Two and a half, three decades ago, you’d have found me at a retreat for the youth wing of a political party. Or one of their weekend conferences, or university pub nights, or provincial council meetings.

I just have to close my eyes to see the faces of friends, refighting some defeated point of procedure over bottles of beer in a hotel stairwell, or collating agenda packages until the not-so-wee hours of the morning, or darting from table to table on the convention floor to pin down the support we needed for some crucial amendment.

I haven’t kept in touch with most of them. But tonight, particularly tonight, I wish I could be in one of those hotel rooms or conference halls again with them all. Just to remember and honour that sense of shared purpose. To give a thought to those young people in our lives who share that spirit of hope, change and possibility – even (maybe especially) the ones who don’t share our sense of where that spirit should take us.

I’ve received many near-identical email messages from an Indian company called Newgen Software over the past year or so. Each one mentions that someone high up in the company will be in Vancouver in the coming weeks, and would like to meet with me to talk about my software development needs.

And each time, I’ve sent a polite — but increasingly terse — “No, thank you; our needs are well met in that department.”

The last time I received one of those messages was on March 24th. I asked them to remove me from their mailing list (again) and added,

Can you understand that this would raise questions for me – not just about your email marketing practices, which have now crossed the line into spam, but about your company’s ability to handle extremely simple customer service requests? If you’re unable or unwilling to respect (or even acknowledge) my wishes at the point in the sales cycle where you’re trying to earn my trust and my business, it makes it very hard to believe your company will handle my business needs with any more professionalism.

Of course, if the answer is that you simply don’t care, and are blasting out emails to some bulk mailing list you purchased or scraped, then I don’t want to have anything to do with your company anyway. I’ll know that’s the case if I receive another of these messages from you.

In closing, I would be happy to receive a reply indicating that you have received this message and removed my company from your mailing list. Other than that, I wish to have no further communication from your company.

Today, I received another email message from Newgen. The boilerplate is identical: someone from the company will be in Vancouver soon and would like to meet with me. Apparently email didn’t work; maybe blogging will.

I’m not sure quite why this bothers me so much. Maybe it’s the disconnect between the chatty tone of their emails and the fact that nobody’s listening at the other end. Maybe I just don’t like having my time wasted.

Here’s my question to you: does this kind of approach actually work for anyone in the software field? Or does it just burn your relationships and, ultimately, your brand?

If you’ve managed to sprint inside of Google+ during one of those brief periods when the front door has been left ajar, then the first thing you’ve seen has been Google Circles. It allows you to organize your contacts into lists, based on how you know them, how much you trust them, whether you consider them cool, how you want to communicate with them… whatever criteria you want.

It’s a great feature, done in an appealing way. But it only goes so far.

If I want to create a circle called Close friends, for people I deeply trust, and another called nptech, for folks active in the non-profit technology field, I can. But say there’s something I want to share only with close friends in the nptech community. There’s no way to say “Share this with the people who are in both of those circles, but not with the people who are in only one of them.” Instead, I’d have to — manually — create a new Close nptech friends circle.

So either I’m creating a lot of circles, some of which I may only use a handful of times, or I’m missing out on the potential power of the feature.

The thing is, this is exactly the kind of issue Google deals with easily in its search function. (Yes, Google still does search.) If I wanted to search for content that contains both the phrase “Close friends” and the word “nptech”, I’d just enter this:

“close friends” nptech

If I wanted pages that contained “close friends” or ”nptech”, or both, I’d enter this:

“close friends”|nptech

And if I wanted pages that contained “close friends” but not ”nptech”:

“close friends” -nptech

I can do it (and much more complex queries) with search terms. I can do it with iTunes playlists. Why not with Circles – either post-by-post, or with automatic smart circles?

Added competitive bonus: I can’t do it with Facebook Lists.

“	Wanted: extension that will let me move a slew of open tabs from one browser to another.
	RobCottingham July 7, 2011

“	@RobCottingham No need for a extension on Chrome: Ctrl+clic and drag your tabs from a browser to an other. On Firefox: http://t.co/bfIu6sI
	yohannh July 7, 2011

“	@yohannh Thanks, I’ll do that if I have to! But I have 53 open tabs at the moment. :)
	RobCottingham July 7, 2011

“	@RobCottingham TabCloud?
	laurarodgers July 7, 2011

powered by Storify