Five minutes later, I sounded like a grumpy old man with this:

Great. People are connecting their Twitter to Google Buzz. Now I can ready your fucking status message SIX times instead of five.

Yeah, every time I try to type “read you”, it always comes out “ready your”. Ignore that. But here’s the point. We’re all on a bunch of social networks. We have them connected to each other. It’s getting ridiculous. I was checking out a friend’s Facebook page last night. There were actually two status updates of the same Flickr photo that was pumped through Gowalla.

Gowalla. Let’s start there. I don’t give a fuck that you’re at Stop & Shop. All the times that I post about my kids taking a crap? That’s me paying you back for Flickring your tweet of a Gowalla Facebook status that you’re getting milk.

Maybe I’m just jealous that I don’t go anywhere.

But anyway, as a hyperconnected kind of guy, I try my best to keep up with my friends. The duplicate postings make this so much harder and much more irritating. I bitched about this before when Ping.fm was all the rage (what the hell happened to them?). You become tempted to not care what anyone is doing, but then you’re losing out completely.

The truth.

I have my Twitter and Facebook accounts linked. I don’t feel good about it. But I actually don’t have a ton of friend overlap there. Facebook is a mixture of family, high school friends (I apparently had a couple more than I realized), guys from my baseball sim league… and a few folks I keep in touch with on a daily basis via Twitter. So, those folks—the ones I’m probably connected to the most—see my stuff twice. Sometimes that’s okay… you don’t usually get to read EVERYTHING people post to Twitter, so it can be a good safety net.

What Facebook does have is excellent filtering tools. You can easily make lists of people you don’t see updates from on other networks. I do this. I have all of my Facebook friends in at least one list. The ones that tend to post to Twitter I just don’t check as often (even then it is really to make sure I didn’t miss anything).

There has to be a better way.

I thought FriendFeed was going to solve this. I really did. They allowed you to feed all of your public data into one stream. Theoretically (and I’m not sure if they ever did this), they should be able to cut the duplicates out and make life easier. They even had a pretty innovating feature called “imaginary friends” where you could make a fake FriendFeed user stream for your friends that didn’t have accounts. So, if my friend was on Flickr but not anything else, I could add his photos to my stream, for example.

It just didn’t work, though. And I’m not sure why. The imaginary friend feature was a lot of work and wasn’t intuitive. You also couldn’t consume non-open data (like Facebook status messages). That was a pretty big drawback. You still had to check Facebook.

What we need.

Moments after that first tweet/rant, I followed up with:

Someone make a tool that aggregates Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc. and removes the dupes. Make it slick. You’ll be rich.

We’re smart people. Someone should be able to build something that automatically fetches (and updates) your connections to your social networks—Twitter, Facebook. Buzz, Flickr, etc.—and trims the dupes. Bonus points for allowing you to merge the contacts from these different networks so you can tell it they are the same person (which could also help distinguish between real dupes or a friend reposting something by another friend).

Maybe this tool could be Google Buzz. I’d be pretty happy if it was. I’m already a Gmail user. One reason I think Buzz stands a fighting chance is that I don’t have to leave my email app to check my other communications. That’s actually quite compelling.

I wish I had the time to figure this problem out and make an app. But the job keeps me busy and the three kids keep me busier.

That and all my spare time is spent reading that you’re picking up the fucking milk.

People of Twitter, there are douchebags among us.

Gone are the days when Twitter’s own description of the service was accurate:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Now everybody is flocking to Twitter in hopes of answering the questions “How can I sell my product to you?”, “How can I get you to follow me?”, and “OMG Plz RT?”. Yes, we’ve gone from Twitter being a virtual unknown outside the geek circles to hearing Billy Bush, Ashton Kutcher, and (this one opened the floodgates) Oprah gush about our beloved microblogging service.

Once all these newbies flock to Twitter, they immediately have a few questions. Specifically, they want to know (a) how they are supposed to make all this money on Twitter, (b) how they, too, can have 1 million followers, and—this one probably bugs me the most—(c) hey, why can’t the up the character limit? 140 is too small! If not helped, these folks will turn into social media douchebags (or worse, social media sleestacks!).

My goal here is to provide some tips you can point these misguided folks to. Help them avoid becoming douchebags.

1. It’s not all about you. If you’re going to get anything out of Twitter at all, you need to immediately check your ego at the door, listen to people, and build relationships. Talking about the things your or your company are doing will only get you anywhere once you’ve already joined the conversation.
2. Don’t tweet about your number of followers. It’s technically impossible to do that without sounding like a douchebag.
3. Don’t ask for x many more followers so you can reach a “milestone”. Double douchey. You’re better off saying something interesting (so people will retweet it) than asking THE PEOPLE ALREADY FOLLOWING YOU if you can get a few more followers.
4. Don’t retweet Oprah*. Just don’t. She has eleven bajillion followers. We’re all aware she has a Twitter account. If we want to see her tweets, we’ll follow her. By retweeting Oprah, you’re exposing Oprah’s tweets to the millions of people who purposely have avoided them at all costs. (* This also applies for Ashton Kutcher, Mashable, TechCrunch, Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, etc.)
5. Don’t ask for retweets. If something is interesting, it will be retweeted. People already retweet WAY too much anyway. Please don’t encourage them.
6. Don’t break the system. I get it. You’re annoyed that Twitter changed the way @replies work. But don’t go putting extra characters in front of your replies, forcing EVERYONE to see your @replies to EVERYONE. I know some people really liked that feature. But for a lot of us, if we had that feature turned on, Twitter would have been unusable. Don’t ruin Twitter for the rest of us.
7. This ain’t no RSS feed. My stance used to be that you shouldn’t tweet about every single blog post you write. My reasoning was that if people wanted to see every blog post, they’d subcribe to the feed. Well, for many Twitter is replacing the RSS reader. So, my new stance is that it’s fine to tweet about each blog post—as long as that’s not the only thing you’re using Twitter for. Mix them in with actual conversations. While you’re at it, don’t just tweet “[title] [link]“. Give us a teenie bit of context, or at least just make them sound friendlier. I know I’m more apt to click on something if the tweet gives me a little incentive as opposed to just looking like an auto-published tweet.
8. Learn how to @reply. By default (and as of this writing, the only setting) is that people will only see @replies from people they follow ONLY when they’re directed to other people they also follow. I love this default setting. So, here are some ways to use it right:

