Today (about 2 hours ago), Utah Attorney General, and rumored Senate Candidate Mark Shurtleff, in an apparent “DM Fail” with what would appear to be Political Consultant Ben Cannatti, accidentally announced his candidacy for Senate. Attorney General Shurtleff has been rumored to be running against the current seated Senator Bob Bennett in the upcoming election, making this no surprise, but a solid confirmation it would seem.

Shurtleff recently appeared in a recent Fox 13 News segment on Facebook boasting his use of Social Media and its potential advantage it could give him in the pending run for Senate. Shurtleff ironically stated on Twitter his realization in what he thought was an SMS to Cannatti, “…I just realized that I was responding to a text from u. I’m going to pull it off immediately”. Other interesting Tweets, “…it will also be against Bennett and I’ll pick up his delegates when he drops off the first ballot. I’m announcing I’m running at 12″. He also shared he “would have no trouble raising up to $2 million”. The original Tweets have been removed but you can read the 140 character version of them (which is cut off) via Twitter search still.

It also comes on the heels of other mishaps by other Republicans. Just recently, Virginia State Senator Jeff Frederick posted on Twitter, “Big News coming out of Senate: Apparently one Dem is either switching or leaving the Dem caucus. Negotiations for power sharing underway.” The Virginia Senate Democrats saw the post and were able to secure their majority by closing the session early and convincing the State Senator Ralph Northam not to switch sides. The Republican party is no stranger to such mishaps.

In response to today’s Twitter DM failure by Shurtleff, he humorously responded, stating in a Tweet, “Thinking of “texting while drowsy” law after private 1AM tweet went public. Formal announcement on 5/20 about senate race and tweeting plans”. It will certainly be a lesson learned for him as he tries to obtain Bennet’s Senate seat through use of Social Media. Mark Shurtleff, contact me if you ever need help!

You can see the full conversation via Twitter search below:

I don’t think Twitter is listening. In fact, I remember a few of them mentioning they don’t read the news or blogs so that it doesn’t affect their work. Perhaps it’s about time they start. Today I blogged over on LouisGray about a cool new change to the e-mail notifications on Twitter where they now show a user’s profile image and follower/friend data along with the new follower e-mails they send to you. (and dang it - MG beat me to the news. He’s good!)

What is scary though is what actually happened behind the scenes in this change. Today Twitter, again without notice to developers, completely changed the format of both their new follower and DM e-mails from plain text, to HTML multi-part format, completely breaking any app that was relying on those formats to parse and process new follows or direct messages.

What’s funny is that the very apps I was saying Twitter was venturing into competing ground with, Topify, and Twimailer, are the very types of apps that would have been broken by this change. In addition, apps like Greg Lavallee’s addNetflix app are now broken because they were relying on the plain-text format of the new DM e-mails. In my previous post about Twitter doing this, Greg commented, stating, “When I first read this post last month I thought, “well, if you code your application well, it should take into account potential changes from Twitter.” I also thought that Twitter would warn us about bigger changes. Wrong on both counts.” Many apps are relying on these e-mails, some of them probably completely unaware their apps are broken at the moment.

This issue was brought up on the Twitter developers list this afternoon by TwitReport developer, “TjL” (”Can Twitter Please Pick a From, and Stick With It?”). Evidently the new format also broke the new follower statistics for his app, and has happened multiple times causing him to have to re-educate his users to re-do their filters every time. Matt Sanford, Twitter API Team member responded explaining,

“We had changed the from address to try and improve bounce reporting and prevent being marked as spam by major ISPs. When we added the HTML formatting we found that we needed a consistent address for the ‘always display images’ option in many clients so we changed things around again. Hopefully this will be the last change as it causes us a bunch of work as well. I’ll keep an eye out for future changes and try and let people know.”

The conversation went on to discuss further elements of the e-mail, and Sanford suggested they were going to change the e-mails again after the discussion. I think TjL reflected the developer community’s frustration exactly when he responded to the further changes,

“Seriously? I’ve already started telling people to change their filters
and now they’re going to break *again*.

