Tonight, Tonight, Tonight… Hot Damn! Tonight!

For those not familiar with the quote in the title, it’s a line from the ubiquitous holiday movie, “A Christmas Story”.

The Old Man jaunts about the living room after receiving a Wester Union telegram informing him of winning a “major award.”

That’s pretty much how I feel this morning.

I just found out I’m one of one hundred “tweeters” invited to the NASA TweetUp during the launch of STS-129 on November 15-16, 2009 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

This is me (the relevant scene is at the 5 minute mark if it doesn’t start right there):

LinkedIn Contacts

My “twitterpal” Ruth Marie Sylte showed some love for my LinkedIn Contacts Facebook Application in her blog today.

Thanks, Ruth, for a very nice endorsement.

If You Want Something, You Gotta Ask

I had something pretty neat happen today.

Watching the growing success of Alltop.com, I wondered: how do I get my blog listed on Alltop.com?

The Answer?

You gotta ask.

I got on Twitter and wrote Guy Kawasaki a brief Direct Message saying that I didn’t really know how to classify my blog, Logorrhea – but if he felt it good enough to be on Alltop, please classify how he felt best.

Five minutes later, there it was, listed under http://life.alltop.com.

Pretty doggone impressive turn around – and I’m assuming that Guy took this on personally, owing to how quickly this all happened.

THAT’S engagement.

If you really want something, simply ask.

Thank you, Guy.

Transparency and Authenticity – They Aren’t The Same Thing

Every now and then, days seem to take on certain “themes” for me. Like a song stuck in your head, sometimes these themes show up in serendipitous repetition throughout the course of the day, and sometimes they simply annoy the hell out of you until something else comes along to replace it.

Anyway, today’s theme for me seems to be authenticity, and tangentially, transparency.

Brian Solis wrote a post today on Making Mistakes and Amends in Blogger and Media Relations. In it, he gives a pretty decent stab at defining transparency as (paraphrasing) sharing the good AND the bad, warts and all. He also touches upon how difficult it is to try and be a good social networking citizen with regard to qualifying what constitutes proper etiquette in unsolicited communications with contacts and the consequences when you get it wrong.

While I agree in part with Brian’s definition of transparency, the definition really (to me) needs to be broader to encompass the idea of full disclosure as to your intent, and what you stand to gain or lose.

What do I mean?

Let’s say I write a blog post, setting up straw men arguments about why product x and y are inferior but product z is far superior. If I had a vested economic interest in product z (ownership or authorship) and did not disclose that fact, then at the very least I’m certainly not being transparent and indeed am being dishonest.

I see this happen all the time on blogs, when I know the writer has an interest in promoting a book, a point of view, or a product, and yet they choose not to disclose these relationships.

I’ve even called a few on this fact, publicly and privately.

We often confuse being transparency with authenticity, because the act of being transparent is supposed to promote our credibility and trustworthiness – our authenticity.

That’s not always the case. We can spend a great deal of time building our online reputations and credibility, only to have our edifices come crashing about our shoulders through lack of attention or simple oversight. it doesn’t mean that we’re any less authentic, or that we aren’t trying to be true to our selves and the audiences that we are trying to reach – it simply means that we are people and that we from time to time make mistakes or pay less attention than we need to.

We pay a price navigating social media networks when we show ourselves not to be authentic, or when we are shown to systematically hide where our vested interests are while pretending to be honest brokers. That price is in lost face, in lost reputation, and in lost opportunities.

Sometimes we pay that price through not fully understanding “the lay of the land” or the mores of the networks we ply, or because our assumptions of what is acceptable are at odds with the majority of the people we wish to influence. Again, this doesn’t make us any less authentic in our intent, but our perceived authenticity can certainly be dropped by several degrees of magnitude.

One last personal recap of something that happened to me recently.

I was on Twitter and had accidentally indicated that I wanted Rodney Rumford’s tweets (http://twitter.com/rumford) to be sent to my phone. As many of you know, Rodney is a popular guy and my phone was inundated with a lot of traffic that I really didn’t need or want to see. So, I tried to turn these notifications off.

