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]

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.

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. I’m happy with the fact that I can be glad that I DIDN’T end up moving to San Fran 6 months ago. Staying in Philadelphia and resolving to uncover this culture…not dormant, simply hidden…has proven to be inspiring, to myself and hopefully to other cities going through a same self-discovery.

Colin talked about this city’s history. It’s a history of innovation. Of revolution. Of energy and inquiry. For some reason…the visibility of this kind of activity has decreased. But I don’t think it ever went away.

I’ve got a lot going on in my head right now about the value of being anywhere BUT the west coast. Not to diss the west coast, of course.

They set the bar. They run the show. If it weren’t for their inspiration and support where would I/we be right now?

And heck, I’ve never even been to San Francisco (yet) but some of my best friends are there. And they support everything we’re doing.

I realize that the biggest reason I wanted to leave this city was because I thought that the grass was greener. “San Fran has the community I’m looking for…so I’ll just go there”.

That would have been the easy way out. Instead, I scratched. I searched. I talked.

I talked a lot.

Some people might say I’ve been a broken record for the last several months. I’m always yammering on about community. Sometimes to people who might not give a shit. But you know what? Most of them did. Or at least they put up with me.

In 9 months, a completely organic community has formed from the people that put up with me. They come from all walks of Philly life. All different jobs. Talents. Aspirations.

But we share one important thing, a passion for what we do, and an interest in sharing that passion. But that’s not unique to our community…everyone wants to love what they do and to be around people who also love what they do. That’s why people in my industry move to San Francisco. They set the bar with culture…most importantly the community side of things.

I think I used to scan event calendars and get jealous that I couldn’t go to all of the meetups and events in Silicon Valley. Then I realized…why be jealous? I’ve got some kind of social prowess (or maybe, like i said before, I’ll really just talk to ANYONE about something that I think is important). Either way. What’s stopping me from pushing people here.

So that’s what I did. I started by coming in to an existing community, PANMA. I’d been lurking on their listserv for some time, contributed when it was appropriate. But this was definitively the largest gathering of industry folk we had, so it was the obvious place to start.

I’m going to go on the record to say that I quickly learned that it was going to be a difficult place to achieve my goals. I’ve heard some WONDERFUL things about PANMA in it’s heyday. Like any community though, it grew up. Its members got into a groove. They started companies. Families. It’s not unreasonable to think that those people didn’t have the same amount of time for the community that they started when they started it.

Not to say PANMA isn’t an incredible community in itself. Lots of people helping each other all the time with anything from technical problems to job postings to business best practices. It suffered from apathy, though, and a seeming lack of desire to evolve. It got into a groove, and was going to be tough to jostle out.

That didn’t stop me from trying, though. I came in and stirred the pot. Good thing I did, too, because I found some of our most dedicated members to date in that pot. And it’s never been my goal to pull people away from PANMA. We serve a different purpose than PANMA, and it serves a different purpose than our group. Like a Venn Diagram, there’s overlap, and I’m so glad that there is because I don’t think one group stands to last without the other.

Along the time I started stirring, Johnny Bilotta came along and started doing the same. At some point, it became clear that Johnny and I needed to go out for drinks. His talent as a designer was astounding, and his interest in my vision was an easy thing to detect. I don’t remember what I said to him, but it was the right thing, because since that first day he’s been all in. I’d venture to say that Johnny was our first member.

Also, getting involved with Geoff DiMasi was a pivotal moment. Geoff contacted me when Johnny and I started making noise on the PANMA list. Geoff was a Multimedia professor at UArts, a business owner in my industry, and had experience establishing a civic association in his community. He had a knack for interactive, business, and community. My hero.

Geoff got involved with Independents Hall as a partner and an adviser. He’s kept me grounded and inspired me at the same time. We clicked on ideas and execution. It was a lot of “hey i was thinking….” followed by “that’s a good/bad idea…” followed by “hey, i did that thing we talked about…”. It was natural, easy, and worked. We set goals. We made them happen. It was almost too easy.

Independents Hall evolved into a larger community, both functional and social. As an extension of business, partnerships of talent formed. Projects seemingly materialized. More and more people just “clicked”. Socializing continued, the mixing continued, and the group grew.

We started thinking about sharing space, coworking style, but we were still finding stability and purpose. The next progression was a series of events where we worked together…instead of from our homes or cafes by ourselves, we regularly started working together. Inspired by Amit Gupta’s Jelly in NYC, we moved our group around the city on a bi-weekly basis. This was another opportunity for us to find out if we could spend entire days together without killing each other, among many other positive outcomes.

