Twitter Lists, why you should care

By brad | Published: October 31, 2009

TwitterListsLists on Twitter launched to everyone this week. A lot of people are very excited this, for very good reason. Some are even saying that it might be the biggest thing to hit Twitter in a while. I’m cautiously optimistic. It’s not going to matter to me until the my favorite twitter clients (cotweet, tweetie) adopt the functionality. It is worth watching closely now, though. Hopefully this is the beginning of some great functionality to come out of Twitter, Inc. Maintaining users with new features should be one of their top priorities right now. Numbers have come out lately to show that usage has been flat over the last 3 months. It’s not the easiest service for someone to use, and hopefully this will go a short ways towards making it easier. I know many people who have opened Twitter accounts only to see what the fuss is about, only to not understand it and go somewhere else (see: Facebook). This is a big deal for Twitter. They haven’t fully implemented a ton of new functionality in the last year, as they’ve spent most of the time stabilizing the service. Of course there have been some sublte tweeks here and there.

Like a lot of things in life, it’s turning into another popularity contest. “Ohh, I’m on 3,746 lists! thanks everyone” is a Tweet I’ve been seeing a lot lately. Twitter obviously wants Lists to become a big thing, otherwise they wouldn’t have placed it so prominently within the page. Regardless, this will be another interesting metric to watch on someone’s page next to number of tweets, and the following-follower ratio.

Here are some lists that I’ll probably be making and watching:

  • Start unfollowing people that you don’t want to read every day, but are still interested in what they have to say every now and then.
  • If you manage a brand account, you probably follow lots of other brands on Twitter to keep an eye on what they’re doing. You can now make a tidy list to watch them on.
  • Organize your lists by where you meet someone or what they mostly talk about, if you like, you can keep your list private to be more descriptive. Did you meet them at a conference, local event, introduced by a mutual friend? Are they into music, technology or

Facebook’s had lists for sometime. I haven’t spent the time to organize it in quite some time, so it’s not even worth using right now. I think with the introduction of Twitter Lists, I might revisit it and try it out again, though.

The api is going to be fun. I already have some super secret ideas on how to use it for the @Starbucks Twitter account.

Can we fast forward to the future when the good apps have fully implemented it and the API is available?

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I have swine flu.

By brad | Published: October 27, 2009

swine flu

Yes, I have swine flu.

I went to bed at Sunday night with a temperature of 99.6 and woke up with a temperature of 101.1, six hours later it was 102.3. I hurried to the grocery store to get Tylenol to control my fever. My anxiety was recalling thoughts of listening to NPR last spring. Phrases like, global pandemic, 1918 Spanish Influenza, and world wide panic crossed my mind. I found a doctor’s office across the street from (thankfully I have health insurance). After telling the woman at the counter why I was there she instructed me to put on a mask. That was kind of humbling. My fever was starting to become less miserable due to the Tylenol.

Next, they stuck a q-tip up my nose, way farther than a q-tip should ever be placed. Then held it there for 10 seconds. That hurt. After sitting in the doc’s office for 10 minutes the results came back A+. That’s the worst A+ I’ve ever received.

I’ve taken to a diet of soup, lots of water, netflix on demand, hulu, sleeping, daytime television and sleeping on the couch (so the wife doesn’t get sick too). The cough sucks, I’m always tired and I’d love to go outside. Fortunately it isn’t what I thought it might be.

It sucks, but it’s not the end of the world.

If you get it, do the following:

  • cancel any plans you might have for the next 5-7 days
  • buy a video game
  • Rent a movie, watch something online through Hulu or Netflix on demand
  • Drink lots of water
  • Take Tylenol
  • Stay away from loved ones
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Signal to Noise on Twitter

By brad | Published: October 10, 2009

A couple weeks ago I sat on a panel at 140tc that was moderated by Guy Kawasaki about brand building on Twitter. There was a lot of great insight by all the panelists, and I had a great time in the conversation. However, there were a couple of disagreements that I wanted to elaborate on.

The last two weeks have been filled with a lot of traveling. I also don’t get cable at home, so I generally have cable TV on in the background in hotel rooms. I get my fill, and it’s decent background noise. When I go home, I don’t miss it. Some were making the point that cable news is a good place to emulate for how to tweet. Repeat the same message many times over the day to make sure you get it across. There are many great tools available to get this done, so technically, it’s no problem.