Instead of checking for the right command to do this using SMS, I instead relied on my faulty memory and typed “unfollow rumford”, reasoning that since “follow rumford” got me into this mess, “unfollow rumford” would get me out of it.

BIG mistake.

I immediately got a message from Rodney via twitter asking why was I telling everyone to unfollow him.

WHAT?!?

Shit. Shit. Shit. NOT what I wanted to do. I immediately apologized and set about trying to put things right by publicly acknowledging my mistake (and now feeling pretty much like the new media douchebag I was hoping NOT to become) and of course apologizing to Rodney directly (who was more than cool about it).

For those interested, I should have typed “LEAVE RUMFORD.” Word of advice – check the documentation before being a command line cowboy .

Still, I had just put something out there in the wild that was damaging to someone who is a high influencer, and to whom I attribute a great deal of respect with regard to all things social media related. Not through malice, but by careless inattention to detail. It could have happened to anybody.

I tried to be as transparent as possible in my mea culpas, and tried to act as quickly as I could to disclose my stupidity in order to keep my (and more importantly, Rodney’s) authenticity intact. I think I was reasonably successful – at least Rodney still answers my email .

In the greater view, this was a small bump in the road.

But it is illustrative how much we can damage our online reputations and authenticity from lack of understanding fully the tools at our disposal or by not always being intentional in our online interactions.

Our prior transparency in how we have built our reputations to begin with, and how transparent we are when we have to apologize or attempt conflict resolution on the social networks we traverse when problems arise, will dictate how much authenticity we’ll retain long term with the people we influence and those we wish to.

Social Media Sheep

For me, one of the great jokes of Social Media is how much more connected we are supposed to be because of it. “Markets are conversations.” “We GET it.” “The new paradigm.” “Vendor Relationship Management.”

Give me a freakin’ break.

Here’s an experiment. Call your television carrier, now. Doesn’t matter – Comcast, DirecTV, whatever. See how long it takes to speak to a person.

Now, call someone at Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIN. MySpace.

Oh, wait… you can’t.

So… even with services we deride as being shitty (television / utilities / cell phone) we can at least speak to a person.

Social Media? Not a chance in hell. And yet, we think that Web 2.0 is changing the world.

Well, in a sense it is. We are now able to be ignored at the click of a mouse – and no one cares.

The actual engagement between the Management of Social Media services and the denizens of their social networks approaches nil. @selves pointed out to me on Twitter that there is a @comcastcares account. I have also seen @JetBlue and others out there – but strangely, no accounts from Facebook, LinkedIn, or any of the other purported new media game changers.

If we want to affect change for whatever follows this iteration of the web, the clear winner will be the company or persons who realize that being human matters.

All this lip service about how great social media is belies what social media should aspire to be – a two way marketplace of ideas rather than a closed off petrie dish of exploitable user supplied content.

Use the Right Tool for the Right Job

Lots of stories today in the “echo chamber” about the departure of the Twitter architect, and claims flying about concerning whether Ruby on Rails was the appropriate choice of platform for Twitter, given Twitter’s well known propensity to be indisposed (I’ve already used “suck” in a post in the past couple of days – trying to expand my vocabulary).

I just finished reading several comments / articles about how Ruby on Rails CAN scale, if only… if only the database is partitioned properly, if only the site is properly cached, if only one held your tongue just so while clicking submit.

My thoughts drifted to that well worn bromide “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

There are just times when we need to step back and be brutally honest with ourselves. Sometimes the tools and skillsets we love best are not the most appropriate tools and skillsets for a given job, and certainly not for EVERY job.

When it’s your livelihood you’re talking about, one tends to overlook that little gem, in the belief that you CAN make it work – I must make it work – even in the face of evidence that (a) my tools are not the most appropriate or (b) I am not the person for the job.

A good friend of mine used to joke that extremely difficult programming tasks (usually doled out by a last minute customer request contrary to all prior work we had done on a system) was akin to doing “brain surgery with a butter knife.” Sure – you can do it. But you’re not going to be happy with the results in the way that you WOULD have been had you only had a scalpel on hand.

