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Jun 11, 02:27 pm: Creating imaginary topical friends on FriendFeed?

The value of FriendFeed, clearly, is the ability to have people you know, like and/or respect (sometimes all three!) point to things and the comment on them in one big friendly pile.

But Marshall Kirkpatrick’s thoughts on microsites have been stuck in my head. That’s a great use of the internet for nonprofits. As Jon Stahl said in the comment here, “building out a thoughful custom project by weaving together a “pipeline” of commoditized services from the interweb, rather than relying on a monolithic “do-everyting” application.” Still, though, I’ve been trying to suss through easy ways to do this.

Maybe a combination of imaginary friends and rooms on FriendFeed is a way to do this. So, the imaginary friends feature lets you pull together the RSS tracks of your friend’s internet trails — if your friends haven’t yet done this for themselves on FriendFeed. And rooms is a way to gather together and join in a conversation.

Let’s say you want to pull together a microsite based on marriage equality — a topic that doesn’t get a lot of result in the FriendFeed search box but does show up on sites like flickr, del.icio.us etc. Well, find those RSS feeds, pull them together as an imaginary friend and then start a room joining that friend to the conversation (can you do that? I haven’t tried yet).

Of course, since an imaginary friend has an RSS feed this might be a way to pipe the aggregated content onto another site. Much less elegant than Marshall’s plan* but it might be quicker and easier way to do it. And it has the bonus of making it easy for people to follow, share bits, and engage in conversation.

Have you seen examples of this? Is there value to doing it in this tool or should it just happen on a website or, say, in a blog?

Apr 8, 03:46 am: 5 Tips for Deciding Whose Tweets You Should Follow

Some simple guidelines to keep in mind when building your Twitter network.

1. Use TweetScan to find people who are tweeting on topics of interest to you. You can also check out Twitter Packs to see if there are people who have self-identified as interested in a topic.
2. Make sure you get email notification when someone decides to follow you. Check out their twitter stream when they do try and, if they are of interest to you, be sure to follow back. And give ‘em a tweet hello when you do. It’s friendly and, over time, helps both of you to grow your network.
3. If you are bugged by the bubbling of messages, don’t follow prolific tweeters.
4. Look and see who your friends follow. Add people who are interesting and you don’t know. This is how you’ll get to know them. And a lot of time, they will reciprocate and you’ll find yourself in new conversation with people.
5. Ask people you meet if they have a twitter identity. This is a great way to stay in loose easy touch with people you have an interaction with at a conference or event. It can be more casual and natural than the follow up email is a single nice to meet you shout but doesn’t have any other conversation built around it.

Do you have another suggestion? Drop a comment or send me a tweet (@webb"). I’ll add it.

Big shout o’ thanks to tet3 and Eduardo for their comments and inspiration for this post.

Apr 3, 06:11 pm: Twitter Resource Roundup

Twitter is a good tool and you can certainly just dive right into it. But here are some resources to make getting to know Twitter, and the people and topics on it, a little easier.

Tutorials and Intros:

• Twitter in Plain English: The fine folks at Common Craft do an excellent job of describing twitter in this short video.
• Twitter Tutorial for Newbies: It’s short and has screenshots. Always a good combo.
• Twitter Me This: Get the free recording of the NTEN webinar.

Posting Tools:

• TwitterMail: send messages to Twitter via email
• Twhirl cross platform desktop applicaiton making it easier to post to twitter
• Twibble cross platform desktop application making it easier to post to twitter
• Twitterific desktop application for mac
• TwitterBerry: posting from your, you guessed it!, blackberry

Search and Stats:

• Tweetburner: shorten the URL and get stats on it so that you can tell what people are clicking.
• TwitterLocal: put in your location, select a radius and find (and subscribe via RSS) to the tweets that are in your area.
• twemes: follow messages marked with hashtags (words or phrases after the # sign)
• Twitter Karma: Allows you to sort through your friends and followers and see a variety of info about them
• Quotably: allows you to follow conversations by user
• Tweet Scan: Allows you to search twitter. This can be a great help when you are looking for people to follow.
  
• TweetStats: Shows you your twitter behavior, or the behavior of any twitter user. Nice to see, in your own stats, who you send tweets to the most.

To find an exhaustive list check out Twitter Fan Wiki.

