Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
Cheez-Its.

I respect Jack quite a bit but this puts it over the top for me.

For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google+ has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) Google+ has not yet been fully adopted. The people that have been most active are very early adopters, people that work at Google, and people that do not have accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Will this change? Will Google somehow convince people, as they did me, to use Google+ for a few days to see if it sticks? We’ll see.

It is now nearly 10-months later. How is Google+ doing? Not so well from my chair. They haven’t figured out a way, besides Circles, to differentiate themselves from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks that clearly have carved out their niche.

I think Google+ is a great product. It does a lot of things and does them fairly well (although their iPhone application is pretty unusable). If it was launched in February 2004 at the same moment Facebook was launched it would have given the now 900 million user network a run for its money.

So what’s the problem? Again, me, nearly 10 months ago:

Every social networking site was started with a particular purpose in mind. Over time those services typically find their niche (if they survive long enough to do so) whether or not it was the original reason for its inception or not.

[...]

Google+, however, goes against this “find the niche” convention. Rather than trying to fill a niche like Facebook or LinkedIn they’re taking on every level of human connection; professional, familial, social, voyeur, etc. and combining them all into one service. They do all of this by providing a different relationship model called Circles.

At the time I thought this approach would have a positive effect for Google+. I thought that nearly anyone could find a way to make Google+ useful. But it seems like it has been the opposite. Perhaps this lack of focus has made it so that Google+ doesn’t identify with very many people.

The only types of people that I see using Google+ on a regular basis are early adopter tech geeks, social media experts, and people that work at Google. Perhaps someday they’ll separate themselves from the pack somehow but until then it doesn’t seem like Google+ has caught on with any particular crowd in any meaningful way.

Places on the web for sharing content and ideas often remind me of real life interactions. Facebook is the everlasting high school reunion. Twitter, which I love, is maybe half cocktail party, half party-line. Flickr & Instagram can be the best way to send a postcard, while LinkedIn is the best way to send a fax To me, there’s something sacred about reading a blog post on someone else’s site. It’s like visiting a friend’s house for a quick meal ‘round the breakfast table. It’s personal— you’re in their space, and the environment is uniquely suited for idea exchange and uninterrupted conversation. In many ways, we should be treating our blogs like our breakfast tables. Be welcoming & gracious when you host, and kind & respectful when visiting.

Twitter, for me is slightly more familial, professional, and often news breaking but otherwise I whole heartedly agree with this sentiment. If you have a blog you should feel it is your home online – everywhere else are places you go out to.

One of the small changes I made was to stop using post titles for posting to Twitter. I had hoped that using more descriptive text would make the tweets more easily retweetable…look at this tweet for example and compare to the title of the post it links to. This hasn’t really happened, which is surprising and disappointing.

And, this about Tumblr.

That big Tumblr increase was due to kottke.org’s new Tumblr blog. Having kottke.org posts be properly rebloggable is paying off. In addition, it’s got over 800 followers that are reading along in the dashboard. I’d like to see that number increase, but I’d probably need to engage a bit more on Tumblr for that to happen.

I don’t know what Jason is trying to gain by having a Tumblr blog for Kottke.org – besides the same benefits of having a Twitter stream or RSS feed – but as most of you probably know I gave up on getting engagement on Tumblr.

For the most part the Tumblr crowd seems a click-happy bunch. If they can’t click a single button to engage (like, retweet) they won’t do much else. So long as you can figure out a model that works within those constraints I suppose it could end up paying off.

Last night, after a whirlwind trip to New York City on business and just before crashing like a rocket into bed, I pulled up Tweetbot to see what was going on the in world. It turns out Instagram for Android came out and some people were going a little crazy.

I thought some of the tweets were pretty funny so I thought I’d respond to them here. Here are my responses in no particular order.

If u ain’t following me on instagram ya mama **** **** n u ***

— Courtney Hooper (@SelfMade_Smasha) April 4, 2012

Fair enough. I’m so glad people that have Android devices can now use Instagram.

BTW, on Instagram it’s not a place where you constantly post pictures of yourself without a hashtag! #getwithit

— Victoria Ann Valdez (@victoriaannv) April 4, 2012

Yes, Victoria, the most important parts about Instagram are photos of yourself and hashtags. You’ve got it all figured out.

So now whats so great about the iphone? Yall exclusive temple run and instagram is now wit android.

— Marissa Na’Sha (@SweetAs_Honeey) April 4, 2012

You know, back in 2007 when I bought the first iPhone I thought to myself: “Why am I buying this phone? It doesn’t have Temple Run or Instagram on it.”

House phones bouta come out wit one next month #instagram

— Rodney(@RodneyRaJaan) April 4, 2012

The next logical step for Instagram is to work on house phones, yes. I realize Rodney was being sarcastic. And I appreciate his snarkiness. Good on ya Rodney.

I’m glad @instagram finally came to Android, so I can stop using my iPod for it (apple cams suck!!!!) but wtf is up with “image too small?”

— Ashlee Pahmiyer (@ZombieAshlee) April 4, 2012

Oh Ashlee, you make this too easy. So, Apple’s cameras suck but your Android device takes a photo so small that Instagram can not use it? Got it.

Instagram ain’t nun but a way to cover up all dem bumps on ya face to make it look like ya face all clear, ***** plzzzz

— Yung Trill (@YungTrillOG) April 4, 2012

Yung is onto something here. Girls, be sure to use Instagram’s bokeh effect tool to “cover up all dem bumps on ya face”.

Keep tweet grams off of instagram. It’s annoying as **** and we already have 2 social networks that tell us about things we don’t care about

— Alexandra Juarez (@alexxxjuarez) April 4, 2012

As she tweets about things we don’t care about on a social network that tells us things we don’t care about.

Just got instagram and I have no idea how to use it

— Timmy Mucklow (@TimmysToNice) April 4, 2012

Hey Timmy, THE BIG YELLOW ONES THE SUN!

Am I the only one who doesn’t know how to work instagram?!

— Mollie Gillman (@ayomollieee) April 4, 2012

Hey Mollie, meet Timmy, and THE BIG YELLOW ONES THE SUN!

Now Instagram is released for android, kinda make it less exclusive photo app.

— Lukas Ardian (@LukasArdian) April 4, 2012

Something being less exclusive is like something being more unique. But you knew that right?

dont know how to work this instagram **** im finna delete it

— Savage Los (@losbaabyy) April 4, 2012

The best part about “Savage”‘s tweet is that he somehow managed to type this on a computer on the web. The shift and apostrophe keys are notoriously hard to find on computer keyboards.

Dang all these droid followers on instagram…..this is dang near Facebook ???? Ewwww

— Christin (@ChrisNikole) April 4, 2012

Exactly the same as Facebook. Zuckerberg is probably furious.

I just made an Instagram account only for the effects. I could care less about posting them, that’s what Twitter is for…

— Chet Seeram (@chetseeram) April 4, 2012

Twitter was definitely built specifically for the purpose of sharing photos, yes. Actually, Chet, while I’m responding to you, you may want to check out my post Instagram is a network, not a camera.

Bunch ah hood *** ****** adding me on instagram . . . Lol uh oh #AndroidSeason

— ?Gøld?£™ (@YellowBoneRyda) April 4, 2012

I love hashtags.

These New Instagram ******* thuggin it…No profile pics and ****……????????????????????

— LiMar Tuttle (@LiMarLK) April 4, 2012

Straight thuggin.

