Friday, February 19, 2010

Coupon etiquette?

What's the 'correct' social etiquette about using restaurant coupons purchased online (such as those from restaurant.com or groupon.com) when you go out in a group and split the check?

For coupons you get in the mail, or basically free stuff, I assume common etiquette is to offer the coupon to the group to use and split the remainder. Does it work the same way when you've bought, say, a $50 coupon for $25 (i.e. you use the coupon to cover $25 off your tab and offer the discount value to the group)? Do you use the entire $50 to cover just your tab? Or maybe simply not using the coupon when dining as a group is the right way to go?

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Hey Google Buzz, I don't email my friends anymore

I just saw the presentation from Google about Google Buzz. The quick summary of the announcements - creating a social network using my email contacts and emailing history as the source of my social graph, and using rich geo-tagged status messages (buzz-es) to keep it updated. It comes with rich mobile apps to help this take off. They also promised enterprise versions of Buzz.

Buzz sounds pretty exciting. Some of the geo-tagged updates sounds really slick. My first reaction - this is going to be 'public follow' thing more than a 'follow my friends' things. Because emailing my friends is like, so 2007!

Fact is, I don't email my closest friends/family anymore. I either IM them, post on their Facebook page, send them SMS or call them. Email is more for work type, non-personal stuff. Having said that, it's important to note that Google does have GTalk and Google Voice so I hope they weigh activity from GTalk and Google Voice higher than GMail activity when figuring out who I must 'auto-follow'.

Time for someone to write a Buzz-to-Facebook cross poster. :)