Before we go any further…let me warn you.

This is another post about Twitter. Well, mostly. I think that Twitter is the primary example of this, but it’s something on my mind.

I just finished reading a post by Nate Westheimer, CEO of NYC based Bricabox, part of the coworking movement in Manhattan, and an all around cool (and smart) dude.

Nate’s post was a his thoughts on another post about how boring Twitter was.

Nate’s point was not that twitter lacked value, but that from his vantage point, the HISTORY of twitter as a utility was boring.

I’m not here to argue Nate’s point or opinion…though I do disagree… it did get me thinking about twitter as a “bigger picture” app. That’s not to say I won’t go through the post and refute his points one by one :-). After all, <cue music>I am a man who will fight for your honor</cue music>. Nate knows I always appreciate his perspective on things, and thank him for this opportunity to spill.

As someone who sits on the developer email list, things are more active than most think. I see use, build, and user demographics having changed dramatically since I started using this application in fall of 2006, and even more since it went “mainstream” in March of 2007 at SXSW.

As far as use, I think new use cases are explored all the time. Think about front-line reporting? How about those fires in California, and all of the status that came directly from the twitter-verse? Think about all of the news that breaks on twitter before anywhere else? I think that’s pretty huge. People use twitter to share experiences as well. I can think of times when a large group of people was distributed but sharing an experience…for example, tonight’s SOTU, or a season finale of their favorite show?

I’ve become a big fan of using twitter as a lazyweb. If I google something and turn up nothing on the first page or two, or quickly need a verifiable resource, I tend to ask twitter. I may simply ask the question, or use the Hoosgot bot. Either way…the value of this use case is directly proportional to the size, and quality of the people you follow (and who follow you). If you follow a bunch of people who say nothing except for what they had for lunch…of course it’s going to be uninteresting. If you follow people who typically have almost no followers but follow thousands and thousands of people…of course, it’s going to be boring. If you follow people whose feeds are nothing but @username responses and contribute nothing to initiate new ideas or conversations, of course, it’s going to be an echo-chamber of “me too!”s. But that’s not Twitter’s fault. That’s yours for not having any discretion in who you follow.

The Twitter API is in active development. Very, very active development. Alex and his crew work hard not only to make it better day by day, but to deal with a LOT of idiots on the list…and still answer almost every realistic request with a yes, a no (and a why), and/or a timeline on the request. Service, and 9x out of 10, with a smile.

And as for that demographic…when twitter was born it was geeks only. Now, I’ve seen it adopted by everyone from educators to reporters to PR people to…cancer patients??? I think the demographic is growing, and faster than you realize.

Whats been magical about the growth of twitter is that it’s been organic. So much has happened, in fact, the MAJORITY has happened, outside of “twitter proper”. It’s happened because the users rallied, or some motivated individual got down and did some work themselves.

I think what my point is, is that you need to remember that twitter isn’t your everyday webapp. I see it as two very distinct and unique things: first, it’s a truly mobile application, and one of very few in that class. Second, it’s almost a social experiment. Give the masses a very, very simple tool and see what they do with it. Be prepared to morph along the way, but ultimately, let the users do what they want. I hope that someday I will be privileged enough to have the resources to run an application as an experiment like this. That’s not to say I hope Twitter doesn’t find a business model that will allow them to sustain…in fact, I think that would be the A+ on this science fair project, to make this into a business and have this much fun along the way.

If you consider all of these things…I think twitter’s one of the neatest things we’ve all experienced, we’re just too busy complaining about it’s downtime to notice :-).

Finally…and most importantly. Twitter is free. By the good graces of Evan Williams, Obvious, and their investors, we have this amazing utility at our fingertips. For free. Relax a bit. Enjoy it. Enjoy life. Go for a walk. Send me a direct message when you get back. Perspective in 140 characters or less is really quite refreshing.

Tags: twitter, social experiments

I just stumbled across this link through the halls of Twitter this morning; the link is a wiki where someone who will be attending SXSW in a couple of months can post their twitter account.

I could be totally off my rocker, but this seems totally silly since last year, nearly EVERYONE was on Twitter already and that was before twitter exploded into an international phenomenon. Now, a year later. The small percentage of people who fell behind last year will likely be caught up, and the ones that aren’t will figure it out pretty fast when everyone is walking through the halls of the Austin convention center, looking down at their iPhones, muttering “f*%&ing twitter!”.

Which brings me to my next series of thoughts:

First, is twitter ready to handle the onslaught of this year’s SXSW twitteratti? I have seen all kinds of speculated numbers of growth, and talked to Alex Payne a couple of times in the last year about the hardware that’s powering twitter and it’s various interfaces (jabber, SMS, etc) and several months ago it was an absurdly powerful cluster of hardware. In order to handle SXSW08, they’re going to need some sort of miracle server.

My second thought is more about us, as users. Last year Twitter ruined the battery in my Treo650 and prompted the purchase of a blackberry. This was, of course, before the advent of m.twitter.com. Another thing to remember was that I was mostly adding new people throughout the conference and checking in on them. I didn’t have a ton of followers or people I was following.