Totally gonna sound like a ***** but instagram not so cool anymore

— Patty Rudawski (@Pattyatty) April 4, 2012

I agree Patty. It went from like 25,000,0000 people using it to like 30,000,000 people using it. Totally not cool anymore.

All these useless android users on instagram… Remainder small black burry will have too

— CaroLyna (@CallMeChoKolate) April 4, 2012

Wow. “Useless Android users” Carolyna? You sent this tweet using an iPhone. An iPhone has spell check. And you chose to type in “Remainder” instead of remember and you called a Blackberry a “black burry”. Maybe you need an Android-powered phone?

iPhone’s words of wisdom to the New Android Instagram users: “You dumb babies!”

— jessie maria (@allThtJass) April 4, 2012

Wisdom indeed.

Instagram Gonna be a flop like temple run cause androids got it

— AsierraC?? (@Naturally_Lexie) April 4, 2012

You called it Asierra. Instagram is dead in the water.

I did some pretty nutso stuff with that little turtle.

I wonder what he’s been up to.

First, @cdevroe removes comments from his blog. Now, he’s uploading DSLR photographs to Instagram. Talk about hipster…

— Derek Steen (@djsteen) March 23, 2012

I realize he was poking fun. But I wanted to address this topic anyway so I thought I might as well reply to him here.

Oh, and if I Twitter would allow Google to properly index my tweets I’d be able to call up a tweet from at least a year ago wherein I called people out for cheating on Instagram by uploading photos that were not taken with an iPhone. I’ll be installing Tweet Nest later to see if I can rectify this issue.

So, yes, at one point I was angry with Instagram users for sharing their DSLR photos on the app. But something has changed lately and I knew it was coming.

Two days ago Instagram and Hipstimatic (another camera app for iPhone) let it leak through FastCompany that Hipstimatic photos were going to be sharable on the Instagram network. Here is what their CEO Kevin Systrom was quoted as saying.

“It’s a step in the direction that we’re testing out. We’ve been very careful about making sure that Instagram photos are about what’s happening right now in your life, and we want to allow for more of those photos to end up on Instagram regardless of where they’re taken.”

They’d like Instagram photos to be about what’s happening right now in your life. Certainly the name lends to this sort of network – and I’d hate to draw the correlation to Twitter’s own motto – but suffice to say – they are beginning to view themselves more as a network of people sharing photos than they do as a camera application.

So, while before I thought it was going against the creator’s grain to share just any old photo via Instagram, I now think this will be their direct intent. Sure, my last few bird photos on Instagram were not about what’s happening right now because I took those photos over the course of the last two weeks – but I’m willing to bend the rules a little from time-to-time.

I’m cdevroe on Instagram by the way.

It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote that I thought that blogs were ripe for disruption. And I still think we’re on the cusp of that. Or, perhaps, it is happening right in front of my eyes and I am simply not noticing it.

In a recent discussion between Anil Dash and a few other veterans of blogging Anil mentioned that even something as simple as a status update or tweet could be considered blogging. Although Twitter is rarely referred to this way today it was, at its inception, called a microblogging service. So maybe blogging has already evolved and we just haven’t noticed. The frog in the boiling pot comes to mind.

Although the conversation seemed to focus a lot on commenting I would have liked to have seen much more discussion around the topic of ownership. Some of the participants felt that ownership was important. Others not as much. If you look at how the party split it was split between the platform-builders and service-builders. Ev and Meg built services (Blogger, Kinja, Twitter) while Anil worked on a platform (Movable Type). I think there was much more to say on this topic.

Meg Hourihan on ownership:

But I’m not convinced people view what they’re doing [on social networks] as producing content, nor thinking it’s something they should own, anymore than I want to “own” my phone call with a friend. (Sure I don’t want someone to record it and sell it, but that’s different.) My call is ephemeral, and it’s about conversation and communication, not content.

While Meg believes that she’s seeing the world as it is I think she’s really just identified the problem with these social networks. Twitter and Facebook have permenant URLs for every single tweet and status update that people post. Those links are not ephemeral as Meg describes. She may feel as though they are because Twitter doesn’t give you access to your entire stream but – in reality – these tweets do not go away.

And that’s where Anil nails it.

So that point is very, very interesting, Meg: What if the phone company gave you free unlimited phone calls but they could record, monitor and sell your phone calls and information about what you said on them.

I do agree so much of why people don’t value ownership in social media is that they see it as conversation, not content, but that’s often because we don’t *know* in advance when it becomes meaningful.

In other words, people are viewing Twitter and Facebook as conversation platforms more than they view them as publishing platforms. Facebook and Twitter are finding value in what we all consider to be valueless conversation. They are making money based on what we are saying, what we’re interested in, and what is happening in the world. If they find value in our “content” why don’t we? And, if they treat this information as permanent why aren’t we?

Back to the evolution of blogs. I don’t think there is much argument about whether or not Twitter and Facebook can be considered blogging platforms. So we should lump them into the conversation of how blogs need to evolve. Which brings us full circle back to ownership. I think that people should own their own content. And they should know, up front, that they will own the content if they use a particular service or choose to host it themselves. It shouldn’t matter. They should also feel as though the content they post to any service is to be considered permanent – not a phone call that is soon forgotten.

I don’t think that a blog needs to run on software that you install on your own server in order for you to feel as though you own the content. WordPress.com and WordPress.org are nearly identical services with the same import and export capabilities yet one is a service and the other a platform. So you can use either of these products and feel pretty confident that you own the content and that the information you post there is permanent.

So how does this particular aspect of blogging need to evolve? I think other services such as Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and (fill in the blank) should do a better job of making your content searchable and accessible (read: exportable into a readable format) right out of the box. Not hidden somewhere in a Mac-only application or three-levels-deep in an API doc. One click easy.

The next aspect of blogging that I believe needs to evolve is the reverse-chronological homepage. In May of 2011 I wrote:

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Imagine you landed on /blog/ here at my cdevroe.com URL. What you’d find there would be what the typical blog homepage looks like. Just a list of posts from newest to oldest. It’d be very difficult to find out what I blogged about based on only the last few posts. This is why I chose to put my about page front-and-center. I believe that is a better way to get to know me, what I’m up to, and what my blog is about.

I don’t think the blog format is broken but it is certainly stale. Someone needs to come along and give us a new way to look at things. And not just in a novel way like tiles or something else that is pretty and neat to look at – I’d like to see something that is valuable, makes it really easy to see what the blog is about, perhaps what is popular now, or what was at one time popular. I think of the currently most visited URLs here on this blog. They are not the most recent posts. Not by a long shot. My top URLs on this blog are a few links that I’ve posted in the past that have somehow found their way to the top of the search engine rankings. Would that be important to show on the homepage of a blog? Or, what about the fact that a few of my posts have had hundreds and hundreds of comments? Would that be important to show?

Sidebar “widgets” sprang up years ago as ways to solve some of these issues. Related posts, popular posts, most-used tags, and other widgets made it easier to discover content that has already been pushed off of the homepage. But I still think that someone, somewhere has an idea of how to fix these issues and that one day we’ll wake up and someone will have made something better.

One last issue that I would have liked to see discussed in regards to what aspect of blogs that may need to evolve would be the use of databases. This is a more technical topic than the others but many platforms and services suffer from downtime whenever a post goes viral or hits the mass media. This simply shouldn’t happen.

