A little less than an hour ago, I received a phone call from my 17-year-old son who is attending a month-long program at the University of Southern California. “There was just an earthquake” he said. “I’m okay,” he said. “It was legit.” I’m not sure exactly what the legit part was referencing. My mind was pausing on the “Okay” part. “Call Mom,” he said, “I gotta go.”
(If you have a 17-year-old son, you’ll recognize that phone call. “Hello, I’m alive, everything’s okay, gotta go.” It’s the same call he makes to us each night whenever he’s away from home. Earthquake or ordinary day, it works the same way.)
For me, however, this is a case where it’s great to be following lots of specific people on Twitter, not just a key word — people I know (via Twitter) who live in LA and who thought first to let those who follow them via Twitter know their status.
It’s situations like this that help make Twitter easier and easier to explain.
You don’t need me to tell you that Seth Godin is a brilliant marketer. He sees marketing lessons in all of life’s journey. And because his lessons about marketing are shared with parable-like simplicity, even people like me can understand them — and be inspired.
Today, he’s having a little fun demonstrating how people will join “tribes” they think are exclusive. If you pre-order his new book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (due out October 21), you can “join Seth’s new tribe.” But hurry, because, “Membership is numbered, with low numbers getting prestige, first dibs on various assets and bragging rights.”
Wait, I’ve heard of this network before: It’s Melin Mann’s award-winning startup concept, “FlockdUP” — the maverick network for thought-leaders.
Okay, Seth. I’ll play along. Since I would purchase your book anyway, I’m also signing up for your maverick network for marketing thought-leaders — the receipt for my pre-order is in the e-mail.
Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape (at age 22), Opsware and Ning (translation: the smartest guy in the room), is joining the board of FaceBook, according to TechCrunch.
Andreessen, of course, has a unique position in the history of the Internet. His entrepreneurial success is also well documented. However, it was not until he started blogging that I realized what a great thinker and writer — a communicator — he is. (Although, like others, he has slowed down his blogging recently.)
I hope Andreessen’s joining FaceBook’s board sends an “openness” message regarding the future of FaceBook. Andreessen’s company, Ning, offers a platform for setting up a FaceBook-like community for your club, church, cause or company. In the past, I have perceived Ning as competitive to what I thought the longterm plans of FaceBook were. Granted, I can understand how the two could be complimentary — FaceBook is focused on macro-community, Ning is focused on micro-community. Obviously, my understanding (translation: speculation) means nothing as Andreessen and Zuckerberg are the only two minds that really had to be melded on this.
Fortunately, because Andreessen blogs, we can understand a little of how his mind works regarding the ways in which social platforms need to work together. On May 14, for example, he wrote about Ning’s integration of two “social” initiatives from Google, Open Social and Friend Connect. (They also support other initiatives like “Open ID.”)
Here’s a quote from that May 14th post:
“From a strategy standpoint, we want to enable maximum flow both into and out of Ning networks and the rest of the web. It should be as easy as possible for users to get from elsewhere on the web into a Ning network, and likewise as easy as possible to flow from a Ning network to anywhere else on the web — and ideally, while taking their social context with them. We think this makes strategic sense for two key reasons:
First, it’s good for users, and whatever is good for users is good for a service like Ning. We think that’s obvious.
Second, you don’t get lots of flow into anything on the web without having lots of flow out to the broader web.
Having someone on FaceBook’s board who advocates that point of view is a good thing for FaceBook — and the rest of us who develop tools and content designed to build community.
If you look at the comments following that FriendFeed post, you’ll note that my friend (and I don’t mean that just because we said so on FaceBook) Dave Winer commented that he, “Totally agree(d) with this.”
Because so many people have learned that it’s important to listen to Dave (even when they disagree with him) his FriendFeed comment about my “tweet” led to a robust disussion that still lingers 17 hours later.
Which leads me to the topic of comments: A small group of the people who read this blog are currently obsessed with trying to understand where “comments” fit into conversational media. Even those of us who think we at least have a grasp of social media — who know its role in de-centralizing “content” — are fascinated (and some, upset) that comments on our blogs are now becoming de-centralized.
It fascinates me that some bloggers, who more often than not, are using their blog to comment on items they read elsewhere, are becoming upset that comments about their posts are taking place elsewhere.
As for me, I love that comments are finally being recognized as the treasure they are.
