Zentact Blog

When I first found Zentact, it took me no time at all to realize how I was going to use this tool. I’ve played fantasy sports for the better part of a dozen years and it is always a challenge to keep track of which players are on which fantasy team. For example, in my ten owner National League only league, each owner has a roster of 40 players. That is 400 players on teams to keep track of — on top of trying to know which free agents I can add to my team. Compounding this problem is the fact that I’m not in only one of these leagues. It becomes an exponential problem pretty quickly.

Zentact saves me many mental cycles and much cross referencing between multiple sites. I’ve added a contact in Zentact for each of the owners in my league. For each owner contact, I’ve tagged them with all the players on their fantasy team. Now when I read an article that talks about baseball players, Zentact tells me which person in my fantasy team owns the players in the article. I don’t need to pop open a new tab and search by player name at the league page to mine that information anymore. Zentact does the player-to-fantasy team matching grunt work for me!

Fantasy sports have an aspect of information secrecy to them. I haven’t found myself reaching out to the owners I compete with to tell them how great their players are… just in case I want to trade for that player later. I do reach out to my co-owner very regularly, so that we are on the same page about what players to try to acquire. Once baseball season is full swing, I anticipate reaching out regularly to opposing team owners too to shoot them information about my players — seeding ideas in case about how awesome my players are.. just in case I’d like to trade them later.

Thank you Zentact team for creating this tool and sharing it with the world! I hope by season’s end I can also be thanking you for your help in winning me another fantasy baseball championship.

- Timothy Dady Jr. h

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.

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.

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!

With New Year’s Eve parties rapidly approaching on Wednesday night, some of us will be facing an evening of both great conversations and boring small talk. Lifehacker’s has a great post on 10 hacks, http://lifehacker.com/399895/top-10-conversation-hacks, to help you with any conversation. I plan on testing #8 myself:

8. Ask sensitive questions indirectly to skip awkwardness.

When the info you need from someone is somewhat sensitive, check out journalist advice site MBToolbox’s suggestions for asking delicate questions indirectly. Use the bluff (”the breakup must’ve been hard, huh?”) or blame others (”so has anyone asked about your prison time?”) or the indirect inquiry (”what year did you get divorced?”) to broach sensitive topics with tight-lipped folks with more ease and less awkward silence.

Zentact can also help with conversations by providing context around shared interests and even names.   In my case, it helps me remember what is interesting to my friends.    With this knowledge, it is much easier for me to start a conversation and participate in a meaningful way.   Whether a ’simple congratulations for the TechCrunch’ mention or a ‘did you see this article’, I have meaningful things to say.

I got a Zentact today from a long lost colleague. I had no idea what he was up to so I looked him up on LinkedIn. I still don’t know what he is up to which made me think about using Zentact and your public profile.

If you are connecting with people you haven’t talked to in a while, you should make sure your public profiles are up to date.   Almost two years ago, Guy Kawasaki wrote a great post about what you should do on LinkedIn - http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/linkedin_profil.html Lots of great suggestions!

On Saturday, the New York Times published the following headline:

You May Not Like It, but Learn to Network

The Career Couch column by Phyllis Korkki is a great read - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/jobs/21career.html

Lots of tips and suggestions of what you should be doing including:

• Reciprocity is intrinsic to the process - you have to give to get
• Mutual interests are a great way to stay in touch and build relationships
• Face to face counts

While Zentact can’t help you with face to face meetings, it can help you with the rest.

We previously posted on the ability to add contacts via a Twitter DM. Scott Rafer called out that we didn’t use the originally discussed syntax and method. He’s referring to adding contacts via a public tweet to @zentact.

While we didn’t follow the “exact” syntax, we’re happy to announce that adding contacts via a public twitter message is live.

Here’s the Twitter syntax:

With a full name

@zentact @johnsampson John Sampson #Zentact #networking #San Francisco

Without a full name

@zentact @johnsampson #Zentact #networking #San Francisco

That’s all there is to it to add contacts to Zentact remotely. Becoming better at networking requires both online and offline interaction, this will help keep those interactions in sync. Use it at your next meeting, dinner, conference or whenever you’re away from your computer.

Quick Tips: Be sure you’ve added your Twitter account to your Zentact profile (enter it on the “My Account” link). Also, if you leave the full name out, the user will be classified under the “Unknown Last Name” section when managing contacts.

Why both public and direct message?

Consider using Direct Messages to add contacts when you’d rather not share tag information about one of your contacts with the world — keeping things more private. Otherwise, tweet away publicly - others will love to see how you’re using Zentact with your contacts.

How did we do it (technically)?

To extract your twitter contact adds, we’ve tapped into the Twitter publisher feed offered via the Gnip Consumer API. We parse all tweets sent to @zentact looking for the syntax listed above, and bang - your contacts are added to Zentact.

Thank you Scott!

Zentact lets you add contacts via Twitter. In order to use this, you must have a twitter account on file with us so let’s start there:

1. Log into Zentact
2. Click ‘My Account’
3. Enter your Zentact password into the ‘Password’ text box at the top of the page.
4. Scroll to the bottom half of the page, enter your Twitter name and password into the ‘Twitter Name’, ‘Account Password’ and ‘Re-type Password’ text boxes. (It has to be your user name, not the email address associated with the account.)
5. Click ‘Update’. You will see a message confirming your update.
6. Log into Twitter.
7. Browse to http://twitter.com/zentact.
8. Choose ‘follow’.
9. You will direct message Zentact to add someone. Use the format d zentact @twittername first_name last_name #tag #tag2 tag2 #tag3. E.G. to add me at A Donkey and Goat Winery with the tags syrah, Rhone wines and roussanne, you would tweet d zentact @donkeyandgoat Jared Brandt #syrah #Rhone wines #roussanne

A great guide for those of us who are not savy with Twitter can be found on the Wall Street Journal’sAll Things Digital website under “Birds of a Feather Twitter Together“.