dangerouslyawesome

What’s up, friends of the “no-collar generation”.

Many of you know that I’ve been working with the CEO of ChoiceShirts, Matt Cohen, on a number of initiatives for quite a while. Our most recent partnership has produced something that I’ve talked about doing “right” for quite a while, making a really easy way to put the contents of tweet on a t-shirt.

Why on earth would we do that? Well, a few reasons:

• Matt and I, like many of you, really love Twitter. Like, really love Twitter. I <3 you Twitter.
• Matt and I, like many of you, really love t-shirts. Just last week, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks said to me at DreamIT’s funding day, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you NOT wearing a t-shirt”. It was an off day, what can I say.
• Twitter is a really great channel for collecting funny, inspirational, or memorable one-liners. More and more often, we heard from others or thought ourselves, “that tweet would make a great shirt”.
• We wanted to try out some new tools in the ChoiceShirts design studio toolkit, as well as make a case for how we can build out new ones. ChoiceTweets is one of what we hope are many prototypes to showcase new and fun ways to get your content onto a t-shirt. A new vehicle for your content so YOU can make money. That’s what we’re really excited about.

Neato! So how does it work?

The whole thing is powered by a bookmarklet. You can read more about how that works on our how-to page. Not sure what tweets you might want to put on a shirt? Take a look at some of the one’s we’ve done, as well as any tweets that other users are turning into tweeshirts.

Also, don’t miss the Merlin Mann collection! Merlin’s tweets are often angry, but humorous. As other prolific tweeters have large numbers of shirts generated from their tweets, we’ll add new featured collections. Maybe yours?

Developer support baked in

For the time being, the feature set is small but that won’t last long! In the mean time, if you have created a Twitter client (web or desktop) and want to include “ChoiceTweets support”, all you need to do is add an icon that links to the same URL as the Tweet’s permalink, and change the Base URL from http://twitter.com to http://choicetweets.com. More on that on our Developers page.

GO! Check it out!

This is the first iteration of the idea, and we’re excited to see how people use it and add new features and learn lessons for the next site that we build. That’s why we’re using UserVoice to collect feature requests! Be sure to add your ideas there after you’ve made your first Tweeshirt.

Big thumbs up to Erik Kastner, who took on some fun challenges with generating the images necessary to make this concept work. I always enjoy working with Erik, and look forward to having him continue to lend his development expertise and problemsolving prowess as this project matures.

And of course, I always appreciate Matt’s support and interest in taking new ideas like this for a spin.

So head over to ChoiceTweets.com, and grab the bookmarklet. And let me know what you think!

Note: my buddy Zach Inglis pointed out that some of his coworkers prototyped something similar in the past. We certainly knew that this had been done before, but thought there was LOTS of room for improvement! So thanks to those who inspired our creation, and we’re excited to continue to improve on the idea based on everyone’s feedback!

WARNING: This post contains extreme abuse of twitter lingo like “@replies and DMs”. Generally speaking, I’m opposed to this sort of language, however…the service is cool and I wanted to share it.

Back when the ‘track via SMS’ feature was still enabled on Twitter, I honestly did not use it…I didn’t find myself with a burning desire to keep an eye on any particular keywords. Since then, my use of twitter has increased, and my reliance on it for communication has changed. I won’t say it’s gone up or down, but the way I use it is certainly different.

I find myself checking Summize/Twitter Search much more often for ‘@replies’ to my username and IndyHall. The biggest reason that I rely more on replies via Search is because I don’t follow everyone who follows me. Not because I’m a hater (far from it) but because Twitter is completely USELESS to me with that many people in my timeline. But I’m increasingly disappointed when I miss replies from people who can’t direct message me since I’m not following them back, especially when I’m away from my computer.

So, with Summize being acquired and energy going into the development of the Twitter Search API, I was stoked to see a really great project announced on the Twitter developer list: TweetTrak.

Functional and still low to the ground, TweetTrak uses the Direct Message -> SMS capabilities of Twitter + the search API to return tracking-style information via SMS, with a simple toggle command to turn it on and off.

The new features that are mapped out for the next iteration are smart, too: user ignore, and a control panel to set up your tracking terms (I imagine this will act a lot like Google Alerts, which I also love and use).

So while this entire system still relies on a system that occasionally lags (Twitter’s SMS and the recently acquired Summize), this is the best stop-gap we’ve had since Summize itself, and I welcome it with open arms, especially with all of the conference going I have lined up.

Check it out, and be gentile! And this should probably go without saying: make sure you have unlimited SMS if you’re doing ANYTHING with Twitter via SMS. Don’t be an idiot.

My buddy Lachlan Hardy was recently featured in the Sydney Morning herald answering some quickie questions about hot new web tech. He put the questions out to his friends and readers. I realized I was about to cannibalize his comments section since he got me hot with the questions, so I began crafting my own post.

