Disruptive Conversations

What the heck is Twitter good for, anyway?  While many of us use Twitter, I think it's fair to say that we're all collectively still experimenting with exactly the best ways to use it.  Certainly it has evolved from being the mundane "Went to lunch. Had a ham sandwich" into being a channel for passing around news.  I've certainly found links through the people I follow on Twitter far faster than I would have necessarily come across them through my RSS feeds.  (Mitch Joel has a similar story about the "Twitter News Network".)

But what does a company do with Twitter?  How can it best be used as a communication vehicle for a company?  Obviously the BBC and others have been using it for news.  ZDNet may provide one other answer - they have a Twitter account, twitter.com/ZDNetBlogs, for following their blog postings. 

Now, you might say, isn't that the role of an RSS feed?  Certainly.  In fact, if you go to ZDNet's main blog page, you will see that they do, if fact, have a master RSS feed for all their blog postings (hosted by Feedburner - on a side note, I'm surprised that someone like ZDNet didn't pay for Feedburner's service to maintain their brand for their feed).  So the savvy web user could simply subscribe to that feed and be done with it.  I'm sure some people do.

But perhaps the point is that for people who come to use Twitter as a "news network", this becomes a way that ZDNet can join in that newstream that people watch.  I haven't spent much time analyzing it, but I do note that the ZDNet twitter stream is a subset of the ZDNet blog RSS feed.  Is it just certain articles they want to highlight?  Or certain blogs within their network of blogs?  I don't know... but the net is that they are providing yet another way that people can find their way over to ZDNet's content.    And they can see the results... there are currently 106 "Followers" of the ZDNet Blogs Twitter account.  106 people... many of whom are definitely in the "Early Adopter" camp.  Not a bad audience to get in front of if you are company with "high tech" content!

Kudos to ZDNet for experimenting with Twitter... I hope it works out for them.

Getting caught up one some blogging, I just had to comment that I loved Mitch Joel's "Burn the ships!" motif in his talk at the Canadian Marketing Association conference back in May.  He started this with a post back in September, "It's Time For Marketers to Burn the Ships" but this was that motif given form in a presentation.  Now, I wasn't there at the CMA to hear it, but I did read the reports and I've consistently heard great things about Mitch's presentations. I'm sure it was fun.

I just like the slogan... "burn the ships!"  What a great way to express the need to plunge into the new world and dive deeply.

Anyway, kudos to Mitch for coming up with a memorable way to frame the whole discussion.  (And yes, Mitch, given that we're only about 1.5 hours apart, one of these days I will have to finally hear you present!)

Over the weekend, Ross Mayfield posted "Status Contests and Attention Aggregators" which speaks to an issue I myself faced this morning.  As I have been talking about my impending trip to Stockholm for VON Europe/Podcamp Europe for the past while, I felt an obligation to tell folks that I was not going to be there.  So what did I feel I needed to do:

• post a note at my blog Disruptive Telephony
• post a note on my blog Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast (assuring people that tonight's dinner was still on)
• post a note on my blog Disruptive Conversations
• post a Twitter update
• update my Facebook status
• change my Skype IM mood message (for a little while, anyway)
• send out email to various folks with whom I had discussed meeting while there

This actually was a good bit of work.  Now, granted, part of it was self-imposed by virtue of my splitting my blogging out from my single blog (curiously, the only one of my major blogs that I did not feel compelled to update).  I also did not update my other IM services because for most of the people with whom I was corresponding, Skype seems to be their IM client these days.  But let's just collapse this list and also drop out the direct email which is just kind of an obvious item - so here were my updates:

• blogs
• Twitter
• Facebook status
• IM mood/advisory messages

Still a good number of places to update[1].  And still a pain in the neck that takes a bit of time... perhaps not a lot, but still, a bit of time.  What I really want is a tool that lets me update my status once and then have it automagically posted across all my various "status services" and blogs.  As Ross posts:

Maybe they can work out a way to let you write your status once, publish everywhere, and remove dupes when aggregating.

Or to invert it, I need some way for all of those sites to pull my status from a central location.  Perhaps it's like the widget displayed on this page that pulls my info from my Facebook status... but, of course, that widget isn't integrated into my RSS feed for this blog so those who read by RSS will have no view of that widget and my current status in Facebook.

