Something is uniquely jarring about hitting one-thousand twitters. You really want to say something prolific in those 140 characters, but prolific things limited to 140 characters are saved for dead writers or dead politicians. What a dilemma. What a service!

I first signed up for Twitter at SXSWi ‘07, as did many others, and I must say it only holds more promise as more and more people adopt it. Upon coming back from SXSWi ‘07 I did a few things - the first was becoming a bit of a Twitter evangelist, I told everyone about it (hi mom!). I also signed up my good friend Brian - who is soon to be the best man in my wedding.

Poor Brian, you see, I didn’t tell him I signed him up - he just started receiving SMS updates every time I twittered. Brian isn’t a geek either, he appreciates technology when it accentuates other parts of his life - and it doesn’t seem to be an end in itself for him. So instead of embracing Twitter, Brian told me, “What the fuck is Twitter Geo? And how do I unsubscribe?” I never told him - he went and figured it out. I guess the 3am twitters about Internet Explorer 6 became too much.

Once he had unsubscribed he would start texting me random moments like, “just saw a slip and fall in the grocery store,” or, “these white people and their bagels.” But never the, “is feeling…” that my twitters tend to lead off with, Brian doesn’t let his guard down. Anyhow, every time he did this I would just respond, “Twitter.” And eventually I think it set in just what Twitter would bring to accentuate his life - a monologue of his inner “B.”

So if you get the chance follow JustB, or JeongSeouk, or JeffReynolds, or J_P_S, or newtypeofjuice, or ldub, or simulacra09, or just follow my whole list - it’s all entertaining and I feel connected to these people even if I don’t see them every day - or every year.

It has been a year, almost to the day, since I first signed up for Twitter. Here I am posting this blog entry (which auto-twitters every time I write a new entry) as my 1000th twitter. With each new friend that signs on it becomes more interesting and valuable. From the ad-hoc organization to the random ramblings of my good friends abroad - I hope I feel the same at two-thousand twitters.

I didn’t really say anything prolific, but I hopefully amused - so hard to do in these 140 character limitation days.

Twitter is a one-to-many short push messaging service to your most loyal, “followers.”

Popularity: 32% [?]

As a creative, I once looked wearily upon “networking.” Never because I thought the ideas generated between people or the relationships they had were inherently bad - I was skeptical of networking because it never felt natural to me. A forced relationship at most - brought about by people leveraging each other for personal gain - what good could come of that?

networking gives me tears

Moving from college where one has a pseudo-something to offer to a professional setting where one gains their real value - I have experienced some profound insight. No, nothing new or original - but my tendency to learn by doing and emulating has given me the real reward of what networking truly is - connecting others.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 40% [?]

Theresa Tran, of Tease Marketing, once said something to me in a conversation that resonated heavily, “You have good, cheap, OR fast, you get to pick two.” After mulling it over in my head for a little while, it made perfect sense. And as I broke off to go start my own business, it’s something I chalked up as a cardinal rule.

“You have good, cheap, or fast, you get to pick two.”

I have been on my own freelancing (or running my own business) for nearly six months, a few things have occurred to me. Cheap is a relative term - relative to the client paying the money as well as relevant to what you’re making across the board for all projects. Good, when doing business for yourself, isn’t so much an option as it is a requirement. And lastly, fast is the speed at which we do business period - people want everything yesterday. So do clients really ever pick two out of three? Or do they just automatically assume to run the table. After all, the customer is always right.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 54% [?]

Sometime last night, MySpace decided to shutout certain types of content from Photobucket. With this whole new web thing, we’ll call it web 2, much of it is predicated upon services building onto services. The mashup! One could even think of MySpace pages as a mashup of YouTube Videos, Photobucket slideshows, and whatever else may be. This is a big part of the reason MySpace has been successful. So what did they do? Pulled the plug on Photobucket.

