Here’s my take on why, after the shininess fades, Google+ will still be an active social network.

First, they’ve learned from mistakes, theirs and others. They learned a lot from the failed Wave and Buzz projects, making privacy front and center; doing uncharacteristically flashy UI design (even stealing one of the Apple guys to do it); and not being too heavy-handed in the rollout. They are leveraging the Google App ecosystem, as Buzz tried to, but this seems like a cleaner and more serious effort—instead of just pasting a social network onto GMail, they’re incorporating apps like Picasa into it. Those of us already drinking the Google Koolaid (and they say that Google Apps is a high priority) will find it very useful (as opposed to redundant, as Buzz largely was).

The biggest lesson they learned was to not let people stream pollute as easily as they could on Buzz. I maintain that Buzz is a great platform for communications. It’s the ultimate cross between a blog and blog comments that could foster great conversations and raise the art of information sharing, if we didn’t have to wade through 20,000 redundant tweets to get to the good stuff. Google opened a floodgate of noise there, and too many users—including very good friends of mine—were happy to add to the din.

Second, they’ve created something compelling. It out-Facebook’s Facebook for interpersonal sharing and it can stretch to Twitter functionality. What’s powerful here is that, unlike Facebook, where targeting subsets of your friends requires advanced knowledge of the platform and a lot of patience, this interface makes it easy to either have an intimate chat or broadcast info widely. It’s easy to follow strangers that I’m not really interested in conversing with, at the same time that I can have deep talks with my close friends. They really got it right with Circles—friend/follower management on FB and Twitter is ridiculously kludgy in comparison. So, unlike Wave, which was too obtuse, and unlike Buzz, which wasn’t compelling, this is elegant and compelling. It wins people over.

Third, they’ve nailed SEO. The early adopters are raving about the hits it’s generating and the great statistics available. That’s going to be a more sticky draw than the shininess.

Most of all, they’ve emulated the cool Facebook stuff while shedding all of the annoyances. You can friend strangers here without over-sharing with them. You can +1 a commercial entity (or NPO) without inviting them to flood your stream with ads. You can tell your best friend something without sharing it with your mom. And that’s all easy; there’s no complicated help screen or multi-level privacy settings to contend with. It just works.Similar Posts:

• Why Google Buzz Should Be Your Blog
• The Buzz Factor
• Why I Don’t “Like” Facebook
• Google’s Creepy Profiles
• Shlock and Oh! Facebook’s social dysfunction

Now, you might think that’s a crazy idea, but  I think Buzz is about 80% of the way there. Last week, in my Google’s Creepy Profiles post, I made a suggestion (that someone at Google has hopefully already thought of) that it wouldn’t take much to turn a Profile into a full-fledged biography/lifestreaming site.  Just add some user-configurable tabs, that can contain HTML or RSS-fed content, and add some capability to customize the style of the profile.  Since I wrote that, I’ve been using Buzz quite a bit and I’ve really been appreciating the potential it has to deepen conversations around web-published materials.

I think some of my appreciation for Buzz comes from frustration with Google’s previous, half-hearted attempts to make Google Reader more social. If you use Reader heavily, then you know that you can share items via a custom, personal page and the “People You Follow” tab in Reader. You also know that you can comment on items and read others comments in the “Comments View”.  But it’s far from convenient to work with either of these sharing methods.  But, once you link your reader shared items to Buzz, then you aren’t using Reader’s awkward ionterface to communicate; you’re using Buzzes.  And Buzz, for all of Google’s launch-time snafus, is an easy to use and powerful communications tool, merging some of the best things about Twitter and Facebook.

So, how is Buzz suitable for a blog?

• It’s a rich editing environment with simple textile formatting and media embedding, just like a blog.


• Commenting—way built-in.


• RSS-capable – you can subscribe to anyone’s Buzz feed.


• Your Google Profile makes for a decent public Blog homepage, with an “About the Author”, links and contact pages.


• It’s pre-formatted for mobile viewing

What’s missing?

• Better formatting options.  The textile commands available are minimal


• XML-RPC remote publishing


• Plug-ins for the Google Homepage


• As mentioned, more customization and site-building tools for the Google Homepage.

Why is it compelling?

• Because your blog posts are directly inserted into a social networking platform.  No need to post a link to it, hope people will follow, and then deal with whatever commenting system your blog has to respond.


