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I got an email today announcing the second round of Turn It Up grants from the Salesforce.com foundation.

These exciting new grants will provide three nonprofit organizations with the financial resources they need to amplify their use of the salesforce.com application and improve the efficacy of their organizations. Additionally, these organizations will share their developments with the larger nonprofit community.

Three grants of up to $10,000 USD each will be awarded to three nonprofits with an existing license donation from the Salesforce Foundation

Some things I’d love to see done with a Turn It Up Grant:

• Building support for multi-payment pledges
• Build a way to display Campaigns on a website as an event calendar
• Dig into some activism processes–how to model brining constituents to action in Salesforce.com

Come up with a good idea and apply!

I started playing with Prefuse a couple weeks ago. It’s an open source java toolkit for visualizing data. Really cool stuff–man there are some smart people out there… f you look at the examples on the site, you’ll see that this toolkit can do an amazing number of different types of visualizations, including social networks, and geography-based stuff.

In Salesforce.com I have a custom object that records relationships between two people. We’re using it to build social network info about our constitutents. The data is good, but navigating it is hard–enter Prefuse. Here’s a simple social network visualized by Prefuse using data directly from Salesforce–it runs off a trivial XML file schema.

In real life it’s a java app or applet that is dragable, auto-centers, and is searchable. My test is just a proof of concept, but I got it working in just a couple hours–surprisingly low entry barrier. The next things I see on the wish list:

• Automate the gathering of data (PHP or some other toolkit to generate XML file)
• Crawl all the relationship types (Contact-to-Account, Account-to-Account, Contact-to-Contact, Contact-to-Other Account, Contact-to-Household)
• Display relationship metadata on the links (“employment”, “spouse”, “board member”, etc.)
• Turn it into a web app so it can be updated from in Salesforce (using a java applet I guess…I wish I were a java programmer)
• Provide links back to sf.com web interface, or display a summary of sf.com info in a sidebar
• Figure out what prefuse visual display options we have and improve the look and usability
• Set it up to be usable with a minimal amount of setup for any Salesforce.com instance

I don’t expect to have tons of time to play with this, but if you’re interested in it, drop me a line.

I was talking to Tucker MacLean of the Salesforce.com foundation today demoing some Opportunity S-Controls I wrote. As I launched one from a hyperlink field, it opened in a new Firefox tab in my current window. Tucker did a double take. Turns out one of the big things people complain to Tucker about is that hyperlink formulas in Salesforce.com spawn new browser windows. Problem solved for Firefox users.

Then Tucker dug into his Firefox settings and found that not only can you can capture new window spawns in a new tab, but you can choose to have them replace your current tab/window. Salesforce.com hyperlinks can now behave exactly like all the other links in Salesforce.com. Imagine that.

To implement this, open Firefox 1.5 (get it if you don’t have it) and go to the Tools menu and choose Options. Click on the Tabs icon and you’ll see a window like this.

Set it up as shown in this screen shot and you’ll be lovin’ those hyperlinks. And remember, friends don’t let friends use IE…except for mail merge.

I’ve been working on some integrations between Salesforce.com and email marketing services, so I was really interested when Andrew forwared on Jakob Nielsen’s article revisiting email newsletter usability. He makes some interesting points, especially around how people just don’t read the things you’d think they would:

People were highly inclined to skip the introductory blah-blah text in newsletters. Although this text was only three lines long on average, our eyetracking recordings revealed that 67% of users had zero fixations within newsletter introductions.

The eye tracking stuff is really cool, too. Note that nobody’s looking at the graphic boxes on the lower right. They look to me like ads, don’t they? They’re not, but people seem to be conditioned to ignore that space. Fun stuff.

My family drives a Volkswagen Jetta. It’s got a really sweet deisel engine that we fuel with biodiesel bought at a public pump. Sit down, this next comment may shock you:

It is cheaper for me to fuel my car with 100% vegetable-oil-based biodiesel than it is to buy gas or diesel.

Think about it. There is now an economic incentive for me to switch from petroleum–altruism doesn’t come into play. I’m not spending more money to put Exxon out of business, I’m spending less. This is a big deal. If organic strawberries were cheaper than conventional ones grown in Mexico with tons of pesticides, what would everyone buy?

Public pumps are exploding in number. If you’re in the market for a new car, don’t forget to check out the lovely vehicles from Volkswagen and make the switch to biodiesel. Just by doing that you can help:

• stop global warming
• build a domestic fuel economy
• remove “oil” from the list of reasons why we go to war

I love driving my Jetta, and I really love driving right past gas stations on my way to the biodiesel pump…

I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of emails I get daily asking for help with my Appexchanged apps: Householding and Rapid Lead Conversion. When I say uptick, that’s an uptick from 0 a day to 2-3 a day. About 100 people have viewed my Householding app on Appexchange, and about 130 have viewed the Lead Converter.

These things were absolutely critical for me to build for our consulting practice. I couldn’t do my work without them. It’s really cool that Salesforce.com has a way for me to publish them and have folks evaluate and use without any variable costs for me–once I published them, I don’t really have to do much.

And the support burden isn’t a burden, but more of a discussion at this point. Since they’re out there for free, I have no obligation to support folks, which is nice. But if the load continues at the manageable level I will continue to respond to requests for help. We’ll make money on this through volume…

I’ve been taking lots of digital pictures since I had a kid 3 years ago. I’ve been using a small Cannon point and shoot that has been great. It’s portable and takes pretty good pictures. Yesterday I got a Nikon D50 digital SLR and it’s a different world…here’s my first morning playing with it.

I couldn’t do my job without RSS and feedreaders. I read posts from about 80 feeds. Most of these are pretty low volume and may post once a week or once a month. But when they do post, they are often really great info. What a drag it would be to have to check these sites manually.

Because I love RSS so, I check my Feedburner stats regularly to see how many people have me automagically dropping into their feed readers. Here’s yesterday’s breakdown if you’re interested.

63 average RSS readers for the week is the highest number I’ve seen. I’m on a slow and steady upward trend, adding a handful RSS readers a month. Fun stuff.

I’ve been using the new Firefox 2.0 Alpha and it’s worked really well so far. I’ve found that Firefox Alpha’s are much more like Betas. Pretty darn solid. I was using a previous Alpha for the last 6 months with great success.

Here’s the offical short list of new stuff:

• Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
• Search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
• Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
• New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
• Inline spell checking in text boxes
• Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
• New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
• Extended search plugin format
• Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath

It’s probably just me, but it seems to load faster. Tabs are much improved–no more need for tabbed browsing extensions like TabMixPlus. The memory link is still there and I haven’t tested enough to know if it’s any better.

All my extensions worked when I put the 1 line config workaround. Go to
“about:config” in Firefox and right click to add a new string “app.extensions.version”.
Give it a value of “1.5″. This will trick Firefox into using all
your 1.5 extensions in 2.0.

Give it a whirl if you’re up for it. To give you a sense of the quality, I installed it for my mom when I was back home last week. When was the last time you installed an Alpha for your mom?