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You Can Do Your Job Without Twitter

Let’s not fool anyone. You can do your job without using Twitter. You can get through any number of days without blogging. You don’t need to consume podcasts to perform your daily duties. Everything on your desk and in your calendar and piled high on your task list doesn’t require the use of Facebook, Friendfeed, Myspace, to get the work done. You don’t need RSS, nor do you need to know the name of even one popular blog.

MILLIONS of people all over the world get by just fine without these tools. Every day. Pick the small town where you live, or even a decent sized city space, and ask a random assortment of people whether they do any of the above. (Starbucks’ denizens don’t count, because we all know most Internet startups live in Starbucks and Panera).

Unless you’ve engineered your role to be wholly dependent on these technologies, you could go about your business without them and live a full and productive life until death.

So why, then, and I’m asking YOU this question, do millions of us thrive in this environment? Why are we threading the social web? Why are we spending hours a day reaching out, building connections, cultivating relationships, producing and consuming media that only a sliver of the world is even noticing?

What makes this our passion?

I know my answers. What’s your take? Feel free to comment below, or if you want to blog a response, please do so and link back to this post so we can all track the conversation.

Photo credit, fictures

Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

Reading this news that Loic LeMeur sent me this morning, I see that Twhirl, the social software front end client, now supports any laconi.ca install. If you’re not yet up on laconi.ca , it’s an open source, run it on your own servers version of Twitter. See the flagship install of it at identi.ca.

So, to sum that all up: Twitter inside the firewall, private for your business is Twhirl+laconi.ca. Twitter outside the firewall with your business colleagues and friends is Twhirl+Twitter. Easy cheesy. One app.

Recently announced at TechCrunch50, Yammer is angling to be the Twitter for the enterprise client. Believe me, lots of companies have asked for this very thing. And while I don’t want to take away from the technical qualities of why Yammer is cool, and why it might well do the trick just fine for businesses, I’m thinking that what Loic LeMeur and the Twhirl team just did kind of trumps Yammer. Why?

Single client.

Logged into my Twhirl account, I can have a tab for Twitter, a tab for FriendFeed, and a tab for my laconi.ca install of choice. That means I can have a behind-the-firewall and a lets-share-with-everyone install all in one client.

This is pretty darned clever, Loic.

I’m digging into it further now, but I think I’ve just found a great recommendation for a dual-use Twitter-like environment thanks to this bridging strategy by Twhirl.

What do you think? Am I wrong?

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Technorati Doesnt Count Microblogs

Something Mack Collier just said rang a bell in my head: Technorati doesn’t count services like Twitter, Friendfeed, Plurk, Identi.ca, etc, as valid sources of traffic for a blog. Meaning, for the dozens of people who say that they find something interesting and share the link on Twitter, none of that goes towards whether a blog is authoritative.

Does that actually make sense? If we’re shifting as a user base into using services like Facebook, Twitter, and Jaiku more frequently (okay, not Jaiku), why wouldn’t Technorati, the current reigning source of “authority” of blogs on the web, count these sources?

Has Technorati become the Alexa of measurement?

Update: I guess Alexa counts FireFox now, too. Again, if you have the bar installed. Thanks for the update. (Note: Alexa, as far as I know, only counts users of the IE browser with the Alexa toolbar installed in its ratings of who visits your website, versus Compete and others who count much more.)

How to Use Friendfeed as a Collaborative Business Tool

The social media aggregation software, Friendfeed has much more value than one might originally think. The tool lets you add several disparate parts of your social web use into one spot (it collects your blog, your Flickr account, your upcoming.org event list, your bookmarks, etc).

Most people use this as a way to share a more enriched experience with friends and colleagues. But I think there’s a business opportunity in using the tool for collaborative business. Remember, Friendfeed can collect your status information, your presence, media from several sources, your bookmarks. There are many ways to use that. Here’s one set of use cases to consider for that purpose.

How to Use Friendfeed as a Collaborative Business Tool

1. Sign up for an account on Friendfeed.
2. On the “me” tab, on the right where it says “services,” click “Edit/add.”
3. Add appropriate accounts. (See below).

Here’s where it gets interesting. You can do lots of things at this point. Let’s list several possible use cases:

• Add any company blogs of relevance.
• Add any external blogs of relevance.
• Add search terms via Technorati and Google Blogsearch.
• Add search terms via Twitter Search (here’s how to search Twitter).
• Add any Flickr (or other web-based) photo groups.
• Add location-based data via Brightkite.
• Add relevant news services using their RSS subscription URLs.
• Add YouTube videos.
• Add Delicious.com for social bookmarks.
• Lots more.

So, pick a few things from the about to think about. If you had lots of people in multiple locations, one way to dashboard their locale would be to have all of them add a Brightkite account, and you could “friend” them and invite them into a group. Pow, instant location-status-presence. There are many ways to configure the 43 or so apps that plug into Friendfeed to be useful for your business.

3. Add your coworkers’ accounts as friends.
4. Create a group and invite those friends to the group.
5. Send private updates to the group. Send more public facing ones to the public timeline.

Friendfeed provides many opportunities to go further than just collecting information in one place. I’m sure there are some other ideas for application of what I’ve just covered that you could improve upon. What do you think? How else could you see this being used?