Each platform and service chooses to handle content management in their own unique ways. Blogger and Moveable Type, for instance, used to publish HTML files (I have no idea what they do nowadays) while WordPress opted to use a simple database to host the content and serve those pages dynamically. Each approach has their pros and cons. But one thing is certain – it is far easier to serve a static HTML file millions of times than it is to request content from a database millions of times. Today’s web is one where at any moment an URL could be plagued by millions of visitors. Modern day blogging platforms and services should take this into consideration regardless if it was manually installed or hosted.

Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook all have extremely capable infrastructures in place to handle these issues. With WordPress.org you’re on your own to setup WordPress properly to handle load. It has taken some heat for this and while the argument could be made that people that are installing software on their own server should know better – the argument could also be made that by simply pre-bundling one of the many caching plugins into the core codebase this issue would be all but solved.

Tons of traffic to any particular post shouldn’t be thought of as an edge case. If you’re a blogger it will happen. Even if you’ve been writing for 40 years and it has never happened to you. It will. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not your blogging product of choice will crumble under the pressure of today’s web. Ever.

I could go on about this topic all day. The rest of the discussion is fantastic and I suggest that anyone with even a passing curiosity about the world of blogging – where it has been and where it is going – should give it a read at your next opportunity.

If you post a pin to Pinterest, and it links to an ecommerce site that happens to have an affiliate program, Pinterest modifies the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. If someone clicks through the picture from Pinterest and makes a purchase, Pinterest gets paid. They don’t have any disclosure of this link modification on their site, and so far, while it has been written about, no major news outlet has picked up on the practice or its implications.

Now you know.

I don’t believe this is a bad or unethical business model – I simply think it should be disclosed. The same way we expect Twitter to disclose what a Promoted Tweet is or Google to disclose what the Ads are on the top of our search results. News like this should spread in order to put just the right amount of pressure on the Pinterest team to make this more apparent.

Jason Santa Maria stated something on Twitter yesterday that I think fits here too:

If I like the things you create, nothing makes me happier than giving you money to keep doing it.

I don’t use Pinterest (perhaps I will one day) but people seem to like the service. If they like the service they’ll likely want it to stick around. Maybe they’d be willing to pay for it. Or maybe they’d be willing to accept the fact that Pinterest is generating revenue using affiliate links. Either way, let the people decide.

Tap and hold on an Avatar to quickly Follow, Direct Message, Mute, Add to a List or Report for Spam. #TweetbotTip

— Tweetbot for iPhone (@tweetbot) December 17, 2011

So, to recap, you can now subscribe to cdevroe.com in the following ways; RSS feed, @cdevroecom on Twitter, Facebook page, Google+ page, and carrier pigeon (coming soon).

Oh, I’ve got a personal account on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ too.

Something must have told the Twitvid team that this is a logical direction to take Twitvid but I don’t see it. Broad category social networks have, more or less, been done and will, more than likely, stay the same as they are now for a long time. The best way to compete in social networking is by creating niche communities. Broad category video sharing is simply not niche enough to cut out a following.

Twitvid was and should have been a utility for sharing videos via Twitter since Twitter doesn’t currently allow that. I’m sure Twitter Photos, which all but negated the need for Twitpic and others, scared Twitvid into this pivot. But what would have been even more sensible is to, like Photobucket, make a deal with Twitter to handle their official service in an unobtrusively and mutually beneficial way.

Millions have used Twitvid and I’m sure many will continue to. However, I’ll go on record as saying that not many of those people will use these new features on Twitvid. I think this move sounds the death knell for Twitvid.

“What would happen if, say, tomorrow Twitter decided that all Twitter clients (third-party and official) had to show some fairly obtrusive ads or you’d need to pay a few dollars per month to use the service?”

It turns out Twitter did change the next day. (I knew nothing of #letsfly at the time, I promise.) Marco Arment, today, whilst linking to John Gruber’s thoughts on the matter.

“I’d wager that all third-party clients will be forced to display the trends and ads within a year, and what we know as Twitter today — or at least what we knew until yesterday morning — will be a distant, quaint memory: Remember when it was just people you followed?”

So, it is happening. Twitter has changed. In the blink of an eye its most loyal users are second-guessing its future. It pulled a Facebook. And I’m guessing that Marco isn’t too far off in his estimate. Twitter will never be the 140-character simple messaging system that we all fell in love with in 2006.

I think it is a good thing for the official applications to all feel and work very much the same. However, for obvious reasons long-time users of Twitter may feel the changes are a bit jarring. John Gruber rips into Twitter for iPhone by comparing it to Tweetie (which is what the application started out as). Mike Rundle rips into the app on its own merits.

Some TweetDeck users seem to like the update since prior to this latest version the application was a horrible Adobe AIR application that (at least in my experience) was slow, poorly designed, and bloated. This latest version seems better.

I don’t use Twitter for iPhone or TweetDeck and I only use the Twitter.com website on rare occasions. I’m very, very happy with Tweetbot.

/via John “I cut in line once” Gruber.

How would paying for a service ensure it won’t sell out? Maciej suggests that free services are more likely to shut down “Because it’s hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt.” No doubt that is true but when is a big payday easy to resist? If I had been paying Gowalla a few bucks a month would they have turned Facebook down? I don’t know. But if they still decided to sell the company (or, more accurately liquidate the product and move the team) to Facebook I would have been both disappointed and out a few bucks.

In other words, paying for a service doesn’t ensure its longevity or that it will never change.

What about Twitter? I saw many people linking to Maciej’s post as being good advice and some even had shown how they added the ability to pay for their free services based on this thinking. However, no one has mentioned that all of us are using and advocating a free service that fits Maciej’s scheme just perfectly — Twitter is a rapidly growing free service.

Yes, Twitter shows us ads from time-to-time in the form of Promoted tweets, trends, and accounts. But unless you use the Twitter.com site you’ll rarely see these ads. And, I’m sure, they’re making money behind-the-scenes by giving businesses access to their “firehose” and more controls and analytics than traditional accounts get. But it is still free for the public to use.

What would happen if, say, tomorrow Twitter decided that all Twitter clients (third-party and official) had to show some fairly obtrusive ads or you’d need to pay a few dollars per month to use the service? I’d wager many would pay up. Many would leave. And their growth would slow. However, none of that would ensure that Twitter wouldn’t sell out to a company sometime in the future. Revenue makes Twitter look even more appealing to potential buyers than if they weren’t making money. Revenue, it could be said, makes a company even more likely to sell.

This leads to Maciej’s next suggestion. Build it yourself. Obviously not everyone can do that (or should do that). But that seems to be the best suggestion he made in his post. The only way to ensure a service will be around and not change is to build and maintain it yourself. But, what if it becomes popular and someone with deep pockets makes you an offer? Then where are you? Back at the beginning.

/tip Kyle Slattery.

In short; I never missed a post.

In some ways, those days are going away and now I’m at the mercy of the realtime web and an algorithm. And so far I don’t think I like it.

On Twitter, from what I can tell, I have access to about 7 days worth of tweets in their official clients; web, mobile, and apps on the iPhone and iPad. Tweetbot, a third-party Twitter client for iPhone, only pulls in the latest 50 messages in my Timeline and also on Lists that I’ve created. If I haven’t checked Twitter via Tweetbot in more than 50 tweets I simply miss those tweets.

Some people do use Twitter just to see, as Twitter puts it, “What’s happening now”. And, of course, that is extremely valuable. The pulse of the planet. But I use Twitter to keep up with family, friends, a few interesting people, a couple of companies, and yes – even a few celebrities. But I want to see every tweet. Not just the most recent few.