I don’t care where the conversation takes place. I want to understand it and embrace it.
Why I find all of this fascinating: You know that kid who loves tearing apart physical things to understand how they work. The one who can actually put the stuff he or she tears apart back together again. “She should be an engineer when she grows up,” people will say about that kid.
I wasn’t that kid.
But looking back, I was obsessed with tearing apart virtual things to understand how they work. I was never interested in how my television worked, but I was extremely curious about how programs were written and produced. I was never really that interested in printing presses, but I can’t remember a time I didn’t wonder about how reporters gathered news and editorial decisions were made. I was also fascinated with what today I’d call group dynamics and how teams and clubs and cliques came together and grew or fell apart. I was an organizer of groups and a conversation “moderator” decades before I even realized that groups and conversation need to be organized and moderated. I was fascinated with why fans become fans and what “loyalty” is all about. I was that kid.
For almost 20 years (back to the CompuServe days) the online world has provided me (and many others like me) with an amazing laboratory in which we get to tear apart the flow of information and the creation of conversation and community in an attempt to understand how they work. For some of us, that’s like being a kid in a, well, info-candy shop.
I’ll admit. I’m not merely doing this for fun. I have a business that allows me to apply what I learn in this laboratory to improve our internal conversations and community — and to incorporate what we learn into improving and enhancing the products and services we sell. But, I think it’s also apparent that I still have a child-like curiousity about the ways in which people use technology to share with one-another and to spread information — and create community.
The most important thing I’ve learned is this: It’s not about the technology. I know so many people who are “afraid” of something because they think it’s “technology.” Frankly, technology developers don’t help things by creating products that are driven by features and functions than by ease-of-use. It still amazes me that after 30 years, so many professional marketers don’t understand why Apple has a cult following. “Cool” is what marketers think Apple is all about. “Not corporate” perhaps, you know, that I’m a Mac, I’m a PC thing, perhaps. As a Mac-tard since 1984, I’ll tell you why Apple has a cult following. They make products for people who don’t give a rip about technology. They make products for users. And even though they don’t say it anymore, their products are for the “rest of us” who don’t really care how the technology works, we just want the technology to disappear so we can listen, read, write, create, share, buy, sell, etc.
I’m obsessed with what’s taking place here. But I’m obsessed as a user and “content” creator and “community” builder and participant.
The Important Part: Despite the fact most people have only been using e-mail for the past 15 years, it has become a dominant channel of business communication — and definitely the most mis-used. A couple of interesting thoughts on e-mail have hit my radar in the past 24 hours. First, this check-list from Seth Godin with some practical (and humorous) considerations you should take before hitting that send button. Second, (via a Twitter ‘tweet’ from Steve Rubel) I saw these blog posts by Luis Suarez, a knowledge management expert at IBM, who is 14 weeks into an experiment of giving up business e-mail.
The Take Away: E-mail is not going away anytime soon, but the people who used e-mail before you ever heard of it are moving onto other methods of staying in touch with one-another. Some of this is generational - Facebook and text-messaging trump e-mail for those under 24. Some of this is frustration(al?) - an effort to reduce the noise-level that has resulted from spam and the ease some people have with hitting the send button. Your not going to moving on from e-mail anytime soon, but the next few years will see a significant evolution in how you use and manage e-mail.
The Important Part: In the current issue of BusinessWeek (and online), Heather Green and Stephen Baker have written a great overview of where “social media” (not just blogs, but all the conversational media and social networking tools and platforms out there) are today as it relates to business. Not, as over-reported in the technology blogosphere, about the business of social media. And not about the tools and features and investment opportunities and anything else gee-whiz that’s going on. This BusinessWeek story is about how all these activities and connections and conversations that are taking place online are changing the way business is conducted.
The Take-Away: The article may not be eye-opening to a crowd who spends all day reading tech-blogs and camping-out on Twitter, but it’s a great article to forward to a “C-Level” person at your company or organization who you think could benefit from a high level view of what is transpiring — from a “media brand” they know.
The Less Important Rambling: Over the past three years, I’ve gotten to know BusinessWeek writers (and bloggers) Stephen Baker and Heather Green pretty well. I haven’t actually met them face-to-face, but we’ve shared conversations about Heather’s wedding, Stephen’s book and a myriad of other “important” and trivial matters. We’re “friends” on all those online networking things you’ve ever heard of (and many you probably haven’t if you’re not a Web 2.0 wonk). Because of that, it may seem weird, but I actually know more about what Stephen and Heather are up to than many acquaintances — and friends — I know “off line.”
