The interface is a lot cleaner, and the integration with other Google products is convenient without being creepy like Google Buzz. While it’s still a little early to share our full impressions, I thought I’d highlight the nicest feature I’ve come across in the new social network.

“Data liberation”. It’s clearly labeled in your account settings, it exports all of your data in a handy .zip file, and it comes across as a bit of a knock against Facebook’s obscure privacy and data settings.

We’ll have more on Google+ soon. Let us know your first impressions in the comments.

The Impossible Project makes and sells polaroid film. Their Twitter account has the typical tweets about promotions and contests, but it never gets spamm-y. They re-tweet almost every photo taken with their film, which goes a long way toward building a sense of community around the product.

Best of all: their customer service. @ImpossibleUSA sprung into action after I tweeted about problems with film and some return-policy miscommunication, saying that I’d have new versions of the film to try out in the mail soon.

A big thanks to Impossible Project for the film, which is working wonderfully (check my Tumblr for occasional scans of my polaroids, or the Impossible Project Flickr account) remember some lessons from their solid Twitter:

Never spam.
Treat your followers like humans.
Classic customer support still matters in the digital age.

And if anyone else has a positive business- or corporate-Twitter account story, please share in the comments!

I’ll let this quote from Reynolds’ for itself:

I don’t think that your opinion about gay marriage or sexual orientation or whatever should ever come into the hockey business. I’ve been in the hockey business for 28 years, and this is the first I’ve heard of it.

Let’s hope this at least sparks some discussion on the topic.

The handle “@uptownhockey” seems to be trending the most in Toronto, Vancouver, and Chicago according to Trendsmap.

More on this tomorrow when their PR team picks up the pieces. Hopefully it’s a case of an overzealous tweeter that doesn’t represent the views of the company.

I’d like to know how you think Uptown Sports Management should handle the incident.

Update: two similar situations (and their resolutions) have been previously covered on the blog. Tim Hortons and Chrysler.

Canvas is the new social network that Christopher Poole (AKA 4Chan founder Moot) recently announced at his SXSW keynote.

You can read a breakdown of how Canvas works here and a nice summary of its coverage here. I’ve had my Canvas invite for a couple of weeks now, and I thought I’d share my thoughts.

The site lets you open a profile (though your identity remains anonymous, true to the Moot philosophy) and post pictures. With a pretty robust online editing tool, you can edit other people’s images, view threads of edits, follow groups, and add stickers to images you like.

Notice that the Canvas toolbar doesn’t have the up or down vote buttons, but playful, nondescript stickers like “monocle” and “cookie” that lend a sense of play to judging people’s images. Some prominent user-assisted moderating buttons in the toolbar are a nice touch as well.

It’s a pretty elegant way to monetize 4Chan, the notoriously gruesome meme-factory that Poole accidentally started when he was 15. The image editing tools streamline the klein-bottle of non-sequitors that 4Chan is known for generating and keeps everything catalogued nicely. The heavy moderating keeps out the offensive content that made advertisers run scared from 4Chan, and the clean design and social media integration helps, too.

I’m sure Canvas will finally make Poole some well-deserved money, but don’t expect it to gain the usefulness of Facebook or Reddit. Canvas is at its core a meme generator, and one that–like 4Chan–will fry your brain if you stay on it for too long.

If you’re interested in Canvas, MediaStyle has an invite to share. Shoot an email to travis@mediastyle.ca and you can check it out for yourself.

Banner image courtesy Canvas–one of the many cat images posted by users.

Organizers raised over $12,000 for The Royal Ottawa Foundation for Mental Health. The organizing team did an awesome job putting this event together, and we’re thrilled to know that TwestivalOTT was in the top 10 highest-grossing in the world!

The tweet came from an employee at New Media Strategies, the firm that handles Chrysler’s social media. Chrysler reacted sternly yesterday, apologizing for any offence and explained that the employee responsible had been fired.

The Red Cross suffered a similar social media mishap when one of their tweeters announced their hilarious drunken weekend plans. The Red Cross rolled with it, and it even turned into a fundraising effort by Dogfishhead Brewery.

How do you think Chrysler handled the tweet? The commenters on their blog think they might have been a little too corporate about it. Was the tweet too egregious to turn into a Red Cross-style save?

David Nicholson, EVP of Product Development for a “freemium web games” developer and publisher in the UK joined the SMBOttawa crowd to discuss social gaming and how to introduce game mechanics to online communities.

His talk focused on his experience developing game strategies for various communities. David maintained that the important difference between online gaming and integrating game mechanics into your site or product development should not be forgotten. Game mechanics are all about influencing audience behaviour, so testing, tracking and re-tooling your site to achieve desired results is key. He reinforced the importance of going where your customers are and studying their current behaviors to direct desired outcomes.

For more info and to keep an eye on the next Social Media Breakfast, follow the #SMBOttawa or the organizers @Sylc, @RobLane, and @RyanAnderson on Twitter.

I recently wrote a story for OpenFile about the use of open data in Ottawa and the upcoming International Open Data Hackathon. It combines a few of the things that readers of the MediaStyle blog love: design, technology, and helping people in cool ways. I’ve included an excerpt below, and the full story can be found here.

Ottawa’s rapidly developing open data community has only been around for a few months, but it’s already had a stunning impact at City Hall.

Since April 2010, a group of developers and tech enthusiasts has worked on building the community almost from scratch.