We all do this, all the time, even if we’re not programmers.

A pair of pliers CAN drive in a nail – sort of – if a hammer isn’t handy. Not so good if you have 50 nails to hammer in. Impossible if you have to hammer in enough nails to replace a roof, when even an ordinary hammer wouldn’t suffice and one would more properly use a pneumatic hammer. But if a pair of pliers is all you have to work with, then by god, that nail is going in. Deep.

In short, sometimes we simply choose the wrong tool for the wrong job because of expediency and not efficiency.

When our incompetency in the choice of the tools we use affects only ourselves, it is merely reduced personal efficiency and inconvenience. When our incompetency in this regard affects the efficiency and productivity of others, it borders on negligence.

I’m passing no judgment specifically on any single person at Twitter for what has gone on this year with availability and uptime.

What I can broadly say is that whatever they were doing, it wasn’t working.

When a Standard Isn’t

Since I’ve been in full bore “old fart” mode for the past week or so, I may as well get this gem off my chest to cap off the week.

A recurring theme this week for me, professionally and personally, is the use (or misuse / misappropriation) of the meaning of words.

Take Standards. I wrote a post earlier today about “the emerging standard of OpenSocial” (emphasis mine). A standard is usually one thing by which some other thing is measured. Since there is an absolute dearth of any applications supporting OpenSocial, how can it be called an emerging “standard?” Hell – it doesn’t even purport to be a specification. At the very most optimistic is a very strongly worded letter with very strong recommendations as to what should be supported – but you can define any extensions you like. What the hell is “standard” about that?

Out here in the wilds of the World Wide Web, people bandy about “standards” as if they are passed down on high, when by and large standards are the most flimsiest of figments of the imagination.

Don’t believe me?

In reality, most “standards” come about because someone is first to crack an idea or concept, make it wildly popular, and everyone follows a “compatibility” formula to success. It is only after the market leader has been established that someone comes along behind, codifies what is in fact a fait accompli, and declares a “standard” now in place. Rarely has it worked the other way around, where someone publishes a document, calls it a “standard” and a successful market spring up around it.

I can think of a set of successful “standards” documents that arguably worked this way: the Q’uran, the Bible, and the Torah – but they are entirely outside the scope of this discussion.

I can cite several early technology examples: the IBM PC compatible (possible because IBM published the ROM code and opened the door to the wild success of PC compatible systems); the Hayes Modem AT command set, which revolutionized the ability of PC software to control modems of any make or manufacture as long as they could recognize the Hayes AT command set; the SoundBlaster audio card and command set, which allowed anyone who could communicate with SoundBlaster’s original code set to talk to anyone else’s SB compatible plug in cards.

This is just a handful of the pioneers who were wildly successful, created the “standard” first, and then had it codified by the marketplace. Again, the emphasis is mine.

Even in the web world, though there exist many so called “standards”, all of the successful ones came about as a result of one company dominating (for a time) and everyone else following behind and calcifying a “canon.” Netscape (plus their extenstions) for HTML; 3COM and Ethernet; Internet Explorer and DOM and XMLHTTPRequest (“Ajax” to many of you); with very few exceptions, the “standard” always recognized the de facto market leader, and THEN became codified canon.

Working code is always the coin of the realm.

If we all had to wait around for specification bodies to waive their hands and declare what standards we’d all use nothing would ever get done. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

I had a conversation with a new Facebook contact yesterday and he was talking about how things would get so much better for communication across social networks once social networking “standards” equivalents like XHTML and Acid were adopted. I reminded him that having a standard like XHTML and Acid codified did not force anybody to use them. How many websites follow XHTML? Far too few. How many browsers are fully Acid compliant? You could count them on one hand and 99 out of 100 people don’t use them.

First movers who capture the market set the standard. Twitter isn’t the best designed site, it’s not the prettiest. But they were first out the gate to capture lightning in a jar and it would damn near take a stroke of timing and luck to knock it out of position merely on the basis of looks, speed, and technical merit. The market has spoken, for good or ill.

