Zentact Blog

When we first launched our private beta, we immediately got feedback from our users that they wanted a log of potential connection points. This ranged from:

When I am in a hurry, I don’t have time to reach out. Can you give me a list of the ones I missed.

to

I like the idea of Zentact, but I find it really distracting as I’m browsing the web. I’d like an option to turn off the browser popup and instead receive a full list of all the link suggestions either as a daily email or on my Zentact profile page. That way, I get all the value of staying in touch with old contacts, but I’m not interrupted as I’m doing other things on the web throughout the day. - Joe Lazarus via Get Satisfaction

Today, we launched Zentact Journal. With this features, we provide to you a list of places you could have made contact with your network but didn’t. We also enabled the ability to turn off those pesky alert boxes.

Want to give it a try, make sure you have the latest extension by downloading it from https://zentact.com/zentact.xpi Then use the web like you would normally for the next 24 hours. As you browse, Zentact will store missed connection opportunities.

Tomorrow, point your browser to http://zentact.com/journal On this page, you will see contacts which were matched to pages your browsed over the last 24 hours. On this page, you can:

• Click the page title link to see the page you could have sent to your network.
• Click to hide the site from future alerts and tracking
• Click Reach Out to email or tweet your contact.

If you decide you don’t want to see the alert in the future, and only use the digest, simply go to My Account, scroll to Preferences and choose “Never Show Alerts” as your Alert setting.

More features are on the way - stayed tuned.

John pushed another update yesterday.  In case you haven’t upgraded, you should by downloading the extension from zentact.com.     Much of the effort in this version is groundwork for our next site update so stayed tuned.  New features include:

• Page Titles are now Email Subjects - When sending an email, the page title will now be your email subject
• Basic Frequency Controls - Some basic frequency controls have been added to reduce unnecessary alerts to reach out
• Improved Handling of Large Contact Lists - A bug has been fixed with processing large contact lists

We are still working on the StumbleUpon bug.

Just in time for the weekend, we have added some new features to Zentact.

• Smaller Package with Same Power - A new and improved alert box with the same functionality in a smaller foot print.
• Gravatar Images - Gravatar images for your contacts are now displayed on alerts and Gmail. Upload your image to Gravatar. More photo features to come - stay tuned.

To update, just login and click the “Download the Extension” link.

For those of you who are addicted to your crackberry or any other phone/email device, we have justed added the ability to use email to update your Zentact account. To do this, just email add@zentact.com with the person’s email address, name and tags. We ignore the body text so feel to write whatever you want there.

Here’s the syntax:

user@email.com Full Name #tag1 #tag2 #tag3

Here’s an example with George Bush

george@whitehouse.gov George Bush #President #tea-totalers #gitmo

You can also update contacts this way. Next week, you could update George with “#ex-president and #Dallas”

Make sure you email from the email account you use with Zentact.

Why would you want to do this? Simple, it allows you to add or update people right after you connect.

Keep it fresh and enjoy!

John just pushed a new version our extension for your networking pleasure. It includes:

• Alert Tracking - We’re now tracking alerts. This will allow us to custom tailor your alert frequency and make using Zentact even more valuable in future releases.
• UI improved on LinkedIn and Yahoo! Mail
• “Reach Out!” added to alert box - Reach out to anyone about anything at any time. Add contacts and edit contact tags in Reach Out! to improve your Zentact experience.
• Right Click Menus - Use a PC, just right click and select Zentact to “Reach Out”.
• Improved Gmail integration - Fixed email matching quirk and single quote bug

Known Bugs in Version 0.6.8:

• Zentact Does Not Alert when Personal Email Editor is selected. To fix: change your My Account settings to use the Zentact email editor.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

I find Keith Ferrazzi’s blog a great resource. He recently posted a video about not being top of mind and as a result, losing a sale.

He also has great idea about Thanksgiving Day cards. Worth watching.

http://nevereatalone.typepad.com/

Crenk.com recently posted their review and a short interview we did with them.

The review - http://crenk.com/build-better-relationships-with-zentact/

And the interview - http://crenk.com/crenk-interviews-zentact/

Fred Wilson’s recent posts about correspondence and the letters between Adams and Jefferson is worth a read.   Fred makes a strong argument that the internet is returning us to the past in terms of literacy and intellectual discussions are becoming more mainstream.   http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/12/correspondence.html

Zentact can become a powerful tool in making your correspondence more literate and hopefully more meaningful.   By helping you build contextual knowledge around shared interests, you interactions can become more interesting with less filler and more meat!

Interested in knowing more about how common your tags are - take a look at our completely alpha tag feedback page:http://zentact.com/tag_feedback.

Make sure you take the results with a grain of salt. My 300 plus tags are mostly accurate but some are not because of my own unique browsing. For example, “Hearth Restaurant” (entered with “AND”) shows as “May Never Alert”. It alerted two weeks back on a New York Times article about barrel aged beer due to a mention of the bar manager.

Let us know what you think.

And if you are in New York, give Hearth a try. It is excellent!

Hotmail users, we’re happy to report that you can now import your Hotmail address book into Zentact. A solution has been implemented to fix the recent Hotmail protocol change by Microsoft.

Simply go to the Import Your Contacts screen, click on the Hotmail tab and follow the steps on the page.

Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and a good ol’ CSV Address Book upload exist on the Import Contacts screen making it easy to add your contacts from many sources.