This is why daddy drinks.

All kidding aside, I don’t understand how a change like this gets
pushed out without the left hand knowing WTF the right hand is doing —
which is what it looks like (from an outsider’s perspective) happened.

IMO/FWIW: You’ve gotten too big to make these sorts of changes without
more consideration and communication. It makes me look bad as a
developer, and it makes Twitter look bad.

The irony is that you’re a company built around communication.”

Twitter has got to change their ways - on my blog posts about this I’m seeing comment after comment of developers now refusing to develop on the Twitter development platform because of their lack of warning during changes like this. The thing is I’m not complaining about rate limits or Twitter scalability or anything like that at all when I’m complaining. As developers, we simply want a little bit of communication before changes go out. I actually like Twitter. I have a business with components built on it so I want it to succeed. I also think the Twitter dev team has done an outstanding job building out this amazing API. The only area they’re failing in right now is communication. We need a) a clear developer ToS, and b) warning before changes go in, or come out. Developers have been amazingly patient for the most part regarding this, but I know there is frustration.

I want to be clear that I love what the Twitter API team is doing. I really like and respect Alex and Matt and the rest of the team working extremely hard, often to the late hours of the night working on this stuff. I’m not sure where the fault lies, but I do hope they are listening. We need some warning on this stuff guys.

There is still no official announcement on the Developer mailing list, nor any official blog post by Twitter on the e-mail changes.

Please note this in no way is inferring @nycgrl88 is in any way behind these attacks - it is simply an attempt to figure out why these bots are targeting her.

My friend Scott Lemon, who runs http://topfollowfriday.com pointed me to this.  It would appear that someone or something has hacked the Twitter sign up process and is creating hundreds of bot accounts, all with the same messages, including one linking @oprah, @mrskutcher, and someone named @nycgrl88 to #topfollowfriday as a recommendation.  You can see all the accounts via Twitter search result here.  They are all posting exactly the same Tweets, all prefixed by 1luv, and complain of things like not being able to upload a photo or background image, a problem Twitter was plagued with yesterday.

Since @oprah and @mrskutcher are obvious names, I naturally looked at the odd one out in the #topfollowfriday recommendation, @nycgrl88.  Her name is Jennifer Regan, and according to her bio, she goes to NYU and lives in New York.  Oddly enough, all of the @1luv spam accounts are owned by a girl named Jennifer (with bio pics that all kind of look similar, but brunette), who lives in New York and goes to NYU.

Could this be a new type of spam attack on Twitter?  I’m not saying @nycgrl88 is the one behind this, but it would not be very hard to game the sign up with a script, create hundreds to thousands of accounts, all that recommend @nycgrl88 to #followfriday, and benefit from top exposure on those sites to get more followers.  Are spammers really that desperate?

Again, let’s not put the blame on @nycgrl88 until we know what’s going on here, but something fishy is happening - I’m trying to figure out the purpose behind it all.  Am I missing anything here?

With the launch of my new favorite Twitter app, Tweetie for the Mac yesterday, I wanted to see how successful it could be.  Damon Cortesi, who runs TweetStats.com, stated he was seeing Tweetie (the number one iPhone app for Twitter) give TweetDeck, the current number one Twitter client, a run for its money. (Literally, considering Tweetie costs $14.95 and TweetDeck is free)  After doing an informal poll via Twitter, I decided to create a SocialToo SocialSurvey around the question, and sent it to my Twitter followers.

From the poll, which is still running, at the time of this writing out of 138 people, 76 (55%) of people on Twitter use a Mac.  46 (33%) use a PC, a far drop behind.  15 (10%) use Linux, and just one uses another OS besides PC or Mac.  These stats would explain the popularity of a client like Tweetie, which runs just for Mac and iPhone.

We discussed this on FriendFeed.  The comments there ranged anywhere from those that were solely on a PC or a Mac, to those that used to be on a PC, but now were on a Mac.  Others use the iPhone or a Blackberry mostly to access Twitter.  Regardless, those that commented were still overwhelmingly Mac.

