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June 22, 2007

Never take the first offer

Filed under: customer service, personal finance — Rakesh Agrawal @ 2:50 pm

I needed to cancel one of my credit cards. I rarely use the card and didn’t want to pay the $75 annual fee. I called Citi to cancel. Of course this is never an easy process. They transfered me to a retention specialist.

In order, here are the offers I was presented:

  • Citi PremierPass card2,500 bonus ThankYou Points
  • $75 statement credit (this was after saying on the first offer that he couldn’t waive the fee)
  • A balance transfer at 3.99% for the life of the balance
  • A balance transfer at 3.99% for the life of the balance, without any transaction fee
  • 5,000 bonus ThankYou Points

He persisted even after I told him that I was doing the bulk of my spending on another Citi card.

I could hear the disappointment in his voice when I canceled despite his best efforts.

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Facebook platform gets Journal ink

Filed under: facebook, personalization, social networking, web 2, web 2.0 — Rakesh Agrawal @ 9:30 am

Today’s Journal has a story on the Facebook platform.

Facebook now offers more than 800 new services — from photo slideshows to online file storage — up from fewer than 100 a month ago. Meanwhile, those who are creating the Facebook services can access information about their customers and make money by selling related items and ads.

Other popular new services are fairly basic. One from Slide Inc., a San Francisco start-up, lets people highlight their “top friends” and recently had 6.3 million users. A horoscope service from RockYou Inc., a start-up in San Mateo, Calif., had 3.5 million users. Other applications include Flash Sudoku, which lets users add the popular numbers game to their page, and Stress Meter, which lets users chart their stress level for all to see.

…

Facebook’s success has attracted the attention of News Corp. Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch. When asked in a recent interview whether newspaper readers are migrating to MySpace, he responded, “I wish they were. They’re all going to Facebook at the moment.”

That’s a great quote from Murdoch.

I wrote about the need for module-based personal publishing last year. I’ve spent a lot of time this week on Facebook and I think they really get it. More next week.

Facebook trend

Note the definition of an “active” user. That’s a much tighter standard than most companies use.

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