For example, because we follow each other via Twitter and Facebook, I knew they recently worked on updating a story from May, 2005 with information and insight that has emerged during the past three years. In that second link, they’ve literally annotated the first article with contemporary statistics and knowledge. That’s a brilliantly creative reporting technique that I’ve never seen before as it uses visual cues from the Word document “change tracking” feature so readers can easily see where the new information has been inserted.
If it weren’t Saturday morning of a three-day weekend, I might be tempted to keep rambling, but I have much less important things that are beckoning me at the moment.
Before I write anything else, let me emphasize that I believe the real news here is a major earthquake. As I write this, the news reports indicate 900 high schools students are trapped beneath rubble. As a parent, I know where my mind and heart are as I read such news.
Admittedly, how the news broke on this story is an extremely esoteric sidebar, however for those who are passionate users and observers of online media and the way in which participants in an event can “broadcast” their observations, the role of Twitter as a form of first responder medium in this tragedy is already being analyzed in the technosphere (good examples: MG Siegler at VentureBeat, The Onlline Journalism Blog and the ubber-blogger/twitterer Robert Scoble) and even by some mainstream media tech-news observers like this quote from the BBC’s dot.life blogger, Rory Cellan-Jones:
“Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences.
Again, this is a sidebar to a breaking story, but (as I’ve written about for a long time) the folks “playing around” with Twitter are creating something that is not just about “play.” It may remain an “edge” medium — a global police scanner for the news obsessed — but I stand by my predictions that Twitter will become the source people will turn to in the early, confusing moments of breaking news stories. As stories develop, the traditional models of reporting will kick in, but Twitter — because one can post to it via text-message, IM, e-mail, (and via secondary services, voice-to-text, audio, video or photos posted elsewhere can be converted into or alerted via “tweets”) — is a powerful eyewitness and message-relay platform.
And for the record, if I’m ever “inside” a breaking news story, Twitter is where you’ll find me.
Later: Search rock-star Danny Sullivan points out that the US Geological Service had information on its website within three minutes of the first “tweet” on the topic. I don’t think anyone (and certainly not me) has suggested that Twitter is a new “authority” on the news of earthquakes or any disaster. Obviously, news will get disseminated with or without it. That Twitter is even in the food-chain is what’s noteworthy today.
I’m sorry. The title of this post is a joke. I’m merely referring to Kara’s post in which she talks about informally polling some friends outside the bubble of Silicon Valley (where she lives and works) regarding their awareness of Twitter and some other services that, well, a few of us use obsessively but that haven’t reached a level of awareness — even a level of obscurity — among “real” people.
Says Kara:
“I conducted a little experiment among the more than 100 folks gathered for the wedding (in Washington, DC), all of whom were quite intelligent, armed with all kinds of the latest devices (many, many people had iPhones, for example) and not sluggish about technology. They were also made up of a wide range of ages and genders, from kids to seniors. And so I asked a large group of people –- about 30 — and here is the grand total who knew what Twitter was: 0
As I’ve blogged here before, I’ve given up on trying to explain Twitter. I know how I use it and why I like it. But, as with most of the social media or gizmo-technology I experiment with: I really don’t care who uses — or doesn’t. I’m not going to attempt to convert anyone — although, I guess adding my Twitter account to my business card is an implicit act of network-effect evangelism and endorsement.
Over the years, I’ve learned that when it comes to certain types of new media, the gap between geek adoption and “real people” adoption is typically wide.
I’ve mentioned on this blog that in 1996, I gave a presentation about the Internet to the 300-member Downtown Nashville Rotary Club. I asked for a show of hands from the audience filled with civic and business leaders: “How many of you have your e-mail address printed on your business card?” I recall precisely that six people raised their hands. Six.
Two years later, I gave a similar presentation to the same group and asked the same question. Nearly everyone in the audience raised their hands.
One of the reasons (one among several) I register on new “social networking” services is to watch their adoption rates — often there is no adoption rate, but almost always there’s a long lag time between geek and real-world registrations. For example, I registered on LinkedIn on February 3, 2004 — over four years ago. For a year or so, I had a grand total of 3-4 contacts, all geeks, and probably all of them personal friends of the creators of the service.