So it begs the question, with the new influx of celebrities and mainstream media on Twitter, will it continue to be this way?  Mac owners are often the early adopters, those willing to try new things out.  Will the PC eventually take over Twitter?  It will be interesting to watch, and maybe in a few months I’ll try this SocialSurvey again.  I’ll try a few other questions I think after this - what would you like to learn about Twitter users that we could poll on SocialToo?

In the meantime, please check out Tweetie Desktop for the Mac!  It’s clean, elegant, and very worth the price.  You can read more of Louis Gray’s review of it here.

About a full year ago, I wrote of developers leaving the Twitter development platform due to Twitter consistently removing features, making changes without warning developers, and effectively putting developers out of business with just a single change of policy.  I advised other developers to be careful building a business model around Twitter, adding that it was a risky move, much more risky than many of the other platforms out there.  It would seem I should have taken my own advice.

It was this time I started SocialToo, a service that originally we built around the auto-follow concept. I named it such because I did not want it to work solely on the Twitter platform.  It was clear Twitter was on an unstable architecture, and their relationship with developers was also quite shaky.  For this reason, I added in features like Facebook profile redirects at the time (a simple “yourusername.socialtoo.com” which redirects to your Facebook profile).  But Twitter, at the time, was the easiest solution to build around, and made the most sense for where we had started so I figured we had to make what we did with it perfect.  Here we are, one year later, and I’m still trying to make it work perfect, but not because our code sucks - it’s because Twitter keeps changing their system, and the rules that go with it!

Today Twitter pulled the rug out from under its developers once more by, with absolutely no notice, announcing that (paraphrased, in my words) since their way was the right way, they were discouraging auto-following, and would only allow a user to follow 1,000 people per day.  What Twitter neglected was that, while not many, myself and others were building business plans around the users that would need this.  A little notice would have been helpful, but is very consistent with the way developers have been treated over the past year or more by Twitter.  Yes, I’m a big boy and we’ll survive, but that’s besides the point.  You can read more about what developers are experiencing over on LouisGray.  Put lightly, I’m not happy.

Twitter Needs a Firm Terms of Service

I know I’m not only one to say this when I say that I don’t have a clue what to expect from Twitter any more.  Any developer out there is prone to this type of treatment, and I can pretty much guarantee it will affect every Twitter developer out there at some point until something is done about it.  The reason for this is that Twitter really has no firm Terms of Service around its platform.  I am not required to agree to any way of using their platform when I write software for them.

Some might see this as a good thing, but what they are neglecting to see is that a Terms of Service gives developers a vision of what to expect, something we don’t have now.  This needs to change, and soon - we as developers need to know what we can and can’t do on the platform.  Can we write apps that auto-follow?  Can we write apps that auto-DM?  What about mass-DM?  Can I store data and what data can I store on my servers and for how long?  What is the definition of spam? There are lots of rules for Twitter users that we agree to, but nothing a developer must agree to when writing apps.  This is why you’re seeing so many apps out there gaming the system, causing these ridiculous rules to have to be made, when it can realistically all be settled before-hand with a simple agreement all developers must agree to before developing apps for Twitter.

If I knew what I could or couldn’t do on Twitter I could avoid it in the first place.  Unfortunately Twitter hasn’t defined that and it’s pretty darn confusing, not to mention extremely risky, to write apps for the Twitter platform right now.  With Facebook, on the other hand, I’m required to agree to a very specific agreement, and they’re very clear when they’re going to change any of the terms, giving developers plenty of warning.  It’s well written out and well defined. It’s a platform with little risk and high reward for businesses because they give developers time to work with any changes they make to it.

We need notice, Twitter!

These “day of” announcements are very immature and something a 15 million user company with millions to billions in the bank shouldn’t be doing.  They were doing this type of stuff a full year ago, and even today they haven’t changed their ways, even though they said they would.  Twitter needs to start notifying developers of these changes or a lot more are going to be put out of business at the drop of a hat.

