The Owen Member Services

As a part of my attempt to facilitate easier communication and collaboration amongst those that are interested in becoming active participants at theOwen I am pleased to introduce theOwen Member Services.

If you are interested in taking part please contact me

So what are the member services?

Basically it starts with an email address. you@theowen.com
With this email address you can access your own personalized homepage at theOwen. This page includes some updates from theOwen, your @theowen.com email inbox as well as a variety of customizable news feeds (I’ll spell out the details soon, no really!)

Member services at theOwen are provided by Google (maybe you’ve heard of them). I am currently taking part in a beta program that allows me to give away a number of feature rich accounts and services that are supported by Google. This of course means that you have to agree to Google’s Terms of Service to take part. It’s a long document, but you should probably read it.

What does all this mean for 1) Me (the potential member) and 2) theOwen ?

For you the potential member you can access a number of cool features that theOwen is putting together.

You get a super cool @theowen.com email address. It’s nice because it’s simple. I envision a future where I’m having a conversation in a downtown coffee shop and I say hey, you should really talk to blank. You should email him. What’s his email? blank@theowen.com See how simple that is. If you ever need to get me I’m ryan@theowen.com. Again simple, and I would like to keep it that way. For those that are going to take an active role in what goes on around here I would very much like them to do so as themselves. You@theowen.com = you in the real world. So if you request a member account expect that I will recommend that you use your proper name. Why? To keep things, well, proper.

You can easily connect with any other @theowen.com member. In fact there email addresses will be pre populated in your email interface.

That’s another good one… you get a pretty slick email interface (I am a pretty big Google fan, in no small part because Gmail changed my life) Each of theOwen member accounts gets you this fancy email interface (only it says theOwen as opposed to Google)

Your at theOwen member email is chat enabled so you can chat (you might call it instant message, IM, MSNing …) with other members from within your email interface. Have a question for another member, you can see if they are available for a chat and be texting (that’s another one) in seconds. You can also record your chat conversations for future reference! Don’t feel like chatting? you can set your status to busy and no one will interrupt.

Voice mail. If you’ve got yourself a fancy computer with a microphone and some speakers ( one of those headset things will work to) you can leave voice mail for another member to pcikup in their inbox. This will be even more interesting down the road as one of my goals is to produce a regular audio program that covers local topics of interest. If you have feedback and want to be on the show, leave me a voice mail. Remember that’s ryan@theowen.com.

You can follow the local events calendar (actually everyone can do this at theowen.com/events from your personalized homepage. Individuals enrolled in the Member services program however can also edit the calendar. This is potentially very powerful stuff. A lot of thinking has gone on around here about group calendaring and how to keep an updated events calendar for the region, well up to date! We think this has some potential and there will be more than a few posts about it in the near future.

There’s actually more but I have a bunch of other articles to get finished before launch day. If you have any thoughts or questions you know where to find me. If you think you might want to be an active member of theOwen community then drop me a line and request a member account. The number of available accounts at this time are limited (this is a beta program still= not yet full featured) so I will reserve the right to limit enrollment, yada yada yada, to those that are going to offer the most back to the community.

The Owen Member Services

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