Making Web Applications People Love

Twitiquette: Etiquette for Twitter

Canary at Night
Originally uploaded by adobemac

I do like Twitter, and think it has lots of room to grow, but I have a particular way that I like it to be used.

1. Cream of Crop. Twitter is not a complete braindump of everything that happens to you throughout the day. It's not IM'ing from your subconscious. It's for the gems. The best. The top events, thoughts and things you come across. It's the stuff you would write home about. Everyone is looking in and if you send too much stuff that isn't worth looking at, you'll stop being followed. You can get a lot and it's not meant to be an exact medium, but there is a point where you miss good stuff because of the bland stuff.

2. Occasionally Personal Qwirky. Once in a while, maximum once a day you can throw in a little bit of individual life. Like, "Back from they gym and I'm really really tired." That's fine. Mix it up a little. Let us know you're human. Just don't tell us every little thing that happens. Don't twitter "Morning" "Coffee time." "Good coffee" "Back to work" "Hungry..." "Reading a website" "Checking emails". I'm really not interested, if other people are and I'm too 1.9 then OK, fair enough, but I think it applies.

3. Remember the Invisible Audience. Your Twitter crowd is vague and changing. Not everyone watches, not everyone reads every message, not everyone follows everyone. Responding "Oh, that's funny." when half the people don't know what was funny is disastrous.

More Twitter guides here and here.

Discuss it Here

True Local is A Hopeless Web App

True Local is Hopeless
Originally uploaded by bigmick

Every once in a while I think that in-house marketing teams at the big companies are getting their act together with web applications and that my services will no longer be required.

Then I come across something like TrueLocal.com.au and think - wow, they are light years behind.

I Googled Hornsby Paint and got a little map and a map promo to a Hornsby based paint store - awesome - no surprises that Google works well.

Then I noticed a listing for Paint in Hornsby from Truelocal, a website that offers local directory listings in Australia. They did a whole lot of ads a while back bragging about how there is no use looking for plumbers in one town when you're in another. In reality they are just as bad as Yellow Pages is in Australia. Just useless. Look for one thing and they give you someone in a different town.

But my click through gave me people in a different state. Truelocal? Huh? WTF? It just comes across like they've never actually used the product.

So there is plenty more room for web application strategists like me to ply our trade. :-)

Offtopic: Keeping Toilet Seats Down

portable toilet planter
Originally uploaded by fredandcharlie

I think that the goal of women to keep the toilet seat down has been aiming (pardon the slight pun) at the wrong thing.

The goal is that every man should put the toilet seat down after they pee so that when they come in they never fall in, plus they don't have to see the ugly non-seat bit.

But there is no motivation. No reason why a man wants to drop the seat. They don't get anything out of it.

Here is my solution. Don't aim for the seat to be down. Aim for the lid. You still get your win. And here is how you do it.

MEN OF THE WORLD....

When you pee, do you always flush the toilet? OK, mostly. When you flush the toilet some of the pee gets splashed around and some of it ends up on you. Some of your own pee! Yuk!

To avoid the pee splash, just drop the lid down. Then you are protected.

So remember;

Drop the Lid, Avoid the Splash

Now spread the word.

On DataPortability

of=50,590,442
Originally uploaded by mk1archive

Nice discussion on My Tangle about Dataportability and the Challenges Therein

Jump in!

2008: Year of Going Outside

stupid sign: "caution door opens"
Originally uploaded by berbercarpet

This is going to be a big year for big companies venturing outside their own websites. They'll discover that the Internet is about connected open networks of people, not connections between closed networks. Some are testing the waters with MySpace and Facebook profiles, but the volume is going to increase this year.

And that's a good thing!

Being on the Internet is about going outside and playing. Have a home base, yes, but get out there and form connections back to your home page. It's a two way super highway (*cough*)

Blogging is two way. You need to get out there and make comments on other peoples blogs that are relevant to your business.

Twittering is two way. Follow interesting people and listen.

Social networks are two way. Create profiles but then find friends, groups and applications

Get amongst it.

Where Will People Run To Next? Ambient Media!

  Running Away 
  Originally uploaded by Heather Garland

Seeing Jeremiah Owyang's post about 2008 made me think about the cycle of;

(1) The mass of people get sick of controlled media and advertising.
(2) They run away and find somewhere to talk.
(3) BigCo and MassMedia find out where they've gone and follow them.