I had nearly forgotten that I’d registered on the service when, a couple of years ago, I started getting a few more connection requests when they added a feature that allows users to upload their contact list and bounce it against a database of LinkedIn users. (I’ve written before about this use of e-mail as a means to assert identity and serve as a rudimentary precursor to some way in the future where we can all easily migrate our “connections” from service to service. In the past month, I’ve received more LinkedIn connection requests than in the previous 3 1/2 years combined — and they’re all coming from my off-line connections. But still, a poll of my offline friends would probably still reveal that few of them have heard of LinkedIn.
So, as for Kara’s friends. Mine are the same. I regularly ask people if they’ve ever heard of Twitter. I then work my way up to services like Flickr. (They’ve all heard of Google, for the record.)
Kara is correct. No real person has ever heard of Twitter.
Sidenote: About two months ago, I spent a 30 minute cab ride from Baltimore (BWI) to DC explaining my use of Twitter to a commissioner of the FCC. Later that day, I spent 15 minutes in a similar discussion of Twitter with 12 CEOs of business-to-business media companies who were perplexed by my use of the service — as they were with my early blogging many years ago.
As I listen to myself explain Twitter, I’m surprised anyone uses it. However, as I discovered just yesterday, using Twitter makes solving problems a snap if you happen to ask a question that someone who’s following you can answer.
Frankly, I think it’s a good thing that Twitter has not gone mainstream yet. But that’s another post for another day.
Later: I believe that Twitter — or something like it — will go “mainstream” one day. It’s just not going to be “soon” in geek-time.
Note: I’m stepping on a plane and will check back in later to edit this post.
Lost photos: I shot this photo from my office window last April. Unfortunately, I can’t locate the photos shot from the same location on April 16, 1998.
My first ever accidental online “citizen journalism” (before the term existed) experience occurred ten years ago, today. Unfortunately, because of the ephemeral nature of the web and certain “wish we knew then what we know now” practices, there is no place for me to point to what I did on that day.
Today, posting “weather photos” is one of those participatory “user-generated-content” activities that even the most up-tight control-freak media company encourages. In the past week or so, I’ve been emailed by at least two big brand online services requesting that I join their network of weather watchers due to my practice of posting photos of weather outside my office window on the 7th floor of a building near Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Ten years ago today, Will Weaver (then an employee at Hammock, now the big-guy — literally and figuratively — at the e-mail marketing company, emma) and I did a rather remarkably dumb thing. We had an early digital camera and decided to take photos of a tornado that was heading straight towards our building.
All the smart employees (everyone but the two of us) headed to the core of our office building, but we were thinking how great it would be to take some photos and post them on the Hammock.com website. That was a rather out-of-the-box idea as the site was your basic brochure site at the time. Not like today where not only do we have several work-related blogs on the site, but every employee also has a “people page” where they can post information they’d like to share.
Back then, Will and I shot a series of photos (actually, I think Will was “shooting” and I was “photo directing”) of what turned out to be the tornado passing by our office as it touched down in Centennial Park on its way to hitting downtown (including the stadium, then under construction) before doing major widespread damage in East Nashville. (Today, the Nashville Tennessean has a retrospective of the days events.)
After the tornado passed our office building, Will and I and a few other Hammock employees jumped in a car and (I don’t recommend this to anyone — indeed, do not ever do this) drove out to survey the damage in the area immediately surrounding our office. A few blocks from our office, we came-upon what turned out to be one of the most tragic events related to that day. As we watched, a large team of Nashville emergency service and fire department personnel were attempting to save a Vanderbilt student who was pinned beneath a tree in Centennial Park. Unfortunately, the student died later.
When we returned to the office, Will posted the photos at the URL (which no longer works) hammock.com/tornado. Within an hour, CNN.com and other news services were pointing to the photos and the site, which perhaps on a good day got 100 visitors, was (thanks to a robust server) getting tens of thousands of viewers. Sometime during the night, a radio talk show host I had never heard of until then, Art Bell, linked to the photos and started talking about them on his show. (Later I learned that visiting aliens and bad weather were a staple of his show.) The link from Art Bell ended up crashing our servers, as I recall.
Several years ago, we discovered that we had “lost” those photos and any archive of what the site was like on that day. I haven’t actually given up on them turning up somewhere, but searches of the WayBackMachine and other services have not turned up any mirror sites that captured the photos.
