dangerouslyawesome

Before we go any further…let me warn you.

This is another post about Twitter. Well, mostly. I think that Twitter is the primary example of this, but it’s something on my mind.

I just finished reading a post by Nate Westheimer, CEO of NYC based Bricabox, part of the coworking movement in Manhattan, and an all around cool (and smart) dude.

Nate’s post was a his thoughts on another post about how boring Twitter was.

Nate’s point was not that twitter lacked value, but that from his vantage point, the HISTORY of twitter as a utility was boring.

I’m not here to argue Nate’s point or opinion…though I do disagree… it did get me thinking about twitter as a “bigger picture” app. That’s not to say I won’t go through the post and refute his points one by one . After all, <cue music>I am a man who will fight for your honor</cue music>. Nate knows I always appreciate his perspective on things, and thank him for this opportunity to spill.

As someone who sits on the developer email list, things are more active than most think. I see use, build, and user demographics having changed dramatically since I started using this application in fall of 2006, and even more since it went “mainstream” in March of 2007 at SXSW.

As far as use, I think new use cases are explored all the time. Think about front-line reporting? How about those fires in California, and all of the status that came directly from the twitter-verse? Think about all of the news that breaks on twitter before anywhere else? I think that’s pretty huge. People use twitter to share experiences as well. I can think of times when a large group of people was distributed but sharing an experience…for example, tonight’s SOTU, or a season finale of their favorite show?

I’ve become a big fan of using twitter as a lazyweb. If I google something and turn up nothing on the first page or two, or quickly need a verifiable resource, I tend to ask twitter. I may simply ask the question, or use the Hoosgot bot. Either way…the value of this use case is directly proportional to the size, and quality of the people you follow (and who follow you). If you follow a bunch of people who say nothing except for what they had for lunch…of course it’s going to be uninteresting. If you follow people who typically have almost no followers but follow thousands and thousands of people…of course, it’s going to be boring. If you follow people whose feeds are nothing but @username responses and contribute nothing to initiate new ideas or conversations, of course, it’s going to be an echo-chamber of “me too!”s. But that’s not Twitter’s fault. That’s yours for not having any discretion in who you follow.

The Twitter API is in active development. Very, very active development. Alex and his crew work hard not only to make it better day by day, but to deal with a LOT of idiots on the list…and still answer almost every realistic request with a yes, a no (and a why), and/or a timeline on the request. Service, and 9x out of 10, with a smile.

And as for that demographic…when twitter was born it was geeks only. Now, I’ve seen it adopted by everyone from educators to reporters to PR people to…cancer patients??? I think the demographic is growing, and faster than you realize.

Whats been magical about the growth of twitter is that it’s been organic. So much has happened, in fact, the MAJORITY has happened, outside of “twitter proper”. It’s happened because the users rallied, or some motivated individual got down and did some work themselves.

I think what my point is, is that you need to remember that twitter isn’t your everyday webapp. I see it as two very distinct and unique things: first, it’s a truly mobile application, and one of very few in that class. Second, it’s almost a social experiment. Give the masses a very, very simple tool and see what they do with it. Be prepared to morph along the way, but ultimately, let the users do what they want. I hope that someday I will be privileged enough to have the resources to run an application as an experiment like this. That’s not to say I hope Twitter doesn’t find a business model that will allow them to sustain…in fact, I think that would be the A+ on this science fair project, to make this into a business and have this much fun along the way.

If you consider all of these things…I think twitter’s one of the neatest things we’ve all experienced, we’re just too busy complaining about it’s downtime to notice .

Finally…and most importantly. Twitter is free. By the good graces of Evan Williams, Obvious, and their investors, we have this amazing utility at our fingertips. For free. Relax a bit. Enjoy it. Enjoy life. Go for a walk. Send me a direct message when you get back. Perspective in 140 characters or less is really quite refreshing.

[tags]twitter, social experiments[/tags]

“We’re a community of workers, unified by the fact that we all make a living doing things that we love” – Dave Speers

I consider myself lucky that I really, really enjoy the work that I do. Recently, my passion has been poured into the coworking project, Independents Hall, and being involved in various other community building events. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I had to force myself to return to reality and face the facts…in order to pay the bills, Alex Hillman is a developer.

Coming back from Orlando I faced a pile..one of the most daunting piles of work I’ve ever felt myself under (far worse than any string of exams I felt while still in school). To be fair, the pile was my own fault. I hadn’t done a very good job of ramping things down right before swinging into “IndyHall Mode”, where I spent most of August and September. But, I had committed to clients, who had paid for services, and I was definitely pushing the limits of the relationships I have with my clients.

On the record, THANK YOU, to all of the clients I have that were patient and proud of the stuff we did with IndyHall, and understanding while I got back in the saddle and found my way back into my development routine.