So, the next time someone starts yammering about the OpenSource “standard” API, be polite. Smile. Nod. If you’re from the South, think “Bless their heart.”

The market always dictates the standard, not the other way around.

This old fart is now going back into his house and you kids can get your ball out of my yard before I call the cops.

Everywhere and Nowhere

This is one of those posts that would probably come off as a very cool video riff, if I didn’t have a face for radio. So, a bit of a rambling brain dump follows. Be forewarned.

Just finished an article titled Everywhere and Nowhere.

The premise basically is that the walled gardens of social networking today (Facebook, MySpace, LI, and others) are really the walled gardens of old (AOL) and that users, because none of the walled gardens can provide best of breed services in all facets force users to use other services to go beyond the walls to do anything useful.

There is a lot of “truthiness” to this, but it goes deeper than that.

More than once today I have heard or read about microblogging on Twitter and Seesmic driving folks away from blogging, where before I have heard that blogging was driving out the notion of the corporate website.

In fact, what is really happening is that one’s online identity, brand, presence, persona, whatever – is all of these and none of these. It is necessary for one to have a corporate website, like it is necessary to blog in some form, like it is necessary to have some take on social networking – but none of these are sufficient means in and of themselves. The social web is a diffuse concept and doesn’t live solely on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Bebo. FriendFeed, Plaxo, and SocialThing! try to aggregate some of this above the flow conversation, but aggregation has yet to solve the diffusion of attention, content, and services that comprise our online presence.

What it means is that for one to be successful on the web today is that you have to work your ass off (as Loren of 1938media so aptly put it in his video on A-Listers), because the easy breezy salad days are gone. One must be everywhere at once, or at least be very, very smart about where their presence is most needed online at any given time.

The FB app land grab is way over and you can’t throw a rock in any direction without hitting someone who was at Davos, or TED, or SXSW, or Burning Man. Everybody has a blog. Everyone is in affiliate marketing.

Sadly, very few people have anything of value to say, or to listen to.

I twittered earlier today that one should BE or DO something interesting, and the rest would take care of itself.

My advice therefore for anyone trying to grok their way through social networking 2008 is to take care of the message first, and the appropriate medium will present itself.

Just be prepared to be Everywhere and Nowhere somewhere along the way.

Getting it Right, Versus Getting it Now

We often convince ourselves that immediacy is the most important thing. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.

For example, the immediacy of the news that Sarah Lacy’s interview from yesterday with Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW had gone horribly off the tracks was fascinating to those of us watching from afar on Twitter, in real time, and was surely disconcerting for Ms. Lacy, who failed to grok first how badly she had stumbled, and then immediately afterwards, failed to grok that she had failed at all. Twitter was almost as much the story as was the interviewer missing the mark.

In part, the immediacy of any moment can betray us, because we are given no time for careful consideration of “what the hell just happened to us. ” I’m sure that after a little time of review, and some reflection, Ms. Lacy will come to the realization that she had conducted an interview in a style neither conducive to the audience nor to the person being interviewed. Her immediate reaction was “screw you guys, I’m Sarah Lacy.” I bet a year or so from now, looking back, that future Sarah Lacy will hold many regrets over the response in the immediacy of the moment of the Sarah Lacy Version 2008.

This “nuance of the now” is lost on the web, where even a monumentally bad interview is being (thankfully for Ms. Lacy) overshadowed by the still breaking news of Elliott Spitzer and his personal problems coming to light.

I was just as guilty as anyone this afternoon of tweeting about the rumors flying fast and furious, once the story hit the NYT online web site. Within the span of ten minutes, I had followed three different rumors that turned out to be wildly inaccurate. When Spitzer did come to the mike, it was anti-climatic and added nothing to what we knew (or what we thought we knew).

In short – we will know more accurately what the true story is later with Spitzer than we do today, because the story will have time to be vetted for accuracy and time will be given for careful and considered reflection of the facts. The same will be true with the whole Zuckerberg interview fiasco.

Both stories may be entirely forgotten twelve months downstream. Or each may have deeper meaning than we can foresee in the moment. That’s the point – without some separation we have no perspective.