Every day on the developers mailing list I’m seeing other things like this happening - OAuth technology being removed without notice (I recognize it’s beta, but we still need to know!), no notice to developers on what’s happening when site slowness happens, when things are fixed on the platform, and when they’re broken, and more.  As a developer with 12-15 years of experience in these things, the entire Twitter platform is a joke!  You just don’t do these types of things in the real world of software development!  I worked at places I would have gotten fired for this type of activity!

Developers will continue to leave if this doesn’t change

I have to admit, I’m re-evaluating my strategy to stop working on what I was doing in the Twitter environment, and move more to other platforms at the moment.  When I do that, no, I won’t remove the existing Twitter technology, but I will admit it will be very easy for the users on my service to get the same value they’re currently getting on Twitter on other services, and as they experience similar treatment by Twitter they’ll be leaving as well (as I’m already seeing).  I know I’m not the only developer in this boat right now - there are a lot of frustrated developers out there with almost no signs of change from Twitter.  I know developers that now refuse to develop on the Twitter platform because of the way they were treated, and that will continue to happen.

I have to admit I had to send out e-mails to 20 or 50 or so of Twitter’s very top users today telling them that Twitter wasn’t allowing them to auto-follow.  Those are tough e-mails to write, especially considering the influence Twitter has allowed these individuals to have and the audiences these people are capable of engaging.  I’d like to make Twitter look good for these people, but Twitter isn’t making it very easy.

Twitter, it’s time to get your act together.  Hire some more smart people, get people in management that know how to make these decisions right, and make us believe, not by words alone, but by actual actions, that you’re going to do something about it.  If you don’t, as I’ve said before, when the developers leave, so will your users.

Come follow me over on FriendFeed over at http://beta.friendfeed.com/jessestay or over on Facebook at http://jessestay.socialtoo.com.

I get asked often by clients, reporters and media folk and others about Facebook’s recent Terms of Service updates, essentially saying they own their users data and have a right to do as they wish with their data. They’ve turned around on that and will be releasing newly revised Terms soon, but at least they’re being honest about it. The thing is, any service on the internet you belong to, which includes Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, even Gmail, and more, owns your data. It’s their right to change their Terms for their users any time they want, and the only choice you’ll have at that point is to leave the service, or continue on, recognizing what you already knew - that what you’ve stored on their service is theirs to own forever. I think people have come to accept that - they just get all up in arms when it’s thrown in their face.

The thing is, as a brand, you can’t afford for this to happen. Owning, and losing rights to your data can make or break your business. People take risks to be able to take shortcuts and survive by joining such services, and frankly, it’s important to still have a presence on these services because people are talking about your brand and you could be missing out on that conversation. But can you really trust your content on such services? What if Twitter, or Google, or FriendFeed were to pull a Facebook and with the drop of a hat own all your previous data. They are within right to do so - you gave them that right when you signed up for their service.

The Social Web Needs More Open Protocols

We were discussing on FriendFeed today how the new FriendFeed beta, with its real-time nature, is a lot like IRC, and enables people to chat, in a completely new way, in real time. The thing is, it’s not at all like IRC. IRC is an open protocol. It’s software businesses can own, modify, and change to their hearts content. They can wrap their brand around it. With IRC a business has the ability to own the community that subsides within the environment they set up, on their own servers.

Not FriendFeed, or even Twitter enable this capability, which is why if they don’t adapt in the future things will change. Facebook is attempting to address this with their Connect product, and that’s a step in the right direction. Facebook also provides quite a bit of their underlying developer platform code, as open source, freely and openly to the community, also a step in the right direction, but they can always do more.

Keep in mind that this is all about owning your own community. Can Guy Kawasaki set his own rules about what is, and isn’t spammy? Can Leo Laporte provide a Geek-friendly environment for his TWIT Army? Can ESPN provide a sports-enthusiast friendly environment for Football fans, and properly advertise and provide things, in their own way, that those fans would appreciate? You can’t do this on any of the networks right now (with the exception of Facebook Connect).