Photo credit, foundphotoslj

FriendFeed- The Hidden Conversation

If “joining the conversation” is one goal of your exploration of social media, it’s almost become a requirement that you maintain a presence on FriendFeed. It’s an application that acts as a central aggregation and discussion point for many of your other Internet points of presence. You can add your YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Brightkite, Upcoming.org, Last.fm, and a gazillion other services into it, and then when you create activity on any of those services, other people following your activity stream can form commentary around what you’ve posted.

First, it’s something you might consider joining so that you can aggregate your content into one stream. Second, it will give you a new audience for some of your content, and some different interactions will happen there than on the primary sites it’s reporting on. For instance, if someone posts information to Twitter, and that person has Twitter added to their FriendFeed account, others using the service can comment on that person’s tweets:

Second, I’m finding that FriendFeed finds me interesting information from the larger body of work of people I’m following. So, for example, if I look at Louis Gray’s FriendFeed stream, I see three Google Reader Shared Items, a blog post, some Disqus comment threads, pictures, and a Google Talk status that led to a conversation unto itself. It’s rich content.

It’s also drinking from the firehose, so not exactly everyone’s cup of tea (to mix metaphors).

Should you try it out? Yes. Is it for everyone? No. If you’re reasonably new to social media and networks, skip it for now, I say. There’s a lot to figure out, so don’t get too wrapped up in this right now.

What’s your take? Are you there? Have you checked it out?

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Alltop Launches Frienderati to Help You Find FriendFeed Friends

Using AllTop’s new Frienderati page might help you find Becky McCray, a small town business professional who focuses on how the web can help out small business owners, especially those in rural areas. You might learn from browsing Frienderati that Becky sees things differently than others. And because it’s a feed from FriendFeed, you’ll see what she posts for pictures, how she uses Twitter, and whatever else she’s attached to the service to track.

She’s one of a whole gaggle of interesting people you might add as friends in FriendFeed once you peruse Guy Kawasaki’s new Alltop page, Frienderati.

Why do I like the project? Because it’s a way to help new folks coming onto the web to see things in a simple interface before they choose to go deeper. Have you looked at the project? What do you think?

How Do I Add FriendFeed Comments to My Blog

Hey, smarter people: how do I add a FriendFeed comments module under my blog comments? I want to see all these great comments. Just found these several days later:

Man, so many great people saying great things, and I didn’t engage at all. : (

Twitter Bashing- A Popular Sport Lately

I’ve been on Twitter since the fairly early days. Pre 2007SXSW, if that gives you a sense. And I give at least one presentation a week, plus DOZENS of conversations in various media spots about the values of Twitter and the benefits. But man, I’m really tired of things not working.

Call this the passion of someone who has grown to appreciate the business implications of what Twitter can do (and has done) for me, who sees several alternatives just sitting here revved up, waiting to take your traffic. No, not Jaiku or Pownce. Puh-leeze. Great teams, but they’re not the right play.

But FriendFeed? There’s a case there. Truly. I posted a new item in FF, and got THAT MANY (see above) comments in seconds. In the time it took me to start typing this, there are 14 19 MORE comments. So it’s alive. Truly.

I look on the twitter streams of the folks running the show and find nothing related. Nothing like, “Um, sorry we’re sucking right now, but we’re going to fix it.” And you know what? It was working better a few weeks ago when certain people were being raked over the coals on the way out the door. Tell you what. I miss Blaine.

What comes next? I’m not ready to bet on this one, because Twitter has somehow kept us all here, even when all these other apps were coming out. They all have some subset of better features, but we’re all on Twitter.

But I dunno, team. FriendFeed, if you can learn to work with the noise, I think this might end up picking up some serious “market share” in the social platforms.

Attention Newcomers to Social Platforms

Tread gently on ditching Twitter for FriendFeed. Read about 100 Louis Gray posts before attempting anything of that nature. Truly. It’s not the same vibe, and doesn’t have the same return on efforts as Twitter (not the same, I’m saying).

And me? I’m still on Twitter. But getting a bit feisty.

You?

Screen caps made with Skitch

Alert Thingy Helps Make FriendFeed Indispensible

I have a blog, a Twitter account, a Flickr account, Facebook, and lots of other points of presence on the web. FriendFeed is one application that lets people see all your various output in one place. Now, with the new application, Alert Thingy, I can see your FriendFeed presence in a nifty little Adobe AIR application.

FriendFeed/AlertThingy makes seeing the larger media output of your friends easier. Does this help you in a given day? Hard to say. But because some of the comments of the web are shifting into FriendFeed and because the audience is becoming more and more atomized, tools like these are becoming important to seeing the larger story.

Presence apps are here. Aggregation apps are here. But when do we get triage and filtering? Attention is scarce, and we’re sacrificing more of it every day. Tools like Alert Thingy are half the solution by putting everything in one place. But who will help us human-filter our sources?

Found via TechCrunch.

Screen caps done with Plasq’s Skitch

The Web Version of You

What FriendFeed gives us here is a sense of how the web might see you (and I also mean “your business”). I don’t mean search. I mean the nature of the things you create. This list of places where you make media in different forms becomes the sum of your output, what you create. Your bitprint (like a footprint, but in digital).

What do you see there? What’s missing? Once we all have aggregated, what comes next?

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