The three questions are:

1. What are the three things online that are exciting you most?
2. What gadget do you never leave home without? And given most everybody will say their phone or their laptop, why?
3. What will be the Next Big Thing?

Read my answers, and then respond with your own!

1. What are the three things online that are exciting you most?
   • Viddler.com Custom Branding & API – A totally customizable player. Colors. Brand badge. Clickthru link. And the among best quality with no file/length limits. Oh, and the only player with time tagging and commenting. Via their API, you can build your own site powered by Viddler’s video engine. You can even build your own viddler.com if you want with Viddler’s B2B API. These guys are nuts and I love it.The video space is among the most compelling on the web right now, and I love everything that Viddler is pumping out for it’s users.
   • Pandora. If this service goes away I will lock myself in my bedroom and cry listening to The Cure on repeat. Why? Not just because I’m depressed, but without Pandora, I’d have no idea what to listen to anymore. It’s a vicious cycle.Really though, the saddest part of the possibility of Pandora potentially closing its doors is the fact that there are people in this world who have not yet experienced it, or are just getting around to it.
   • Twitter. I know it’s not new. In fact, I can’t believe I’ve been on this service for nearly 2 years. But it’s certainly at a critical mass where things are more interesting, both socially and technically, than ever before. All of these presence/messaging apps are interesting in general. Really, really interesting. Watch this space.
2. What gadget do you never leave home without? And given most everybody will say their phone or their laptop, why?
   • I’ve always got my iPhone, and more and more, I’m carrying my Flip Mino. My iPhone is a must have because even though I hate talking on the phone, I’m an info addict and the iPhone fuels that addiction. The Mino is a badass new addition to my pocket arsenal, and is becoming increasingly valuable as I get better at remembering to capture some of the brilliant (and often ridiculous) conversations we have around IndyHall and with the IndyHall members out and about in Philly. Even the ability to quick snap a video while walking to/from work, or to/from a client site, just to capture my thoughts, is fantastic. Partner that with Viddler, and I’m in heaven.
3. What will be the Next Big Thing?
   • What, you mean besides me? JUST KIDDING!That’s a hard problem. That’s like asking “whats the next problem you’re going to have”? Whatever solution solves the biggest problem for the largest number of people…that’s the next big thing. I’ve got LOTS of itches that need scratching. Do we share an itch? Are we the only ones? If we share one, we’re probably not alone, and we should talk.

It’s a little silly that this is the first post I’m making from San Francisco. I’ve got a bunch of other drafts started, but I wanted to get this one out now while it was fresh in my mind.

I learned a lot this week.

I’ve often described my past experiences at SXSW as somewhat sobering (not chemically, but psychologically). It was my first exposure to some of the people responsible for literally creating the internet, or critical parts of it that we all take for granted. And rather than be presented with an egomaniacal rock star, I found lots of people just like me, who wanted to do cool things with cool people.

I’ve had this experience repeatedly over the last 2 years. I’ve got some really incredible friends. I’m friends with some really incredible people.

Secret? One my “would be cool if…” ideas for this week was to sit down with Evan Williams and chat. Not about Twitter, not about anything in particular. Just in general as someone who has interest in his approach to business and thinks he’s done cool stuff. I still would love for that to take place at some point.

This week has been a difficult week for one of our favorite one to many real time device agnostic communications platform. Seems I picked a bad week to try to make my sit down with Ev happen.

I’m not going to go into the details of what’s been going on with Twitter, technically or socially. I reserve my own opinions, and many others reserve theirs. Way cool. Thats what happens when services transcend the usual verticals of user expectations. That’s not what I really want to write about.

What I wanted to remind myself, and everyone else is this:

The door above is the front door to Twitter HQ. Twitter isn’t a magical creature. It isn’t a mythical beast.

It’s the product of a lot of hard work by people who, unlike the conjurers that we sometimes make them out to be/expect them to be, still need to walk in that door at the beginning of the day, and out the door at the end.

We’re upset because we care. I get that.

Based on some of the information they’ve released, the team seems to being through some of the “converting a hang glider into a Boeing747 in mid-air” syndrome that I’ve alluded to in my own life, so I empathize.

The other side of things that I can parallel to my own experience is that, I hope, it’s not over. There’s lots more to pan out. This isn’t 100% uncharted territory, but there certainly is a good deal that’s new. If for nobody else, it’s new for the team who’s dealing with it right now.

I’m watching intently. I’m resisting the temptation to use Twitter as a self-referential kvetch-funneling megaphone, because that certainly isn’t helping the situation right now.

These websites live up in “the cloud”, but the people are real. And a lot of the time, the people are WAY cooler than the websites they drive. If decision making were easy, people would fuck up a whole lot less. And I don’t know when the last time you looked around you was, but there are way more failures than successes out there.