   • @adarowski wrote this awesome post about CSS. http://tinyurl.com/6×9add

     The problem with this tweet is that it would only be seen by people who follow both you and @adarowski. People who follow @adarowski likely saw him tweet it already. I’m guessing you want this to go to your whole network. @adarowski would appreciate that, too.

   • Check out this awesome post about CSS by @adarowski. http://tinyurl.com/6×9add

     Now this would go to your entire network. Win for you. Win for @adarowski.

   • @mattgillooly Heading to Providence Geeks? I’ll be there in about 30 mins.

     At first glance, you might think this should be a direct message. But for an event like Providence Geeks, the folks that follow both you and @mattgillooly probably would be happy to know you’re arriving soon (unless, of course, you’re a douchebag). What I like about this is that it doesn’t go to your entire network—just the folks that know both of you (and therefore actually care).

   • @adarowski See you soon!

     Something like this is probably best as a direct message. There’s no event context and it’s clearly just for one person to see.

9. Do not—under any circumstances—send an automatic direct message to new followers. Sending an automatic direct message says one of two things:
   • You don’t know me yet, but I feel comfortable enough to send you some spam.
   • I do know you, but I’m the type of douchebag who sends auto-DMs to EVERYONE, so you get the same generic response as everyone else. Feel special?

   Don’t be a douchebag. If you want to DM them, send them a real DM, typed with your own fingers.

10. Fill out your profile. A laundry list of ways to NOT get followed on Twitter:
    • By not using your real name. I’m talking to you, socmed14413 and flygrrl182.
    • By not using an actual photo of you (like your logo or something). Or worse, by not adding a photo at all.
    • By not providing a link. We’re not convinced. We want to find out a bit more about you before following. If you don’t have another link to provide, write a blog or join LinkedIn and come back later.
    • By not providing a “one line bio”. Think of this as your answer to the question “why am I interesting?”. Leaving it blank gives people no reason to follow you back.
    • By calling yourself a “social media expert”. Even if you are one. Everybody on Twitter calls themselves a social media export. After all, they do have a Twitter account.

Let’s help these folks out. What else you got?

Turns out, the problem is that my friends on Facebook were basically my friends on Twitter. So, by the time I checked out Facebook, everything I was seeing was old news.

Time passed, and something happened. More people joined Facebook. And I’m using it more and more.

The people I’m finding on Facebook now are people from high school… people from college… people from old jobs. As it goes more mainstream (and the early, core users probably hate this), more and more people sign up. And those are the folks that weren’t already on Twitter, Flickr, or FriendFeed.

So, suddenly my Facebook news feed is no longer a list of tweets I’ve already read. It’s updates from people I’ve only recently connected with after (sometimes ten) years of silence.

Some Facebook (re)connections:

• Guy from high school who showed me this band called “Nirvana” about a month before Nevermind was released.
• Girl from college who I ran into outside of Build-a-Bear with our respective batches of children. She still looks the same as in college.
• Guy from a couple jobs ago who felt bad that he kept his job while the rest of us were laid off, so he meticulously edited everyone’s resumes (he was a kickass editor).
• My sister’s friend who asked me to her junior prom. I went and we had a great time. But Facebook is the first time we connected since then.
• Bass player of the band I was in circa 1995ish. He was a huge Toadies fan and had a pet squirrel that just walked in his house one day and decided to hang.
• Girl from high school who I traded mix tapes with. She gave me showtunes and I gave her indie rock. Neither of us changed the others’ taste, but I like to think we enlightened each other a bit.
• Girl from high school who was super cute and… I never told her that.
• Ex-girlfriend of my friend (my friend who I was in a band with for a while, is my wife Erin’s cousin, and is the person who introduced me to Erin). I’ll always remember her “X-Ray Techs Do It in the Dark” bumper sticker.
• Guy from college who’s doing simple, standards-based web design in Providence. Basically, he’s me. But we hadn’t spoken in about eight years until recently meeting up.
• Intern from a couple jobs ago who’s lasting effect on my life is introducing me to The Appleseed Cast.
• Best friend from grade school to high school, who’s house I would ride my bike to every day and we’d play baseball until it was dark. If it was raining, we played computer baseball.
• That guy’s little brother, who I have a hard time picturing older than 12 or so years old.
• Girl I worked at the grocery store with… I tried, but failed. But now we’re Facebook buds, so it’s cool.
• Ooops, another girl I worked with at the grocery store with. Tried. Failed. Was kind of the story of my life in 1996.

I know it’s cool for us “open web” advocates to openly complain about Facebook. But you know what? Without it, these people wouldn’t be in my life at all right now.

So, who have you reconnected with?

In October, I wrote about Twalala, a new Twitter client. Twalala bills itself as “Twitter with a mute button”, but muting is only half of what makes Twalala a worthwhile Twitter client.