On Facebook the News Feed is run by some algorithm (which I shall now refer to as “secret sauce”). This secret sauce is both pretty bad and pretty nebulous. It is pretty bad because I’m routinely missing posts that I probably would have cared about. Case in point, my brother asked me the other day if I had seen a video he put on Facebook. “Nope, never saw it.”, I replied. I have my brother marked as a family member on Facebook. Surely Facebook’s secret sauce would deem a post by him as something I would like to show up in my News Feed? Apparently it didn’t. It is pretty nebulous because apart from some controls on the News Feed about the types of items I would rather not see, there really aren’t many controls for this secret sauce recipe thingy.

I realize I’m probably in the minority but I prefer to have access to every single update from the blogs that I subscribe to, Twitter accounts that I follow, or people on Facebook that I friend. I wouldn’t have decided to make those connections if I didn’t care to see them all. I’m going to miss the good old days.

First, the problems I’m having on my Mac. Since upgrading to Lion my Mac isn’t going to sleep. It is frustrating as I’m the type of person that never, ever shut my Mac down. Instead I usually would just close the lid and be on my way. But, now, when I come back to my Mac the fans are spinning and in some cases the battery is drained. I’m hoping that a forthcoming update to Lion will fix this otherwise I may have to take drastic measures.

Also Lion related, I believe, is Mail.app is a bit crash happy. I’ll be scrawling a note to someone and poof – instacrash with no warning. And although Lion touts itself as the resumable OS and I am usually able to pick up just about where I left off this is still frustrating.

To top it off my Mac is running fairly hot. I don’t believe my fans turned on more than once a day on Snow Leopard but on Lion they don’t seem to shut off and there aren’t any processes that seem to demand it. Again, I’m hoping that a update to Lion will cure some of these things.

Next up, my iPad. Twitter for Mac is one crash happy application. I think it has a lot to do with the way it tries to handle the various types of media that people are tweeting. I’ll do a search for baking (yes, I do searches for baking) on Twitter and within one or two tweets – crash. Unlike Lion on the Mac I can not resume where I was. I have to start over. I appreciate that the team at Twitter wants us to have a unified experience for how media is displayed but it is killing the reliability if the app.

One more gripe about Twitter for iPad. I separate the accounts that I follow into Lists. So, while I only follow about 60 accounts I’m actually keeping up with hundreds using Twitter’s Lists. It’s great. Except that on the iPad app I’m very limited in the number of tweets I can load. On Tweetbot for iPhone (which is arguably the best twitter client ever built) I can go back much further in the timeline. The problem I have is that some of my Lists are rather bloated – like my Software list. I follow many accounts that relate to software that I use this way I can keep up-to-date. But I have hundreds of accounts in that list. Which would be fine if the iPad didn’t limit the number of tweets I can pull up. Give me infinite scroll!!

The App Store on the iPad is dated and I hope that Apple works very hard on making this experience much better. Back in the days of the App Store having hundreds of applications it worked well. Now with hundreds of thousands of apps it doesn’t hold up. For instance, last night I was searching for travel planning applications. For our trip to Ireland I would like to store a list of possible locations to visit based on their location. So, if I’m going to be in Killarney and I want to pull up an already curated list of places we’d like to visit I’d think there would be a good application for that. Hint: there isn’t. Back to why the App Store doesn’t work – I kept having to start my search over at the beginning. Doing a text search turned up very little so I decided to go into the Travel Category. I ordered it by highest customer rating first and then paged through 174 pages of applications. The problem is that when you view an app and then click the back button your back to page 1 without your filters stored. It’s horrible and I ended giving up after only two or three tries.

So, yeah, Apple and Twitter have some work to do – for me. I feel better, thanks.

Pardon me while I tweet about that new Jeep I’ve been wanting.

However, there are times when I just want to focus on what I’m doing. Mac OS X Lion’s new fullscreen feature is designed to help me focus on a single application at a time. However, when Skype, iChat, Mail, or Twitter are open they will notify me (audibly or with bouncing icons) when they’d like my attention. They will inevitably pull me away from what I’m doing to see what is going on.

Skype, for me, is the biggest culprit because our team at Viddler uses Skype as the primary way to communicate. So even though Skype is notifying me that there is something new in Skype sometimes it is just some of the team members chatting about what’s for lunch and really isn’t meant for me and isn’t high-priority.

So there are times that I do not want to be distracted or even notified that something is going on in Skype. I want to be left completely alone and work on whatever it is I’m focused on. Enter Shh, an AppleScript and/or Alfred Extension (I love Alfred) that will quickly close these four applications. It is a dead simple script that closes all of these applications at once (rather than closing them individually).

I’m guessing that I will extend this script to include other applications over time and even enhance it in some way (perhaps by forcing the foremost application into fullscreen mode on OS X Lion or turning off Growl notifications) so if you’re interested in such things be sure to watch this project on Github or contribute to it yourself.

A good read and a discussion I’ll be sure to follow.

Google+ has run me over like a freight train. Over the last few weeks I’ve been living on it instead of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare. In fact, I made the prediction that Google+ could replace many of the most popular services.

But before I get into all of that I thought I’d share how Google+ is different.

Every social networking site was started with a particular purpose in mind. Over time those services typically find their niche (if they survive long enough to do so) whether or not it was the original reason for its inception or not.

Let’s use LinkedIn as an example. LinkedIn was created to be the professional’s social network. A network of people that are connected at some professional, rather than personal or familial, level. This sort of distinction for LinkedIn is completely different to that of Facebook, which tries to connect people that know each other in some way, or Twitter, which doesn’t care if you know anyone, and is an invaluable differentiator in the world of social networking. Heck, it led to LNKD.

Google+, however, goes against this “find the niche” convention. Rather than trying to fill a niche like Facebook or LinkedIn they’re taking on every level of human connection; professional, familial, social, voyeur, etc. and combining them all into one service. They do all of this by providing a different relationship model called Circles.

Circles are nondescript buckets of relationships that you create on your own and can change at anytime. For example you can create some typical social Circles for Coworkers, Friends, Family, Ex-Schoolmates, Basketball Friends, etc. Each of these Circles will have specific meaning to you and no one else. They allow you to segregate your relationships into very meaningful categories that help you connect with many different people all in one place.

Why is this a good thing? In my mind the reasons are innumerable. For instance, maintaining profiles and networks in multiple locations, and somehow engaging with those services regularly, can end up being a monumental draw on your time. I won’t say it is a waste of your time because keeping a LinkedIn profile up-to-date and active has meant many professional opportunities for people. However, keeping every single site up-to-date can get cumbersome and, for those that “follow” you in multiple locations, noisy.

Your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook networks could all co-exist and never intersect using Google+’s Circles.

One more thing to say about Circles… they aren’t just lists. Facebook and Twitter both have lists and Google+’s Circles are not, and should not be, comparable. On Facebook someone has to confirm that you are their friend before the relationship is created. So if you only want to “follow” what is going on with a particular person you can’t unless they approve the relationship (or if they are a Celebrity and create a “page” for themselves rather than a normal account). Once they have, though, you can then separate them into lists. On Facebook you may use lists to filter your main stream or use them to send messages directly to those within those lists (though not nearly as easily as you can on Google+ which I’ll get to in the next paragraph). On Twitter, lists are made to keep your main stream cleaner. Rather than “following” Ashton Kutcher, as an example, one can add him to a Celebrities or Entrepreneurs or Investors list. This way Kutcher’s tweets don’t muddy up your main stream but you can check in with him from time-to-time using Twitter’s Lists. At least, that is how I use Lists. Oh, and you can’t specify how you share on Twitter. You’re either public or private and that is it.

