I’ve been doing web work for over ten years, so I’m sort of jaded about new websites and online initiatives.  I’m not easily impressed.  It gives me great joy when I run into something truly new and novel, as I did last night.

I happened on the website www.fixoutlook.org, which is an effort to lobby Microsoft into supporting CSS and other design standards in Outlook 2010.  The site essentially functions as a Twitter petition.  Twitter users can sign on to the effort simply by sending out a tweet that includes the words fixoutlook.org.  The site then displays all the tweets in a constantly updated wall of Twitter avatars.

The difference between good and great is always in the details, and www.fixoutlook.org gets the details right:

• Having the wall update in real time and including the avatar is a powerful incentive to send the tweet.  Maybe I’m simple, but I wanted to send out a tweet about it just so I could watch my picture show up on the screen.  And once I sent that tweet, all my followers know about the effort, causing the message to spread via word of mouth.
• The site has a counter showing how many people have sent tweets so far.  This will lead to people coming back to the site to check on progress.  Over 13,000 people have sent tweets so far.
• It is smart to have people tweet the URL of the site instead of a hashtag.  This ensures the URL of the site is in every tweet, driving people back to the mother ship.

This is a really well done initiative.  Check it out.