Open data is the philosophy of unlicensed and unrestricted access to public data. In Ottawa’s case, that means municipal data like park locations, recreational schedules, bus routes, and election information that has been slowly made available for public use over the last year.

Ottawa’s open data community is known for its collaborative tendencies. Programmers and developers here will come together at City Hall on Dec. 4, where they’ll join participants in 51 other cities around the world in the International Open Data Hackathon.

The hackathon unites programmers under one roof to work collaboratively for the day. Much like a similar Open Data Hackfest at City Hall last April, the event is meant to spur the development of smartphone and web applications that use data to help citizens.

Edward Ocampo-Gooding, a developer for local start-up Shopify, is often credited with founding the open data community in Ottawa.

Ocampo-Gooding first brought the idea of open data to the city’s information technology sub-committee in April.

Inspired by an Ignite talk by Nick Charney in April of 2009, Ocampo-Gooding teamed with Mary Beth Baker and developer Daniel Beauchamp to help promote open data projects in Ottawa. That process included finding engaged citizens on Twitter and personally inviting them to open data events.

Full story here. OpenFile encourages the evolution of news stories, so be sure to comment and add to the discussion.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey (@nonstopnicktv) is a prolific Ottawa freelancer and the editor of OpenFile Ottawa (@OpenFileOtt), the recent extension of the OpenFile news service. If you’re not already familiar with how OpenFile works, it’s a collaborative news site that allows citizens to open files and suggest stories for freelancers to cover. Files stay open after the are published, and the community is free to add to it as the story evolves. A process that Nick describes as, “”The best possible marriage between citizen journalism and professional journalism.”

I sat down with Nick, a former colleague of mine at the Fulcrum, before the OpenFile Ottawa launch today. Be sure to follow OpenFile Ottawa on Twitter and make an appearance at the launch party tomorrow night at Spin.

How do you see OpenFile behaving in ottawa?

Ottawa is a very well covered city by existing media. Having said that, I think there’s a real place for OpenFile to succeed because Ottawa is a big city that has this lingering reputation as a small town. Translated to OpenFile, that means we have a lot of very small, tight-knit, connected communities throughout the city who will really embrace the idea of being able to shape their own stories. You pitch a story, we assign a reporter to the story, together we shape local news. I think that idea will be really popular, and I don’t think that’s just wishful thinking.

What kind of audience do you see it having? Do you think it will skew toward a younger audience because of it’s digital nature?

I’m not sure. When you look at the experience in Toronto, there are a lot of young people involved, but that’s not to say that the older demographics don’t use the Internet and aren’t engaged citizens… You know, I’m not sure I want to answer that question yet. I want to see how it plays out. I’d like to see it attract everybody. I know that there are a lot of engaged young people who are attracted to social media, which of course OpenFile loves and tries to exploit at every opportunity, so maybe that’s something that attracts a younger crowd. I think we might surprise people with the diversity of our readership.

How have you tried to grab an audience so far?

In addition to trying to attract all kinds of excited freelancers to the mix, I’m also going out and meeting as many community associations and as many community groups as I possibly can. Everyone I talk to is excited about this because they love the idea of being able to be a part of the news gathering process. We’re not asking people to be journalists, but we’re asking people to be our eyes and ears and help shape the news that we report.

In a past interview with the MediaStyle blog, OpenFile’s online journalism director Craig Silverman said that OpenFile came from a separation between the people and the newspapers they read. Do you think this is an problem, and do you believe OpenFile remedies it?

I think the first thing to note is that we’re not out to get traditional media. Once we all become millionaires things might change, but at this point we’re not trying to replace traditional media. They’re very important for a lot of reasons and there is always a place for them. I think there is something to be said for the top-down model that broadcast media and newspapers have adhered to for years and years. I’m not saying that’s the wrong way to do it, but we’re just trying to do it differently. So instead of getting together for a story meeting at 9 a.m. and figuring out what is news for people, we’re going to go to [the people]. We’re going to say, “What do you guys think?” We’re remedying the problem, I guess, but we’re not out to revolutionize anything. We’re trying to fill a role that we don’t think is being filled right now.

You mentioned you’re going out and talking to community groups. You said they’ve had a positive reaction, but how much do you think they’ll interact?

Well, I hope they interact a whole lot. I mean if people don’t, we’re not really different than anyone else. There’s been excitement from the get go. They’re just refreshed. A comment I had from one person so far, he said, “It’s really hard to pitch stories to the CBC and to the Citizen and to the Sun, and this is kind of a neat idea.”

And this is exactly what we’re going for. A lot of times people might give story tips to news rooms and it’s a gamble. Maybe the story will be assigned a reporter, or it may be a day when the email or phone message goes unanswered. Here, this gentleman can be confident that when he opens a file, I’m going to see it. And, if it’s a compelling story, assign a reporter to it.

And you’re up for the challenge?

Yeah, it’s going to be a great challenge. And it certainly will be that. This is not going to be easy. It’s a whole new way of doing things. And even people who are excited about it, still aren’t comfortable with it. They really like the idea, and they want to jump on board, but it’s hard to get used to this idea. On our side it’s a bit of an adjustment. We’ve all worked in a media environment where it’s all about the ideas that we have. Our ideas are still important, but now we have to drop our guard a little bit and be a little more transparent, open ourselves up a little more and listen to the people.

Remember to attend the open file launch, and read our past interview with OpenFile’s Craig Silverman.

Banner image courtesy RobMan170.