First, I have a few personal requirements in a Twitter client. I know not everybody’s requirements list is the same, but mine are important. They are:

1. Web-based: The majority of my Twitter usage is actually done on the iPhone. But I don’t want a native iPhone app because I like to maintain the same Twitter workflow whether I’m mobile or not.
2. Mobile: This goes along with the first, but the app needs to be usable in both desktop and mobile formats. Preferably, it would be the same interface for both.
3. Full-featured: The mobile version of Twitter.com is decent, but lacks some important features (like DMs, which you need to switch to the full twitter.com to access).

So, the only app that has filled these requirements is Hahlo. I love Hahlo. Like, a lot. I really have no complaints about it (recent downtime troubles aside). My newest pain point has nothing to do with Hahlo, but has everything to do with my growing Twitter network. When I’m online and working, I have no problem skimming the tweets from my entire stream, seeing what’s going on in tech and the world. But the problem is if I’ve been offline for a while and I want to catch up. I just can’t catch up on everything I’ve missed.

This is why some people use Twitter as a real-time thing and don’t worry about catching up. But I have a large number of people in my stream that I want to see EVERY tweet from. It’s not everybody, and that’s the problem. With Hahlo (and every single other web-based Twitter app), I either catch up on everyone or nobody.

I tried some hacks, such as subscribing to some people (via a FriendFeed list) in Google Reader. But that’s delayed and it mixes in what I’ve already read with what I’ve missed. It was just more trouble than it was worth. So, I turned to Twalala. And it worked.

When it was first released, I used Twalala as a bit of a novelty, muting a few phrases so I’d never see them in my Twitter stream (like those damn Qik.com links). I hadn’t gone as far a muting people. That has changed.

A couple weeks ago, I opened Twalala, took a deep breath, and started muting the crap out of my follower list. Who made the cut? People I know personally and industry folks I REEEEALLY want to see everything from. I believe I muted 150 or so people. Sounds shady, right? But no. The thing is, Twalala is my “catch-up” app. I don’t use it all the time. In fact, I still might use Hahlo a bit more than Twalala.

Remember when I said that muting was only half of what makes Twalala cool? The other half is the complete opposite—white listing. If you “white list” certain terms, they will always be highlighted (in yellow) in your stream… even if you’ve muted the person that said it. This is perfect for @replies and brand monitoring.

How can Twalala become my full-time Twitter client?

I’m still using multiple clients (Twalala, Hahlo, and twitter.com), but how far away is Twalala from being a one-stop solution for me? Here’s what I’d need:

• An unfiltered stream: It’s great that I can mute people and phrases. But that means I’m locked into those settings (unless I remove the filters one by one). It would be nice to have a view that shows my friend stream unfiltered along with one that shows it filtered. Right now, the main tabs in Twalala are “home | @replies | direct messages”. I’d recommend “all | filtered | @replies | DMs”. That way I could see my entire list in one tab, but also see the list filtered a click away.
• The ability to follow/unfollow: I’d love to be able to follow someone from within Twalala. Right now I have to hop to a different client to do that.
• The ability to favorite: Because sometimes @wrycoder is so good that I need to jump to twitter.com to fave that ish.
• Profile data: Right now, I need to click out of Twalala to see a user’s basic profile info. On their page, I’d like to see bio, number of followers, number of following, and URL.
• Remember me: A remember me button would be nice, especially with mobile. Sometimes I open up Hahlo when I’d rather open Twalala because I need one click to get to my stream on Hahlo and (lemme count…) about 20 to do the same in Twalala.
• iPhone-optimized input: Not sure why, but posting a tweet has gotten pretty slow. You need to punch a bunch of letters on the iPhone and wait for Twalala to catch up. I admit sometimes I read in Twalala and jump to Hahlo to tweet.

That’s it! Not to much, right?

So, give Twalala a look. I might just be what you need to make Twitter work better for you.

Spend the weekend of October 18th and 19th with us, designing, developing, and deploying the micro application you’ve been dreaming about.

So, eat burritos and code for an entire weekend. One of these days, I’ll be able to pull something like that off.

This year, Providence Geeks rock stars Matt Gillooly (@mattgillooly), Alex Taylor (@goldenmeanie), TJ Sondermann (@sondernagle) and Steve Babigian (@k00k) formed a team. And they came up with something awesome.

Twalala is a web-based Twitter client (I just happen to be running it as a site-specific browser using Fluid.app in the screenshot above). Why does the world need another Twitter client? Because this one solves a problem that nobody else does.

Twalala is “Twitter with a mute button”. Why would you want to mute something in Twitter? Here are a few examples I can come up with:

• You don’t want to hear anything about a specific movie/tv show until you’ve seen it. You can add “Iron Man” or “LOST” to your mute phrases and nothing containing those words will show up in your stream.
• You’re like me and hate automated messages that come from other services. Find the text that is always in those (like “Welcome new followers:”) and cut them from your stream.
• Maybe you feel obligated to follow that reeeeeeally annoying person that’s new to Twitter. Well, you can, then mute them, and they’ll be none the wiser. Until they ask you what you thought of that tweet…

Here’s where you set your muting preferences:

“No Thanks” includes phrases you want cut from your stream. “I Didn’t Mean You!” is a whitelist. You can add phrases or usernames that will be allowed through, even if other parts of the message are muted per the filters above it. Finally, “Take a Timeout” mutes everything by a specific user.

When something is white-listed through the “I Didn’t Mean You!” portion, it is highlighted in your stream (see my “twalala” tweet from the first screenshot). Very cool for your ego, when you can easily see if someone mentions you or your company.

