A few weeks back I mentioned here that I was giving myself a whole week without a single check of my Google Reader feeds in order to see how reliant I had become on RSS, and where I could shift my priorities in order to become more productive. It’s a technique I tried last year with Twitter, and I think proves effective with anything you want to gain a new perspective on. I mentioned I was going to report after my hiatus, and I admit I have been slacking, considering it’s now almost a month later. The time has been good on me though, as I’ve been able to learn how to adapt after my hiatus, and have found several things that have worked for me.

What I Learned

Going without RSS was insightful.  I learned what was really important to me, what I may be able to do without, and what I would miss without RSS.  First of all, the things I learned that were most important:

• Blogs I write on - it’s important for me to know what my co-authors were writing so I can stay up to date, as well as promote the content of the blogs I write for.
• Family - I follow several of my family members who blog. Knowing what they, and close friends write about is important to me, and saves me the need for the dreaded family newsletter we used to have to pass around.
• Guilty Pleasures - okay, perhaps these could go within the “do without” column, but let’s face it - we all have a few blogs we read that are just enjoyable to read.  They keep us sane, and give us balance to our days.

Believe it or not, that’s about it.  To help explain why, let’s go with what I can do without:

• Most tech blogs - lets face it, I can now pull most of my favorite blogs from sites like FriendFeed and Twitter.  Better yet, FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter work better for “media snacking” because I can filter results by number of people talking about each topic.  I can also hold a conversation with a large group of people on each topic, and help promote the blog I’m reading much more than I can in a Reader.  Believe it or not (and I learned this from my friend, Jeremiah Owyang), I can get most major news by just checking FriendFeed or Facebook or Twitter.  I have yet to miss anything I regretted losing.
• Sharing - Google Reader (my preferred RSS Reader), and most RSS reader tools out there are very outdated in the way they let you share the feeds you read.  I would much rather share something on FriendFeed, where I can re-post out to Twitter, post an image with the feed, or encourage much more conversation, real-time, with a very large audience.  I can’t do that effectively with Google Reader.
• Mundane news - I noticed after my week was over that I was subscribed to a lot of just dumb news that really was unimportant to me.  It was cool for that “one special article” the authors would some times write, but I found many of those were also sharing on FriendFeed or Facebook, and I could get my news there instead.  In addition, there were many news sources that would just repeat news from other sources, making many of my feeds redundant.
• Shares from many of my friends - A lot of the shares I was getting on Google Reader I was also getting on Twitter and FriendFeed, and I was also already subscribed to the blog they were sharing.  I hid most of those sharers from view, and instead added them to my “Favorites” filter list on FriendFeed.  Now I still get all their shares, and can freely discuss, real-time with them and others rather than fracturing the conversation.  If you want to share stuff with me, make sure I see it on FriendFeed.

Of course, there were several things I found I couldn’t ever leave.  RSS is not, nor will it ever be completely unnecessary, although I can very easily see myself being proven wrong in the “never” category there as well.  I found several things I just missed, and still can’t think of a perfect way to solve.  Those include the following:

• Blog mentions of my company, name, or brand - the infamous “ego search”, as it’s called, is very important to brands and learning what others are saying about you.  It’s how you can get eavesdrop, know where you stand, and perhaps step in where necessary.  Notice I said “blog” though.  Through FriendFeed, now in the Beta you can set up your own “ego filters” and save them in the right-hand sidebar.  Any mention of your name in the comments and posts will appear in your filters.  On Twitter, you can always use http://search.twitter.com, or a separate column in TweetDeck or PeopleBrowsr, or as I’m currently doing, set up a custom search in CoTweet for your brand name and track it that way.  No RSS needed.
• Comment tracking - on any post I do for LouisGray.com, there is no way via Disqus for me to track just the comments from the posts that I wrote.  Therefore, I subscribe to each post’s RSS comments that I write, and any new comments come into my feed reader.  I do this with many blogs that don’t provide a way other than RSS for me to track all the comments.
• Wiki, forum, and other site tracking - one strategy I use to get the latest data is to track the “recent changes” on MediaWiki installs.  This is available via RSS, and any change will be sent to your RSS reader.  In addition, forums do the same thing.  For forums, being replaced more and more by microblogs, it will be interesting to see how necessary this becomes, but it’s necessary for the moment.  Now, I’m curious who creates the first real-time Wiki (send your royalties my way).