And thanks to edobejar, silverbell, LittleLaura, ahynes1, ruby, danieljohnsonjr, astrout, and CarrieBethH for their twitter tool thoughts.

Updated: with the additional tools of a lotta smart and helpful twitterers.

Apr 2, 06:43 pm: Twitter helps with conversation

When I was thinking about Week 4 in my little 52 week series, I started thinking about what tool people should use to start the process of publishing on the web. And so I turned to twitter to ask.

Beth Kanter took the question further in her post, Marnie Webb’s Chicken or Egg Question: Twitter or Blogging?. She writes sums up the responses and has some great comments.

In writing up my own comments, I came to one of the reasons I feel that publishing starts with Twitter. It’s not about publishing. It’s about the conversation.

Blogging has lost some of that. I think that people are taking it increasingly more serious and the tools encourage that as they become more sophisticated. Twitter can’t help but be about conversation.

I think that starting there helps to encourage a habit of conversation and questioning, a sort of pose, that can be brought into the blog that helps to genuinely engage the people you are talking with.

Tags: twitter, conversation, questions, socialtools, web2.0, nptech, net2

Feb 25, 02:30 pm: iSwitch: Notational Velocity

I’m finally getting the Mac toolkit pulled together into something I like a work flow and – I know, I know – I keep threatening to write that up and I will. In the meantime, another tool that has made the cut: Notational Velocity

There are a lot of terrific text tools out there. And many of them work just great. More than great. But they have too many features and require too much thought about organization for me and the way that I work and write. I like to get stuff out of my head as quickly as possible and be confident that I’m going to be able to find it later.

Notational Velocity has turned out to be a terrific tool for helping me get meetings out of my head and into a place where I can, without thinking very hard at all, find the information later.

I have a lot of standing meetings and I like to dump all of those notes into one place – separated into section – and I don’t want to twiddle with it – indenting and outdenting, making headers, rearranging – once it’s there. Notational Velocity makes that easy. A simple “Process” in the note body makes it easy to find the things that haven’t had their todos plucked from them yet. And deleting the “Process” moves them into the done file simply by not having them show up in that search.

So, is it a full featured text editor that allows me to easily move and shape text? Nope. Is it a word processor that allows me to come easily to a finished document? Nope. Is it the best little lightweight note taker around — you bet.

Tags: notationalvelocity, notetaker, application, tools, macosx, switch

Feb 12, 11:57 pm: Do you have a beginner's mind?

Because it’s the most important thing in your social web toolbox.

I do a lot of talking about this — how to assemble the tools and build the skills to get involved in the social web and I’ve tried to frame it in a couple of different ways (1, 2, 3). But really it comes down to the beginner’s mind.

Open and questioning.

A conversation implies that you don’t know everything and that you have to learn. And you learn that in a back and forth.  Otherwise, it’s instruction or lecturing or a message I’m trying to get out of my mouth before you hang up on me. 

But to really participate in the social web you have to want to exchange. This shows up as fun — movie comparisons on Facebook — but it is a attitude that extends to really making a wiki work for a group.

How do you explain this?  How do engage in this when you talk to people?  How does this attitude get built?

Blogged with Flock

Tags: net2, web2.0, socialmedia, nptech

Dec 7, 10:07 pm: Embracing technology can stop rogue uses

This paragraph in a recent CIO.com blurb caught my attention:

But there is another market for Google Apps: A growing number of information workers, frustrated by traditional corporate IT systems, have flocked to the consumer version of Google Apps covertly (forming their own “Shadow IT” department). When this happens, Jones notes, companies can put themselves at risk of breaking compliance rules.

“The covert use of Google Apps is almost becoming ubiquitous,” he says. “Companies can try to shut it down, but the reality is the business users will go on using it,” he says. “The implications if you don’t do this in a controlled way are huge.”

Web-based apps are hard to shut down. Sure, you can make it difficult for your users to go there but they are hard to shut down. People do, after all, have home computers.

It’s the same with thinking about blog policies or flickr use. Forbidding it or sticking your head in the sand is just going to mean that people are going to use it without your knowledge and without guidance. And that might end up being very bad for your organization.

So maybe you don’t adopt a particular technology, Google Docs or flickr or WordPress, but maybe you do tell people how and when to use it and then let them. That means that you can really explain why maybe using Google Docs to share membership data via the spreadsheet application. Or why you have to be careful about not getting the faces of your constituency in those flickr photos.