However, I have a problem with this. To me, it feels like it’s fighting noise with noise. Eventually everyone is going to go twitter-deaf (twideaf?) and unfollow you from the amount of redundant tweets. I personally try to keep my number of followers kind of low on Twitter. It makes it easier to actually get to know people, which is what I’m interested in. I’m sure that if I followed more people, I would have built up a bigger following base. Which is great, but that is tertiary to what my actual goal on twitter is; have great conversations with great people and learn something every now and then. This use case on Twitter is not conducive to brands that counter noise with more noise. I’m far more interested in real conversations with real people, quality always trumps quantity.

The conversation on the panel was top notch, and I’m thankful I was asked to participate.

Anyway, here’s the panel, in it’s entirety:

Growing Your Brand on Twitter: Strategies and Tactics From the Trenches from Parnassus Group on Vimeo.

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The Starbicks VIA road trip is almost over.

By brad | Published: September 26, 2009

Tonight we’re headed to Boston. This is the last big push, ten hour drive today. Then three and a half to New York tomorrow. After Tuesday we’re all done.

This trip has been filled with so many great memories.

Here are my stats from the trip:
- 2 countries
- 17 states, 1 province (including my 140tc excursion)
- 14 days
- 3,937 miles
- 0 hotdogs

Posted in tonic | Tagged | 2 Comments

On the Road

By brad | Published: September 20, 2009

The_road I’ve always wanted to drive across the country. I figured it would be to either visit all the major league baseball stadiums, or to follow Phish. Never thought I would be doing it for my job. Two weeks ago I found out I’d be spending the last two weeks of September with 10 strangers filming a series of webisodes. I was worried about a couple things at the beginning:

  1. Would the other people be fun? Told myself that I can do anything for two weeks, but still … two weeks is a long time to spend with people you don’t know.
  2. I’ve never spent much time in front of the camera, would it be fun?
  3. Will I be away from the internet for too long and cause withdrawals?

The answers are turning out as follows; incredibly so, affirmative, 3g usb cards – ftw.

The first two days were spent in Seattle, Vancouver, and Bellevue. I did not feel like I was on a road trip. It was just an odd trip. The third day we made the trek to Montana, and it definitely started feeling like we were going to actually drive across the country. My original plans for road tripping involved lots of camping and couches. I’m fairing much better with couches and wifi.

For the most part, only Erin and I are on the camera, but it truly takes an army of smart dedicated people to put it together. When we started, I thought I might have to actually do some driving. Fortunately, we have four of the coolest drivers that are complete road veterans schlepping us and our coffee around. We should do an episode on the radio banter, exclusively. It’s hilarious.

Traveling with comedians is really fun.

Tomorrow I’m flying to LA to speak at 140tc, I’ll meet up with the road trip in Nebraska on Wednesday. Then it’s Chicago, Erie, Boston, and NYC.

You can follow the road trip on Twitter or watch the videos on YouTube.

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Ultimate Music Throwdown 2009

By brad | Published: September 6, 2009

I have a Republican (he says he’s “libertarian”) friend that listens to metal. We argue often. We’re both stubborn. Recently there was a discovery that we both love REM (must have been a sensitive time in his life?). I can’t argue with a man about the album Monster. It’s a great album and defined a portion of my life. Knowing that we have something like this in common has opened up the chance that perhaps, just perhaps, we might have other types of music in common. Or, at the very least, we might be able to introduce music to each other that we were previously unaware of. I’ve never shied away from listening to something new.

The original premise for this came up through him mentioning (or at least how I remember it) the classic Radiohead album, OK Computer. Some would argue that it isn’t the best Radiohead album, but few would argue that isn’t a classic. He’s never listened to it. That’s cool, I didn’t listen to it until well after it had been released. My only regret about it is that I didn’t discover it earlier. He doesn’t seem to think that it’s what everybody cracks it up to be.

The other side of it came last week, he asked me about an album called Destruction of Puppies or Appetite for Puppies or something like that, can’t remember exactly. Nonetheless, in all my 28 years of listening to almost all types of music, it had slipped through. He was noticeably shocked and disturbed by my lack of knowledge of said album.

Over beers we decided that we should duel over discuss these albums publicly on our blogs and continue the discussion to two other albums. We both agreed to give well thought out critiques that are fair to the music and not to look to score cheap hits. I’m not intent on changing his opinion, rather I’m intent seeing him acknowledge the choices I give him as important and/or interesting pieces of music. OK Computer is first. There will other choices afterwards and I’m totally undecided on what direction to take. Think I’ll just wait on it and see where to go.