The challenge goes back in part to my previous discussion of the "walled gardens" of social networking.  Part of why I feel compelled to update my status in different places is because there are different "communities of interest" with whom I communicate in those different areas.  There are some who only read one of my blogs.  There are some who only read my Twitter stream.  There are some who live online inside of Facebook... while others really only pay attention to IM.

There are different audiences within different walled gardens.

I am the same way.  There are some people I only follow in Twitter.  Others only in Facebook.  For a good number, I see their Facebook updates, Twitter updates and their blog updates.  But they don't know that.  If they want to post a message that they want all of their various friends and followers to see, what do they have to do?

Post everywhere, naturally.

Breaching those walls - or at least running communication conduits through the walls - will become increasingly important as people continue to understand the utility of these various different "status services".  I agree with Ross Mayfield that new forms of status aggregators will need to evolved.  The walls must be torn down - or at least eased a bit - because the current situation can't really last long, especially if these services are to move up the curve into mass adoption.  (Either that, or one or two of the biggest sites will win out as the place that people use for status updates.)

[1] And yes, I could throw my MySpace page in there, too, but I don't really use it all that much and so have not attracted people who follow my updates there.

Curious to know approximately how many miles it was from here in Vermont over to Stockholm, Sweden, I hit the "Get Directions" link on a Google Maps window I happened to have open.  I was a bit surprised and very amused to get the response shown in the graphic on the right (click on it to see the larger version), particularly step #16...

Yes, indeed, I'll go do that right now... drive down to Boston and dive right into the Atlantic!  :-)

Nice when a company has a sense of humor in its products!

As I wrote over on my Disruptive Telephony blog, sometimes things outside one's control intervene in the best of plans... and so now I'm home in Vermont for the week instead of in Stockholm.   There is still a dinner tonight in Stockholm among some listeners to my podcast (which is still going ahead) and a colleague from the open standards world, Cullen Jennings of Cisco and IETF, will be replacing me on the VoIP security panel at VON that my friend Martyn Davies will be moderating. 

What I can't easily cover, though, were the two talks I was going to do over at Podcamp Europe.   I was going to give a little "Audacity 101" intro to using Audacity to create podcasts... something I've been doing now for 2+ years and have become quite a strong user of it.  And then I was going to give a talk on "using VoIP softphones to include co-hosts or interview guests in your podcast".  Both were going to be fun.  Alas, I'll have to save them for Podcamp Boston2 this fall.

Meanwhile, I'll be looking forward to reading all about the various events happening over there this week.... would have been fun!

Have you ever wanted to meet someone for coffee/food/whatever but found yourself at a loss for a place to meet that was somewhere between the two of you?   It might be that you want to meet someone in your same town/city... or the person might be many miles away.

Well, by way of a Twitter message from Donna Papacosta, I learned today of site called a.placebetween.us, that does exactly that.  I have to say this is one of the coolest Google Maps-mashups I've seen to date.  (Well, okay, Twittervision is definitely cool, too.)  In the field in the upper right, you enter first one address , press Add, and then the second and press Add.  Then you say the type of meeting you want ("coffee", "food", etc.) and then you click "What's Between"... ta da! 

Very fun - and useful - mashup!

I admit to being a bit behind in listening to FIR episodes, so I wasn't aware that Shel & Neville were recording the show together yesterday in London until I saw a Twitter message about it in the morning.  Unfortunately, some Internet connectivity issues on Wednesday ate into the time I was to record my weekly report... and so I was doing it early on Thursday morning.  However, it was not in with enough time to be included, so it will run next Monday instead... so that's why you FIR listeners out there won't have heard me on yesterday's show.

In one of the various groupchats I monitor, someone mentioned TwitDir the other day and I have to say that it's an interesting little site.  You can obviously search on someone's Twitter name, but you can also just search on more generic terms, like part of a person's name or a location.  Searching on just "Burlington" showed me that there are two other Twitter users from Burlington, VT. (Well, or at least there are two other Twitter users who have identified themselves as being in Burlington, VT.  There could be others here who choose to leave the location blank.)