Laconi.ca is headed in the right direction on this. As is Automattic, and SixApart. They all have their own major services, but all of their services enable you to focus on owning your own community. And even if you don’t have enough control, they provide you the source code to give you the control you need, should you need it. This is the future!

Why does this matter to the end-user?

You may think, well, I’m not a business. I’m just a casual user so this doesn’t matter to me. I’m willing to bet if you’re an Athletics fan, or a Boston Red Sox fan, or a 49ers fan, or a Mom, or even a Dad, that you put much more interest in those things than you do the brand name Twitter or FriendFeed or Facebook. Those things are your real life! Now imagine if those brands started to give you a way you could communicate with like-minded individuals, and what if different brands could talk with each other? This is one reason Facebook is going to succeed, and one reason Laconi.ca is going to succeed, because I can chat in the environment I want, and my friends all still get to hear me! As an end user, and especially a brand targeting that end user, that’s powerful!

This is why TodaysMama Connect is seeing great participation in their new Connect community for Moms. Now, with their service, Moms can connect with each other without having to sift through the massive data mine of Twitter. At the same time, TodaysMama gets to own and control the community in a way that works well for Moms and is inviting for them, while maintaining their brand image. You see the same with Leo Laporte’s TWIT army, and I’m already talking to several other major brands that are considering the same.

How do you control your data?

Will the future be full of everyone creating their own communities of “followers”, competing for who visits their site and embraces the community? It’s possible, but that’s far down the road. We need more open standards. The Twitters, the FriendFeeds, and the Facebooks all need to be providing and leading these open standards and serving instead of being data hoards, becoming network Connectors, providing ways to connect multiple smaller networks with each other. They need to be the directories and the places where people can go to find each community. They need to be the search, and the stream of the “brand-owned” data, and providing as many ways as possible for those brands to completely own and customize the experience for their own communities. Their role is the glue of the Open Web.

Let’s truly make these services the IRC of the Social Web. Thank you, Laconi.ca and Automattic, and SixApart for leading the way.

Photo Courtesy Eric Kilby

“Twitter’s all about the real time.” That’s what Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, said in this interview Scoble did with me sitting in the background almost 1 whole year ago. As I sit here, my Twitter is inconsistently providing updates, they have specifically told their users some updates will just be missing over the next little bit, and I’ve been waiting on CoTweet, my preferred client, for hours to provide me new updates. No, I don’t blame CoTweet - after all, my own service, SocialToo has also been suffering from these delays and slowness issues due to some sort of “architectural changes” they are making on the back-end. Twitter’s slow, follower and following numbers are off, apps are hitting rate limits when they shouldn’t normally be, caching issues are everywhere. We’re at Twitter’s mercy, and it’s far from real time!

Rewind back one year. I recommend watching the above video if you have 15 minutes. I’m hearing the same things today that I heard one year ago in that room, and I’m still just as frustrated as I was an entire year ago. I’ve been strung along and I’m not happy, as a user, and especially as a developer.

A full year ago Twitter was working on their architecture, dealing with scalability issues in times of “massive growth”, and that never, ever stabilized. In fact I think the media has actually kind of gotten used to it - you rarely hear frustrations today like you did back then when nothing has really changed! At this point I’m beginning to think it will never stabilize - I’m scared as both a business owner who writes software on top of the service (I should have heeded my own warning half a year ago), and I’m scared as a user, and someone who has brought hundreds, if not thousands to try out the service that my reputation may be tarnished.

I’m talking with a lot of media entities and reporters about Twitter lately and frankly, I’m not sure what to tell them any more. Do I keep pushing them to try out Twitter? Do I just be brutally honest that this is just what Twitter is and people should just be prepared to get used to it? Or do I tell them it’s not worth leaving Facebook and their existing networks there to pursue? After all, Twitter themselves barely even use their own service. When was the last time you saw them respond to a complaint from someone about Twitter, on Twitter? Does anyone really know where to go on Twitter for Twitter support? Even in the video above I’m referred back to the developer mailing lists, not Twitter - nothing has changed. When at the same time I can always contact @comcastcares, or @scottmonty, or @RichardAtDell and get prime support from some of Twitter’s biggest users.

