IMAP and misc..
Blogging has been light of late, mainly due to being immersed in writing our own min-CRM tool for Tax123.ie (why write your own CRM in this day and age I hear you ask? For very good reasons, mainly to do with achieving 100% integration with our internal processes (and also a significant long term cost reduction) - I’ll blog about this some more at some point in the future. Anyhow, a core feature of our mini-CRM is complete integration with our email (hosted by Google Apps, which I have nothing but praise for also), so that any emails to customers can be kept in sync regardless of where they’re sent from (i.e. GMail or our mini-CRM).
Thankfully timing wise, Google Mail added IMAP support back in October. Also thankfully, IMAP does exactly what it says on the tin - I love it with API’s just work! (Although there were a few hairy bits ensuring that everything is UTF-8, the Polish charset is ISO-8859-2 and was causing a few problems before I got the encoding right). So, we’re away on a hack with our mini-CRM, roll on tax processing nirvana!
Also, just read the Ecomonists interesting take on social networks and the AOL/Bebo acquisition - some good points in there, but to me however, it is a business - its all about the brand! I’m not saying it’s justifies a $850 million price tag, but Bebo is a household brand name (in Ireland and the UK anyhow) and it very much keeps AOL in the game. Coupled with AOL’s other less news worthy acquisitions and that somebody, somewhere, in AOL has a plan - good luck to them, it will be interesting to watch!