RSS is not dead.  It’s just losing its value.  As the web gets more and more real-time, we are less and less having the need to have data pushed to us via RSS - we can go get what we want, when we want it, from any point in time.  We can now, through filters and real-time data, retrieve much of the data we want to get, in an environment amongst peers.  Google Reader itself is old - it’s slow to adapt, and I just can’t see it keeping up with sites such as FriendFeed, Facebook, or Twitter.

If you want me to read your stuff, I still subscribe to some RSS feeds, but if you want to guarantee I see your stuff, subscribe to me via FriendFeed and get my attention there. Your site, in order to continue in the future will need to be part of the real-time web and those that don’t keep up will be left in the past.  You can follow me on FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/jessestay (check out http://beta.friendfeed.com/jessestay for a true realtime experience!), or on Facebook at http://jessestay.socialtoo.com.  I can’t wait to read your stuff there!  You can read all the content I write across all the blogs I write for, real-time, in the custom FriendFeed room I created at http://friendfeed.com/jesse-stay - either subscribe to the room in FriendFeed, or you can add it to your RSS Reader!  Of course, as always, for the old-fashioned out there you can always subscribe to this blog at http://staynalive.com/feed.

Are there any other things you can see a need to use RSS for?  What other techniques have you begun using to adapt to the real-time web?

Coming out of High School I had a dream, like many Mormon boys of my age, to have good grades and get accepted to Brigham Young University. It was the “Notre Dame” of the Mormon faith, and having sat through many BYU football games with my family cheering them on and getting the nudge from my Dad I felt I was destined that I too would go there some day. I was very disappointed after High School when, while my 3.5 GPA was decent and I excelled in extra-curricular activities, it wasn’t decent enough for the school of my dreams and I would never graduate from there. I went on to follow the dot-com boom and bust, and get my degree late, graduating Summa Cum-Laude at Strayer University (take that BYU!). Even today, I’m still a very strong BYU football fan, and longed for that dream of the “BYU Experience”.

Today, my dream came true, and I was able to finally participate in the school I grew up so dearly loving. I guess you could say it was my “Rudy” moment. I’ve spoken many places recently but this was truly a highlight. Today I had the opportunity to Guest-Lecture an Intro to PR class at BYU. Despite having some issues getting YouTube to load on the BYU network (I’m told it’s not due to censorship, but rather strain on the network - yeah right), the lecture went extremely well! I compared the likes of Professor Harold Hill in “The Music Man” and that small town of River City he was selling to to Social Media, and used his lessons learned to share some of how Social Media should be used. My slides are below and if you ever want to see it in person I’d love to present it for your group or organization! For those in the class that are now readers, thank you to all of you and Dr. MacFarlane for the great opportunity you gave me!

I want to meet you. I’m no TechCrunch, nor am I aspiring to be, but I really do enjoy meeting my readers in person. I’ll never forget the day I met Daniel Ha and Jason Yan at Disqus Headquarters with Robert Scoble and them mentioning that they were readers of my blog - I was blown away!. I think it’s really fun to meet my readers and discover why you think my content is so interesting.

There are several events coming up that I wanted to make you aware of. Some more personal than others. I really wish they were in more diverse places - if you or your organization are interested in having me speak please don’t hesitate to ask! Here is what I have planned thus far:

Today, February 16 - Interview with Krishna De on BlogTalk Radio. You can tune in and listen to her interview me about SocialToo, Facebook, and whatever else comes up. You can call in on the show’s number at +1 347 633 9467 or listen live on the web at 11am MST.

Omniture Summit - While I won’t be speaking (maybe next year?), I’m looking forward to attendance at Omniture’s annual Summit this week. It starts Tuesday and ends Thursday. Look for me and say hi if you’re visiting!

Social Media Club, Salt Lake City Panel - I’ll be on a panel this Thursday, February 19 with Rachael Herrscher of TodaysMama, Sara Brueck Nichols of Operation Kids, and Anthony Power of Recipe31. The basic topic is, you guessed it, Social Media.

Bebo B.E.S.T. Contest Awards Night - While I won’t be there in person, I had the privilege of judging the Bebo B.E.S.T. developers contest with Dave McClure and Frank Gruber, in which the winners will be announced this Wednesday, February 18, in a special awards ceremony in San Francisco. I’m looking forward to seeing the winners.