Here is where Google+’s Circles really separate themselves from the pack. Sharing. Anything you share on Google+; a post, a photo, a video, specific information on your profile such as your phone number, etc. can be shared with a limitless subset of your relationships on Google+.

Here, I’ll provide some examples. Let’s say that you want to send a message to everyone at work. If you had a Coworkers Circle you can type in your message to them, choose to only share it with your Coworkers, and hit publish. Only people that you’ve put into the Coworkers Circle will see it. But it can get even more granular than that. You can choose to share a bit of information with more than one Circle or a Circle and a specific person and so on. Maybe you want to tell all of your friends that you’re going to see a movie tonight but you also want to tell your family and one guy from work. You can do that. Or maybe you just want to send a message to one particular person, or two or three, you can do that too. Or, better yet, maybe you want to send a message to someone privately that doesn’t even have you in their Circles, you can do that (unlike Twitter’s Direct Message feature).

Privacy and Sharing options on Google+ are probably the best we’ve ever seen on a social networking service to-date and, believe it or not, they’ve made it pretty easy to understand and use. We all remember the flack Facebook got for making privacy confusing to its hundreds of millions of users. Google+’s privacy options, by comparison, are very easy to understand.

They even have a “view my profile as” feature that allows you to view your own profile as if you were someone else. You can view your profile as if you were your boss or the public-at-large or your future girlfriend. This makes it simple to edit who can see what.

Hopefully this helps frame where Google+ could potentially fit for some. It could, in theory, replace Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn’s niche approach to social networking and allow you to combine all of your relationships in one place. And, you can control exactly what you call those relationships rather than being tied down to the world’s nomenclature of relationships.

The Plusses

I’ve described why Circles are, potentially, better at describing relationships and give us the ability to combine all of our social networks in one spot. But that isn’t the only thing Google+ has going for it.

Ever since the days of Brightkite I’ve been using a secondary service to handle check-ins. Checking into a place, for me, is a better option than simply tweeting “I’m at such-and-such with so-and-so”. Surrounding a check-in is important metadata like location, time, etc. and a tweet is fleeting. Also many check-in services provide you with some sort of context around the location you’re currently in. At the moment my favorite check-in service is Foursquare. However, Google+ provides you with a nice set of check-in tools (although very young). From the Google+ iPhone application you can simply check-into a place and provide no other information (ala Foursquare, Gowalla) or you can choose to add additional information or a photo. While it separates out an actual check-in from a normal post it doesn’t make you feel as though the two are not interchangeable. They’ve struck a great balance with this and I can only hope it will get better.

Photo sharing from your computer or mobile-phone on Google+ is not only simple but also has a rich feature-set. Don’t forget, you can use the power of your Circles to share photos with any subset of your relationships. A photo of your newborn that you only want mom and dad to see? Done. A super-secret-mockup of something you’re building at work that you only want your coworkers and wife to see? Done. A photo of you in front of a landmark for the whole world to see? Done. Oh, and Google+ allows you to apply some effects to your photos as well. Someday Google+ could replace Instagram, Flickr, and Facebook photos.

Posts on Google+ have no character limit. Some consider the 140-character limit of Twitter to be its single greatest strength. As is often said sometimes your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness. There are times when our thoughts span beyond 140-characters (no matter how succinct you are). I’ve found the slightly longer posts of Google+ to be most enjoyable and the Google+ team have designed the interface in such a way that longer posts don’t detract from the shorter ones. The vast majority of posts I’ve seen on Google+ could fit within Twitter’s character limit but every once in a while people have more to say.

Google+’s Hangout, Huddle, and Sparks features are neat but they don’t yet fit into my plusses list. They aren’t minuses either. Whether you use them or not they do not get in the way. I’ve played around with these features and while I haven’t found a valuable use for them yet I may in the future.

The Minuses

For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google+ has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) Google+ has not yet been fully adopted. The people that have been most active are very early adopters, people that work at Google, and people that do not have accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Will this change? Will Google somehow convince people, as they did me, to use Google+ for a few days to see if it sticks? We’ll see.

Keeping up with your stream on Google+ is fairly impossible and by that I mean making sure you see every single message. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that these realtime services care less and less about people keeping up-to-date with what has happened but care much more about showing them what is happening right now. This is a design choice and one that ultimately we may all have to get used to – but it isn’t one I particularly care for at the moment. Right or wrong I treat these streams like I treat my email inbox. I don’t want to miss messages from my family or friends and on Google+ this is very difficult. You see, Google+’s stream shows you the most-recently-updated post on top rather than the most-recently-published post. This distinction is important. A post that was written 5 days ago could resurface to the very top of your stream because someone left a comment in it. From what I’ve heard and read Google is using some complex computation to manage the stream. These guys are extremely good at fiddling with “algorithms” until they’re just right so I’ll withhold judgement on how they do this until they think they’ve got it.

The brevity of tweets makes them very, very easy to consume. Posts on Google+ can be a little harder to digest and that has caused, in some, a feeling of being overwhelmed. When my mother logs onto Twitter she sees a few messages from friends and family and perhaps a tweet or two from NASA. On Google+ with links, photos, videos, hangouts, etc. it can be a bit jarring and you feel like you can’t get your feet on the ground. Maybe Google will be able to figure out this problem but maybe not. Those of us that stick with Google+ may be the type of people that can wade through an enormous amount of information quickly while those that can will be left out in the cold. We’ll see.

At a technical level Google+ is fairly sound. The growth rate of Google+ has been nothing short of astounding and the fact that there hasn’t been an interruption in service is commendable. The iPhone application, on the other hand, is another story altogether. It was released fairly soon after Google+ went into “field testing” mode and its newness shows. It is incredibly slow, poorly designed (for actual use but it looks great), and has major issues with location. These types of frustrations, no doubt, will go away but for now the iPhone application falls squarely at the bottom of my minuses list.

Overall I believe that Google+ could replace many services for me; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Instagram, Flickr. Each of these services may still have their place but the majority of what I choose to share could definitely be handled by Google+ if more people actively used it. Ultimately whether or not I go 100% Google+ or not will depend on whether or not people adopt it. I don’t know if the 25M+ people that have created Google+ accounts will give it enough time to sink in and use it on a daily basis. Selfishly I hope they do because I’m sort of tired with keeping up with multiple streams and services. It’d be very nice to consolidate many of these things into one stream.

Time will tell where we all end up. But if you’d like to add me to your “Really Cool People” Circle I’ve created a special URL for my Google+ profile: cdevroe.com/+

And for the past few years I think this has settled down a little. The standards those few pioneers set in the beginning are still around. Most blogs today have a fairly similar feature-set and layout. Even when the layout is dramatically different than the status quo the feature-set is still just about the same.

I believe the blog format is ready for disruption. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be “the next” WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger for this to happen. Maybe all we really need is a few pioneers to spearhead an effort to change the way blogs are laid-out on the screen. There are still so many problems to solve; how new readers and also long-time subscribers consume the stream of posts, how people identify with the content of the blog on the home page, how to see what the blog is all about, how to make money, how to share, and how interact and provide feedback on the content.

Several rather new trends are appearing in the pro blogosphere that started only a few years ago but are now becoming the new pro blog recipe. These trends simply weren’t there 7 or even 5 years ago. Disabling comments is seems to be the main dish (though 4 years ago it was debated). Having a podcast on-the-side is the side-dish. Add to that some sponsorship opportunities in RSS feeds, and a sprinkling of an ad network to taste, and you’ve got yourself the modern day pro blog recipe. Actually, all you really have is a direct mirror of what John Gruber has put together with Daring Fireball – but, nonetheless, these are the trends among pro bloggers and these must be taken into consideration when coming up with a brand new blog format that could set the trend for the next few years.