• Your blog’s community grows easily, again fueled by the integrated social network.


• Managing comments – no longer a chore!

This is the inverse of adding Google or Facebook’s Friend Connect features to your blog.  it’s adding your blog to a social network, with far deeper integration that Twitter and Facebook currently provide. Once Google releases the promised API, much of what’s missing will start to become available.  At that point, I’ll have to think about whether I want to move this island of a blog to the mainland, where it will get a lot more traffic.  I’ll definitely be evaluating that possibility.

• Why Google+ Will Succeed Where Wave And Buzz Failed
• Google’s Creepy Profiles
• The Buzz Factor
• Google Reader Reaches Out
• More RSS Tools: Using Google Reader for Research and Sharing

Geek and Poke cartoon by Oliver Widder

Social networks differ primarily from email and fax in that they are socially-driven messaging. The priority of any particular message can be set by each persons community that they tune into. My friend thinks his campaign is the most important thing coming down the pike, and that he should be able to transcend the casual nature of Twitter conversation in order to let me know about it. And, of course, I think that every campaign that my org trumpets is more important than his. But I think that proper campaign etiquette and strategy is to blast information on the mediums that support that, where your constituents sign up to be individually alerted. If you want to spread the word on Twitter or Facebook, focus on the message, not the media, and let the community carry it for you, if they agree that it’s worthy.Similar Posts:

• The Death of Email (is being prematurely reported)
• Feed Fight
• Why We Tweet
• Losing Facebook
• Filling the Communication Gaps

Image: SRD

Did Twitter Kill it?

The popular theory is that, with social networks like Twitter and Facebook serving as link referral tools, there’s no need to setup and look at feeds in a reader anymore. And I agree that many people will forgo RSS in favor of the links that their friends and mentors tweet and share. But this is kind of like saying that, if more people shop at farmer’s markets than supermarkets, we will no longer need trucks. Dave Winer, quite arguably the founder of RSS, and our friends at ReadWriteWeb have leapt to RSS’s defense with similar points – Winer puts it best, saying:

“These protocols…are so deeply ingrained in the infrastructure they become part of the fabric of the Internet. They don’t die, they don’t rest in piece.”

1. RSS is, and always has been about, taking control of the information you peruse. Instead of searching, browsing, and otherwise separating a little wheat from a load of chaff, you use RSS to subscribe to the content that you have vetted as pertinent to your interests and needs. While that might cross-over a bit with what your friends want to share on Facebook, it’s you determining the importance, not your friends. For a number of us, who use the internet for research; brand monitoring; or other explicit purposes, a good RSS Reader will still offer the best productivity boost out there.

2. Where do you think your friends get those links? It’s highly likely that most of them—before the retweets and the sharing—grabbed them from an RSS feed. I post links on Twitter and Facebook, and I get most of them from my Google Reader flow.

3. It’s not the water, it’s the pipe. The majority of those links referred by Twitter are fed into Twitter via RSS. Twitterfeed, the most popular tool for feeding RSS data to Twitter, boasts about half a million feeds. Facebook, Friendfeed and their ilk all allow importing from RSS sources to profiles.

So, here are some of the ways I use RSS every day:

Basic Aggregation with Drupal

My first big RSS experiment built on the nptech tagging phenomenon. Some background: About five years ago, with the advent of RSS-enabled websites that allowed for storing and tagging information (such as Delicious, Flickr and most blogging platforms), Techsoup CEO Marnie Webb had a bright idea. She started tagging articles, blog posts, and other content pertinent to those working in or with nonprofits and technology with the tag “nptech”. She invited her friends to do the same. And she shared with everyone her tips for setting up an RSS newsreader and subscribing to things marked with our tag. Marnie and I had lunch in late 2005 and agreed that the next step was to set up a web site that aggregated all of this information. So I put up the nptech.info site, which continues to pull nptech-tagged blog entries from around the web.

Other Tricks

Recently, I used Twitterfeed to push the nptech aggregated information to the nptechinfo Twitter account. So, if you don’t like RSS, you can still get the links via Twitter. But stay aware that they get there via RSS!

I use RSS to track Idealware comments, Idealware mentions on Twitter, and I subscribe to the blog, of course, so I can see what my friends are saying.

I use RSS on my personal website to do some lifestreaming, pulling in Tweets and my Google Reader favorites.