That said…2 weeks of hell, 18+ hour days, juggling stacked and overdue deadlines (again, all my own fault)..and there’s finally some light at the end of the tunnel. If I could bottle the refreshing feeling I had as I started crossing things off my to-do list, and sell it, I would. I’m pretty sure that the government would make it a controlled substance, it because the feeling was that good. Ahem. Anyway.

I realized something. These working conditions I put myself under were taking away from one important part of what I did. I develop, because I love to. I was developing these projects, because I HAD to, and the situation I got myself into was leading me towards a burnout. Understanding that my commitments and promises are what drive business and growth, and my loyal customers could have left weeks ago but instead stuck it out with me, helped. But emotionally…the realization that I wasn’t enjoying myself was a little damaging. I did not want to burn out this quickly at doing something that I enjoy so much.

Then, one week ago today, a screenshot came across my desk from one of the sharpest interface designers I know, Amy Hoy. At the top of that screenshot, I saw this:

My good friend Gary Vaynerchuk, recently soaring into the stratosphere with his 300+ episodes of a wine-tasting video podcast, was staring me in the face from the “laid back friday” couch and pointing at me as if to say, “yo man, this one’s for you”. Amy asked if I knew anyone who could build this out for a wordpress template for Gary’s new side project, and something in me said “you’ve got other stuff to do, but this one will be good for your soul”. So I agreed to spend last Saturday banging out this template.

I’m still not 100% sure what about this project set it apart, and realistically, it was only about 3 hours of work, but it was able to zero me out. I didn’t do it because I had to, I did it because I wanted to. Yesterday, I spent part of my afternoon with Gary and WLTV Producer Erik Kastner, at the Wine Library (holy crap, you have to go the place is nuts) talking about some of the things clunking around in my head. We’ll see what materializes from those conversations, I think it’s some good stuff.

I guess the whole reason I started this post was to stress the need to do things that you love. It’s energizing, and it’s healthy. I remember being in grade school and having assigned reading and pleasure reading. At the time, assigned reading may have been something from a composition book, or a textbook…but either way I read it because I had to. On the other side, I’d pick up something I wanted to read (at the time, I remember R.L. Stein “Goosebumps” series was a popular choice).

The act of reading was the same. Eyes scanning pages for letters forming words forming sentences, paragraphs, pages, and ultimately some story. But the book I picked, I had an emotional gratification from. I think this goes for the work I do, too. The act of building out this page for Gary was no different, but seeing Gary’s site live was a different reaction than I had to any of the other project’s I’ve wrapped in the last few weeks.

So where does this realization leave me? Well, I’m still processing that. I’ve got some exciting new things on the horizon, opportunities and events. I have a dream that is being realized day by day. I have some of the best friends in the world that I’m so happy are around for all of this, and many more friends that I’ve made because of the events of the last several months. I’m glad that I have them to turn to at this point in my life as I’m putting all of the pieces together and figuring out the next move. Big or little, something’s brewing.

The only thing that’s certain is that I’m going to love it.

update: seems gary and i were reading each others thoughts and he did his 120 second video today on a very similar topic, his “big picture patch“. A good reminder to put things into perspective, no matter your situation.

Originally Uploaded by ducttapeavenger

First off, you should know about a blog that was started during BlogPhiladelphia. Literally, in the 30 minutes of me running an open grid session, a blog was created from scratch (domain purchase to live) as a response to Scott McNulty’s “Group Blogging” session. You can keep an eye on it’s evolution at PhillyGeeks.net. The most recent post by Viddler’s Colin Devroe, has elicited the following response from me. It’s sort of to Colin, sort of to myself, and sort of to you, the reader. Some of it requires reading his post first, which I suggest doing. In the end, I’ll likely end up taking it elsewhere, since this is effectively a brain dump.

So I apologize for any confusing direction of a message, or the language used. This is direct from my brain to your screen.

Here goes. [...]

Update: we’ve made lifehacker, which is a first for me. Way cool. Also I’ve now added some heavy duty caching and ajax callbacks to make our feeds work quicker.

Just in time for iPhoneDevCamp, Chris Messina and I have launched exPhone.org!

This little mashup site is not only a photo graveyard for photos of old phones that have been pushed out by shiny new iPhones, but also a resource for how to properly get rid of those old phones…either by donating or recycling!

If you’ve got an iPhone, you can use the builtin camera to snap a photo of your old phone. Then you can send that photo as an attachement to myexphone@exphone.org, straight from your phone, and it will show up in our flickr stream AND on the site!

Do you have resources to add to the list? Email us!

Thanks to TUAW for the sweet writeup, and Dan Burka for officially Powncing on the link.

[tags]exphone, apple, iphone, recycle, greenmyapple, donate, sustainable, phone[/tags]