Syndication has also changed. It seems just yesterday that people thought full-content RSS feeds would destroy their ability to make money blogging. It turns out that could possibly be the most profitable part of their blog’s business model.

Having a Twitter account for your blog, or simply being selective with what is tweeted from your blog (which is my current model), is where things may very well be shifting. Today it would be unthinkable to see sponsored tweets in amongst the links to posts but give it a few years. Today’s Twitter feed is yesterday’s RSS feed. I imagine there will be sponsored tweets too and, in the near future, people will be just fine with that.

Exclusive, paid-for email newsletters had a spike earlier this year with a few services launching and some key figures in the industry taking a stab at them. I have no inside information on how those are turning out – but there is reason to believe that the blog could also do with some exclusive, paid-for content. It may not work for your blog about Hobbit-lore but perhaps it’d work for an incredibly good cooking, investing advice, design-and-code-tutorial, or architecture exam review blog.

Something I’ve always had issue with is that there aren’t enough “home pages” on blogs. That is why the home page for my site is my about page rather than a reverse chronological list of posts as most blogs are. I have that page too but people landing directly on cdevroe.com should not be introduced to my website by only seeing the latest few posts I’ve written. It wouldn’t be a very good introduction and, very well, may not even represent what my blog is about. Because this is a personal blog and not a blog about any one topic, the latest few blog posts would be a very bad representation about what this site really is – a personal blog.

Most blogs that try to earn a buck want to put as many clickable items on their home pages as possible. They probably feel that if they didn’t you’d never go anywhere besides the home page. I can say, after pouring over the stastics of my home page, that isn’t true. A fair percentage of the people that have come to my home page have stayed on that page for a few moments (presumably reading the page) and subsequently clicked on the blog or diet page(s), done a search, or gone to my Twitter account. All good things. I hope that someone solves this issue in a much better way than I have because I really do believe there is a lot of room for improvement here.

Advertising on blogs has simply never worked well. Yes, publishers have made money. Yes, advertisers have increased sales by purchasing ad space on blogs. However, for the core-subscribers to a blog the ads are just noise. Ad networks like The Deck do a very good job at striving to keep a higher quality product by controlling the ads and how they are displayed. But, arguably, even at that level of curation we still just end up with an ad in a sidebar on a blog. I wish there was a better answer for making content “free” to blog subscribers but – at present – advertising is our mule.

Some people claim the trackback is dead. I don’t believe that to be true. In fact, I rather like trackbacks. I like when blogs show me what others have written about a particular blog post. I like them even better than comments. Perhaps if blog software, and the theme of a blog, used the optional excerpt of the trackback standard better they’d work much more like comments (and be much more valueable) than they do now.

Reblogging, Retweeting, Sharing/Liking on Facebook, etc. are all ways to have a post be spread outside of a blog’s audience. The modern day word of mouth. There is no doubt that these tools work very well for some blogs while on others they do nothing. I have these options on my blog and, while I do get a few people using them per day, they serve little purpose then to remind people that if they’d like to share the post they can do it quickly and easily. But in reality, if a post is simply too good not to pass on it will be passed on whether you have a big Facebook button on your blog or not. These tools aren’t going anywhere in fact they are going to become even more ubiquitous – but it’d be nice if someone with an ounce of taste figured out a way to make these options pretty as well as easy to use and, as a hat-trick, much more valuable to all parties involved.

I know, I know, I’m going on and on about this but all of the above is just the tip of the iceberg as to why I believe that the blog format is ripe for someone to really begin innovating again. We have all of the tools and over a decade’s worth of content – all we need are some pioneers.

A few years ago I made it a goal to read a book a month for a year. I did OK. I didn’t reach my goal but I found time to read a fair number of books and had a great time doing it.

But now I’m finding it hard to get through a single book, or even a few chapters of a book. I find it especially hard to read long form on the iPad. With a flick of my fingers I can check Twitter, Facebook, my email, CNN.

Most books have rough parts. Parts that drag, lull, or seem to slow way down. You expect it. And when I came to these parts in past I would simply power through them. But now, if I find even a few sentences in a row that do not keep my attention I feel like I should move on, close the book, and read something else.

OK. We get it. We are probably all suffering from this trend. So how am I going to conquer it? Simple; practice. I’m going to retrain my attention span. I’m going to sit down with something – a book, a project, maybe even some time for meditation – and spend 30 minutes with it. Then, I’ll progress from there.

For whatever reason this hasn’t really affected my work or my personal research projects. I’m guessing that deadlines have something to do with that.

I’ll report back on my progress.

Following up on my obvious love for Notational Velocity is this little nugget from Justin Blanton via Twitter. The latest build of Notational Velocity can actually handle bulleted lists in plain text using unicode bullets and some smarts.

Here is how you do it, again, via Blanton;

“Do [space][some bullet-type char (I use "•")][space][text][return] and you’ll get another bullet.”

That “dot” you see there can be found in about 1,000 variations using your Mac. The easiest one to key, in my opinion, is keyed using OPTION+8. So, simply key Space + OPT+8 + Space + Text + Return and you’ll be editing a list.

Thanks Justin.

My handy dandy little script that makes it easy to parse an RSS feed and send links to Twitter using PHP just got a nice little update. It now supports OAuth and has been cleaned up quite a bit.

Oh, version 1.0 is still available.

However, something else about this information seems to be changing too. Its size. Seemingly it is being chopped up into smaller and smaller bits until what is left is but a few sentences. An entire story told in 140 characters.

This too is good in that this information can be easily distributed, consumed, and used in ways we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of. However, I think it is the way that we’re consuming information that might end up hurting us. I think that those of us that consume this stream of information on a day-to-day basis are actually training our brains to become bored easier.

It is a proven fact that one way humans can fight boredom is through variety. By switching tasks throughout a day you can avoid becoming bored with any one thing. Wake up, make breakfast, read some news, do some work, listen to some music, draw a picture, go for a walk, talk to some friends, watch some TV, read some email, go to bed. Most of us would look at this list and think “not a bad day”. However, a sure fire way to feed boredom is to grow accustomed to being able to switch tasks without completing the last one. If the next task is always available and easy to move to – what stops you from moving from one task to the other aimlessly – never accomplishing anything?

This is what the consumption of information is beginning to become. Not for everyone, mind you, but for a growing number of people connected to the Internet or their cellphones. Think about how many times you change topics in a given day based on how you consume information. You open your email and you have 20 unread messages from friends, family, and coworkers. Each of them has their own topic. You skim through them, replying to some, simply reading others. There is 20 topics in the span of only a few minutes. You open your favorite news website and scan through those topics. My last count on the CNN homepage was a few hundred different topics. Again, you could choose just one or two but the length of these articles is dramatically shorter than they used to be so you’re able to go from one to another in just a few moments. Now, you move over to your social network of choice – or maybe you’re part of more than one? – and you scan down through that stream. Your friend just ate some lovely sushi, your brother is golfing, your neighbor mentioned something you have no idea about so you follow that link to Wikipedia and spend 5 minutes figuring that out, your mother put up a photo, and – of course – you have to update with the type of coffee you’re drinking. Oh, and you just got an Instant Message from your cousin who wants to come visit and an audio chat request from your coworker for that meeting you had scheduled. This continues throughout the day.