But I’m pretty dull—what’s more exciting is the way that Google Reader let me create a “bundle” of all of the nptech blogs that I follow. You can sample a bunch of great Idealware-sympatico bloggers just by adding it to your reader.

Is RSS dead? Not around here.Similar Posts:

• NPTech Phase 2
• NPTech Update
• Google Reader Reaches Out
• More RSS Tools: Using Google Reader for Research and Sharing
• More RSS Tools: Web Site Integration

• If you hate visiting this web site, and believe that RSS is dead (I don’t!), then you’re welcome to ditch both and follow Techcaferia and nptech.info on Twitter.

• The Techcafeteria Twitter feed will post links to blog entries like this one, and topically-related articles from around the web, much like you see here under the “Stuff” tab.  Note that this is simply my Google Reader Shared items; if you use Reader you can just share with me there, as well.

• The nptechinfo Twitter feed will post links to items tagged with “nptech” from around the web.  Note that ntech.info also aggregates a bunch of nptech blogs, general tech info, and nptech tagged tweets, which are excluded from the Twitter feed because they create redundant links. The nptech.info blogs are well worth following, and you can subscribe to the feed there, but I have no care to compete with Joe Solomon’s awesome nptechblogs feed, which he is better about maintaining, anyway.

• With well over 100 posts on this blog, I took some advice and I’m going to make some improvements here to better locate particular content.  I’m surprised to see how quickly I’ve built up a body of work. This is the 119th post here.  And I’m happy to see that it meets goals for the blog that I articulated back in April of 2007 fairly well.

• On a different topic, NTEN’s Online Technology Conference starts Wednesday. You can still register, and, if you tell them that you heard it here, they’ll give you a 25% discount. Who’s says it doesn’t pay off to read my blog?

• NPTech.Info Updated
• How and Why RSS is Alive and Well
• More RSS Tools: Web Site Integration
• NPTech Phase 2
• Google Reader Reaches Out

Twitter Results in Google

One Stop Web 2.0 Sign-up

Make Friend Lists on Facebook

Exhibit Your Info

Google Voice is on the Horizon

When I look at GMail, Google Voice, and the recently announced Google Wave, a real-time communication and collaboration platform, and then picture these all integrated into a Google Apps account, it becomes clear that our phone systems are moving into the cloud as fast as our servers are, and, while it is always that controversial proposition of Google giving you stuff in return for the right to market to you based on all of your data, it still looks like they are poised to offer one of the most powerful, integrated communication platforms that the world has ever seen.

Have you run into any awesome things lately worth sharing? Leave a comment!Similar Posts:

• Google’s Creepy Profiles
• Things You Might Not Know About…
• I’ve been busy
• Losing Facebook
• Tweaking Twitter

Those of you familiar with my sideproject at http://nptech.info know that it has been trustworthily aggregating blog entries, photos and websites tagged with the term “nptech” for close to four years now.  It’s been a little negelcted of late, but after Annaliese over at NTEN gave it a shout-out, I figured it was due for some clean-up. Here’s what’s new:

• About 25 blogs added to the NPTech Blogs section, and a broken link or two corrected on the existing ones;


• Information from Twitter added to the main “Tagged items” feed that already grabs nptech items from Delicious, Flickr and Technorati;


• New additions to the general tech section from sites like ReadWriteWeb and Mashable


• A simple Facelift, primarily adding a little color and going for a more attractive font (fancy design is not a big priority here, particularly since my last big effort to pretty it up got creamed in a Drupal upgrade).

As usual, if you have a blog focused on Non-Profit Technology that you’d like added to the mix, let me know, but rest assured that, if you can find your blog on Technorati, we’re already grabbing the items that you tag or categorize as “nptech”.Similar Posts:

• NPTech Update
• More RSS Tools: Web Site Integration
• NPTech Phase 2
• The Road to Inbox:0
• Google Reader Reaches Out

Here it is Saturday, and I’m still reeling from the awesome event that was the Nonprofit Technology Conference, put on by org of awesomeness NTEN. First things first, if you attended, live or virtually, and, like me, you not only appreciate, but are pretty much astounded by the way Holly, Anna, Annaliese, Brett and crew get this amazing event together and remain 100% approachable and sociable while they’re keeping the thing running, then you should show your support here.