This year…I’m a) on an iPhone that doesn’t have a changeable battery and b) following a few hundred people before I even touch down in Austin. Sounds like trouble to me.

Is Twitter going to be nearly as effective this year as last, or will it become too chatty and therefore, ineffective for conference-going uses?

A couple of ideas to resolve the issue:

1) Twitter does a proper implementation of groups, complete with shorthand.

While I realize this isn’t likely, it’s also not impossible and they have been talking about it since LAST year in Austin. Groups would let me message only the appropriate group of people, or the people that care. This would also leave the people who couldn’t come to the conference out of the line of fire when twitter gets really rowdy at the nighttime social events. :-)

2) Hashtag adoption

A close second to the groups implementation, a follow hashtag/track hashtag feature would help. Since I’m not using twitter over SMS, track doesn’t help me in the least. I really wish it did, because I’d love to use it. Hey guys, make track work on my personal timeline, not just via SMS.

If I was to include the hashtag “#SXSW” and other relevant variants (”#OpenIDMeetup”, “#WordPressMeetup”, “#BarCampAustin”, etc), in tweets (which would be annoying, but doable), it could resolve some of the firehose. It’s still a hack, and has lots of holes and opportunities for missed messages, but hey…Twitter drops messages all the time so we really should be used to that by now.

3) Extra Phone/Twitter Device

If Twitter sold a Twitter-enabled device, I’d not only buy it but I’d probably pay a service fee. Sure, most of the time, I use my phone but in heavy-use cases (read: conferences) I’d be willing to carry something else to make sure that Twitter wasn’t killing my cell phone’s battery, and that I got optimum performance out of twitter.

Something like the Amazon Kindle, without the shitty design, but with the built in EVDO device so I didn’t need to be at a WIFI hotspot. Like I said, I’d pay for the service. Maybe not EVERY month, but I’d pay for a week-long pass during conference periods, and I’d probably pay upwards of $30-50 for that week-long pass - IF the battery life didn’t suck and if the message delivery was stable.

Since there PROBABLY won’t be a Twitter-handheld in the next 60 days, I may resolve to getting a cheap-o 2nd line on my ATT plan, with very low minutes but unlimited text messaging. I’d get a phone that was not only small, but had a changeable battery. It doesn’t even need to have a WAP browser, I can use my iPhone for that. This phone will be for TWITTER ONLY!

I really hope that Twitter usage is still viable for SXSW because it really enhanced the conference experience for me last year. Do you have any grand plans for how to make Twitter work for you this year?

Sometime in the next couple of months I need to do a re-vamp and re-post of my “How to Survive SXSW” post, since I’ve learned more about conference going in the last year.

Tags: twitter, SXSW, SXSWi, SXSW08, mobile devices, hashtags, battery, group interactions

In a comment responding to my previous post, Lachlan Hardy asked me what continuing value Facebook had to me.

First, and most simply, none of the blunders they’ve made have directly affected me: none of the privacy violations invaded my personal privacy since I do my best not to have anything to hide, anyway. The closest thing to an invasive blunder Facebook has ever made to me, personally, was the inclusion of SuperPoke, Funwall, and that confounded Zombie application without including an “ignore forever and ever and ever” button.

I think during the initial wave of Facebook account deletions due to, Tara Hunt said something along the lines of “Facebook has made some lousy decisions, but they totally have me by the social graph”. Now, I’m paraphrasing (I wish I could find the original tweet, this was the closest I could find). But Tara’s and my shared sentiment about why we are still on Facebook is similar to why, for instance, I have an account on Pownce and Twitter but spend ALL of my time on Twitter: it’s where my peeps are at.

I can do the same thing and more elsewhere, but my stuff and more importantly, a great deal of my friends, are there.

Remember, I’m from a generation where I was on Facebook before it was open to non students. Remember, the majority of my friends outside of the social media/new media space are either recently graduated or still finishing school. Unlike most of the users of Facebook, who are more of a layer of very rich sod sitting just on top of the surface, I’ve got deep and twisty roots buried into photos, contacts, comments, connections, messages. And many of them are personal, not the casual “nice blog post” or “I think Scoble is a douchebag, too, who needs 8000 friends?” type exchanges that happen for many others.

Roots via Wikimeda Commons - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Roots_by_cesarpb.jpg

Now…I’m not interested in tangent-ing down the road of, “well, if the data was portable like it should be…”. Because it’s not portable. That’s Facebook’s M.O. and I accept that. We’ve got plenty of other opportunities to make it better. Then, Facebook can play catch up (or not).

So really, the value of ANY social network, be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ZipKarma, my blogroll, or any other NETWORK OF SOCIAL CONNECTIONS, the value is in those connections, not the tools that the network provides.

In the case of right here right now, the majority of the people that I care about can be found on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Maybe this is why I chuckle every time someone tries to identify value in social media. I think value is the wrong word.

Value, to me, suggests that it must be for sale because something is only “worth” a certain amount if someone else is willing to pay for it.