After just two days of development, Twalala is surprisingly robust. Every time I accessed it over the weekend, something was new, tweaked, or fixed. Of course, there are still a few things missing to make me completely ditch Hahlo, but I’m sure they’re coming. Those things are:

• A replies view
• The ability to view DMs sent and received
• A favorite button next to each Tweet
• Hyperlinked hashtags (even if it just sent me off to the search.twitter interface, though integrated would be cool)

I love where this is headed, though. It even looks great on iPhone after a double-tap (one of my requirements for a Twitter client is consistent user experience on iPhone and in-browser).

Great job, guys!

Please, give Twalala a try.

Hey, we’ve all been there. I chuckled. Great tweet.

Then my email dings. I get this friend’s Brightkite updates via email because he is local. I checked it. Same message. Throughout the day, I checked Facebook and FriendFeed. The same tweet was over there in the form of status updates.

The kicker was later seeing that tweet as a LinkedIn status update. I’m a pretty laid back guy, but I’m sure not going to post something like that as my “professional” status update.

So, what’s the problem here? This friend of mine uses a service called Ping.fm to update all of his services at once. This leads to two big problems: redundancy and context.

The Redundancy Problem

I follow this person (and many others) on several services. When the same message is broadcast over all of them, there are serious duplication problems. One of the reasons I loved FriendFeed was that it was a potential fix to this problem. You could now follow all of someone’s feeds in one place. But with the redundancy problem, FriendFeed becomes a mess.

Some folks will publish a blog post, tweet about it, digg it, save it to del.icio.us, Stumble it, then roll it and smoke it. So, the same post hits my stream a half dozen times. I know I can hide stuff in FriendFeed, but that involves a lot of per-contact strategy just to make FriendFeed usable again. Usually, I’d rather just skip it.

The Context Problem

Context is a big issue, too. Brightkite is a social network based on your location. So, any messages you post are affiliated with the last place you “checked in”. So, did my friend want to bite people just in that location? I think not, but that message is now affiliated with that place.

And LinkedIn? Are recruiters really into face biters? I’m guessing not.

Where I’m Redundant

I’m a bit guilty on two counts. I have Twitter update my Facebook status. I do this because I used to have very separate groups of contacts on Facebook and Twitter. Also, I wasn’t much of a Facebook fan and that was an easy way to keep that network updated. The truth is, ideally only some of my tweets would go into Facebook, but there’s no good way to manage that from within Twitter (which is where I update).

Also, I’ll occasionally tweet about a blog post I just wrote. I save this for posts I’m particularly proud of and thing more people than my small crew of RSS readers would like.

I’m going to revisit how I update Facebook. The tweeting of blog posts I don’t mind as much because I follow a lot of people on Twitter who’s blog feeds I don’t subscribe to. People seem to be good about really only tweeting links they want a response to.

But folks, for the most part let’s kill the automation and use these services as they were intended to be used

If not, I’ll bite your face.

I’ve heard a lot of people complain that FriendFeed is an uncontrollable firehose of data. I disagree. If anything, I’ve found that with a few tweaks it can actually help you manage your information better. Here’s a few tips:

You Don’t Have to Follow Everyone

This one sounds obvious. But ever since I started subscribing to feeds or following folks on Twitter, I’ve been very selective about adding A-listers. Why? Those folks tend to produce a hell of a lot of content. Following too many prolific A-listers can really turn your feedreader into a mess.

My theory has always been to follow bloggers with whom you share similar interests. They’ll tend to chime in about the stuff that’s worth talking about. I’m thinking of Brian Oberkirch here. You can’t believe how much time I’ve saved over the last two years by reading Brian and NOT reading other people.

FriendFeed gets this. I don’t need to follow Robert Scoble. I just wait for some of my friends to let me know when they’re interested in something Robert posted. It appears in my feed like so:

Never Miss an Important Tweet Again

I’ve already talked about how I can filter my FriendFeed feed by service, letting me read all tweets on Twitter and not duplicate them on FriendFeed.

But, I’m hitting that “following” threshold that makes it difficult to keep up with EVERY tweet on Twitter. So, if I only have time to skim the last few pages of tweets or I go offline for a few hours (or, more realistically, Twitter does) and can’t catch up on every tweet, FriendFeed will let me know which of my friends’ tweets are being “liked” or commented on.

Follow Stuff that was Previously Clunky to Follow

Does Del.icio.us even have a “friends” feature? I don’t even know. It very well might.

If it does, nobody uses it. And that’s a shame. Think about the mundane things you find yourself reading about folks on Twitter. Then, when you consider that you’re missing an important activity like taking the time to read an article online and save it for later… It’s crazy.

It’s true that everyone with a Del.icio.us account has had an RSS feed, but with FriendFeed it has never been so easy to subscribe to all of someone’s services at once. There’s gold in those Del.icio.us feeds. And the more you rely on your friends’ bookmarks, the less you’ll need to subscribe to a billion blogs.

Saved bookmarks on Del.icio.us appear as individual entries in FriendFeed. This is awesome because now I can see, for example, what Joshua Porter is bookmarking. Chances are, if he’s bookmarking it, I want to read it.

I used to appreciate when people would have a post of “this week’s links on Ma.gnolia” or whatever. I didn’t want to have to hunt for their bookmark feeds. But now, there’s a downside to those blog posts. I’m now subscribed (through FriendFeed) to the blog feed AND the social bookmarking feed. That means I get duplicate content.