We had 1400 people at the sold-out event, and if that hadn’t been a capacity crowd, I’m pretty sure we had at least 200 more people that were turned away. What does that say about this conference in a year when almost all of us have slashed this type of budget in response to a dire economic situation? I think it says that NTEN is an organization that gets, totally, and phenomenally, what the web means to cash-strapped, mission-focused organizations, and, while we have all cut spending, sometimes with the painful sacrifice of treasured people and programs, we know that mastering the web is a sound strategic investment.

Accordingly, social media permeated the event, from the Clay Shirky plenary, to the giant screen of tweets on the wall, and the 80% penetration of social media as topic in the sessions. As usual, I lit a candle for the vast majority of nonprofit techies who are not on Twitter, don’t have an organizational Facebook page, and, instead, spend their days troubleshooting Windows glitches and installing routers. My Monday morning session, presented with guru Matt Eshleman of CITIDC, was on Server Virtualization. If you missed it, @jackaponte did such a complete, accurate transcription, and you can feel like you were there just by reading her notes (scroll down to 10:12) and following along with the slides.

My dream—which I will do my best to make reality—is that next year will include a Geek Track that focuses much harder on the traditional technology support that so many NPTechs need. I stand on record that I’m willing to put this track together and make it great!

I was also quite pleased to do a session on How to Decide, Planning and Prioritizing, based on my chapter of NTEN’s book, Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission.  It was really great to start the session with a question that I’ve always dreamed I’d be able to ask: “Have you read my book?”.  I’m in debt to NTEN for that opportunity!

The biggest omission at this event (um, besides reliable wifi, but what can you do?) was the addition of a twitter name space on our ID badges. Twitter provided a number of things to the—by my estimation—half of the attendees who hang out there.

• Event anticipation buildup, resource sharing, session coordination and  planning, ride and room sharing and other activities were all rife on Twitter as the conference approached.


• Session tweeting allowed people both in other sessions and at home to participate and share in some of the great knowledge shared.


• For me, as a Twitter user who has been on the network for two years and is primarily connected to NTEN members, Twitter did something phenomenal. Catching up with many of my “tweeps”, we just skipped the formalities and dived into the conversations. So much ice is broken when you know who works where, what they focus on in their job, if they have partners and/or kids, what music tastes you share, that catching up in person means diving in deeper. The end result is clear—#09ntc is still an active tag on Twitter, and the conference continues there, and will continue until it quietly evolves into #10ntc.

One thing, however, worries me. This was the tenth NTC, my fifth, but it was the first NTC that the online world noticed. Tuesday, on Twitter, we were the second most popular trend (the competing pandemic outranked us). NTEN’s mission is to help nonprofits use technologies to further their missions. But, as said above, this conference was, in many ways, a social media event. I’m hoping that Holly and crew will review their registration process next year to insure that early spots in what is sure to be an even more popular event aren’t filled up by people who really aren’t as committed to changing the world as they are to keeping up with this trend.

But, concerns aside, we need to send that team to a week-long spa retreat, and be proud of them, and proud of ourselves for not only being a community that cares, but being one that shares. I urge even the most skeptical of you to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, we’re not on there discussing what we had for breakfast. We’re taking the annual event and making it a perpetual one, with the same expertise sharing,  querying, peer support and genuine camaraderie that makes the nptech community so unique – and great. Come join us!Similar Posts:

• NTC Wrap-up
• The Evolution Of The NTEN Tech Track
• Why I Won’t Be At NTC (And Why You Should Be)
• Where I’ll be at 12NTC
• My Full NPTech Dance Card

The article provides numerous examples of RSS sources, but all in the form of web sites, blogs and web services that offer you one or more streams of information. If you want to narrow your view beyond the feeds available on a site, say, because you are only interested in Idealware posts about CRM tools or the ones written by Steve Backman, then you need a tool that will refine your search. Alternatively, you might want to put a section containing news stories relevant to a particular issue on your site, but want some control over the sources, as well as the subject matter. For this amount of control over the content you retrieve, you want to use something like Yahoo! Pipes.