Again, none of these are bad things on their own but by jamming them all together in just a few minutes of time we’re really training ourselves to be bored with whatever our current task is.

Not sure if this is effecting you? How many times do you check your phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, or __________ through out the day? When was the last time you read more than 40 pages in a book? Listened to an entire album without skipping or shuffling and doing nothing else but enjoying the music? Watched TV or a full movie without your laptop, iPad, or iPhone next to you? (For what its worth, Google TV-like devices are going to bring this “stream” to your TV making it even easier to be distracted and – ultimately – bored.) In fact, when was the last time you spent more than an hour on anything at all without being distracted by something else?

I’m willing to bet that many of you reading this notice this trend too. Most of you are probably OK with it. You feel more connected to the world around you than ever before, more informed than you’ve ever been, and more capable of spreading the word then the local news station. But chances are none of those are really true. What is going on at your local market? How is your family doing? What single topic are you most interested in at the moment? Are you learning anything new well enough to teach others?

Maybe it is time we all slow down a bit and pick just a few things to care about and focus on them instead of training ourselves to become easily bored. We need to start training ourselves to be focused, productive and interesting.

Side note: Remember Brightkite? Oh what could have been.

/via Eric Brophy.

I think I can spot a winner too, honestly.

Take the Mac for example. When I switched I told everyone I knew that they should switch to the Mac. Most people gave excuses (some good, most not) about why they “couldn’t switch” or “it wouldn’t work for them”. Now nearly everyone that I suggested the Mac to has at least one in their home as well as an iPhone and I wouldn’t doubt an iPad is next. Oh, and they’re all on Twitter too.

To them I say – I told you so.

1. Well, they are watching TV. – Lets face it, people are just sitting on the couch watching other people work out. This isn’t a work out tape. This isn’t Richard Simmons and definitely no Tony Horton. This is a TV show and people are sitting there, watching it, doing nothing.
2. Eating junk food! People eat a lot while watching The Biggest Loser. And, it isn’t like they are eating a sensible meal either. This dude eats pie. Someone else cake.
3. Drinking alcohol. Jillian recommends almost no drinking of alcohol while dieting. But I guess champagne is ok?
4. Cry. The journey for the contestants isn’t only physical, it is also emotional. I guess it is emotional for the viewers too. Every time.
5. Make fun of The Biggest Loser. If you can’t beat ‘em, make fun of ‘em. This guy says he is going to get some cookies and this chick is going to get some donuts for tonight’s premier.

The authors of this list are big fans of The Biggest Loser and are probably as guilty as anyone of doing one or all of them while watching the show.

Enjoy the premier!

The Watercolor Gallery is not even two months old yet and it has 70+ pieces of art in its archive, a Twitter account, a brand-new domain name thanks to Jesse Davis, a fledgling yet unused mailing list (you can subscribe on the gallery’s homepage), and much more.

How, in such a short period of time, could one person who is running this website as a few-hours-a-week hobby possibly have set all of this up? It is all about the tools.

The website, as you’re undoubtedly aware, is using Tumblr for both hosting and the content management. I use the “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet to quickly create drafts during the week as I rummage around the Internet – which I’ll then go back in later (typically on Sunday mornings) and pretty them up, write some sort of description and queue them up for the entire week. Tumblr has made creating posts for the site quicker than any other software I’ve ever tried – and I’ve used a lot over the last 16 years.

The mailing list, which I haven’t yet used but am collecting email addresses for to the tune of a few a day, is powered by Mail Chimp. For my use, so far, Mail Chimp is free and simple to use. Win, win.

Having an account on Twitter has several advantages. Many people do not use feed readers. Having a Twitter account, even though there are a very few people following it currently, makes it possible for those that do not use feed readers but do use Twitter to keep up-to-date with the gallery. The other main advantage is being able to engage the community and artists that I find on Twitter under The Watercolor Gallery’s brand other than my own Twitter account.

To track the statistics for The Watercolor Gallery I’m using Google Analytics. It does a pretty decent job of quickly showing me what people are most interested in on the site as well as whether or not people simply come and go or if they stick around and look through the gallery or not. It is pretty interesting to see.

For an upcoming artist interview series, wherein I will interview some of the artists who have been featured on the gallery already, I am using a quickly thrown together and free Wufoo form. This form asks the artists the same few questions, collates all of the information together for me, and emails me an easily digestable block of text that I can then use for the interview itself. It is quite wonderful really.

Aside from that I may need to edit an image here or there to fit the gallery – which I use the incredible Acorn for.

Although I’m sure the number of tools I use to make life easy over at The Watercolor Gallery will increase or change – I’m really happy about how easy it is to put out what I think is a fantastic website.

• The RSS feed. – This gives you everything. Notes, links, photos, videos, etc. I suggest Google Reader.
• @cdevroecom on Twitter. A simple link to every single post immediately as it is published.
• CDEVROE.com Facebook page – Syndicates the @cdevroecom tweet stream.

If you follow my personal Twitter account, @cdevroe, you will only get linked to mobile photos and posts that I feel are worthy of tweeting about. Oh, and my smooth wit and charm too.

Adding these features to one’s website is now easier than ever but that doesn’t mean you should add it to your website. The entire Web needn’t be social. The way I see it the Web is a shopping mall not a day-long concert.

At a concert, or music festival, the venue does not change – the band does. The experience does not change for the viewer no matter what band gets on stage. The audience can interact, move throughout the crowd, look to their right and tell their friend how awesome the music is, etc. The environment is the same regardless of the content. (Though I will say that some bands can completely change the feel of the place if they ‘re great but it doesn’t change the tools available to the audience.)

At a shopping mall each store is a unique experience confined in relatively the same-sized space for each store. Wholly different experiences can sit side-by-side – an Apple store next to a Hot Topic next to a Victoria’s Secret next to a JC Penny. JC Penny does not make the atmosphere inside it’s store match that of Hot Topic or vice versa. Why? Because they’ve both chosen the experience they want to offer their shoppers.

And so should you. Just because it is easy to add Facebook, Twitter or any other host of social features to your site does not mean that you should. It simply means you have the choice. Don’t get caught up in hype. But don’t ignore it either. Now you have to sit back and think about the environment you want to create for your audience and decide if social is right for you. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

“Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” – Ian Malcom – Jurassic Park.

Example.

So, you’re new to Twitter. Welcome! You’re about to tweet your first tweet – but there are some things you need to know first. Some rules to live by if you will. @cdevroe and @elizard, Twitter experts with over 20,000 tweets between them, have created the following rules which are inarguably true and beyond contestation.

Not a tweeter? Maybe you use Facebook? Check out The misguided Facebook guide for the new, umm, Facebooker.

• You don’t have to sound smart and witty to use Twitter. You just have to think you sound smart and witty.
• Using Twitter as an instant message service is exactly what it was created for. Go nuts.
• Any statement that has a #hashtag as a punchline is absolutely hilarious. (e.g. “I’m stuffed! #atetoomuch”) LOL! See? Hilarious.
• People that have 4 million followers actually have 4 million people that are hanging on their every word.
• Replying to another person’s tweet without ‘@username’-ing them will not cause any confusion so don’t waste your time typing it in.
• Following someone and then immediately unfollowing them just so that they follow you is standard procedure.
• Syndicating your tweets to every single social network does not create an annoying Internet echo. It shows you “get” social media.
• You shouldn’t only have 1 Twitter account. You need one for your pet, one for imaginary people you make up and one for fart jokes.
• Retweeting every single thing @garyvee says is mandatory.
• Justin Bieber is not a never-ending trending topic. Justin Bieber is Twitter. Twitter is Justin Bieber.
• Tweet 140 times a day. Minimum.
• What you tweet will never have any affect on your daily life, friends or family. Express yourself.