More on that notion later.

In other news, I finally got to pick up an official Twitter shirt. And I got to see Alex Payne and Brit Selvitelle for a few minutes (and hopefully again this weekend) and they’re two really rad dudes who walk through the aforementioned door every day.

And Ev…you were there today, but you looked busy, man. Didn’t want to bug you. So hopefully another time.

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]

I just stumbled across this link through the halls of Twitter this morning; the link is a wiki where someone who will be attending SXSW in a couple of months can post their twitter account.

I could be totally off my rocker, but this seems totally silly since last year, nearly EVERYONE was on Twitter already and that was before twitter exploded into an international phenomenon. Now, a year later. The small percentage of people who fell behind last year will likely be caught up, and the ones that aren’t will figure it out pretty fast when everyone is walking through the halls of the Austin convention center, looking down at their iPhones, muttering “f*%&ing twitter!”.

Which brings me to my next series of thoughts:
First, is twitter ready to handle the onslaught of this year’s SXSW twitteratti? I have seen all kinds of speculated numbers of growth, and talked to Alex Payne a couple of times in the last year about the hardware that’s powering twitter and it’s various interfaces (jabber, SMS, etc) and several months ago it was an absurdly powerful cluster of hardware. In order to handle SXSW08, they’re going to need some sort of miracle server.

My second thought is more about us, as users. Last year Twitter ruined the battery in my Treo650 and prompted the purchase of a blackberry. This was, of course, before the advent of m.twitter.com. Another thing to remember was that I was mostly adding new people throughout the conference and checking in on them. I didn’t have a ton of followers or people I was following.

This year…I’m a) on an iPhone that doesn’t have a changeable battery and b) following a few hundred people before I even touch down in Austin. Sounds like trouble to me.

Is Twitter going to be nearly as effective this year as last, or will it become too chatty and therefore, ineffective for conference-going uses?

A couple of ideas to resolve the issue:

1) Twitter does a proper implementation of groups, complete with shorthand.

While I realize this isn’t likely, it’s also not impossible and they have been talking about it since LAST year in Austin. Groups would let me message only the appropriate group of people, or the people that care. This would also leave the people who couldn’t come to the conference out of the line of fire when twitter gets really rowdy at the nighttime social events.

2) Hashtag adoption

A close second to the groups implementation, a follow hashtag/track hashtag feature would help. Since I’m not using twitter over SMS, track doesn’t help me in the least. I really wish it did, because I’d love to use it. Hey guys, make track work on my personal timeline, not just via SMS.

If I was to include the hashtag “#SXSW” and other relevant variants (“#OpenIDMeetup”, “#WordPressMeetup”, “#BarCampAustin”, etc), in tweets (which would be annoying, but doable), it could resolve some of the firehose. It’s still a hack, and has lots of holes and opportunities for missed messages, but hey…Twitter drops messages all the time so we really should be used to that by now.

3) Extra Phone/Twitter Device

If Twitter sold a Twitter-enabled device, I’d not only buy it but I’d probably pay a service fee. Sure, most of the time, I use my phone but in heavy-use cases (read: conferences) I’d be willing to carry something else to make sure that Twitter wasn’t killing my cell phone’s battery, and that I got optimum performance out of twitter.

Something like the Amazon Kindle, without the shitty design, but with the built in EVDO device so I didn’t need to be at a WIFI hotspot. Like I said, I’d pay for the service. Maybe not EVERY month, but I’d pay for a week-long pass during conference periods, and I’d probably pay upwards of $30-50 for that week-long pass – IF the battery life didn’t suck and if the message delivery was stable.

Since there PROBABLY won’t be a Twitter-handheld in the next 60 days, I may resolve to getting a cheap-o 2nd line on my ATT plan, with very low minutes but unlimited text messaging. I’d get a phone that was not only small, but had a changeable battery. It doesn’t even need to have a WAP browser, I can use my iPhone for that. This phone will be for TWITTER ONLY!

I really hope that Twitter usage is still viable for SXSW because it really enhanced the conference experience for me last year. Do you have any grand plans for how to make Twitter work for you this year?

Sometime in the next couple of months I need to do a re-vamp and re-post of my “How to Survive SXSW” post, since I’ve learned more about conference going in the last year.

[tags]twitter, SXSW, SXSWi, SXSW08, mobile devices, hashtags, battery, group interactions[/tags]

Original Photo by Jill Greenseth

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of me having gone independent.

Wow.

A year. Really? I go back and forth between “that’s it” and “that long”? In some aspects, I feel like it was only a couple of months. In other aspects I look at all that I’ve managed to accomplish everything I’d set out to do, and much much more.