Pipes is an RSS mashup editor. It’s a tool that looks a bit like Microsoft’s Visio, where you drag boxes onto a grid and draw relationships between them. But it’s not a layout or flowcharting tool; instead, it’s a visual mapping and filtering tool that lets you identify sources and then apply rules to those sources before merging them into an aggregated feed. To break that down, let’s say that your goal is to either monitor talk about a bill, or, maybe, to publish a section on your web site titled “What they’re saying about bill 221b” (I made that bill up). You have identified eight blogs that have good posts on the subject, and these are blogs that you trust to properly represent the issues and not, in any way, malign or confuse your efforts.

In Pipes, you can select all eight as sources, and then set up a filter to block any posts that don’t reference “221b”. The resulting RSS feed—which you can then subscribe to our republish— will isolate the posts that are relevant to the bill from your selected sources.

For example, here’s that pipe that will allow you to skip Michelle, Heather, Paul, Laura, Eric and my posts and just see Steve’s:

Another, more advanced example: You have an organizational Twitter feed that you want to republish to your site But you only want to publish your posts, not your individual replies. In Twitter, a reply is always identifiable by the very first character, which will be an “@” sign. Twitter RSS items arrive in the format “yourtwitterid: tweet”, so any reply will start with “yourtwitterid: @”. Setting up a Yahoo Pipe filter to block any result with “: @” in the text will isolate your posts from the replies. You can add a “Regex” (e.g. Search/Replace) command to replace “yourtwittername:” with nothing in order to publish just the tweet. The pipe will look like this:

If you play with Pipes (Yahoo! ID required, otherwise free), I highly recommend starting with an example like mine or this one by Gina Trapani to get the feel of it. Save your pipe, and you can subscribe to it—it updates automatically, and you don’t have to make it public for it to work.

Google has it’s competing Google Mashups tool in private beta, and similar tools are popping up all over the web. I talk a lot about how RSS is the technology that allows us to manage the information on the web. Pipes let us refine it. It’s great stuff.

Look for more RSS talk on OPML files and Google Reader in my upcoming posts.Similar Posts:

• More RSS Tools: Web Site Integration
• More RSS Tools: Using Google Reader for Research and Sharing
• More RSS Tools: Sharing Feeds
• Google Reader Reaches Out
• How and Why RSS is Alive and Well

My take is that each of these networks serve different purposes, and, while I am connected to a lot of the same people on all three, they each have distinct audiences and the communication I do on these networks is targeted to the individual networks.

• LinkedIn is a business network. This is a place where potential employers and business associates are likely to go to learn about me.  Accordingly, I sparingly use the status update feature there, and never post about what movie I took the kid to or how funny the latest XKCD strip was.


• Facebook is a casual network where I have some control over who sees my posts; it’s also the place where I find the most old friends and family. So, given that my potential employers and business associates aren’t likely to see my profile unless they have a personal or more collegial relationship already established with me, this is where I’ll give a status review of the Watchman movie or post a picture of the kid.


• For me, Twitter is the business casual network, where my nptech peers gather to support each other and shmooze.  I am mindful that my tweets paint a public picture, so I keep the ratio of professional to personal tweets high and I don’t say things that I wouldn’t want my wife or boss to see on the web.

The multiple, overlapping networks create some issues in terms of effective messaging.  One is the echo chamber effect – it’s ridiculously easy to automatically feed your tweets to Facebook and LinkedIn.  The other is the lack of ability to do more than broadly address numerous audiences.  I mean, my Facebook friends include co-workers, business associates, childhood friends and Mom; you’re probably in a similar boat.  For some people, this creates the “I really didn’t want Mom to hear about the party I attended last night” issue.  For most of us, it simply means that we don’t want to bore our old friends and family with our professional blogging and insights, any more than we really want our co-workers to see what sort of hippies we were when we were 17.

So I manage some of this by using Tweetdeck as my primary Twitter client, because the latest version lets me, optionally, send a status update to Facebook as well as Twitter, which I do no more than once a day with something that should be meaningful to both audiences.  What I won’t do (as many of my Facebook/Twitter friends do) is publish all of my tweets to Facebook—that’s cruel to both the friends who don’t need to see everything you tweet and the ones who are already seeing what you tweet on Twitter.