Nevada Interactive Media Summit 2009 Keynote - This is a highlight for me which I’m really looking forward to. On Saturday, March 7, I’ll be flying out to Reno, NV to keynote at the Nevada Interactive Media Summit. I’m excited to meet everyone attending at the summit, some very new to Social Media and looking to find ways to better integrate Social Media into their organizations. I’m looking forward to sharing some inspirational successes and failures in the realm of Social Media and how the organizations attending can improve their use of Social Media through Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and more. Come say hi to me!

PhotoCamp, Utah - Saturday, March 14 I’ll be presenting at PhotoCamp, Utah, where I agreed to speak about promoting photography through Social Media. I’ve always said if I were a photographer I’d get on Facebook and start tagging those in the photos I took. There are other techniques that I think would improve any Photography business that I will share.

Dr. Larry McFarland’s PR Class at Brigham Young University - On Thursday, March 19 I’ll be guest presenting for a PR class at Brigham Young University, speaking to Dr. McFarland’s first year PR students about Social Media. I’m sure what I share will be very different from what they’re used to hearing, but very valuable!

Utah Medical Marketing Association - On Wednesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking with Josh Carr, of Sprout Marketing, on Social Media, targeting the BioMedical fields. This will be an interesting topic, and I may need to do my research to hit the right audience considering my medical background is limited, but I’m really looking forward to it. Social Media is Social Media, regardless! This is a very interesting area, and maybe I’ll try to pull in some of my learnings from UnitedHealth Group when I speak.

As you can see, I have an extremely busy schedule ahead of me in the next month. I’m really looking forward to it, and if I can schedule you or your business in for a quick hour or two (or 4) of consulting I would love to see what I can do to help! My consulting sessions are jam-packed, and well worth the time. E-mail me if you’d like to meet some time, or please, just stop by and say hi next time you see me!

SocialToo.com has been a huge success for me so far. Just this last month we have gone from just less than 1,000 users to over 7,000 users, and that number shows no sign of slowing down. We’re starting to monetize the site, via one-time purchases of various services, advertising, and will be adding some premium features very soon. I’m slowly actually starting to monetize a service based on Social Media, and thus far, I’m proving it’s going to work.

However, I’ve just about exhausted my resources financially to continue supporting this on just my own savings alone, and have decided it’s time to find something full or part-time that can supplement SocialToo. I am also looking for financing and investment as an alternate source of income, but in tough economic times I have to put my eggs in multiple baskets to ensure something works out.

So, here’s what I have to offer. If you’re looking for a RockStar Facebook, OpenSocial, Twitter, YouTube, or you name the Social Media platform developer to take your app to the next level, I’m your man. I have a very strong software development background which you can see on my LinkedIn profile. I have written two books on Facebook, one on Facebook Development and FBML for O’Reilly (see those in the upper-right of the blog), and one on Facebook professional growth and marketing. I speak and teach others regularly on the subjects of Facebook, Twitter, Social Media, and related topics. I have a good following on multiple networks and a great platform to build your brand as an employee or consultant for your company. Any such relationship would be announced in full disclosure here and any other place it makes sense to mention the relationship. In addition, I am an entrepreneur at heart, which means I have passion in the products I help build. I love seeing these things grow to become successes!

I can develop software - I wrote SocialToo.com from the ground up, by myself (with thanks to some great advisors). I can market Social Media. I am learning to monetize Social Media. I have a successful business, and have helped businesses based on Social Media become successes. So, if you or your company are looking for someone with my skills, let’s talk. We can talk full time relationships, consulting relationships, temporary relationships. I’d love to help you out. Oh, and international is definitely an option - I speak fluent Thai, some Spanish, and even some Indonesian and am no stranger to learning new languages and cultures!

At the same time, if you know anyone looking for a good investment that will make money in the near future please forward them my way. In either scenario, SocialToo will continue to grow, will continue to be a focus (while if I work full time for you it will be a side-focus), and you can continue to expect to see the same growth you always have as we move forward. At the same time, I’m a hungry entrepreneur.

You can read my LinkedIn profile at http://linkedin.com/in/facebook

My contact info is in the upper-right of this blog.