I learned that lesson as a kid collecting comic books. It was during a collector “bubble”, and me and my friends were excited to have gotten our hands on comics that were “worth” hundreds of dollars. The reason this bubble was a bubble, though, was that much like many valuations they are arbitrary until someone is willing to shell out. People invested big bucks into comics, and since not many people were on the high end of the buying scale, the whole thing fell in on itself. Comics are still very popular, but people collect them for the enjoyment of them, not necessarily to own a “valuable” collection.

There will never be “value” to a social graph because a social graph’s “value” is highest to it’s creator. And even then, my friends aren’t for sale.

I don’t value Facebook. I don’t value Twitter. I don’t value LinkedIn or even my Blogroll. I appreciate Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all of the individual connections, nay, the individual PEOPLE that make up the social graph. In the case of Twitter, I totally heart twitter because of the WAY that it’s let me connect.

But Heart != value.

Heart = Appreciation++

Now that I’ve identified a new term to replace the overused and diluted term “value” with something more relevant in this context…on to the next task. Getting rid of “social graph” and “join the conversation”.

I’ve noticed recent trend in people feeling high and mighty by removing their social network profiles. Like, they are punishing the social networks or something. Yes, without us, they are nothing. We get it.

But…I still get a lot of use out of The Facebook. And I wanted to see for myself if it was true, and if deleting a social network profile was as gratifying to social geeks as shooting a vein full of heroin is to a junkie.

So, I decided to consider this whole B.S. Scoble/Plaxo/Facebook debacle. I’ve already removed Robert from my twitter stream cuz I find his twitter style dilutive ad useless to me, plus, he tends to be an echo chamber for information I’ve already found elsewhere or on my own. Facebook, as I state, still has a tremendous amount of social power for me. So I did the most obvious thing I could.

I deleted my Plaxo account. I never use the thing anyway, except to approve people who’s contact info I already have, or deny people I don’t know (the whole interaction sounds a lot like myspace is these days).

Maybe deleting Plaxo is just equivalent to “the really weak shit”, but I’m not feeling the buzz that you all seem to be getting.

Tags: Facebook, Plaxo, Scoble, shutthehellup

I don’t consider January 1st the official start to the year because for myself, like many many others, it’s more like “national hangover day” and not really how I want to represent the beginning of the year. So effectively, for me, January 2nd is the beginning of the new year.

That said, my upside-down sleep cycles from the last several weeks of whirlwind have been making for some rather interesting dreams (no, not the naughty kind). I don’t usually remember them, but last night’s was vivid, odd, and stood out to me as trying to deliver a message to me.

I don’t remember ALL of the details, but the general sentiment was that I was back in my high school. Much like most of my high school experience, I was late and hadn’t done my homework. Where things got weird were, I found myself surrounded not by my high school teachers, but instead by various faces from today’s social media/new media/tech/geek scene that I’ve become so fond of. Instead of my stat teacher, I saw Allen Stern from centernetworks.com. Instead of the Bodeys (a mr. and mrs. pair of english teachers, for those of you who didn’t go to high school with me), Mr. Messina and Ms. Hunt. Hall monitor David Blumenstein had a watchful eye on me as I ran to my locker when I was late for class. Junto-master and IndyHall co-founder Geoff DiMasi was there as the social studies teacher. I’m sure there were more injections from my current reality to my actual past that I don’t remember as vividly, but you get the picture by now.

I’m not usually one for analyzing dreams, but I thought it was interesting that at the turn of the year, the turn of a year where I have so much more that I want to do and so much more that I want to grow, I have a dream like this one. I’m going to think of it as a cue that I need to remember to never stop learning, or think I have to stop learning. I’m going to think of it as a cue that the people around me are the best teachers there are, and part of the reason I look up to them so much is that I hope to be as good of a teacher as them.

2008 is, for me, a year of growth. That was my response on New Years Eve to a tweet that Chris sent out with a “themeword” meme. 07 was a year of experimentation and leaps of faith. I had just quit my job, started attending conferences, building my clientbase, adopting all kinds of new best practice techniques that made me more efficient. Nevermind the leap of faith that IndyHall would not only be successful, but becomes so integral into a community here in Philadelphia.

1 year later, it’s time to take all of the good habits and lessons that I acquired along the path of experimenting in the last 12 months and put them to use in a growth phase. Putting together a more formal team of talent is at the top of my list of “to-dos”, and we’ve already started formulating how that will work. Splitting my time between being the talent, and evangelizing best practices to new ears is also a priority. It’s about personal growth, its about industry growth (our industry, effectively our home), its about knowledge growth.

Instead of just attending conferences, I’m hoping to speak more. Instead of just building web sites, I hope to build web apps. Instead of just inspiring and managing myself, I hope to have a team to manage and keep inspired. I have some personal goals for IndyHall, but I’m going to save them for myself for now because I’m more interested in seeing how the community that we have here continues to hit a stride and take advantage of the resources we’ve created. That giving up of some control, for me, is part of my personal growth as well. I’m learning to practice what I preach!

I’m really excited about this year. Really, really excited.

Tags: 2008, dreams, growth, outlook