But, FriendFeed has all sorts of options for hiding this duplicate content. For example, if you have a FriendFeed friend who has social bookmarking links published in their blog feed, you can just hide all social bookmarking entries from that person. Similarly, you can turn off the other two features I profiled here—you can choose not to see friend of friends’ content or tweets that people “liked”/commented on.

So, FriendFeed can be a firehose, I suppose. But they have put a lot of tools in place to help you turn down the pressure.

I’ve already subscribed to most of my FriendFeed friends in some way over the past couple of years (be it their blog feed, Flickr stream, Twitter feed, etc.). So, a large amount of content in FriendFeed was stuff I’d seen before (or was about to see). However, the chief offender was Twitter.

Here’s how much of my friends’ content came from Twitter:

And that’s nothing. About 75% of my own personal feed content is from Twitter.

I skim or read every single tweet from the people I follow. So, that meant for a LOT of duplicated content. Through FriendFeed’s Advanced Search feature, I stumbled upon the fact that you could filter the feed by service using a nicely hackable URL. If you enter http://friendfeed.com/adarowski?service=blog, you get just my blog posts. Swap out “blog” and put in “flickr” and you get my photo stream. Swap in “twitter” and get my tweets. And so on.

I wondered how I could instead set my feed to show all services EXCEPT one… that one, of course, being Twitter. I was about to write to FriendFeed when I saw that someone else had asked the same question. I had assumed the “Hide” link under EVERY entry was to hide an individual entry. I never understood how helpful that would be. But it turns out, that link offers you a popup:

There ya go. You can hide all the Twitter updates. They even let you decide if you want to show tweets that people have commented on/favorited. A nice touch. My feed is much more manageable now.

There are still a few things that are keeping me from replacing Google Reader with FriendFeed as my #1 source of feeds, but I’ll save those thoughts for another time.

For the second straight year, I attended the South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival. This trip was much different than the last for many reasons.

• Last year, I must admit, the main goal was getting my name out there so I could find a position doing more SXSW-y type things. This year, I’ve got that gig. I was there to network, learn, and spread the word about our product, BatchBook.
• Last year, I dragged my laptop and camera everywhere, blogging like crazy. This year, I carried an iPhone.
• Last year, I blogged 16,657 words in 29 blog posts. This year, I took a few notes in the Notes app on the iPhone.
• Last year, I went to a panel at every time slot. This year, I realized better things happen when you skip panels sometimes.
• Last year, I went alone. This year, I had Michelle from BatchBlue with me.
• Last year, I tried to plan everything I was going to do. This year, I let Twitter dictate it at night.

The Panels

There weren’t a ton of memorable panels, to be honest. These stood out:

Nick Finck’s The Contextual Web gave me some good ideas for things I could do on BatchBook, especially if we start optimizing for iPhone/mobile. I went to the Henry Jenkins Keynote because of the urging of my friend Kate from PatientsLikeMe. The talk was amazingly thought-provoking and probably should have a post of it’s very own. Jason Fried’s 10 Things We’ve Learned at 37signals was a reinforcement of a lot of things we’ve already heard on his blog, but it was nice to hear it all in one package.

Social Design Strategies (Joshua Porter, Chris Messina, Daniel Burka, and Todd Sieling) was one of five panels I was considering going to. It was a good choice. I was particularly interested in Todd talking about the “gardners” ma.gnolia uses to control spam accounts. I don’t use ma.gnolia enough… probably should. Kathy Sierra, of course, was fantastic in Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users. The online downside was the remember that we don’t get her incredible blog posts anymore.

Again, seven panels at one time that I wanted to see. Who won? Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing Brian Oberkirch was supposed to moderate this, but unfortunately he couldn’t make it. But the panel still featured Dave Parmet, Hugh MacLeod, Tara Hunt, Jeremiah Owyang, Chris Heuer, and Deb Schultz. The only complaint is that there were so many great minds on the panel that it could have gone on for at least a couple hours. Portable Social Networks was another one that really could get it’s own post. Jeremy Keith is a moderation master and his panel included Chris Messina, Leslie Chicoine, Joseph Smarr, and David Recordon.

A Few of My Favorite Things… and People

John Eckman

We hung out with a lot of great people at SXSW. It was great to spend time with folks like Kate Brigham and Joshua Porter again, but one person I had never hung out with before was John Eckman. By then end of the trip, we were playing shuffleboard with John. Best moment? Michelle’s amazing 5-spot on her final shot against John:

Matt Gillooly

I had met Matt Gillooly of Providence-based Public Display before, but… never really got to know him. Some of his pre-SXSW Twitters clued me in on what was to come (things like wondering if the sharpie on his arms from the night before would be a problem with airport security).

The dude didn’t disappoint, and I come back from Austin a total Gillooly fanboy. The dude knows how to rock. Not only that, the dude knows how to work under pressure. You see, he was at SXSW to show off his product, FuseCal. They were going with a relatively lo-fi booth anyway, but then Delta went ahead and lost everything they had, including business cards.

But Matt ripped up sheets of notebook paper and wrote “shittycard@fusecal.com”, asking attendees to email that address so they could be mailed a real business card. The booth design (seen in a video shot by Michelle below) actually won them an official “Fanciest Booth” award from SXSW.

Twitter

Many people were asking as SXSW approached… “What will be this year’s Twitter?” The answer was easy: Twitter, again.

SXSW ran on Twitter. The audience revolted using Twitter. Meetups were planned ad hoc using Twitter. Party arrangements were made using Twitter.

Even Michelle started using Twitter.