One of the reasons I now am obsessed with backing up and organizing digital media — and displaying it on multiple platforms — is my disappointment in having lost that April 16, 1998 moment in time — as experienced by a few of us.
Today, Hammock Inc. would have the photos uploaded to Flickr.com/hammock and YouTube.com/hammockinc instantly and the photos would be backed up on three different servers in our offices and off-site. And, oh yeah, they’d also be posted on that “Out My Office Window” Flickr set. Additionally, we would grant rights to anyone wanting to display the photos for news-coverage purposes.
We’ve come a long way in the past ten years. Today, the city of Nashville has a network of siren alarms that warn people of weather emergencies. Vanderbilt students can be contacted immediately via text message during any type of emergency. And today, the notion of individual witnesses of an event providing personal coverage directly to an audience, and not mediated by a professional news operation, is accepted as a norm — and even “covered” by traditional media.
Later: Laura Creekmore, who then and now lived in East Nashville, recalls the day’s event (she was one of the smart people who went to our building’s basement). I spoke today also with Will Weaver whose recollection is similar to mine. If Lewis Pennock or others are reading this, please comment to fill-in-the-blanks of any details from that day.
Chris and his commenters raise some interesting issues. The debate taking place focuses on the notion that Andrew is “selling” or “selling-out” his “community.”
I think it’s a great “micro” lesson in the economics of circulation or subscription-value — or “list value.”.
I don’t think, however, it’s about “community.” Following someone on Twitter is like signing up for an RSS newsfeed. With one-click the subscriber is in or out. No “registering.” No “approving.” No “confirming.” One-click in. One-click out. Anything with that low of an admission price is not a community. I have the same problem with calling Twitter followers “community” that I have with magazine companies calling their subscribers a “community.” To me, community is something the “members” create among themselves. A person or entity may host or foster community — and a community may evolve. But a “list” is not a community.
Is there any value to nearly 1,500 Twitter-users agreeing to follow you account?
There is if they’re the type of people who would follow Andrew Baron.
Will they continue to follow the new account-holder when the “following” is transferred to a new username (if, indeed, it is)?
I’m guessing a majority of the followers won’t know it’s been changed unless it is purchased by an online gambling service who will use it to test out Twitter spam.
Whatever happens, it’s an interesting experiment.
Interestingly, Andrew has picked up a lot of followers since announcing this — including me.
Sidenote: I bet Chris Brogan would do well if he auctioned off his 6,200-follower Twitter account. But in Chris’s case, a community “has” evolved, because he spends so much time and effort introducing one follower to another. With Chris, you get the feeling he actually knows those 6,200 people. In Chris’ case, his followers are not just a list.
Second sidenote: I’m sure there has been some Twitter “username” speculation. I’ve got at least one or two registered for a rainy day.
In a really transparent link-baiting, page-view inflating scheme, eweek.com is running a slide-show-ish “editorial” feature titled, “Should Facebook be Banned from Work?” (I hate doing it, but as a service to you, dear reader, here’s the link.)
Obviously, I think it would be ridiculous to ban Facebook from work. I prefer to ban from work employees who aren’t productive and responsible. If employees are productive, they’ll discover how to use anything productive that Facebook enables — and learn how to manage the noise.
What I’d rather see banned from work are editorial features that make the reader click through 12 pages (or more, if you count the ads popping up along the way). The “page-view” metric is the reason publishers do this, but it’s a nightmare user experience and I’m sure any analysis of site traffic would show that people rarely click through more than 2-3 pages. On this one, I didn’t get past the second frame.
Also what I’d like to see banned (and I thought it was) are the types of embedded-in-editorial link-ads that appear on the eWeek website. The type that send Paul Conley over the edge.
For anyone the least bit “web-savvy,” eWeek is a much bigger time waste than Facebook.
I think it’s pretty interesting that Hugh MacLeod’s post about deleting his Twitter account is rapidly working its way up Techmeme.com. If this works the way events like this typically work, in a day or two, Hugh will be the lede in a New York Times article on Twitter burn-out. (Those familiar with the blogosophere can easily connect the dots between his post and the upcoming New York Times article. It will start with lots of blog posts saying, “I hate Twitter, also.”) I wish Hugh had not deleted his account — he could have just stopped posting to it — as the historian in me likes to see things archived, rather than wiped-clean. However, if Hugh was finding Twitter a distraction from finishing his book and his art, and he needed to pull the plug completely, I applaud him for doing so. I like Twitter and have written on this blog about how I believe it can serve many positive purposes. But yes, it can be a time-waste. That’s why I try to keep my Twittering in the background and turned off while working. I’ve found the program Twirhl, a desktop Twitter (and other services) client is helping me filter out lots of Twitter noise and have a better framework and context for the use of Twitter.
