PAL (Philippine Airlines) Uses Twitter For Airline Requests

A traveler flies Philippine Airlines and lands in Manila, his stopover on his way to Bangkok. He wanted to spend the few hours he had at his pit stop to revisit the famed sites flanking Manila Bay. But alas! Would he have to be hauling his luggage around the whole time?

Yes, these are actual events that happened one late evening three months ago. Would this story have a happy ending? Let’s see.

So he takes out his iPhone, logs on to his Twitter account, and begins sending messages about his dilemma. To whom? To @flyPAL — Philippine Airline's official Twitter handle.

@flyPAL was established in September last year. Here, PAL team members from corporate
communications, system management and planning attend to passengers' unique, sometimes quirky, Twitter-based concerns, queries and requests.

For everything from lost luggage and checking seat pitch, to legroom concerns and asking about three- pronged power outlets on the plane, the PAL team is able to give quick and specific replies either publicly or privately on Twitter, depending on whether an answer would be beneficial to everyone or to the sender alone.

For general matters, bookings, and the rest of the 80% of what passengers normally need from Philippine Airlines, they encourage people to browse through their website as most of the information can be found there. But for other concerns, there’s PAL’s official e-mail address, and @flyPAL on Twitter.

Okay, wait. Back to our story.

Tweet sent, the airline responded quickly. In just four exchanges of less than 140 characters each, @flyPAL provided him step-by-step directions, leading him to the baggage storage near the terminal's transfer desk at the arrivals hall in Terminal 2 of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.

And in less than 30 minutes — probably less time than one would normally spend just getting off the plane, clearing immigration and passing through customs — the passenger was able to store his luggage for a minimal fee. Our Bangkok-bound traveler is left impressed, thankful that he chose to fly with the Philippines' flag carrier.

So for PAL’s Twitter team, they remain optimistic about increasing their Twitter followers and furthering their vow of customer service. And for those of us who plan to cruise the clouds anytime soon, we can rest assured that with @flyPAL, our very own Philippine Airlines will always be just a tweet away.

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Gmail’s Latest Feature: The "Priority Inbox"

E-mail is great… unless there’s too much of it.

With the advent of e-mail accounts providing almost limitless storage capacities, an unlimited stash of patience to deal with all that mail doesn’t come attached, unfortunately.

Spam guards that have been developed have helped… somewhat. But for some of us, even sans the spam, e-mail is still overwhelming. If only the e-mails you receive would become more proactive, grow legs, pick themselves up, and line up according to importance, right? If only.

Google may just have come up with the next best thing.

Introducing the Gmail’s Priority Inbox! This new feature is said to be Google’s attempt to appease the woes of Gmail users who manage to amass huge amounts of e-mail. The Priority Inbox helps by segregating e-mail by importance, putting them into categories like “Important and Unread,” “Starred,” and “Everything Else.”

The Priority Inbox marks as “Important and Unread” what is just that, mail that it feels is important to you and needs your utmost attention, that is still unread. “Starred” stars e-mail that was previously “Importand and Unread,” but is marked by the user for further attention after being read. And of course, “Everything Else” is everything else that is not up to priority par, which ends up as typical inbox items.

The Priority Inbox feature works with an intelligent algorithm at its core, a virtual intuition that classifies your mail based on the people you e-mail the most, the type of mail you reply to, the keywords that apply, and other e-mail habits that it can observe from you.

While the Priority Inbox doesn’t declare that its deductive prowess is perfect, it does claim to learn from any corrections you point out. But perfect or not, either way, the Priority Inbox feature of Gmail hopes to get you on the path towards an inbox that’s anarchy-free

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Philippine Government Needs To Tighten Website Security

Following last week's hostage incident in Manila, security breaches continued to haunt the Philippines, even in the virtual world.

The Philippine National Police website, www.pnp.gov.ph, was down for several hours due to attacks from alleged "hacktivists." The official website of Bulacan, www.bulacan.gov.ph, was hacked by a group claiming to be from China and Malaysia, a page inserted demanding an apology from the Philippines for the August 23 hostage crisis. The Philippine Information Agency website, www.pia.gov.ph, was also defaced over the weekend, its homepage bearing the words "Hacked by 7z1" and signature "Black Matrix Team | 0x.oday@Gmail.com". The Hagonoy, Bulacan homepage, www.hagonoybulacan.gov.ph, showed the Chinese flag and Chinese characters that translated to "Do not underestimate our pain ... Hackers from China by custom group F.M.T.”, with a dialog box saying, "You make me angry."

Government officials have yet to confirm if the hackers who defaced the websites of government
agencies were indeed from Hong Kong and China, or if the hacking was done locally and merely takingadvantage of the situation.

Fortunately, the hacking incidents did not affect any vital government services as all the sites that were attacked were merely “brochure” sites with no interaction or database-building required between the particular government websites and the users. The hacking incidents only underlined the lack of security of government websites.

Presidential Communications and Operations Office Secretary Herminio Coloma said Malacañang has alerted all government agencies to review and improve security of their websites. "We are adopting best practices to lessen the vulnerability of our websites to hacking and other cyber crimes," he said.

Carlo Ople, the country’s first Certified E-Marketing Consultant says, "It's more of a PR thing especially now that the temperature is a bit high." He added that hackers can compromise a website by exploiting various weaknesses such as outdated scripts, third-party plug-ins or outdated software on the site, or even using programs to get a lot of computers to access a site to consume all the bandwidth and cause it to crash.

Ople adds that the Philippine government should tap reputable hosting companies to secure high-profile government websites. He also recommended employing the top IT professionals, a lot of whom are Filipinos, to help make government websites more secure.

All of the four government websites that were attacked have since been restored.

Hotbox Creations is a web development and design studio which helps individuals and businesses put their ideas online. Hotbox also provides clients with elegant and sensible solutions for branding, print, web and motion. Visit Hotbox Creations’ website at www.hotboxcreations.com and start your own personal or corporate website today.

Hacked Philippine Websites.