Please Re-Tweet

Photo courtesy the talented Brian Solis

Are you addicted to Twitter? Janet Meiners Thaeler (@Newspapergrl) thinks I am. Guy Kawasaki has a great SocialToo survey asking the question. Janet even gave me an award for it! (and I sincerely appreciate it - I love awards!) I’m not so sure I’m addicted though. Even though I do have near 10,000 updates on Twitter and am active on the service, I think I use FriendFeed much more, and in a much shorter time frame I have near half that in likes and comments on FriendFeed. I think I also use Facebook more - I wrote two books on it after all.

Twitter is a tool, and I use the best tool for the job. This is part of why I left Twitter a few months ago - Twitter wasn’t doing what I wanted it to. When I realized I wasn’t going to get better from other services I came back. Twitter is where I post my thoughts and share things that I can’t post to this blog or elsewhere. This status propagates my Facebook status (through the Twitter App on Facebook), as well as FriendFeed, where more people comment, and I can have more personal, lengthy conversations in those places. Twitter is a tool I use to meet new people, to share thoughts, and build relationships, just like I do on FriendFeed and Facebook.

Could I leave Twitter? You bet. If another service with a much larger network, and just as many opportunities comes along with an actual revenue model and something I could rely on to not delete my followers or data, I’d leave in a minute. It’s part of the reason I have a close eye on FriendFeed, and have built an early hold there to build a strong network. I see potential there. I’m not addicted - I use the best tool for the job. I’m building a network everywhere I go.

The honorable Chris Brogan (if I may call him so) enlightened me back at BlogWorld. He was joking around at the time, and I can’t even remember our conversation that led to it, but his comments were something to the effect of “Listen, TechDork, technology doesn’t solve problems! Humans do!” Oh how right he is. How do you define Social Media? Social Media is about the technologies we use to enable real-life relationships. Emphasis on real-life. If a service isn’t doing that for you in the most effective way, or if you can’t do it with just one service - be prepared to leave. We can’t afford to be addicted to these services. I know I’m not.

Janet had a great idea though. What awards would you offer your Twitter friends? Janet and Larry Weaver have come up with “Social Media Awards” you can create for your friends. Share yours below.

I presented this in Dallas in September to a room full of 100+ CIOs at the Dallas Chamber of Commerce CIO Symposium. We had CIOs from Mary Kaye, Boy Scouts of America, Bank of America, and the moderator was the Strategist for EDS that helped lead them to an Acquisition by HP. It was a lot of fun - I hope I can come again and share some more. I promised them I would upload this presentation. It may not make full sense to all, but if you’d like me to come present it to your organization, contact me! Some day if I get some time I’ll do a recording on top of it so it makes a little more sense, but at least you can get the idea for what I shared.

I’m a sucker for a deal. Let’s just say I’m a cheapskate. That’s why I was excited when I heard that Chick-Fil-A stores were offering free chicken sandwiches nationwide today. So I went out and voted, excited to celebrate my vote with a nice chicken sandwich from Chick-Fil-A. Never mind the $5 in gas it cost me to drive there.

I get there after a long drive telling them about hearing online about them offering free sandwiches, showing my “I Voted Sticker”. They’re response was “Chick-Fil-A isn’t doing that - it was a ‘Media Error’”. I responded arguing it was all over the web, and all they could do is tell me their manager said they couldn’t give anything out.

So what did I do? I got on Twitter (well, actually FriendFeed, which goes to Twitter) and hashtagged it #ep and #votereport (as a joke), and shared with my 1400 or so friends on Twitter, along with anyone monitoring #votereport and #ep, not to mention the near 800 friends on Facebook and near 700 friends on FriendFeed how Chick-Fil-A had made this huge PR error. And now I’m blogging about it to at least 500 more people, and who knows if others share this with friends and how many more people end up seeing it.

Here’s the problem - I noted to them that I had heard the offer on the internet. That means I have reach. I most likely share things with my friends through this enormous, now social tool. This should signal that to them, regardless of who I am. I know not all their customers have heard of the offer, so therefore they aren’t going to go broke giving stuff away. However, if they would have just given away a free drink (which, from my fast food experience, costs practically nothing), or free fries, or even a coupon to come in next time for a free sandwich, they could have taken advantage of that reach. I would have been tweeting about my great experience getting free food at Chick-Fil-A, they would have gotten more customers and more people aware of their location, and this blog post would have been much more positive in their favor.