I’m seeing hundreds, if not thousands of people begin to game the system of Twitter. People are using services all around Twitter, and I’ll admit some are even using mine, to gain massive followings, empty followings, just to accrue followers with no relationship underneath that number. I’m beginning to feel that most of my followers are just dry numbers because of that - Twitter is seriously losing its value for me as a user.

Evan and Biz, it’s been a year already - I’m your biggest fan. Because of that I’m also your biggest critic, and I’d really like to see some improvement! At what point can we expect to see brighter skies and greener pastures on Twitter, or will it continue to be “we wish we could give you a time frame, but it could be months down the road” like you said a whole year ago? Just be frank with us - be honest. Let us know what to expect. Communicate to both your users and your developers in a way we can all enter this knowing what we’re going to get, because frankly I have no idea what to expect from the service any more.

Maybe it’s about time Twitter starts looking to sell. There are many businesses quite large enough to handle the problems Twitter is experiencing right now, and even prepare for 2 years down the road. There are businesses that have experienced this growth and know how to get it in order quick. Something’s not right at Twitter - it hasn’t been right for over a year now, and maybe it’s time to fix it.

Forgive my venting - as a developer I’m frustrated and I needed to get this out. In the meantime I’m going to go write some more code. While Twitter’s down you can find me on FriendFeed where it’s nice and green and pretty, oh, and real time!

CoTweet is the ultimate Social CRM for any business looking to get a handle on their Twitter presence. With the ability to assign Tweets, schedule Tweets, add notes, support multiple accounts, and more, CoTweet will solve many of the problems I’ve seen in Corporate environments trying to manage a Social presence. I just did a full review on LouisGray.com where you can read more, but for now, on your honor, if you subscribe to StayNAlive.com, and also subscribe to LouisGray.com via RSS and say you did so in the comments and want an Invite, I have 6 invites I’ll be giving out randomly to commenters here, and 6 more I’ll give out to commenters on the LouisGray.com article. As I get more I’ll continue to give out invite codes to people who subscribe here.

Let me know what you think!

As long-time readers of my blog know, I am a very strong proponent of self-hosted, branded micro-blogging communities. Imagine, for instance, if ESPN were to create a Twitter-like site, just for sports enthusiasts (call me!). People are known for talking their minds on Twitter, but when someone mentions what they ate for lunch, they go nuts! How about a Subway-branded micro-blogging community for food-lovers? Another example I have used is a community, solely for Moms to communicate and share with other Moms. That’s why I was excited when Rachael Herrscher, CEO of TodaysMama, sat down with me looking for new ways to build community around their brand. What we came up with is something I’ll admit blew me away when I saw the final version. Yesterday they launched the live version of it, TodaysMama Connect for the world to see.

TodaysMama Connect - What it Is

TodaysMama Connect, put quite simply, is “Twitter, for Moms” (as I call it). They’ve taken a simple open source Microblogging platform, Laconi.ca, and have made it beautiful, something your Mom could use. The site has simple microblogging functionality, enabling users to post, in short burst, what they’re doing at the moment or what they’re thinking, while at the same time communicate with each other via @replies or direct message functionality.

In addition, the site uses a feature of Laconi.ca, groups, to allow groups of people, such as what we’re seeing through the #GNO (Girls Night Out - takes place every Tuesday night) “group” on Twitter, to truly communicate as a group without disrupting the flow of the site. In fact, the very large #GNO movement which makes Twitter trending terms every Tuesday has also created a group on TodaysMama Connect, and the group is continuing what they started over on Twitter, in the more Mom-focused environment. When users send !groupname and their message, the message goes out to only those who have joined the group on TodaysMama Connect. There are already hundreds of groups to join, top groups including “Toddler”, and “Office”, and “Potty”.