So I respect Hugh’s decision. Many media and technology people I know have said to me they “don’t get Twitter.” I understand. I’ve even written here that nobody “gets Twitter.” And that’s one of the things about it that I find so fascinating. It’s also why I’m not deleting my Twitter account.
Later: Surpassing actual news about billion dollar tech giants, Hugh’s Why I canceled my Twitter account post is now atop Techmeme. Go figure.
I’m sure there will be lots of chatter suggesting Flickr is way late to the video party. Of course, the reality is that those who live far out on the leading edge often lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of people still don’t even share photos via e-mail. The majority of people still don’t have digital cameras, much less some easy-to-download means of capturing video. And what Flickr is doing — starting out by allowing only 90 second videos — makes it clear that they’re not trying to be another YouTube — this is something different.
But, then, I confess. I love Flickr. I love just about everything about it. While there’s a “free” version, it’s one of the few online services I gladly pay an annual fee for a “Pro” version due to its incredible array of services and features. It’s one of the few services I use that I believe is just about perfect.
I shoot video and photography using the same camera (well, most of the time) and I upload them both to the same desktop software (iPhoto), so why wouldn’t I want to save and share them on the web using the same service? It just makes sense to me.
I’ll still use YouTube, just not the same way I’ll use Flickr.
Later: Some folks are already harping on the ‘90 second’ limitation. While I think Flickr will probably expand this time limit later, the time-collar is actually an opportunity for thinking about video in a new way — in my opinion. One of the challenges with video is the editing process — it’s a new skill for most of us. However, sharing video doesn’t have to be limited to the linear narrative piece we’ve come to expect after years of watching TV. In reality, those linear pieces are typically a series of clips. What if, using a Flickr set, you can present those clips in a way in which the viewer can understand why they are being grouped together, but watch them in a new non-linear way? For example, people can already present non-linear video stories on a map, for example — posting small clips of video on maps using the MyMaps feature of Google Maps (example, how-to). Flickr’s new feature will enable this type of video story-telling as well. Here is a great insta-tutorial from Andrew Baron (of Rocketbook) about using Flickr sets to present a series of videos in a way that could be very helpful to viewers. (Andrew’s post via Twitter from Dave Winer)
I’ll be experimenting in the morning and will update this post with quick review then.
In the meantime, here is an embed of the video Flickr used to launch the service:
No one asked, but here are the primary ways I’m currently expressing myself online.:
rexblog.com: Professional and business-related focus (media, technology, conversational & new media, marketing, magazines). Once each day, my blog includes a posting that aggregates all of the links I’ve bookmared on del.icio.us/rexblog that are related to those topics.
Hammock.com/rexhammock: My official Hammock Inc. “people page.”
RexHammock.com: Personal passions and random-topic tumble-log.
Twitter.com/r: Stream-of-life commentary in < 140 character posts, and where I "hang-out" online.
Flickr.com/rexblog: Where I post photos.
YouTube.com/rexhammock: Where I post videos.
Facebook, Linkedin, etc.: I don’t really “express myself” on these and other “social networking” sites, but on most of them, you can find me if you search for my name or the username “rexhammock.”
FriendFeed.com/rexhammock: A “lifestream” of everything I post anywhere.
Recently, I re-booted RexHammock.com, a URL on which I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr.com for several months. I had determined that I was under-utilizing it as merely a “lifestream” catcher — a place that collects all the different RSS feeds generated by my various online-expressions on Twitter.com/r, Flickr.com/photos/rexblog, etc. And, with services like FriendFeed.com and even MyBlogLog getting more into being pure-play lifestream platforms, I decided to go back and figure out how to better utilize the very cool features of Tumblr.