Three cool things about Twitter this week:

1. We never had to plan what we were doing at night. We just checked Twitter to see what might get the most bang for the buck.
2. I had never met Kara Soluri before, but we’re Twitter friends. Turns out, we were in the same panel. So we Twittered where we each were sitting and met after the panel ended.
3. We didn’t get to meet Dave Seah at the recent Newburyport meetup we attended, but the first evening in Austin he Twittered that he was in the hotel lobby checking email. Just so happened to be our hotel. So, we went downstairs and said hi.

From Hard Rock to Storytelling

There’s karaoke, then there’s karaoke with a live band. Karaoke Apocalypse played at the end of BarCampAustin (shortly before we got there) and simply rocked. It was here that Chris Brogan and Pistachio (two well-known Boston bloggers) completely stole the show. Ewan Spence was the M.C. and that Scot rocked like no other.

At the other side of the spectrum, Fray had a storytelling event. It was an open mic for personal stories. Again, Ewan was there. He told an amazing personal story… he writes about it, so I’ll let him explain it.

Ira Kaplan

I already blogged about meeting Ira Kaplan. That still hasn’t quite sunk in. I did actually meet two rock stars. One of them just happens to be a techie NOW. But back in the day, I was a HUGE Orbit fan. I met frontman Jeff Robbins.

Steve Ganz

I like to say that this year was about meeting real rock stars and not web rock stars (see above). But being a fan of Microformats and LinkedIn, it was really cool to meet Steve Ganz. I told him about some of the things I’d like to see from LinkedIn, debated portable social networks a bit, and talked about my complete lack of Javascript knowledge. Hell of a guy, really.

The Final Word

It was a very inspiring trip, again. I gotta thank BatchBlue again for sending us. I know I’ll be going next year—I’ll be going every year. In fact, I’m already planning to submit a panel…

Why do I like Twitter?

• I can stay in touch with people in a more laid back manner than constantly pinging them with “what’s up?” messages and phone calls. Not only is it less intrusive, but it is far more efficient.
• I can see what industry folks I really care about are thinking about. I don’t follow a ton of web celebs, but I follow the ones that provide the most value to me—folks like @factoryjoe, @bokardo, @simplebits, @brianoberkirch, @missrogue, etc.
• I can keep in touch with the local web community. A lot of Providence web geeks are on Twitter. Good to know what people are up to, who’s going to what meetup, etc.
• I can lighten my blogging load. Sometimes 140 or less is just fine. Blogging can be intimidating if you only have something quick to say and you’ve got that big old text field with a scrollbar looking at you.

But most of all, if I page through my own tweets, it is basically my biography of the last year—in bullet points. Twitter feeds tend to contain a lot more personal information than blog feeds, and that’s okay. I like reading back at my tweets about when Ella ate Play-Doh for the first time or when I was working with Nolan sleeping on my chest. And call me crazy, but I like to see when others tweet about that too.

So, in closing, here are some “landmark tweets” from my past year…

My first tweet:

Now with BatchBlue:

Nolan is born:

Got the iPhone (yes, it really has been a landmark moment…):

BatchBlue going to DEMOfall07:

World Champs. Again.

As a Twitter user, what motivation do I have to go to Facebook just to read the exact same content? I’m starting to realize I’m just not Facebook’s target audience.

Last.fm tracks my iTunes music listening habits and creates charts from them. For many people, this would not be enough personal value to make it worthwhile. But for me, it totally is. I love this. I eagerly await my charts every week. It’s like fantasy football for audiophiles.

When I make the fantasy football comparison, what I’m really saying is these stats are very important to you, and you watch them update like a hawk. Yet, nobody but you likely cares about them at all.

So, that’s the personal value I get out of Last.fm. I love listening to music, but I’m also a stats junkie—particularly baseball (if I do occasionally watch a football game I get completely frustrated if I ask someone what the record is for longest field goal and nobody can tell me). So, I get an additional kick when I see artists overtaking others on my charts.

Well, I came across another site that gave me this type of personal value. I adore Twitter. I use it all the time. But there is very little front end for looking at what you’ve tweeted in the past. Heck, you can’t even search your past tweets. I recently came across a site called Tweeterboard that starts to tap into some of this.

One of the first things that caught my eye about Tweeterboard is that it was developed by Gene Smith, who I saw at Webvisions (the event that completely shifted my career track). Next, what excited me about Tweeterboard may not have even been what is there, but what could be there.

Here’s what’s there:

The Dashboard

Tweeterboard crawls Twitter, collecting data along the way. It uses an algorithm to rank the top Tweeters by reputation points. I have to say, this isn’t the part that I’m all excited about, so I haven’t really looked into how the rankings work.

Gets Love

These are the folks who I specifically talk to on Twitter. If you’re not sure what @username is, you probably either quit reading this already (or you should check this out if I still have you).

So, apparently I write a lot of messages to @hmason, which is funny since she’s a new Twitter buddy. I’m guessing not all tweets have been crawled yet. I could have sworn I’ve tweeted @jharr more than that in a night. In fact, as I read this it looks like his page has not been crawled yet.

Gives Love

Again, looks like a very incomplete list so far and checks of a few friends’ pages show they have not been crawled yet. But these are folks that tweet @adarowski.

Box Score

Nothing says geek fantasy sport more than “box score”. This tab, of course, tallies the tweets to and from a pair of users.

Links

And here’s where they really got me. Any time you post a link to Twitter, Tweeterboard extracts it and adds it to an RSS feed. It’s like del.icio.us for your links you felt compelled to immediately share with the world. I think I’m going to go ahead and subscribe to a bunch of these feeds since the links people share via Twitter are probably far more relevant than those they would save to another site. Why? Well, to me del.icio.us is basically “mobile favorites”. I use it for reference. Twitter I use if I want other people to look at it.