The various "Top 20" lists were also entertaining. On the "Top 20 updaters", it is rather amazing to think that someone has posted 32,244 updates.  It would be curious to know the frequency at which they update.  (Unfortunately, this particular person is writing in what looks to be an Asian language and I have no clue what they are writing!)  The BBC World Service is in there with 27,224 updates as well. On the "Top 20 followed" (when it eventually appeared), it was no surprise to see Scoble on there, but I didn't expect Dave Troy (the man behind Twittervision) to be on the top with 6,766 followers!

Anyway, if you are a Twitter user and haven't checked the site out, you may find it useful - or at least briefly entertaining.

I have to thank Wayne Smallman for clueing me in to a minor little detail that I'd overlooked back in January when I had first launched this blog.  Wayne, who I have met through a public chat room about Twitter and Skype, IM'd me (on Skype) to let me know that he wasn't able to subscribe to the feed for this blog.

Given that this blog has been in action now for most of 6 months and I hadn't heard this issue at all, I was very surprised.  Feedburner stats do show a good number of subscribers to the RSS feed... but I'm guessing that they (some of you!) must have all grabbed the feed URL from the big orange RSS button or used the "Add to Google" or "Add to Bloglines", because the RSS icon in the browser address bar would definitely not work.

Here's the deal... back when I was looking to split out my writing into multiple blogs last fall, I had another name for this blog and had set up a similarly-named feed in Feedburner.  Wanting to ensure that people got to my Feedburner feed, I went into the TypePad settings and "connected" my TypePad blog to the appropriate Feedburner feed.  Everything was good.  I was getting ready to launch.

But before I launched, I found that "disruptiveconversations.com" was available and since it went nicely with my already existing "disruptivetelephony.com" domain, I decided to rename the blog.  In fact, I changed the underlying TypePad URL... changed all the template names, mapped the domain... and I created a new Feedburner feed with the new name.  All looked good and the various subscribe buttons you see on the right side all worked.    I launched the blog and you all have now been reading it for the past 6 months.

There turned out to be just one minor little detail:

I never went back and updated the TypePad <-> Feedburner connection!

Oops!  Yes, indeed, in the TypePad configuration screens this blog was very happily connected to the old feed at Feedburner.  The problem is - I deleted that feed quite some time ago!

The fix was quite simple: I simply disconnected this blog from the old Feedburner feed and then connected it back to the new Feedburner feed.  Done in just a couple of minutes and I verified that it all works.

I'm just a wee bit embarrassed that I never noticed it and obviously didn't test it.  I'm also a bit surprised that no one ever commented in all this time... are people not using that RSS icon in the browser address bar to subscribe to feeds?

So in any event, thanks to Wayne's query the button should now work fine!  If you tried subscribing in the past and it didn't work, please do try it out now.  And Wayne, if I ever do get over to the UK, I will have to look you up and buy you a drink! :-)

As part of my continued experimentation with Facebook, I recently installed the Facebook Toolbar for Firefox and have to say that I'm quite impressed.  Now, this toolbar isn't new... it was released back in November 2006, but I just hadn't tried it out yet.

As shown in the image to the right (from Facebook's web site), the toolbar offers a good number of features.  I haven't really used the "search Facebook" feature, but I definitely do like the notifications that appear telling you how many messages or friend requests you have.  With a single click, you can jump directly to that part of your inbox.  Even more useful to me is the "house" icon that takes you directly to your Facebook home page.  Great way to jump there when you want to.  The "Quick Links" feature similarly gets you to other parts of Facebook.

I also like the "Share" button that lets you easily post a link with commentary to your internal Notes page inside of Facebook.  In a way, it's similar to the del.icio.us add-on to Firefox that I use... a pop-up appears, you enter the commentary and press the submit button.  Of course, this toolbar only posts inside the walled garden of Facebook... but it is a nice quick way to get info posted there.

Perhaps one of the greatest things I like about the toolbar is the fact that after you install it you get pop-up "toast" notifications when friends update their status message, send you messages, add Notes, etc.  So now I get toast pop-ups for Facebook along with those pop-ups for various IM notifications.  I have to say it's rather nice... but then again, I don't have a zillion "friends" in Facebook so that I'm always seeing status updates.  If I did, this could be a bit annoying.  For now, though, while I continue my experimentation, I do find it quite useful.

All in all, the Facebook Toolbar has already made my personal use of Facebook more productive.  If you are looking for a way to enhance your use of Facebook, do check it out.