At first, I thought the idea of Facebook incorporating Twitter might be a good one.  Facebook has a big advantage over Twitter.  It’s hard to be new to Twitter; the usefulness and appeal are pretty muted until you have a community that you communicate with.  Facebook starts with the community, so it solves that problem.  But, for me, the amount of control I have over the distribution has a lot to do with the messaging, and I like that Twitter is completely public, republishable, and Google-searchable.  I communicate (appropriately) in that medium; and if you aren’t interested in what I want to communicate, I’m really easy to drop or ignore.  But my Mom is probably far less interested in both non-profit management and Technology than my Twitter followers, and I don’t want her to unfriend me on Facebook.  So I’d rather let Facebook be Facebook and let Twitter be Twitter.  Just because an occasional beer hits the spot, as does an occasional glass of wine, that doesn’t mean that I want to mix them together.Similar Posts:

• Losing Facebook
• Sleazy Sales Tactics and Social Networks
• Facebonked
• Tweaking Twitter
• How and Why RSS is Alive and Well

If you’ve been curious about Twitter, or you tried it, once, but couldn’t see the utility, now might be a good time to try again. Getting started with Twitter can be a bit of a challenge if you don’t know many people who are on it, but we have an active community that Idealware readers should fit right in with. The nonprofit Twitter pack gives you a quick index of people that you might actually want to follow. And as we move into nonprofit conference season, with NTEN’s big shindig up in April and Techsoup’s Netsquared a month behind it in May, there are a lot of people joining in. Just be sure that, before you follow a bunch of us, that you tell us who you are in your profile, and maybe post an introductory Tweet—most people will not automatically follow back a blank slate.

Convenience, simplicity, immediacy, camaraderie—these are the terms that I associate with Twitter. There are some features that I’d love to see, though. These could all be implemented by Twitter, or some by a clever third party.

First, I’d like to have the option, and for my followers to have the option, of typing an introductory note to appear in the email announcing that someone has a new follower. That way, if I follow you (assuming that you’re on Twitter), I can say “Hi, you, I’m following you because I can tell by your tweets that you read the Idealware blog, and that indicates a refined taste in blogs” or “Hi, you, I see that you have all sorts of tweets about Android and the T-Mobile G1. I’m a fellow G1 user.” Make this optional, sure, but the ability to set some context when I’m establishing a social relationship would be a welcome addition.

Second, please, make the user lists (followers and followees) into a manageable interface. Let me sort them by name, location, average number of tweets a day, whether they’re following me back, how long since they last tweeted, how many tweets they’ve posted total. These are all useful metrics, and I can gleam some of them on Twitter; others via useful tools like Tweepler, which takes a stab at this type of manageability. And let me add people to groups, something that I really appreciate in Facebook’s feature set. This can be done, in a fashion, by Tweetdeck, but only if you want to donate that much of your screen’s real estate to your Twitter client. Twhirl added spellcheck this week, so I’m not going anywhere soon.

Third, while we all appreciate innovations like “Mr. Tweet“, a service that analyzes your Twitter connections and makes additional recommendations, the main algorithm for this service seems to be “who are your friends following? You should follow them, too”. Seems logical. But the result is that Mr. Tweet tells me, and everyone else, that we should follow the Twitter superstars, mostly social media gurus with followers in the thousands. Analysis of my profile should reveal that I use Twitter to converse with friends and associates, and follow very few people like that to begin with. So a recommendation engine based on my behavior, as well as my friends lists, would be great—the current options are like a Google without the option to search on terms, just a button that returns the most popular sites on the web.

Those are my top three—add your Twitter wish list requests in the comments.Similar Posts:

• Feed Fight
• How and Why RSS is Alive and Well
• NPTech Update
• Useful Tools and Tips
• Twitiquette

The fact is, it’s not easy to manage even a home computer. It’s gotten better: they’re nice enough to color code the audio ports on a new PC, and put little labels below the connectors, and more and more things connect over USB, making the “where do I plug it in?” question a little easier to answer. And, wow, they even put a few ports on the front now. But we’re a long way from the day when operating a computer is as easy as operating a toaster, and I, for one, question whether that will be a happy day.

My biggest case in point is email. Email is the application that everyone in the family knows and uses. It’s compelling. Even the most technology-averse people can’t escape the argument that communicating with family, friends and associates electronically is inexpensive and convenient. But the problem I see is that, once most people learn email, they don’t want to learn anything else. Want online community? Sign me up for the email mailing list. Want news headlines and informational updates? Send it in the email. The problem with this is that email is an astonishingly useful application, but there’s a point where it breaks down, and that point is when the volume of email becomes greater than the capacity to keep up with it. Email has a huge flaw as an information management tool: important things scroll out of sight. It’s a FIFO medium (First In, First Out), that doesn’t prioritize information for you, so that message from Aunt Irma supercedes the spam from the travel agency which supercedes the alert that your home is in foreclosure which supercedes the announcement that dog food is on sale… you get my point. And managing the email, staying on top of it and storing it in folders is a job.