We’ve been doing these sessions, dubbed the “Cream Cheese Sessions”, for about 3 months and the attendance grows each time. Until we get our own space (and likely afterwards), these events will continue, and hopefully so will their growth.

Oh, and that PANMA group? 4 of their board members frequent our circle of events, and I hope to have a good showing of IndyHall members at their summer social this week. Remember, we need to support each other.

In the beginning of May, I got an email from Brian Oberkirch tipping me off to the impending unconference that we recently experienced in the form of BlogPhiladelphia. It seems like this event, and its planner Annie Heckenberger, were a gift from some greater being that had been watching our activity. One of the goals that Geoff and I had set early on was some sort of conference, and right around the time that we were gaining momentum with our own initiatives, Annie and BlogPhiladelphia came along.

And it rocketed to the forefront of mainstream media exactly what we’d been saying for months: amazing stuff is happening in Philadelphia every day, but there’s no visibility for it, inside of the city or out.

The number one comment to me during and after BlogPhiladelphia was: “Wow, I had no idea that my neighbor was building this, or working on that”.

Whitney Hoffman, a planner for PodCamp Philly, said to me early in our conversations, “we shouldn’t need to leave the city/state/country to find out who our neighbors are and what they are doing”. And the same goes for the fact that we shouldn’t need to throw a gigantic conference to find out the same information.

I don’t have a single source of information. I search and scrape and somehow bring as much as I can together.

We need a mechanism to get out the “What’s going on” buzz, out. In my head, it’s no good. Distributed across meetup.com, upcoming.org, various blogs and forums, it’s worthless. I’m currently brainstorming a convergence of this information. To be involved, drop me a comment/email.

Ultimately the goal is to create a go-to place for all information within the industry, and an opportunity for conversations and groups to converge. More on that in another post to come.

Fingers are cramping, brain is slowing down.

What’s the point of all of this, you may be asking, if you even got this far in my rambling.

Well the lessons I’ve learned are large, but consistent. The biggest one has to do with consistency, as it were.

1) Ritual events are critical. Having events “when it’s convenient” is good, having them regularly is better. They’re easier to plan (set a repeating event in your calendar). There is less guilt when you miss one (there will always be next time). There is more opportunity to take advantage of the event. Ritual events make it easy to go, “oh, look, it’s friday, time to go cowork!”. It’s easy, it’s fun, and its advantageous.

2) You can’t do it alone. And even if you can, you can do it BETTER with support. Support networks are critical to the sustainability of ANY initiative, too, so doing it yourself is just silly if you have a long term vision. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Just be clear of what you need, and what the return will be. ROI isn’t just a business term.

3) If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you aren’t looking hard enough. It’s ok to talk to everyone. It’s ok to be a broken record. If what you’re looking for is really, really important, you will likely have to work for it. But that goes back to #2…just because you have to do it, doesn’t mean you should do it yourself.

4) Don’t ever get to one goal without setting another one first. That’s a recipe for stagnation.

5) Write down everything. Everything. Blog it. Twitter it. Email it to yourself. Scribble it in a moleskine (thanks Josh).

Where do we go from here?
Up. Onward. Just, for the love of god, don’t stop.

A couple of afterthoughts:
First, I know I said you can’t do it alone, and neither can I. The series of events I’ve scribbled down here for you wouldn’t be ANYTHING if it weren’t for the awesome teams that helped organize them, and just as importantly, the participants.

Independents Hall is a helluva group. Coworkers. Friends.

How often are the majority of your coworkers your friends. Not as often as me, I bet, and for that I’m blessed.

Also, I started this off talking about how I almost left for San Francisco. I almost left for an opportunity to work with two of my mentors, Chris Messina and Tara Hunt. Finding them, and interacting with them, was one of the most inspiring moments (or series of moments, as it would be) in my life. When I realized that some people were just meant to work together, I felt the need to be around them. And to date, I still love any time that I can find to work with them, face to face or online. Luckily, they helped me see that what I was looking for was already all around me. Chris and Tara, thank you for sending me on this incredible journey, and congratulations on affecting so many things that I needed to dump as many as I could muster into this post.

And finally, if I didn’t thank you specifically, it doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate something you’ve done for us. There are simply too many people TO thank, to get to them all. So globally: “Thank you”.

[tags]brain dump, Philadelphia, coworking, community, goals, messages[/tags]

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]