Just because we can “know” something – now – does not mean that we have the whole story now, or that we have time in the immediate moment to grasp the significance of what we are watching in the now, ever increasingly in real time.

Watching the Spitzer story unfold today I was reminded of the day 26 years ago when Ronald Reagan was shot. Wildly inaccurate information was flying about; about James Brady dying (he didn’t) and Al Haig being in charge (he wasn’t). That is the closest I can come to describing the flow of what was happening today in the news, though the seriousness of a politician getting caught in sexual misconduct comes in no way close to the seriousness of an assassination attempt.

We have the ability to communicate “in the now” to a broader audience with an immediacy only imagined a short while ago – but it does not give us greater insight or understanding. That still requires time, careful consideration, and judgment.

They still don’t have a Web 2.0 service for common sense. But I hear they’re working on it.

Attaining Critical Mass, without Exploding

I’ve always been one to not suffer fools gladly.

One of the challenges I face in my adult life is to harness my inclination to say the first thing that pops into head whenever someone says or does something utterly stupid, myself included. Honestly, I am a stupidity carrier at times.

But something is happening to me as I travel the wilds of the Social Networking ecosystem. I find that I am connecting with more and more people who talk a lot of game, but are more interested in the how many ways the game may be played rather than the objective of the game itself – namely, produce something of value; more profits, better living conditions, better products, smarter kids… name your favorite metric of success.

I’m finding more and more people are simply concerned with attending the next conference, meetup / Tweetup, breakfast, lunch, dinner – and less interesting people who are doing. Doing. Doing.

My realization shouldn’t be all that surprising, because all of the doers ARE doing, not tweeting about it. Not blogging about it. And before anyone hits me with the “irony” tag, yeah, I do realize the irony of blogging about the futility of blogging as opposed to doing something useful. I get it.

Believe me – I am not ranting against social media and how it can transform our reach.

Social Media and the great tools coming from the community are tremendous force multipliers – but for both bad AND good.

Like Springsteen sang, “Fifty seven channels and nothing on.” We are becoming a community of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

People, if the world of communications is really going to be transformed in a positive way, the end result should be a better workplace, a better world, better products, better standards of living, better knowledge – and not just more of the same people attending conferences and contributing to the mutual circle jerk of self congratulation.

Still seeking critical mass without having my head explode. I am failing miserably this morning.

General “Must Have” Requirements for the next “Killer” Web Service

Just my opinion, your thoughts welcome

1. Must have Twitter integration, in and out
2. Must be visible across all web services, using RSS as the universal glue
3. Must accept OpenID, if not also be an OpenID provider to boot
4. Must be SEO friendly, if not a downright SEO “juicer”

In short, openness, visibility, and portability are necessary and sufficient for its success.

My idea would be for an “open” data store based upon OpenID trusts to extend personal profiles across web services. Yeah – I know there are already groups out there trying to grok this in group thought.

Someone just needs to do it and let the market decide. The internet has enough committees.

Hate to think what Twitter would look like if designed by committee… or community for that matter.

Reliable Services

One bane of the social web is the unreliability of services that we depend upon more and more to extend our brand, connect with friends (real or imaginary), or flat out do our work (work? what’s that?).

Twitter (at least for me) is more noticeable when it is down, as it is one of the more immediate and impactful of all the social web services. I update all of my sites that have statuses using Twitter integration in one form or another. I regularly use 3 twitter clients a day (two browser based, one mobile based) to check tweets and update my status.

When Twitter is working, it is the best thing since sliced bread. When it is not… ah, there’s the rub. It is down ALL the FREAKIN’ time.

On the one hand, how can one complain about the uptime of a “free” service? And yet, how can I delegate more trust and business function to a service that is as unconstant as the moon (nod to Will Shakespeare)?

I’m picking on Twitter in this regard, though there are plenty of other examples out there in Web 2.0 land (the Bloglines Plumber and the LinkedIn Wizard – who made an appearance last night, BTW – are just as recognizable as the Twitter Cat and Robot screen). Bebo had some ungawdly downtime number, measured in the double digit HOURS for a two month period, and that just ain’t gonna cut it ongoing.