As you can see from RexHammock.com, one of the smart things they did was make it drop-dead-simple for me to use my own URL instead of some long / this-and-that account name. And, despite my design-free look on the site, the Tumblr platform has some attractive templates and is very CSS-friendly for those who want to (and can) be creative. I’m trying to master the functions and ethos of the platform and its community, before putting any time into determining what it should look like however. So, in my experiment, you can consider it now in a wire-frame state.
What I have determined is this: I’ll be writing about and pointing to mostly non-work or non-professional-related topics on RexHammock.com. For example, this week, I started off with my review of the Punch Brothers new release and have followed that up with posting quotes from the New York Times and the long piece yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered. (I’m happy to note that if you had read my review on Tuesday, and had listened to a YouTube video I pointed to, you would have been better prepared to understand why such a “different” kind of recording is receiving such attention.)
So, to summarize: On rexblog.com, I’m gradually shifting to focused commentary and links related to magazines, new media (specifically, what I call “conversational media,”) marketing, corporate and association communication. Some of this is cross-posted on Hammock.com and elsewhere. My non-professional interests (stuff my wife & kids & pets do, the world, my hometown, travel, music, photography, books, movies, table saws, humor, tomatoes, Tennessee Titans, Vanderbilt basketball, etc.) are slowly showing up on RexHammock.com.
I’m sorry if you landed here thinking this was going to be a helpful explanation about what Twitter is. I’ve given up on attempting to explain Twitter. And chances are, if you’re someone who wants to understand something by reading about it instead of using it, then you’ll probably never understand it.
Twitter is really easy to explain: You set up an account so people can follow what you have to say via the web or instant messaging or via text-messaging on a mobile phone. Unfortunately, Twitter is apparently incredibly difficult to understand, because any time I explain it, the response is inevitably something like: “Uh, so why would you want people to do that — and why would they care?”
Unlike with some online phenomena, understanding Twitter is not a “generational” thing. Twitter is not one of those fads that caught on among kids that has worked its way up the age-chain. It’s more like Google, in that it started as a drop-dead simple solution to a problem no one knew they had — and has become an obsession with a sub-set of tech-geeks and people obsessed with the nature of online community and conversation (I confess).
My then 16-year-old son was with me last March at South by Southwest where Twitter first grabbed the attention of the geekorati. He observed the obsession’s ground-zero, but I’m sure he’d echo the quote from the daughter of this NY Times columnist, who says, “I’m looking at the site right now, and I don’t get the point.” Here’s my theory why teenagers don’t get the point: There’s a feature on Facebook called “status updates” that does everything a teenager would care to do with Twitter, so why bother? To high school and college students, Twitter is like Facebook without the dozens of other things they like about Facebook — except on Facebook, your parents can’t follow you if you don’t allow them to. (You can block someone on Twitter or opt to limit the visibility of your message to only those you follow, but the common practice is to allow anyone to become a follower — really, why not?)
I’d feel worse about my inability to convey to others any level of understanding of why Twitter is important but in comparison to some explanations I’ve seen and heard, I do a decent job. But, unfortunately, we all fail because we drift into explaining Twitter by telling how we use it. But the most amazing thing about Twitter is this: everyone uses it differently.
It’s a little like trying to explain the telephone by describing what people talk about on the phone. “Telephones are devices that teenagers use to spread gossip.” “Telephones are the devices people use to contact police when bad things happen.” “Telephones are the devices you use to call the 7-11 to ask if they have Prince Albert in a can.”
Like the Internet itself, Twitter is hard to explain because it doesn’t really have a point. And it has too many points. Here’s what I mean: All it does is provide a common-place to relay short messages to a group of people who agree to receive your messages. Here’s the second part of what i mean: When you stop thinking those short messages aren’t limited to “I’m about to get on the elevator” but can be eye-witness accounts of breaking news stories or bursts of business-critical intelligence, or warnings that a gun-man is loose on campus, or shared conversations about political debates you and your friends are watching on TV, the possibilities of what can be done using Twitter becomes amazingly confusing — I think in a good way. It’s easy to understand something when you think it’s limited to Prince Albert in a can prank calls. It’s more difficult to understand when you start imagining the ways something that’s today more toy than tool can be used to create new models of communication, conversation and community. It’s even more difficult to imagine that something called Twitter will morph into a serious business platform — or that it will one day save lives. But it will.
You don’t need me to tell you that 
The Important Part: In the current issue of BusinessWeek (and 
I’m sorry if you landed here thinking this was going to be a helpful explanation about what 