There are many reasons why this is akin to shooting oneself in the foot. First off, if a user has a couple hundred pictures on Photobucket, they’re not going to suddenly upload all of those to MySpace. What they will do is get irritated with MySpace, and remember it.
Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 13% [?]

So everyone here at SXSW is hot on Twitter. It pricked my curiousity, so I decided to sign up and see what all the fuss is about. OMG! It’s fun! After playing around with it for a bit I have decided there are two sides to Twitter, one of which I didn’t see until I actually started using it, and the other is the obvious side.

The Obvious Side
Texting or Iming “I am eating pringles” is really useless information. People will see it and read over it, it will get no responses. But it was fun for me to know that Twitter-ers will see my words on their screen, whatever. This has no practical purpose except as a visitor to the site, it’s kind of interesting to watch, probably kind of like watching the Search Terms screen at Google Headquarters. From the outside, there is no draw in getting a Twitter account, just watching what other people are doing.
Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10% [?]

About five days ago I was given an invite by a co-worker to a new social networking site called Virb. If I had one line to describe Virb to anyone else it would be this: Virb is MySpace’s hot sister who has a ton of experience and a ton of class.

Currently Virb is in beta mode, which means invite only. Which means it’s the “Who ya know” network. I really want Virb to succeed, so after my initial invite frenzy, I have slowed down a bit and will only give invites to those who really will use the service to pass along to others. People should not be on MySpace, they are trying to build a walled-garden and the whole site feels cheap. Virb is the designer’s MySpace.

Having already skinned my profile page, I have a few feelings on Virb, what’s hot and where they can improve. And let me say this, I really truly love it.
Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 15% [?]

Often times one stumbles on a really cool tool, yet has no idea what to use it for. Now don’t get me wrong, there are some really cool things people are going to do with the new Yahoo Pipes application. From what I can tell the application is meant to be a program to help one organize/aggregate different types of data. The description has to be broad as it looks like the application can do a whole lot of stuff.

It takes the idea of a mashup a whole lot further. Essentially, anyone with an idea can go and create a mashup of the different services out there (flickr, craigslist, googlemaps to name a few) and create their own feed based on those services. What I see being really great about it is the fact it will become one of those communities that gets better with time. Why?
Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 5% [?]

I’ve been using Movable Type for about two years, and while part of me is starting to think WordPress is really the way to go, part of me is still building sites in Movable Type and coming up with solutions.

What follows is a list of Movable Type plugins I find useful in my daily building of blogs.

Enjoy, and if I am missing anything, please let me know. I would like this post to grow over time.
Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 6% [?]

About a month ago I decided it was time for me to bring a calendar into my life. It seems up until recently I have faired well with keeping everything organized in my head. And then a weekend came where I had three events to go to, which I had assumed were all on different nights (friday, saturday, sunday) and they all ended up being on the same night. No good.

I’m a Mac user by night and a PC user by day, so I couldn’t use one of the available desktop calendars. Believe me, I was tempted by iCal. We’ll see when the iPhone comes out. Anyhow, I decided to go with Google Calendar and I am very pleased for the most part. It’s extremely easy to use and does a nice job of allowing me to collaborate with others using the Google Calendar service.
Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10% [?]

Awhile back when Digg was first getting popular, I figured it wasn’t long before someone would come in and try to pollute the system. Apparently that is happening. While occasionally I do submit my own stories to digg, as it is a good tool for shameless self-promotion, it is unfortunate people are taking such measures as paying people to digg their stories. Of course as with any popular healthy system, it’s gonna attract sharks.

More specifically, the cnet article gives out some numbers:

Companies charge as much as $15,000 to get content up on Digg, said Neil Patel, chief technology officer at the Internet marketing firm ACS. If a story becomes popular on Digg and generates links back to a marketer’s Web site, that site may rise in search engine results and will not have to spend money on search advertising, he said.

I would be curious to see how acurate these figures are. It seems strange that somebody could manipulate digg to this effect.

Read the whole article here.

Popularity: 12% [?]