So I advocate for making an early investment that pays off later—learn a few more applications. Read RSS feeds in an RSS reader; visit your major social networks and online communities at their web sites; eschew the mailing lists—or subscribe using an alternate email account that you follow with another application. Do some research before investing in any application or gadget—there’s a powerful argument that digitizing your music will save you time and effort in the long run, but that’s of little use if, as happened with a friend of mine, you buy the iPod the day before you’re shipped out to an island on military duty, with no chance to get any music on it. Keep It Separated, Sally, and Knowledge Informs Strategy, Sam. Because the idea that funneling all of that information through one conduit is somehow simpler than doing some up front research, management, prioritization and segmentation of information is a self-defeating myth.

• Substitute your favorite subjective noun starting with the letter “S”.

Similar Posts:

• The Death of Email (is being prematurely reported)
• Losing Facebook
• Filling the Communication Gaps
• From Zero to Sixty: What type of Project Management tool is appropriate?
• Why We Tweet

1. Should my Facebook community include everyone I know from work, professional circles, friends and childhood acquaintances? That’s a lot of communities slammed into one. I already wrestle a bit with the fact that most of what I talk about on Twitter is probably not interesting to some of the family and non-nptech friends who follow me. My online persona is my professional one. I’m not pretending to be someone else—the personal things that come through are authentic—but I really don’t want to bring every aspect of my life and interests online.

2. One of the main things that I dislike about Facebook is the applications. I keep pretty busy, with a demanding job; my family; active blogging/writing/presenting and volunteering duties; friends and relatives; an appreciation for movies, music and television; an unhealthy addiction to news, culture and technical info; and a love of crosswords. I’m not sure how I do all of this—and sleep—in the first place. So filling out Facebook movie comparison quizzes (and the like) does not qualify for a spot on my schedule. If you are connected to me on Facebook, and you’re hurt that I haven’t responded to the numerous gifts, games and trivial pursuits that you’ve invited me to, please don’t be. If you message or email me directly you’ll get a reply!

3. I think the people who run Facebook are unabashedly doing it in order to mine marketing info from the membership. And, since the main thing that you do on Facebook is connect with old friends and family, they’re using some fairly extensive personal history and interaction as fodder for their advertising streams. This is the nature of the net, of course, as I have Google ads in my email and a slew of ad tracking cookies no matter how often I clear them. But Facebook manages to be ten times creepier than any other web site I visit when it comes to this stuff. I just don’t trust them.

I’ve seriously considered doing whatever it takes to delete my account. I even emailed everyone and warned them of that intention at one point. But it’s getting to the point where deleting Facebook is kind of like boycotting food—you might have good reasons, but you’ll probably hurt yourself more than help, particularly since there is real value in having the place to connect, and, sadly, it isn’t LinkedIn that’s grabbed the zeitgeist.
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• Feed Fight
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• Why I Don’t “Like” Facebook

So we have postal mail, the telephone, the telegram, facsimile, short wave radio, walkie-talkie and intercom holding up the old guard. And we have email, cell phone, IM, chat, IRC, blogs, Twitter, forums and social networking services charging in as new(er) mediums. And I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch. The internet has opened up a Pandora’s box of communication mediums. So why use one over another? If we break it down to a manageable number of mediums, say, Phone, IM, email and Twitter, there are some intriguing differences. These differences don’t imply that one is better than another, but, certainly, one is more practical, courteous or efficient than another in a given circumstance. I evaluate the mediums on a few defining attributes:

Private or Social? While allowing that you can send group emails and IMs, and hold phone conferences, these mediums are primarily suited for one to one or a few conversations, whereas Twitter, and many of the web-based mediums, are social, with a large and partially unknown audience included.

Ambient or Invasive? A phone call is invasive, as is, to some extent, an IM. The sender is sitting there waiting for a response, so the courteous thing to do is to immediately re-prioritize whatever you’re doing and respond to them. Email and tweets, on the other hand, are casual mediums. Ignoring either one for an hour is within the bounds of the sender’s expectations.

