I’d like you guys to weigh in on something. A couple of days ago, I was having a conversation on Twitter about Mac personal finance software.
I’m an old-skool Quicken user. I’ve got more than 15 years of data in Quicken. I manage everything in there: chequing and savings, credit cards, mortgage, 401(k)s and IRAs, employee stock grants and purchases1, even my life insurance. When I was a Linux user, I maintained a Windows partition only for Quicken and games. When I became a Mac user in 2001, I imported all of my Quicken for Windows data into Quicken for Mac so that I didn’t have to maintain a whole OS for one app. Ever since that switch, I’ve never been entirely satisfied with Quicken for Mac. I’ve tried several different apps in the intervening years, but haven’t been able to find an app that fully supported my extensive use2. Even the latest version of Quicken, Quicken Essentials for Mac, doesn’t meet my needs. So I’m still using Quicken 2007.
I follow Andrew Laurence on Twitter, and we had the following exchange on Wednesday:
@atlauren: Quicken Essentials, iBank, or MoneyDance? Go!
@nadyne: how hardcore are you? Quicken Essentials sucks if you try to do serious tracking, or if you’re an existing Quicken for Mac user.
@atlauren:Currently Quicken/Mac/2007. I basically use it for statement reconcile, transaction dload. Direct Connect/QFX is important.
@nadyne: QEM doesn’t support QIF downloads, but does support OFX. I use Q07, tried QEM, and went back to Q07 even though it’s so buggy.
@atlauren: Hurm. Most my institutions use OXF/DirectConnect. One does OXF/WebConnect. One only does OXF for Quicken/Win; Mac has to use QIF.
@nadyne: The last time I tried iBank and MoneyDance, they didn’t have enough support for my use. But that might’ve changed.
The next day, we got the following tweet:
@IGGmarketing: Full-featured iBank 4 imports from Quicken, has reports, budgets, iPhone sync, free trial.
This felt like spam to me, so I went and checked out their twitter stream. Most of their tweets were identical to that one, with a few that were responses to questions. So I responded:
@nadyne: It’s so full-featured it’s got spammers and everything! Isn’t that something to be proud of.
@atlauren: Blocked and reported. sigh.
@nadyne: at least they were kind enough to remove themselves from consideration, I suppose
@IGGmarketing: Sincere apologies but in doing my job there’s a big diff between “spam” and entering a public discussion via social media.
@nadyne: When you send a form tweet that doesn’t address the conversation, it’s spam.
@IGGmarketing: Just sharing relevant info. Granted I lose a certain amount of nuance in 140 characters. But I never disguise my ID, intent or bias.
@nadyne: that’s the point: your tweet wasn’t relevant to our conversation, and is the same tweet you use for any mention of Quicken
@nadyne: the issue isn’t a lack of nuance, but rather a lack of consideration
So, what say you? Were they spamming, or did I overreact? I’m really curious what y’all think.
at first glance, looks like total twitterspam, in fact, it looks like a bot.
I get the intention, but the execution was all wrong. if the person behind the tweet had tried to personalize the message, y’all would probably not have marked it as spam. your final tweet about lack of nuance/consideration is right on the money.
Definitely spam.
Your remark was about the lack of support of iBank, not iBank itself. He introduced nothing new to your conversation.
Coincidentally, I’m a home VMWare customer today because I received a tweet from the @VMWare account 2-1/2 years ago. I wrote this in a blog post back then:
If more companies would spend their social media efforts on one-to-one communication rather than trying to use it as a broadcast tool then I’d be more inclined to use their products.