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

Original Photo by Jill Greenseth

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of me having gone independent.

Wow.

A year. Really? I go back and forth between “that’s it” and “that long”? In some aspects, I feel like it was only a couple of months. In other aspects I look at all that I’ve managed to accomplish everything I’d set out to do, and much much more.

I partnered with some amazing talent, many of whose work has earned us opportunities to work together more than once. I worked with some amazing clients (many of whom are brands that I really, really love).

I’ve co-built a couple of funny little apps that got a fair amount of attention, which was never the plan…the plan was to have fun building them.

I co-founded our own little version of a much larger movement that, in it’s own right, has paved the way for more opportunities for myself and countless other people. That’s one of the most gratifying and exciting accomplishments of my life, and I’m SO happy and grateful to have been a part of it and have made all of the friendships and connections I have along the way.

One year in, I’ve learned a lot about making choices and how to learn from the choices that I, and others have made.

The Next Chapter

It’s only appropriate that my newest client not only has choice in their name, but is excited to learn what happens when you give a community some opportunity to make choices.

My newest venture is a new kind of building. This one is less about building a website site and a lot more more about building a community. Learning from the wonderful community building experience we’ve had here at IndyHall, I thought it’d be great to take the model to the road and allow others to benefit from it. This next foray into community building is with a company called Choice Shirts, just outside of Philadelphia in Pennsauken, NJ.

The new project is called The Choice100 and it’s first incarnation as a blog has launched last night. It’s simple and direct, but that’s by design. The whole goal of the project at this stage of the game is to facilitate asking a potential community of design talent what they think about the proposed community model, and feed back as to what would benefit them the most.

This project has me really excited for a number of reasons. One, it’s a really fun opportunity to have conversations with the folks who work in a field that I’m closely tied to (design, that is) but from a whole new angle for me; graphic design for apparel.

Even moreso is that a company with a fairly traditional (and well established) business model is just as amped as I am to listen to their customers (who, in this case, double as their product creators) and be so open about the process.

In the preliminary research on who to have in the loop for this, I got some really positive feedback from designers that have worked in other t-shirt “contest” and “designer community” scenarios. Of course, they’ve all had thoughts as to what was good and what was bad. What’s really great about ChoiceShirts and The Choice 100 is that the company has a history spotted with creative evolutions of existing and established business models, and that they are embracing a conversation within a community to help model the next steps for their company.

Sounds wonderfully Cluetrain to me. What happens when you stop selling and start conversing. ChoiceShirts is not only embracing that, but they’re excited to embrace that. That’s immensely energizing and inspiring for me.

We’re going to be starting from the ground up. This blog is out there to announce the existence of this new evolutionary process for ChoiceShirts, and gather the interested parties in a place where they can converse. Next steps will include some real-world brainstorming, which we’ll facilitate at IndyHall much like the first brainstorming session we held back in August.

Check out the site, leave some comments, and subscribe to the blog and twitter feeds if it sounds like something you’re interested in participating in. Remember, this project is about us hearing what you have to say!

My friend Randy Schmidt IMd me tonight to tell me about a friend of his who is driving a race called One Lap America.

The race follows the route that used to be the Cannonball run when it used to be illegal. Check out the history of the event at the website.

Randy’s friend, Chris Gottschall and his driving partner Jim Wegielewski had hoped to blog the experience, but recognized the obstacles. When Randy told Chris about Twitter, it was clear that this would be the best way for both the drivers to record the event in real time. Both of them plan to twitter the entire way.

Twitter has been used for all kinds of things from application mashups to server status notifications to conference party going. This is one of the first time’s I’ve seen someone recognize twitter as a tool to do something that would be very difficult by any other means. The multiple on-ramps (and I’m not talking about the ones on the interstate) provided by twitter mean that an activity that would be pretty tricky to do mobile…like blogging…that is made even more tricky by long distance mobility…like a cross country race…is now possible. And best of all, easy.

I’ll be interested to see if there is any kind of fan-groups that form around Chris and his driver’s twittering as they cross the country. I know I’ll be watching. Will you?

Tags: twitter, One Lap of America, Chris Gottschall, Jim Wegielewski, Randy Schmidt, Data Onramps

some twitter users do…and we’ve made it easy to find them (or for them to find themselves and realize a problem).

Last night Alex Rudloff approached me about doing some visual cleanup on a little hack-fest he had put tgether called Twitterholic. It simply scrapes the public timeline and dumps stats to a database, and then displays the users with the highest number of followers. Over time, the numbers will get more accurate and interesting…and there are plenty of fun ideas for the aggregate date collected in the works.

Seems it’s gotten a little out of control.

Of course, some of our friends aren’t thrilled with what we did…but you know, if someone had to do it, aren’t you glad it’s us? At least we’ll use our powers for good. Besides…we didn’t make it for money. Or recognition. It was totally a goof, totally fun, and like it’s big brother “Twitter”, will continue to be a social experiment to see what kinds of numbers and trends we can uncover.

Alex and I love twitter too. For better or for worse.

Tags: twitter, twitterholic, weknowhtml, alex rudloff