Social Media is powerful, people. Yes, I did end up buying my own sandwich and I still like their food, but they could have taken advantage of a much greater opportunity to spread the word about their brand and promote that particular location. Chick-Fil-A, and especially that particular location, missed out on a huge opportunity here.

Representative John Culberson, the Twittering and Qik’ing Congressman from my good old home town of Houston, Texas, has been on a rampage this morning about a proposed new regulation for the House of Representatives, which, he claims, will require all world wide web communications from the House floor from those in congress to receive “prior approval” from a Democratically-controlled Committee on House Administration before it goes out to the web. From the letter:

“

• Official content posted on an external domain must be clearly identified as produced by a House office for official purposes, and meet existing content rules and regulations;
• To the maximum extent possible, the official content should not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information or any other information not in compliance with the House’s content guidelines.
• Any link from a House website to an external site on which the Member video is hosted must contain an exit notice.
• CHA, the Office of Web Assistance(OWA), or other designated House entity should maintain a list of external sites that meet whatever requirements are established by the CHA

”

Per the above proposed recommendations, this would rule out any Twitter communication because by law, each Tweet would need to be prepended by a disclaimer, identifying it as being produced by a House office for official purposes and, as Culberson puts it, that will most likely in and of its self exceed 140 characters. Also, it would mean that any Congressman wishing to use a site such as Twitter to share publicly what is going on in Congress with their constituents will have to get prior approval, censorship essentially, before using such a site or technology.

I find it ironic that it is a Republican that is trying to show the Democrats how to use technology on this, but Representative Culberson has a point here, and we need to speak up if we’re to continue seeing social media propagate through our government. Social Media in government means a more open government, and that’s a good thing! I’d like to encourage all that read this to write your Congressman or Congresswoman about this (Pelosi is part of this!) and get them to see things straight rather than requiring censorship of our House floor.

You can read the Proposal here. (Which, were this proposal to take effect, I believe I would be breaking the law by sharing with you)

UPDATE: Want to discuss? Let’s discuss in a nice open format right below this post via the FriendFeed link below!

I mentioned this at the Hackathon in March, but have not had the time to blog about it yet. Thus far all announcements for the Utah Social Media Developers Garage Meetings and Utah Facebook Developers Garage Meetings have been announced either through this blog, or our Facebook Group. I’ve now created a Google Group for us at http://groups.google.com/group/utsmdev. Please sign up there and I’ll issue all announcements via that list. Google Groups provides a more neutral ground in the sense that users don’t have to have an account to use it (to an extent), as compared to the Facebook groups. We’ll keep the Facebook groups around, and depending on membership I’ll still send announcements there as well, but I encourage all to sign up on the Google Group if possible. In addition, having a mailing list will allow us to have more of a discussion. This way if you are working on a project in Facebook, or OpenSocial, or even Wordpress or Twitter or other APIs and you run into issues, you can ask the group and we can work together to solve the problem. I figure this way we’ll be able to all build a strong Social Media Development community here in Utah that others can rely on. Google groups will also give us a page we can tell others about the group, when the next meeting is, etc. If you have some graphics and HTML skills to help with that I am open to volunteers!

Also, I have created a Google Code repository at http://code.google.com/p/utsmdev/. For anyone okay with producing their code under the GPL, this will give you a place to store your code, and collaborate with others on the code, track issues, etc. If you want commit permissions to that repository please contact me and I’ll add you. As Google App Engine gets more integration into these things we’ll also set up a hosting option through Google App Engine to actually host your apps. Hopefully all these options will make it all much easier for everyone to get out and collaborate in their coding. It’s a good time to be a developer…

P.S. - We will continue on in our every-other-month meeting structure now, so our next meeting will be the second Tuesday in May. I’m working on a speaker, so if you know anyone or have ideas let me know!

According to Mike Arrington (I know, I said I wanted to boycott TechCrunch but it’s just so dang hard to avoid! I’ll stick to boycotting Crunchgear for now.), Google is having another “Campfire One” event tonight. The last Campfire One event they announced OpenSocial. It was the OpenSocial team that announced the event, and the biggest bloggers and developers in the industry were all there. Mike Arrington thinks this one is going to be the announcement of “BigTable”, Google’s answer to Amazon SimpleDB.

I think otherwise - see my thoughts at OpensocialNow.com.