I partnered with some amazing talent, many of whose work has earned us opportunities to work together more than once. I worked with some amazing clients (many of whom are brands that I really, really love).

I’ve co-built a couple of funny little apps that got a fair amount of attention, which was never the plan…the plan was to have fun building them.

I co-founded our own little version of a much larger movement that, in it’s own right, has paved the way for more opportunities for myself and countless other people. That’s one of the most gratifying and exciting accomplishments of my life, and I’m SO happy and grateful to have been a part of it and have made all of the friendships and connections I have along the way.

One year in, I’ve learned a lot about making choices and how to learn from the choices that I, and others have made.

The Next Chapter

It’s only appropriate that my newest client not only has choice in their name, but is excited to learn what happens when you give a community some opportunity to make choices.

My newest venture is a new kind of building. This one is less about building a website site and a lot more more about building a community. Learning from the wonderful community building experience we’ve had here at IndyHall, I thought it’d be great to take the model to the road and allow others to benefit from it. This next foray into community building is with a company called Choice Shirts, just outside of Philadelphia in Pennsauken, NJ.

The new project is called The Choice100 and it’s first incarnation as a blog has launched last night. It’s simple and direct, but that’s by design. The whole goal of the project at this stage of the game is to facilitate asking a potential community of design talent what they think about the proposed community model, and feed back as to what would benefit them the most.

This project has me really excited for a number of reasons. One, it’s a really fun opportunity to have conversations with the folks who work in a field that I’m closely tied to (design, that is) but from a whole new angle for me; graphic design for apparel.

Even moreso is that a company with a fairly traditional (and well established) business model is just as amped as I am to listen to their customers (who, in this case, double as their product creators) and be so open about the process.

In the preliminary research on who to have in the loop for this, I got some really positive feedback from designers that have worked in other t-shirt “contest” and “designer community” scenarios. Of course, they’ve all had thoughts as to what was good and what was bad. What’s really great about ChoiceShirts and The Choice 100 is that the company has a history spotted with creative evolutions of existing and established business models, and that they are embracing a conversation within a community to help model the next steps for their company.

Sounds wonderfully Cluetrain to me. What happens when you stop selling and start conversing. ChoiceShirts is not only embracing that, but they’re excited to embrace that. That’s immensely energizing and inspiring for me.

We’re going to be starting from the ground up. This blog is out there to announce the existence of this new evolutionary process for ChoiceShirts, and gather the interested parties in a place where they can converse. Next steps will include some real-world brainstorming, which we’ll facilitate at IndyHall much like the first brainstorming session we held back in August.

Check out the site, leave some comments, and subscribe to the blog and twitter feeds if it sounds like something you’re interested in participating in. Remember, this project is about us hearing what you have to say!

My friend Randy Schmidt IMd me tonight to tell me about a friend of his who is driving a race called One Lap America.

The race follows the route that used to be the Cannonball run when it used to be illegal. Check out the history of the event at the website.

Randy’s friend, Chris Gottschall and his driving partner Jim Wegielewski had hoped to blog the experience, but recognized the obstacles. When Randy told Chris about Twitter, it was clear that this would be the best way for both the drivers to record the event in real time. Both of them plan to twitter the entire way.

Twitter has been used for all kinds of things from application mashups to server status notifications to conference party going. This is one of the first time’s I’ve seen someone recognize twitter as a tool to do something that would be very difficult by any other means. The multiple on-ramps (and I’m not talking about the ones on the interstate) provided by twitter mean that an activity that would be pretty tricky to do mobile…like blogging…that is made even more tricky by long distance mobility…like a cross country race…is now possible. And best of all, easy.

I’ll be interested to see if there is any kind of fan-groups that form around Chris and his driver’s twittering as they cross the country. I know I’ll be watching. Will you?

[tags]twitter,One Lap of America, Chris Gottschall,Jim Wegielewski, Randy Schmidt, Data Onramps[/tags]

some twitter users do…and we’ve made it easy to find them (or for them to find themselves and realize a problem).

Last night Alex Rudloff approached me about doing some visual cleanup on a little hack-fest he had put tgether called Twitterholic. It simply scrapes the public timeline and dumps stats to a database, and then displays the users with the highest number of followers. Over time, the numbers will get more accurate and interesting…and there are plenty of fun ideas for the aggregate date collected in the works.

Seems it’s gotten a little out of control.

Of course, some of our friends aren’t thrilled with what we did…but you know, if someone had to do it, aren’t you glad it’s us? At least we’ll use our powers for good. Besides…we didn’t make it for money. Or recognition. It was totally a goof, totally fun, and like it’s big brother “Twitter”, will continue to be a social experiment to see what kinds of numbers and trends we can uncover.

Alex and I love twitter too. For better or for worse.

[tags]twitter, twitterholic, weknowhtml, alex rudloff[/tags]