Its been awhile since I’ve posted here. I’ve been busy with some other, pressing endevours. (I still am busy, but thought I should at least finish up with the Cinch review that I started.)

First, let me begin by saying that I think that this Dubli thing is a really great idea and I think it will take off. (Not as fast as you and I hoped or even expected, maybe, but still, its gonna work and its gonna make those of us that got in early very happy.) I saw Michael Hansen in person a little while ago and I have to say he is an impressive man. He says that he gets ideas almost every minute of every day, and I believe him.

I also have a lot of respect for Tom Ashlock, the creator of Cinch. He is one of the first two Vice Presidents in Dubli, and, I think, a genuine good guy.

But, I don’t like Cinch.

I understand the vision: get Dubli customers to use dubli through a different channel and then use that channel for any number of other things – advertisements, communication, interaction. It really would be great for Dubli and for Dubli business associates.

But, there isn’t enough of an attraction to customers to make them anything but annoyed. In my opinion.

My experiences: Our team has been successful in attracting customers. We’ve sold quite a few credits and had some good feedback from them. I sent 6 of my customers, some of my closet friends who aren’t dubli business associates, Cinch. Only one person installed it and he has since removed it.

Two friends said that they would install it at home, but really only access dubli at work. and their work will not let them install a program like cinch. (Then they never did install it. I quit asking.) The one who did install it had similar issues to me.

1) It often crashed. It would lose connection with the dubli site or something and gray out. Sometimes it seemed that my whole computer would slow down when this happened.
2) It starts up everytime you turn on the computer. This is how dubli and dubli business associates need it to work so that its always on the customer desktop. But, it takes time and its a bit annoying when you have no intention of looking at dubli at the moment.
3) It doesn’t really do anyting from a customer stand point.
4) Its old technology. We don’t install programs anymore – we go out to the internet. Facebook doesn’t require a fat program on your desktop. Twitter doesn’t need anything but a browser – even the myriad of applications that work with Facebook and Twitter don’t need you to download and install them. At my place of business, we are moving to ‘thin client’ where applications and needs are met through applications hosted elsewhere – not on the desktop.

Now, Dubli’s stated goal is to move to mobile phones. I have an iPhone, and this is actually a place that I do install programs. A program like cinch would work well on phones, I think.

And of course, this is only my opinion. I could be wrong. But, I am not trying to get my customers to install cinch anymore. (I might try again once Connect is free to use.)

Please post your experiences with Cinch in the comments. Let me know if I’m wrong. Does anyone have somre great positive feedback? I’d love to know.

I earlier promised posts on our experience as we begin to use Cinch and Connect. Here’s the first in a series.

As you Dubli Business Associates know, these are the programs built by Lariat Software that helps connect business associates with: 1) customers, 2) potential customers 3)other business associates and 4) potential business associates.

For those that have been with Dubli for awhile, you know that the launch of Cinch was a very highly anticipated event. It was to be the signal for all associates to begin launching their credits into cyberspace to start attracting new dubli customers.

Well, it finally arrived in mid-July after several false starts and a long delay. (Which is understandable for a brand new software/internet product.)

We weren’t sure that we were going to use it. We had been sending credits out and attracting customers without Cinch or Connect since February. We have developed a nice little system that seems to be working well.

But we decided to jump in and try it. We watched the first two Cinch training videos over the past few nights.

Last night, I subscribed to Connect and downloaded Cinch to my desktop. Here’s how it went:

I went to http://dubli-connect.com and found a login screen with no way to register and no instructions. It didn’t look like the screen I remembered from the training videos. So, I went to my e-mail to find the message that announced the launch to see if it had a different address. It did. The correct address is http://http://www.dubli-connect.com/Subscribe

I registered using our login info for dubli. Pretty easy to do. I read the Terms and Conditions and saw that the license fee is month to month. We could cancel at anytime. (The site asks that you give it 90 days to see if its helpful.) We paid the $14.95 for one month.

At this point it came to the Connect subscription site. On the site there is an icon to click to download and install cinch. (The subscription is for Connect – the website. Cinch is a program that runs on your desktop and is free. More about the functions of the two in later posts.)

We downloaded Cinch with no problems. It immediately showed the number of credits we have left in our account which meant that it had successfully connected to dubli.

Then I began attempting to import some contacts. I have a file of contacts that I had ealier saved in .csv format. It was easy to browse to the file and Connect immediately recognized it and brought up the info from the file. It asked that I idnetify each column of data and required that at least First Name, Last Name, and e-mail be identified. I also had some phone numbers that I labeled. Very easy and intuitive.

Then it asked that I identify each contact as either 1) a BA (Business Associate) 2) Potential BA 3) Customer or 4) Potential Customer. I did this – again easy. (I dumped all that I didn’t really know into Potential Customer.)

Then I pushed ‘Continue’ which is the place that the software really begins to take the file and the infor you provided to begin the import process. Things went well for the first 5 contacts. Then (at 13% done), the program froze. I noticed that the Cinch program I had open also froze. I had to cancel, and, I presume, lost all of the info that I had entered.

I haven’t been back in yet to see if anything was saved. I’ll post that with the next update, coming soon.

We’re looking for information about using Cinch. We are going to start using it in the coming week and will post our results. In the meantime, please comment to this post with what you are experiencing.

I have to say I’m nervous about trying to get people to not only register at Dubli, but also install a new program on their computer that they are not familiar with. I know that this is why we really should call everyone that we send the Cinch to, and that is what we will do.

What are you seeing out there?