This is how I see it's gone over the past 12 years:

1996 - Mass media TV, radio, magazines and news papers are stale, controlled, contrived and yelling so loudly we can't hear the good things they could say. So people found this Internet thing that seemed pretty open and unladen of strings and roamed freely.

2000 - BigMedia finally realised that they were yelling to an empty(ing) room and wondered where they had all gone. "The Interwebs, that's where they are!" So they built brochure sites and yelled at us with banner ads.  The People responded by building tools that let them write what they want to write be what they want to be yeah. Build your own websites and then blogs were blank pages of freedom.

2004 - BigMedia finally learned how to spell blogs and about community  contributions. Some good bloggers, but not the great melting pot that was. The People realised that what the media companies could never control was their friends and personal network. Social networks were (truly) born and useful applications were applied to them.

2006 - With the Fox purchase of MySpace, we see BigMedia again finding The People hiding, this time in gangs of friends. Madonna profiles and even Coke promotions in World of Warcraft. Focused or more controlled networks like Dogster or Facebook pick up the pace as social havens.

2007 - Lacking the time to write diatribes, The People turn to micromedia through social apps (Facebook Status) and Twitter to just 'keep in touch' with a loose community of people they know. It's almost ambient media. In fact that's exactly what it is. It's not fool proof, it's rarely personal, it's just a soothing wave of 'my friends are around, and they are doing cool stuff.' 

Which brings us to 2008...

BigMedia are still a little confused by it all, but if history is anything to go by, you'll be followed by Ronald McDonald, Alec Baldwin and Hilary Clinton before January is over.

Micromedia and walled garden social networks are still fairly open spaces, free of big media noise. Facebooks attempts at 'sponsored fans' is banging at the gates, but the graph has held strong so far.

What impact would a truly OpenSocial have on that freedom is yet to be seen. It could strengthen it by making your connections stronger and still giving you the Power to Ignore. It could weaken it by making too many weak entry points that feel like Sospam (Social Spam)?

I'm not sure, but history shows that the motivation to make millions of dollars (like with spam) can overwhelm the determination of the crowds, at least until they run away again.

Questions:

1. What other safe havens exist now days?

2. Is mobile still a safe haven?

3. What impact does smart phones / iphones have on mobile havens?

4. Will BigMedia crack the Ambient Media wall?

5. Will Open Social strengthen or weaken the social graph against noisy intruders?

2008: The Year of Big

"Early" Big Bang of 2008
Originally uploaded by eton_shu

Hello all, just saying a bit of a hello after some time off.

Big year gone and a bigger one on the way.

More blogging, more reading, more experimentalisation.

:-)

Facebook removes the IS from the status.

Facebook removes the IS from the status.
Originally uploaded by bigmick

Wow, just noticed Facebook removed the "is" from the front of the status in their profiles.

Big news. Small, but big.

Lite: Good 404 Pages

Nothing found for Mickhasahotarse
Originally uploaded by bigmick

In the course of trying to convince Tara Hunt to jump across the Tasman Sea and visit us here in ol' Botany Bay I said that if she could sing lounge numbers she could get 7 nights worth of work.

She replied;

"Can I sing funky lounge songs? You haven't seen my 404 error."

Try this one or check the picture out.

Tag Spam

Pile
Originally uploaded by The BrassPotato

I like to use Creative Commons pics from Flickr to pretty up my blogs but I'm finding it increasingly hard to find good pics through key word searches. It's petty good, but lots of people are adding lots and lots of tags which reduces the strength.

It's the fine line of trusting your community and rewarding good tagging and having some people abuse it to lift their traffic. This post says that Flickr and Delicious don't reward it too much but I'm not sure that's true. It might be subtle but adding lots of superlatives "wonderful awesome sexy lovely nice funny" tags can give you incrementally more traffic. And when you can bulk tag, e.g. using the uploading programs, it is really easy to do.

It's also interesting to think about Plasq who add a Plasq and Skitch link to every image you upload to Flickr using their app. Great promotion for them, but if they are successful (as I'm sure they will be) I wonder what impact it will have. Firstly you'll never find pictures of the actual app (unless you add 'screenshot' I guess) nor of Cris and Brian (no great loss ;-) ) This is not exactly tag spam, but it's mass link association which has the same search effect.

End verdict. Add tagging (of course) but make it easy to do but hard to game. Welcome to the challenge.

It's the mysterious and uncontrolled beauty and beast of tagging.