Hallways receive my vote for the best part of a conference (especially those with big leather couches). I’ve been to large conferences with 15,000  in swarming masses and to small conferences with only 12 attendees and in both cases (and all in between) I’ve benefitted the most from the conversations in the hallway. Some of those are random conversations that I’ve struck up with the person sitting beside me and others are more strategic accidentally running into a speaker  (after stalking them from the speaker’s lounge).

When I started put all those together as digital, the numbers behind it all started to matter- analytics. When I looked across the board in communications I saw the numbers outside of the web- TV, print, direct mail.

Now, I see all those things as communicating with technology. Everything falls into communicating with digital. Convergence.

If you’ve been on Facebook the day a change is made you’ve certainly seen it in your news feed.  Today, for example, Facebook changed up the contents of the primary feed, made the photos larger and added a widget to the right sidebar about what your friends are doing. If your friends feed is like mine, then it is full of all manner of whining about how people want facebook to switch back and hints on how to find the old interface. On the otherhand, I like it. It’s an improvement. I think it makes facebook more useful for me while removing steps I took in their old interface to see what I wanted to see.

If you’ve ever redesigned a web site, you’ve heard about how much people hate change. My favorite redesign story about how people hate change was when I worked at The Commercial Appeal a decade ago and we launched their new design in January 2000. The design eliminated frames from a Pagemill design and started to implement CSS– we designed the whole thing in Dreamweaver. It wasn’t a great design, but a huge step forward. Faithful readers of The Commercial Appeal’s web site reacted like we had dug up Elvis and moved him to a hidden grave.

One particular set of emails from a retired lady who had moved to Chattanooga stood out from the rest. The day after the redesign she reamed us for moving things around and messing up her daily return to Memphis via the Internet. Her email was pretty similar to the other 1000 or so emails we received about the redesign. What was unique about this lady from Chattanooga was the 2nd email we received from her two weeks later. She emailed to apologize for her first email and to let us know she actually liked the new design and now everything she wanted was easier to find.

So, the moral of the story is Users Hate Change, but eventually with a good well-tested design, they will come around and use the site.  I promise you all those people swearing at Facebook today will have forgotten about it in a weeks time.

For me, I like change– for better or worse. Innovation and improvement are hard. If you are unwilling to change you’ll never know if that next step is two steps forward or a step backward.

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Jakob Nielsen has a great related post on how users are resistant to change: Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign

We’re debuting our online campus at Fellowship Bible Church Sunday morning at 11 a.m. I’ve been working on the launch team on this since around September and will be one of the rotating hosts for the service.

Besides the video stream of the service there is also a chat feature to allow discussion of the message, a place to notes on the screen and the bible passage for the sermon.

If you’re not in church on Sunday mornings at 11 (central), you should stop in, check it out and say hi. I’ll be there.

Curious as to what their site looked like, I checked it out and wow. It was still my site design, 10 years later. I showed one of my colleagues the site and he said it had “stood the test of time” and didn’t look that out of date (for a 10 year old design).  I think this was one of the first sites I wrote a little vbscript and created a database for a school comparison tool. Of course, we started picking it apart… left aligned, tables, too many images, background image, etc.

After several attempts on my own to solve the problem (changing my password), I finally google my issue and find a twitter support site that says twitter knows about the issue, but hasn’t solved the problem and asks anyone to experience the problem to leave a comment with their username and any specific details. So, I leave my username with the other 40 pages of comments.

That was two days ago I reported my issue. My twitter account still doesn’t work. Now their are 95 pages of comments on the twitter support page. This is the first time I’ve had extended issues with twitter since I signed on in March 2007. Since I’ve lost touch with all of my twitter pals, I’ve discovered there is absolutely no one left on myspace, but still a lot of people on Facebook. I guess I can live without twitter (if forced) and without twitter I actually found something to blog about for the first time in over two months.

UPDATE: Within 15 minutes of publishing this post twitter started working correctly again. I’m sure it’s not related.

From Andy Stanley at Catalyst discussing how to create a healthy work culture.

Surprisingly, I didn’t have to hold for an operator at all, but the operator I got had me on hold several times as she tried to figure out my phone’s problem. After trying several different network changes on the AT&T side and several changes on my phone over the course of an hour, the support tech finally gave up and suggested I needed to reinstall the Surprisingly, I didn’t have to hold for an operator at all, but the operator I got had me on hold several times as she tried to figure out my phone’s problem. After trying several different network changes on the AT&T side and several changes on my phone over the course of an hour, the support tech finally gave up and suggested I needed to reinstall the iPhone OS and offered to connect me with an Apple support tech to help me out. I declined the Apple help and told her I could handle the reinstall myself. Before I hung up on her I she made an appointment to call me back the next morning to see if my voicemail was working correctly.

After I got off the phone, I turned to my trusty support database, google, and queried, “visual voicemail broken iphone” and on the second page, two minutes into my search, I found my solution– reset the network settings under Settings > General > Reset Network Settings. My phone restarted and I immediately got two visual voicemails– Problem fixed!

I thought I already knew this lesson, but I guess I learned it again– Google your problem before calling for support and more than likely you’ll find the answer your need. Now, I get to to explain to the AT&T tech how easy it was to solve the problem.