His side of the discussion is here. Stay tuned, this will be fun.

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Thoughts on Trending Topics

By brad | Published: August 2, 2009

Twitter’s Trending Topics is one of the reasons that Twitter has become so successful. Revealing the public consensus to the simple question of “what are you doing?” is one of the most enjoyable parts of being a part of Twitter. When my favorite band, my favorite baseball team, or my favorite coffee company show up on the list, it’s really exciting. I’ll spend some time reading everybody’s responses for a little while, and perhaps even add my own commentary. It turns into a global discussion on a single topic. Once a word, phrase, or hashtag shows up there, it only catapults it to more discussion.

Like all good things in life, if they’re accessible enough, it’ll be taken over by people that aren’t necessarily looking to do good or have a thoughtful discussion. At it’s best, the stupid hashtags show up, such as #threewordsaftersex or #musicmonday, at it’s worst, spammers leech onto existing hashtags and just use it to get into people’s search, w/out being relevant to the discussion. Long term, this is the equivalent of MySpace’s irritating ads. Untargeted and distracting. As this becomes more frequent or targeted, this could be a reason that Twitter loses relevance.

Twitter has a big opportunity to turn Trending Topics into Trending Topics based on user criteria. The useful areas for me are in the following areas:

  • Follower list: What are my friends talking about? How about their friends that I don’t know (friends, plus once removed)?
  • Location: What are people in Seattle, WA (my hometown) talking about?
  • Interests: What are trumpet players (my instrument) talking about? How about other motorcyclists? Or others that work in Social Media?

I like to think that my beer drinking friends are smarter than your beer drinking friends. With this, you could have 3 or so different lists of trending topics. All of which could be opt-in if you decide. However, I don’t work for Twitter Inc, so it’s not my job to say how they should do this. Regardless, the need for a middle layer of relevance between Facebook/Twitter status updates and the greater world’s Trending Topics exists.

This could get really interesting. Twitter biggest strength right now is the collection of data detailing what people are thinking about right now. If they want to become the central place for global consciousness, it’s going to need to become more granular.

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Virtual Analog Tweeting

By brad | Published: July 24, 2009

I was just commenting this week how people hide behind Twitter. I’ve never seen anybody yell #FAIL at a business or person in real life, but they tweet that all the time.

This is some funny stuff:

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location, location, location

By brad | Published: July 17, 2009

What is the future of location based social networking? Location is the most important part of real estate and in baseball it’s the difference between a Cy Young award winner and a minor leaguer. It’s also something that is making it’s way to most mobile phones and conceivably laptop computers someday. The benefits are vast, and benefit all sorts of users; including regular people, advertisers, gov’t intelligence officials, and stalkers, all in very different ways. Some benefits are pretty damn cool, some are pretty damn scary.

There are many sides of the equation, such as; i have friends and i want to see what they’re doing, maybe I’ll hang out with them right now, i’m a stalker and i want to be a creep, i’m a gov’t and i want to follow my citizens, and i’m an advertiser and i want to spend my money wisely with smart call to actions. All sides need to be addressed for the location based social web to take off, which it will someday.

Existing location based social web apps exist for the iphone right now. All of them have their advantages, some range from neat story-telling with people you don’t know at the place that you’re at, see where my friends are now, play a game based on the location, or see what else is around me. I like all of them for different reasons. I hate all of them because whenever I use them there is no benefit to me. None of my friends are on there, at least the ones that live in my city that I hang out with. It’s only a matter of time.

These social networks are going to take off this way, by focusing on shared experiences and shared events where a lot of tech savvy people are going to be present and leveraging existing mature social networks for promotion. Facebook and Twitter are great, but the problems they need to focus on are very different from the features that these location based networks are focused on. It’s a big area of opportunity. Hashtags are great on Twitter, but they aren’t the final answer.

This is going to be a fun area of the internet to pay attention to.

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It’s the Fourth of July and the Mariners are contending ?!?

By brad | Published: July 4, 2009

Don’t look now, but this Mariners team might actually have a chance to make things interesting. The injuries have been a bummer, the left side of the infield is not what it could be. Junior’s bat has been disappointing, but he still has a flair for the dramatic (and I’ll take a .220 batting average just to watch him one last time). If we can trade one of our relievers for another bat, left field perhaps? Then we have a strong chance of contending for the title. It’s been a while since we had a good time, they flirted with being semi-decent in 2007, but that turned out to be a big dud. This one might have a chance.

Pennant Races are fun to watch.

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