Convenient or In Need of Management? I can send and receive IMs and Tweets and forget about them; phone calls as well, although voicemail needs to be dealt with. Email, on the other hand, is a demanding application. i have to manage it, sort it, categorize it, and clean it up.

Disposable or Archived? Phone calls and IMs, unless I record them, disappear after the conversation is ended. Emails and tweets are saved and searchable, giving me an always available archive of my communications (unless I delete them).

I suggested in a post last week that Twitter bridges the gap between email and IM, just as email bridged the gap between the letter and the phone call. Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out if a social, ambient, archive-able and convenient medium like microblogging is compelling in my organization. I took a look at Socialcast, one of the many corporate Twitter clones popping up, and I was very impressed with their implementation, which breaks the messages into statuses, ideas, questions and links.

Selling my staff on a tool like this is proving to be a challenge. The argument for it is fairly nuanced, and urging anyone to try something new on faith isn’t easy. They’re asking why this is better than the Microsoft Messenger chat application, or a more full-featured Sharepoint site? Those are good questions. Micro-messaging software lacks some of the features that these other mediums sport, but it provides a very simple and powerful, approach to information sharing that is far more collegial and less invasive than chat, while it’s simpler and quicker to use than Sharepoint. And my bet is that, in the war of communications mediums, it will ultimately be the ones that are easiest to use and least disruptive that win. Or it should be.
We’ve come a long way since the Pony Express. It’s hard to imagine living in a time when your options for communication were limited to face-to-face, sllooowww mail, and, perhaps, carrier pigeon. Today, we have the opposite problem: there are so many mediums to choose from that a key communication skill is to gleam the method that the person you want to reach prefers.Similar Posts:

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Twitter is, at its core, a messaging service that is more immediate and casual than email, but less immediate and intimate than IM (Instant Messaging). Just as email bridged the gap between the letter and the phone call, Twitter bridges these digital extremes. But, unlike email – and more like, say, Delicious or Flickr, web sites that take what were traditionally private things – bookmarks and photo albums – and make them social, Twitter makes this messaging social. You can protect your tweets so that they can only be seen by people that you approve, but the majority of tweeters don’t do that.

I came to Twitter via NTEN. In 2007, as we were revving up for the annual conference in DC, a bunch of us signed up for Twitter accounts and used them—to mixed success—for casual announcements, off-agenda organizing and “Hey, what session are you in?” friend pinging. By the 2008 NTEN shindig in New Orleans, Twitter was an incredible asset. Even before the conference I was alerted to nationwide problems with flights, as I followed my friend @kariapeterson (and others) stories about being trapped in airports hours after their flights were due to leave.

Joining Twitter with a good chunk of my social/professional community was definitely a boon. If you sign up without a group of friends established, it can be a fair amount of work to identify and connect with people that share enough of your interests and motives for using Twitter. Because using Twitter involves more than just finding interesting people. It’s also about finding people who will interact with you on Twitter in ways that fit your needs and goals.

Margaret Mason’s wonderful blog entry on Twitter tips breaks down Twitter users into two camps:

“With the usual exceptions, people on Twitter tend to fall into two main camps. There are responders, who use Twitter as a channel to interact heavily with other users, and broadcasters, who use it primarily as a micro-blogging platform.”

But the real power comes from the crowd. For example, @johnmerritt, who works as IT Director for a SoCal YMCA, did a Twitter survey about email server message limits. He requested that survey response tweets include the tag “#inboxlimit”, and then he set up a web page subscribing to an RSS feed for that tag, so that we could share a growing list of responses. This survey helped me provide context to my staff about our email policies.

On Monday, @webb, co-Exec at an awesome San Francisco nonprofit, asked us all what non-financial giving we have planned for the coming months, with the request that we tag our answers with “#givelist”. If you want to be inspired, and learn a lot of ways that you can be philanthropically productive without increasing your budget for donations, then the responses are a worthwhile read. You can learn even more at this website.

The typical assumption about any social networking site is that it will allow you to market your mission and, possibly, increase donations. Twitter, of course, can do those things, as Facebook or MySpace can, under the right conditions. But it’s a far more natural tool for generating ideas and camaraderie than cash. If you’re writing it off as just another place to promote yourself or your cause, I’d say that it deserves a deeper look.Similar Posts:

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