The relative unreliability of social networking services, free though they are now, are real stumbling blocks to wider adoption by businesses that need reliable up-time “always there” access. Web services should STRIVE for the level of service and reliability that we expect from our phone service, water systems, and electrical grid.

Strive is the key word.

Think I am overhyping this? What if you were trying to alert a campus emergency ala Va Tech with Twitter or a service like it, and got the Cat and Robot screen? What happens when Skype goes down for a day?

Real world high availability systems are just as vulnerable as the virtual systems I’m ragging on. Just ask the people on the East Coast of Florida about their half-day blackout a couple of days ago.

Again, we must strive for a higher level of service from the online services to which we are devoting large chunks of our lives and intellectual capital.

Now, forgive me. I have to go interact with real people until Twitter allows me to chat with my imaginary friends.

Social Networking’s Big Disconnects

I am a relative latecomer to the Social Networking party, really jumping feet first into the fray last October with a flurry of activity releasing several Facebook applications to see what kind of traction actually existed in the marketplace and to see if there was any “There, there.”

Over the past five months or so I have uncovered several surprising (to me) truths about where Social Networking suffers significant disconnects:

• The vast majority of “the business world” is oblivious to social networks, either passively or actively ignorant of the potential reach and impact of these networks,
• Most of my colleagues / contemporaries (grew up in 70s, college in 80s) are absent from social and professional networking, and
• Businesses that do engage heavily in social networking are media, HR, or web-invested.

Editorial Note: These so called “truths” are of course my personal observations. Your truthiness will vary.

In short, while the numbers of people actively engaged in social networking activity are hyper-aware of the space and what’s going on, there is seemingly no middle ground of those businesses or persons passingly familiar with social networking; they either get it, or they don’t. A great deal of the people who don’t get it – in fact, I would argue they represent a VAST majority of businesses – are the decision makers for technology training, direction, and expenditures.

There are many times I would like to engage my contemporaries with something exciting that I have uncovered or discovered on the social web, only to to find that I don’t share their frame of reference and that I have a many hours, days, or weeks task of bringing them up to speed on the ecosystem before I can begin to discuss the relevancy of this world to what they are (or should be doing).

It’s like discovering that people under 30 really don’t use email like those of us over 30 do. Discovering that nobody gets your “Marsha! Marsha! Marsha!” rant (for me, this happened first in college when my landlord’s son asked me who “Yes” was while thumbing through my albums).

HR people definitely “get” social networking. LinkedIn is the SN equivalent of the Rolodex for these folks as they hungrily hoard their network connections and chum with the best of them. Media types (PR flaks, marketers, political activists, RSS geeks, news organizations, bloggers, conference goers, echo chamber yodelers, attention whores, and the like) “get” social networking for its ability to reach audiences. The web-invested (the Facebooks, MySpaces, Bebos, LinkedIn, Twitters, QIKs, Plaxos, web startups, VCs, etc.) “get” social networking as another fresh field to “flip and fly.”

Where does that leave the vast majority of the “real” business world? You know, the business world of retailers, bakers, butchers, car repairmen, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, firemen, policemen, government cogs, Walmart greeters, teachers, factory workers, engineers, dry cleaners, convenience store clerks, TSA screeners (TSA Gangstaz, holla), and the like? Disconnected and disenfranchised.

This is not an argument that for social networking to be successful, all of these (and more) need to be connected and engaged – I simply am pointing out that what the echo chamber of the social web deems to be important and all encompassing really only represents a small fraction of the “real” economy that the “knowledge based” economy willingly or unconsciously fails to consider any time we’re slapping each other on the back for Google Juice.

If social networks are about making connections, and meaningful connections, we will need to extend beyond the self-congratulatory echo chamber silos that we have built for ourselves and figure out how all this stuff we are building can be used for meaningful and long lasting purposes; raising our kids, feeding the poor, paying tuitions and mortgages, providing insight to the masses, leaving the world a better place than how we found it.