Wish List

Some things I’d like to see.

• On those Gives/Gets Love tabs, I’d like to see a link on each line that brings you to a page that shows all tweets back and forth between those users using @username.
• I’d love to be able to search my old tweets. Perhaps Tweeterboard could provide that since they are crawling them all anyway.
• How about recommended users? Say many of your friends are following a particular person that you aren’t. I wanna know, dammit!
• Hashtags aggregator? Chris Messina has been adding hashtags to some tweets. Some have made fun of him. But this could be a great application for using them.
• I’ve always wanted to see a cool visualization of my tweets over time. If this was available for each user, that’d be great.

I’m sure I could think of more, but those are my first impressions. Very fun app.

Take a moment to think about the problem. You have met somebody for a couple of hours at a meet-up. You get on well and feel it is worth keeping in touch. You could swap telephone numbers but why would you call them? You certainly don’t know them well enough at this stage to call for a chat! You could exchange email addresses but what reason would you have to write? People get enough junk email as it is without you pestering them. What you need is a lightweight and informal way of keeping in touch so that the next time you meet you have something to talk about. Twitter is the answer.

I love it. This is quite similar to how I met a couple folks for the first or second time at SXSW but was able to talk about what’s going on in their lives because of their blogs or Flickr feeds. However, I wish this didn’t stop at just tech folks. I’ll say it now.

I wish everyone used Twitter.

Here’s my other problem. I switched jobs a few months ago. I loved the people at my old company. Quite honestly, there are probably about 40 of them I’d like to keep in touch with. But that’s just not realistic. I’m not going to just send an email every once in a while to 40 people saying “Hey, what’s up?” In real life? More like three people.

Like many, I mix personal and professional notes in my Twitter feed. For example, I’ll mix in:

Manny being Papi. 12:45 AM October 06, 2007 from web

with

Playing in leaves with Ella. about 23 hours ago from web

and

Jason Fried is presenting in Providence today at BIF3. Going to a meetup later on this evening. Should be fun. Gotta go early… overbooked. about 2 hours ago from web

So, as you can see, following my feed gives you a good idea of what I’m up to. Nothing obtrusive, just quick little updates to keep you in the loop about my life.

One of the criticisms of Twitter is “who the heck cares about your life?” Maybe it is a bit pig-headed of me to think people might give one half a crap what I’m up to. But the way I look at it is… I give a whole crap what others are up to. Keeps me in the loop. Gives me some context when I talk to them next. None of this “so, what have you been up to” small talk.

I hate small talk. Twitter can help eliminate that.

Similarly, I have a couple of friends who I talk to every couple to few months or so. One of the first questions is “what are you listening to?” I’ve got it all out there in public. And I wish you did, too.

So, this is better than just losing touch with a bunch of people, no?

Joshua Porter posted a great article yesterday on Bokardo called “Sermo a sign of a larger trend toward specialized social networks“. In the post, Joshua says:

Sermo is a sign of a larger trend: the move to smaller, more specialized social networks that have custom tools to support a unique activity and may cater to a private or exclusive set of users. In this case it is sharing medical information among verified doctors.

I’ve blogged about Sermo in the past. I love what they are doing—creating an exclusive social network for physicians so that they can discuss medical issues long before they hit the journals (and are likely more candid than journals). Of course, they are raising a little hell as the pharmaceutical companies can no longer control their messages delivered to each physician. They are (gasp) talking to each other.

If it is possible to have a crush on a company, you know I’m in love with PatientsLikeMe. I left a comment about them on Josh’s blog, so I’ll just repeat myself:

On the other side of the medical spectrum, I’ve spoken with a few folks from Boston-based PatientsLikeMe, another example of a specialized social network. They are a network for the patients. I love that instead of Amazon’s “customers who bought this also bought this…” intelligence, they have “patients at the exact same stage of ALS as you who are experiencing these symptoms that you are have taken these medications and felt these side effects.”

Ridiculously amazing.

The market of “just because” social networks is now bloated. In order to take off you’re going to need one of these specialized networks that offers something nobody else can. One key to that can be taking detailed profile data and using it to help foster your users’ social interactions (like PatientsLikeMe, and others such as last.fm).

Damn, reading that back, it sounds good. You can tell I love this idea. I recently joined Facebook. I yawned about it here. All I’ve done with it is insert widgets into my profile of specialized networks I have elsewhere (last.fm, Flickr, Twitter) and add friends that I have elsewhere. I find Facebook doesn’t really do anything more than my personal blog already does—act as an aggregator for all this information.

So, these specialized networks—last.fm (for tracking my music listening habits), del.icio.us (for storing my bookmarks), Flickr (for storing my photos), Twitter (for microblogging, public IM, whatever the hell you wanna call it), etc.—offer a hell of a lot more value than the “aggregator” social networks. You can easily hop to another aggregator (or create your own) and add the specialized content to that new profile. You still need the specialized services, but the Facebooks and MySpaces become expendable.

Then there’s OpenID and portable social networks (via Oberkirch). Once these reach their enormous potential, what really is the purpose of Facebook or MySpace?

personal value precedes network value

I guess that’s why to this day I still haven’t signed up for a MySpace account. I simply have no idea what I would get out of it. I have accounts with a few social networking sites and I’ve noticed that how much I use them more or less directly correlates to what personal value they have to me.

Here are eight social networking sites I have accounts with. Six of them I use enough to have posted links to my profile in my blog footer.

