Posts tagged with 'twitter'
It’s been an interesting morning in the wonderful world of social media, hasn’t it? First, Twitter went dark. Then Facebook started acting janky. Then we all sat there and just stared at the blinking cursors on our screens, with their telepathic messages of “get back to work.” But did we? No! Of course not– we went over to FriendFeed to discuss.
Twitter reported its outage being caused by a denial-of-service attack. (Quick explanation: when skilled nerds/hackers write programs to flood a server with tasks and requests, so that the server is overloaded and taken down.) What happens when we come to rely on the social web for all kinds of things, and then those services disappear? Sure, we can all merrily hop over to the next one, but as Allyson Kapin pointed out, to a certain degree, we’d all have to start over on building our networks. Our social capital translates across platforms, sure, but the physical reconnecting of users to users is one big pain in the butt.
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As you may have heard, I’ve signed a contract with Berrett-Koehler to write a book about social media this summer. But! I need a tremendous amount of support — monetary, moral and otherwise — to get it done in the super-fast timeframe that I’m working within. Can you help? Here’s the email that I sent out to all my friends and colleagues. Please use the ChipIn to the right, or click here to make a donation.
Update, 7/13/09: Two things. There’s a post on my progress and thoughts here, and also, to reflect the offline donations I’m getting, I’m now gradually lowering the goal of the ChipIn.
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Friends, colleagues, clients! Lend me your ears…
I’m writing you with some exciting news that makes me very happy. I just signed a contract from Berrett-Koehler publishers to write a book I’ve been imagining for a long time. But it’s going to take some very hard work on my part, and I hope you can help me succeed.
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Here’s the interview I did this morning with the Morning News Hour crew at Hofstra University — great conversation and lots of fun, too. We cover Iran, other countries with repressive Internet policies, Net Neutrality, the big picture of social media and so much more! A jam-packed 17 minutes of goodness:
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There’s a ton of great material out there on the nuances of the Iranian election and protests, and I just want to quickly throw some thoughts into the ring.
First, from an American media perspective, here was another great moment for folks to demand what they wanted to see covered on national news media. What a moment of media dissonance: As protests erupted — and in some cases, turned violent — in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere in Iran, major broadcast media in the US had little to no news on the events at all. By using the hashtag1 #CNNfail to collect all of the dissatisfaction on Twitter, Americans were able to shift the focus of the conversation and eventually influence CNN’s decision makers to start covering stories by Sunday.
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I had the immense pleasure of spending most of the week in Toronto, training about 90 people on the ins and outs of all things social tech. It was an honor to join the other trainers, real rockstars of both American and Canadian social tech for social good worlds: Beka Economopoulos, Cheryl Contee, Roz Lemieux, Jason Mogus, Sam Dorman, Phillip Djwa, Darrell Houle, Samer Rabadi, Eric Squair, Tim Walker, Julia Watson… man, I felt smarter just hanging out with these peeps all week.
Here’s some links to the presentations and workshops that I led and co-led all week; thanks to the participants who took killer notes. There’s tons of incredible info on, and being added to, this wiki, so check back often:
As more people are jumping into the social media river, many are wondering what they should share online — specifically, where are the boundaries between personal and professional behavior in this brave new world, where we’re all able to peek into the windows of our friends, family and coworkers.
I talked in pretty simple terms about some different approaches in “The non-fanatical beginner’s guide to Twitter.” With this post, I’m going to flesh out some of the nitty gritty and help to answer some of the tougher questions.
It used to be said with one of the very first popular online social tools — email — that you shouldn’t write anything in a message that you wouldn’t want to appear in the New York Times. Few people ever followed that rule, thank goodness. How boring would our lives be if we all subjected ourselves to Grey Lady standards of information sharing?
Nowadays, new tools make it easier to share as much of ourselves as we want, and especially if you’re just getting going, it can be difficult to know what’s okay to post and what isn’t. A flat-out easy beginner’s guidepost comes from the illustrious Susan Mernit, who told participants in a workshop we led: “If you’re wondering whether you should post something or not, you probably shouldn’t.”
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I know everyone wants to talk about the latest and greatest Twitter app, or what the Facebook killer will be, but I’ve been thinking a lot about filters lately and how much more critical they’ll become for managing our daily lives. The ability to filter information to our individual satisfaction is going to be what makes or breaks the onslaught of always-on social media.
One of the biggest complaints I get from clients and friends who join a new social network (besides the pain of setting up the profile) is the feeling of info overload. I’ve talked about how the paradigm of email has set us all up for disaster in this department, and I always come back to that Clay Shirky quote: “There is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.”
In the past, we left the responsibility to others to filter our information for us in a number of ways, mostly because there wasn’t any other way to get the goods. Media organizations, through their hierarchies of gatekeepers, have determined for ages what the important stories are. Businesses have decided what demands needed to be met with the products they produced. Whenever we did get information via social means, we could manage the incoming info because there wasn’t that much of it to handle — our networks were considerably more closed and less overlapping.
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Incredibly exciting news came across the transom last night while I was at the Women Who Tech after-party in NYC: I’ve been offered a book deal with the stellar Berrett-Koehler publishing group in San Francisco. I’m absolutely thrilled to be working with Johanna Vondeling, their vice president of editorial and digital, and the rest of the staff there. Their commitment to social change as well as digital innovation for publishing makes them the perfect fit for what I want to do.
What do I want to do, I hear you asking yourself? In short — I do want you to buy the book, after all — I’m going to be describing the social media moment as a huge opportunity for social change and action. If you’ve read some of what I’ve written about Twitter and other services, and my ideas about the giant gene pool and the desperate need for diversity, you have an idea of where the book will go. Plus, it’ll be stunningly entertaining to boot!
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Tweetie for Mac finally came out yesterday, cheered by many a Twitter-nerd. I’d tried Nambu recently, but just couldn’t get the hang of it (for one, it didn’t show me all my friends when I tried to create groups), and Tweetdeck is just too overwhelming for my style– as Nezua pointed out once, “It’s the Deathstar of Twitter clients.” My Twitter usage is pretty heavy, but I don’t like to have too many things to look at, and I like feeling a “stopping by the water cooler” vibe when I pop in. So, I’ve been using Blogo, which is actually first and forement a regular blogging client. The microblog/Twitter features are simply lovely, though, and I’ve been using for about 4 months now.
But hey, I’m a magpie and I like shiny new things, so I decided to give Tweetie a whirl. Both apps cost something, by the way: Blogo is $25 after a full-featured 21-day trial period (but it includes a robust blog editor); Tweetie for Mac is $14.95 till early May, then will be $19.95, with an ad-supported free option.
Here are my pros (+) and cons (-) for each app:
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