM and assigned as a new lead with notes detailing what actions they took from email and which campaign they were a part of.
• Timed resends ie: schedule a newsletter to go out once a month all you have to do is edit the newsletter content template each time.
• Pre-send spam checking and weighting – before you waste your send have your email content checked for likely hood of being caught by spam filters.
• Pay as you go system. You have your system and contacts for life and you only pay when you actually send an email.

Now there’s a few other smaller things that go with the above but there’s also a few potential other features I’m thinking about putting into this outside of the initial remit of “email marketing”.

SMS Marketing – Ability to schedule and send bulk SMS’s just as you do with the emails above but instead with text messages.

Twitter Marketing – I’ve been playing with the twitter API and as part of this suite I’ve also considered building in a twitter manager. Handles multiple accounts, schedule timed broadcasts to accounts, pre-set templates the whole lot.  I’m thinking this is perhaps a phase 3 system but its something that I’m keeping in the back of my mind as a value added service if you like.

Think thats about it I’m sure more idea’s will come to me over time or if you have any suggestions all are welcome.