Twitter

Twitter is probably the application on this list I use most for “social” purposes. For those that don’t know, Twitter is an application that is compatible with all sorts of interfaces (web, email, IM, SMS, RSS, etc.) that essentially lets you get status updates from your contacts. It has been described as “microblogging”, “public IM”, or “public away messages”.

I started using it at SXSW, mostly because Evan & Co. were the darlings of the event. But I quickly started to appreciate the value. Not only can you subscribe to friends, you can also subscribe to industry professionals you enjoy learning from. Their Twitter feeds often contain interesting nuggets of information they don’t publish on their blog. That’s the beauty of it. It’s short (140 characters or less) and quick. You can publish and consume quick thoughts without needing to sift through large blog posts.

The basic personal value I get from Twitter is the ability to post short thoughts of my own without having to dedicate an entire blog post. Beyond that, it lets me keep track of folks who are doing the same.

Flickr

Flickr is an easy one. The personal value is public sharing of photos. The networking effects allow me to always have the newest photos of my contacts delivered to my RSS feed. It is a simple, beautiful thing.

Last.fm

I’ve written about Last.fm in the past. Last.fm tracks my iTunes music listening habits and creates charts from them. For many people, this would not be enough personal value to make it worthwhile. But for me, it totally is. I love this. I eagerly await my charts every week. It’s like fantasy football for audiophiles.

I’ve actually dipped into the networking side of things, as I documented my befriending of my #1 Last.fm “neighbour” (person in the system with listening habits most similar to yourself). I swear, Last.fm must think I’m a Scot.

LinkedIn

Honestly, I’m almost surprised I use LinkedIn. I signed up when a friend wanted to link to me and then I actually started using it when Steve Ganz deployed all those hResumes. Now that Mario Sundar is with them, I’m intrigued.

It requires minimal effort to add contacts, and there are some personal benefits. It is nice to see what old colleagues are up to. In particular, I found out through LinkedIn’s home page that Kate Brigham had joined PatientsLikeMe. That alone was worth the minimal investment. Combing through others’ contacts to find old contacts is also a worthwhile task.

It seems that the possibilities for LinkedIn aren’t even being touched. I mean, right now it is essentially a hyperlinked address book. Things like the new Questions feature are promising. You would think it would have been more prominent in my job search a few months ago. Every once in a while, I see some UX positions listed from my “network”, but everything’s pretty much on the West coast.

That said, I get the feeling that LinkedIn is in it’s infancy and it is going to keep adding more useful functionality.

Del.icio.us

Ah, the site the Del.icio.us Lesson was named for. Tons of personal value here. I use a lot of different browsers and a couple computers. Saving links to Del.icio.us ensures I’ll have them on whatever machine or browser I happen to be on.

I rarely use the network value, but sometimes it can be interesting. For example, it allows you to see who saves your own posts so you can get a better idea about other sites that they find helpful.

YouTube

YouTube can have a HUGE personal benefit if you share a lot of your own videos. I’ve only posted a few, so I don’t utilize it quite that much. But I do also use my account to save excellent live performances (like this) that I want to make sure I can easily find later.

And now, here are the two sites not yet in my blog footer—meaning… I simply haven’t found a specific use for them.

Facebook

It’s all the rage. It seems to be all some people (Kawasaki, for example) can talk about right now. I’ve even signed up. Like, less than a month ago. And let me tell you what—I pretty much have no idea why I should use it. It really is just a collection of the same activities that I do elsewhere. I mean, as a blogger, do I need Facebook?

What is the only thing I’ve really done with Facebook? I’ve added a few apps to my profile. I’ve added the Twitter app, last.fm app, Flickr app (though I can’t get the damn thing to work right)… but I link to all of those profiles from my blog footer, too.

Facebook wants me to update my status. I already do that with Twitter. Worst part is that Facebook wants me to go to the site to update everything… and read everything. Sorry, no RSS. Sorry, but I really don’t go to websites anymore. (Also wish LinkedIn provided updates to your contacts via RSS, for the record.)

Facebook also feels anti-open, anti-standard, etc. For example, I have no idea how I would even link you to my profile. Could it really be “http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=544839151″? They can’t do any better than that? How about Facebook.com/adarowski? No? Why not?

As you can see, I’m underwhelmed. About all it is good for is the groups features (which I don’t even use because there is no RSS… so maybe it’s not all that good) and the last.fm widget rocks if I’m on a machine that doesn’t have my music or the last.fm app installed. As of now, I can only envision using it if it somehow crushes LinkedIn and becomes the #1 site for business networking.

Pownce

Pownce is a really cool technology that some compare to Twitter. As Brian points out, they should not. I simply haven’t been able to use it for anything because it seems that where it differs from Twitter is that it is great for small working groups. For example, if we didn’t use Skype at work, Pownce would be a great option. But we don’t, so I don’t use it.

I’m not saying it is bad. In fact, it is quite attractive and well done. I just don’t have a use for it yet. If it had beat Twitter to the streets, we’d all be using Pownce. But it didn’t, so it needs that extra use for people to adopt it.

So there you have it.

Those are the social networking apps I use. As you can see, I’m not much for the networking part, go figure. Gimme value immediately and you’ll suck me in.

A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!

It’s great for something like SXSW. Wanna see where everyone is headed for lunch? Look at their tweets. Wanna know what Jeremiah really thinks of that panel? Find out in real time.

I guess it’s kind of like a public IM that is permalinked like a blog. You can easily “subscribe” to people and get their latest updates to whatever device you want. It’s really device agnostic, since it is just plain and simple text. Do it from your phone, your browser, an IM client, whatever.

Twitter is brought to you by Evan Williams, the brain that brought you Blogger and Odeo.

Here is my Twitter feed.