The site integrates fully with Twitter, so you can use Twitter directly from the site itself, importing your current Twitter stream into TodaysMama Connect, and also sending your updates from TodaysMama Connect out to Twitter. In addition, as a Laconi.ca instance supporting the OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) standard, the site works fully with clients such as Twhirl, which support Laconi.ca and OMB. I even got it to work on my iPhone with the LaTwit app (using http://todaysmama.com/connect/api as the API URL). You can get it to work in Twhirl using username@todaysmama.com/connect as your username.

Even if you’re not a techy and prefer a nice, plain, web interface, the UI is comfortable enough any Mom would enjoy using. The site supports normal login/registration, or if you have an OpenID you can login/register via that means as well. Registration was extremely easy. There is lots of help documentation, and if you get stuck, you can always pose your question, and @todaysmamastaff is listening (as is the CEO, @todaysmama).

The Power of Micro-Branded Communities

I’ve said this time and time again, and I’ll keep saying it. The only way Twitter will survive is if they open up by allowing other communities to communicate and build “Twitter” in their own environments. This is “Forums 2.0″, and Twitter just so happens to have the largest master Forum site on the internet right now. That won’t last forever if they keep their closed environment.

Businesses want their customers interacting in their own brand environments. Many have strict rules, requiring they host the content and do it under their own umbrella. Twitter can’t do that right now, and will never fully do that if they don’t open up.

At the same time, Twitter is a mess of mixed niches, all on the same platform. It’s very difficult as a brand to pinpoint users devoted and interested in a single type of product. It’s difficult to identify demographics. What TodaysMama is doing is enabling brands to now have a specific demographic of people they can target and share information with. Rachael Herrscher, the CEO, even shared an example of a local Zoo being able to share local deals to the Moms in the area. Businesses want this - and this is the perfect social environment to do it in. They now have the power to interact with one of the most powerful demographics on the internet - Moms.

The Future of Microblogging

This is only the start. What Laconi.ca and OMB allow users to do is connect with people, across platforms, in ways they weren’t able to do before. For instance, if someone were to create an OMB-compatible site for Dads, now my wife would be able to follow me as I interact with other Dads on the Dad-related site, and she would never have to leave TodaysMama Connect.

Evan Prodromau, the author and maintainer of Laconi.ca is offering services to help large brands set up and maintain these instances. From my conversations with Rachael, he was there the entire way to help with the technicalities of the TodaysMama Connect set up. Businesses like this type of professional service and guarantee. Large Brands will embrace this.

I know of several other large brands also interested in such a set up, and many don’t even know this is possible yet. Dave Winer is also looking to push this concept, as is Steve Gillmor and others. Twitter is a powerful force, but it has a long way to go before it can embrace every niche out there. I really don’t think people are as devoted to the “Twitter” brand as we think they are. They are devoted to “NASCAR”, and they are devoted to “ESPN”, just as they are to being a Mom, or being a Dad, and the products and services surrounding those. Twitter has led the way, but it’s time to break out of the mold.

If you’re a Mom, have a Mom, or are married to a Mom, I highly suggest you try out TodaysMama Connect. We are already seeing the site take off and I’m amazed by the many conversations I’m already seeing there. I think for the first time I may actually get to see my Mom, or my wife, truly microblogging and interacting with others via such a service. I only wish I could hear them from Twitter now. That won’t happen until Twitter opens up.

You can sign up for TodaysMama Connect at http://todaysmama.com/connect.

Recently, I have become increasingly aware of my dependance on RSS for news and information. Like Louis Gray, I am a data sponge. I like new news, when it happens - I really think I should have majored in Journalism for that reason. Because of that dependance on the news, I have, over the years, subscribed to enough RSS to constitute thousands of news items in my feeds that I read daily. And yes, while some I skim, I go through each and every one of them.

At the same time I’m beginning to realize the amount of time it involves to stay so updated on the news. While I have become increasingly good at using my “J” and “K” keys in Google Reader, I find my dependance on the news constantly drawing me back to Google Reader, in almost an addictive manner throughout the day.