Does anyone have any policies like this to share? Policies that aren’t about full-scale organization wide adoption or blessing but about providing boundaries?

tagged: enterprise, adoption, shadowit, net2, nptech

Dec 5, 04:45 am: Why should you be on Facebook?

In an article for Harvard Business, Forrester’s Charlene Li writes:

Let’s start with a fundamental premise – that all business is social and personal. Business involves people and communications and we all prize “networking” skills and opportunities. Businesses don’t strike deals with each other – people do. And we build bonds by talking about everything from sports teams and the weather to our families and hobbies.

So we as business people already engage in social networking every day, primarily through phone calls, emails, meetings, and events. The same activities take place on social networking sites – people share the tidbits and moments that build relationships.

She’s writing about business but it’s true of foundations as well: People are the ones doing the work, making the change, calling the shots.

But this line of thinking can too easily lead to fundraising and asking someone to be an ATM is not the same thing as engaging with them. And it’s still hard to figure out what that engagement can look like. Here’s what Charlene writes about that:

But remember: The notion of creating social applications is only 6 months old – we are in the early days here. Business-oriented developers are just now waking up to the possibilities, and the audience that would use these tools are just discovering social networking. It’s going to take some time for these two sides to find each other and develop an ecosystem for business applications.

And that’s the key. Not thinking that every problem is money or advocacy but thinking about other ways to engage and talking with motivated developers about what can happen.

tagged: net2, facebook, charleneli, enterprise, tools, nptech

Nov 15, 02:11 pm: iSwitch: Hog Bay Software

I’m no longer using my workhorse, sticker covered Dell. A bandwagon is never to full for me to jump on. I’m carrying around a white piece of plastic with a stylized apple on the front. Or, rather, Apple.

I’d like to write about some of the software that I’m finding particularly useful as I make the transition.

I’ve been a heavy Outlook user on the PC. We have Exchange at work which has made calendaring a blessing. But I also use and share the tasks, manage items by assigned categories and even take meeting notes in the journal. I am that kind of Outlook user. I use the Journal.

Or, I was that kind of Outlook user.

When I moved to the Mac I fumbled on Entourage. More on that and I how use Mail and iCal with Exchange later. But I missed my tasks. I found the Entourage key commands to clumsy and many of the functioned that used took too much work to get to. I just couldn’t train my fingers to get a task out of my brain and into my list quickly and easily in Entourage. So I started hunting around for a new application.

Now I should say that I’m a GTD disciple. I really am. I have a stack of copies in my office to hand to anyone who seems to be angsting over their to-do list. That kind of disciple.

I downloaded a raft of applications for managing my list. And I thought I was happy with iGTD. I like the tight and nice integration with Quicksilver. I liked how easy it was to empty my head of my tasks while attaching them to a context (for you non-GTDers that means, basically, making sure that you have a phone list and an errands list so that it is quick and easy to find the next thing to do). But I didn’t like the weight of the app. It takes GTD seriously but I wanted something that managed my lists simply (I know, I used tasks on Outlook but this is a part of the change here). I’ve tried in the past to just use a text file as the ubber geeks do but my manipulation skills weren’t classy enough to make that workable for me.

And then I found Hog Bay Software’s Taskpaper. It is thisclosetobeingatextfile. I am able to use my two main organizing principles: contexts and projects. They built the search and manipulation tools into the application. And, thanks to a user created script I have a relatively neat integration with Quicksilver.

I can ask for a couple of more features (mainly and F-key or two so that I can put tasks in even easier) but if the application stayed exactly the way it is today, I’d continue to be very happy to use it

tagged: mac, gtd, hogbaysoftware, taskpaper

Nov 9, 05:13 pm: Dear Ma.gnolia: Please give me space

I love Ma.gnolia. I love the feature that allows me to turn any page into a .pdf. I love the groups. I love being able to thank people for their links.

But give me space.

I used del.icio.us for too long. And I still am deeply, deeply in love with flickr. And they’ve trained my fingers to hit the space bar between tags. I get why commas are friendly. I get why people want ‘em. But how about a choice? A setting where I can say if I want commas (that can even be the default) or a space delineate tags.

Please?

tagged: ma.gnolia, feature, request, tools