You see, going through my news I’ve come to realize recently that much of the news I get is simply entertainment. Much of it is repeated, and much of it, while very interesting, simply isn’t necessary to enhancing my business, SocialToo, improving my Consulting knowledge or improving me as a person in any way. I discussed this recently with my friend, Jeremiah Owyang, and he gave me some insight into how he gets his news.

Jeremiah is a Senior Analyst at Forrester, and perhaps one of their most vocal (if not the most vocal) employees, with one of the top blogs on the internet on Web strategy, Social Media, and Web 2.0-related topics. He knows his stuff, and is very up-to-date on what’s current and what’s happening in early-adopter, as well as Enterprise technologies. In discussing my dilemma with him, Jeremiah revealed to me that he doesn’t use RSS. He relies solely on FriendFeed Friend Lists, Google E-mail alerts, and what people tell him on Twitter. From that he hasn’t missed anything he needed to know, and has remained an expert in his related field of expertise. I was amazed that he was able to do this without RSS.

I decided to give this a try. In fact, I’m going to use a religious holiday as an excuse to try it. Yesterday at noon was the beginning of Lent (Ash Wednesday). Admittedly, I’m not Catholic (although I do run one of the largest organized groups of Catholics through my We’re Catholic App, at 70,000 users), but I love the concept of Lent. The holiday is based on the fast that Jesus Christ performed for 40 days and 40 nights, in which he was tempted despite his hunger and weakness, and came out triumphant. People around the world give up different items for those 40 days as a method of overcoming weakness and temptation.

For this Lent, I’m going to give up RSS and Google Reader. I’m going to be a weakling and only do it for 1 week, but my attempt is to figure out if I can be more efficient without it than with it. With the advent of Social Media and tools such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and even normal e-mail, I wonder if I can remove this addiction and still be as productive as I used to. Here is how I will do it:

• The start - Yesterday at 12pm I closed my Google Reader tab. I haven’t yet re-opened it, and I won’t re-open it until next Wednesday at 12pm. I will declare RSS bankruptcy and delete all remaining RSS at that time.
• Google/Twitter/FriendFeed Alerts - I’ve been doing most of these through RSS up until now. I am contemplating the best solution. One option would be to create a FriendFeed Room that imports all my searched terms into one place. Another would be to start sending Google searches to my e-mail, filling up my inbox - not sure I want to do that. I could also set up a TweetDeck or PeopleBrowsr column to search for the terms I need to track. I may do a combination of all of the above.
• Getting the News I Want - If there was ever a better reason to be on FriendFeed, this is why you need to do it. Even if you don’t participate, make sure your blog is populating FriendFeed (I would add it to Facebook as well). This will be how I obtain my news. Now, instead of just tracking news, I’ll be tracking Twitter, Blogs, Youtube, and more through a Friends List on FriendFeed. If I was subscribed to your blog before and you’re on FriendFeed, I’m now tracking your blog via that method. I’ll be “media snacking”, as Robert Scoble calls it, and IMO, this is the future of news discovery, and takes much less time. Add me on FriendFeed if you want me to discover your content as well.
• Twitter - If there’s anything you think I should read, @reply me on Twitter. I track things there as well, but that will guarantee I read it, and some times ReTweet it.
• Sharing - One thing I love most about Google Reader is my ability to share items I come across, and even comment on them. This saves me a lot of the need to write a blog post about something someone has already covered. FriendFeed provides a nifty tool you can add as a Bookmarklet in your browser which will add any page you come across to FriendFeed. I’ll be using this religiously moving forward. You can follow my shares in FriendFeed, or on my FriendFeed widget over on the lower-right of this blog.

It’s my hope that I can learn something from this. Fasting, whether it be food or other material items, can teach you what’s most important in life. I did this with Twitter for a few months last year and learned a lot on what Twitter is, and isn’t important for. My hope is I can do the same with FriendFeed. Perhaps this Lent we should all, regardless of religion or faith, figure out something we want to learn about and give up those things we would at other times call a “need”. I think this world would be a much better place if we all did this every so often.

I will post a follow up to what I learned in a week.