We hope this guide gets you started on your journey into tweeting like the professionals and quickly becoming someone everyone despises.

Inclusion of this ad system into third party applications is not mandatory but is certainly welcomed by developers that were striving to make a buck on free, ad-supported applications. But, Twitter is missing out on the app up sell.

I use Echofon for both iPhone and Mac. I paid $2.99 for the iPhone application (very much worth it). The Mac application is $20 for the paid, no ads, application and free for the ad-supported application. So far the only ads I’ve seen inside of Echofon for Mac has been these new Promoted Tweets from Twitter’s new ad platform.

Here is where I think Twitter loses. When and if I pay Echofon $20 to remove the ads from the application Twitter doesn’t see a lick of it. They also lose ad impressions because Echofon will not display these Promoted Tweets anymore.

I’m not so sure that Twitter needs to care about this because the number of impressions they can count on from their site, search and stream injection is probably much higher than I could guess and growing steadily. But, I still feel they are leaving a bunch of money on the table somehow.

I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.

Until this latest release the Top Sites page in Safari was too slow for me to find useful. Now, however, it is much faster and I’m liking it very much. I liked Chrome’s New Tab page a lot. However, unlike Safari it wasn’t really all that useful for more than giving you a clickable tile to go to your favorite sites. Safari’s Top Sites page does a bit more.

First, it shows a ‘page-curl white star on blue’ icon to show which pages have been updated since you visited them last. This makes is quick and easy to go to the pages that have been updated rather than checking them yourself. Second, Safari allows you to choose how many sites show up on this page. Chrome does not. Depending on your screen size you can choose between Small, Medium and Large tiles for each site. Small is more, large is less.

Third, but not necessarily specific to the Top Sites page, Safari allows you to search your history in a visual way right from the Top Sites page itself. As you type in your search query a coverflow like window shows you a thumbnail of the Web sites that match it. It makes finding pages you’ve been to in the past much, much easier than in Chrome.

So, for now I’m back to Safari.

My Top Sites in Safari are (from left to right and down) this site, my WordPress admin, Twitter (although I rarely use this because I use Echofon so it may be replaced soon), Facebook, Gmail, Instapaper, Tumblr, 37Signals Launchpad, Flickr, Viddler’s Recently Uploaded page, GitHub and Google Reader.

Tweetie for Mac still has a few standout features that draw me to using it – but any software that runs on a public social service that isn’t updated in months tends to fall behind rather quickly. Echofon keeps up.

After searching on GitHub for scripts that did the same thing I didn’t come up with much. Hopefully this both fills that void and gets better because it is now out in the open.

• On Viddler I save videos that I like, that I want Derek (our Community Leader) to see, or that I want to promote to the front page.
• On Flickr I save photos that I like, would like to paint or draw, or want to find again easily.
• On Twitter I save tweets that I like, would like to read later, or that I think are notable in some way.
• On Tumblr (no permalink?) I save posts for the same reason I do tweets. Reading later.
• On Google Reader I star things I want to read later.
• On Facebook I like things that I agree with but have no comment on.

And that is about all of the services that I use on a regular basis or that I favorite things on. With my recent addiction to Instapaper I like less Tumblr and Google Reader items but I still do occasionally.

What about you?

“Science does not embody all that men know, only what is for men of science. The woodman tells me how he caught trout in a box trap, how he made his trough for maple sap of pine logs, and the spouts of sumach or white ash, which have a large pith. He can relate his facts to human life. The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.”

I also like the bit where he mentions that a lot of man’s knowledge ends up going to waste – presumably because it is lost with the man at death. Henry David Thoreau, though, didn’t live in a world with blogs and Twitter. If more people would spout out knowledge through these channels, instead of negativity, I think Henry’s thoughts could be outdated.

The good bits are in woven into the fabric of his piece. Essentially Kyle hopes that geocoding continues to improve and, most importantly, becomes much easier to use. I’ve already said that 2010 is the year of location. Location based services are going to explode this year and any content-publishing service that does not somehow include location in 2010 will probably be left to wallow in the dead pool come next year.

That much time, attention, and resources being thrown at a problem will hopefully mean real progress. We’re going to see a lot of change for good and bad over the next 12 months in this area but at the end of it all, as Kyle mentions, it has to get easier and more accurate.

Kyle, a longtime user of Brightkite, also mentioned that he agreed with my What Brightkite Could Be. What Brightkite Should Be. post. Some of which is relavent in this context if you haven’t read it.

Turn up your speakers for this one folks. My friend Eric Brophy and I (more him than me) have a chat about geocoding, mashups, Twitter, and the potential for other geocoded things to pop up in the future.

You can pretty much expect First initial, last name to be 85% geo in 2010.

No question this time around… simply sound off in the comments.

Every single post to this site will be immediately linked to from @cdevroecom while only some (mostly just the mobile photos category) will be linked to from @cdevroe.

If the kids want to use Twitter to “subscribe” to Web sites then I figured why not? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Brady Forrest for O’Reilly Radar on the possible implications of this acquisition:

“Second, does this herald Twitter’s moves into being a location provider? At Sarver’s previous company they had a location-brokering service called MyLoki that never gained ubiquity. Twitter has the opportunity to become a major location broker. Twitter currently has a very simple on/off switch for location. To become a full-fledged consumer location service (like Latitude or Fire Eagle) they will need to build in more controls.”

Forrest’s use of the term “location broker”, I believe, means that Twitter could become a standard for just about anyone to location-enable their own applications rather than simply geocoding tweets. I think Twitter should do this by keeping GeoAPI “open for business” allowing developers to continue to build products using the API, commit data to it, and improve the API over time.

Forrest asks if Twitter will charge for the use of the GeoAPI like it charges for access to Twitter’s public timeline (or firehouse as they call it) to developers. I think they should charge for the use of this API and they should use the same reasonable pricing model that GeoAPI already had in place. No one should have to pay for the data, but they should have to pay for requesting that data hundreds of thousands of times.

In essence, I believe GeoAPI should stick around. It looks like a fantastic API and I’m looking forward to it being implemented into Twitter’s own API but I think it’d be a good idea to have the service stick around separate from Twitter itself.

Update: After reading the post on the GeoAPI blog about the acquisition by Twitter I realized that they are planning, for now at least, to keep GeoAPI up and running. They said: “We will continue to give new API keys for GeoAPI.com – however there may be some delays in getting keys over the holidays.” Good.

Until somewhat recently, however, only Brightkite offered another layer ontop of these features that really separated it from Twitter without question. Geolocation.

Brightkite users can “check in” to just about anywhere like restaurants, gas stations, their own homes or just about any real world address. It asks two questions to Twitter’s one: Where are you and what are you doing there?

Twitter is working very hard at bringing geolocation to its own service. It has been rolling out, only through its API at the moment, the ability to geocode each tweet with a specific latitude and longitude. Unlike Brightkite’s check-in based model Twitter’s model isn’t tied down to any address and doesn’t add the extra friction of having to check-in at a place before you’re able to post at it.

There are benefits to both models. For Brightkite some of the benefits include the ability to use SMS commands to find the location you’re currently at, check in, and then post to. This removes the requirement for a GPS-enabled device in order to add metadata to your posts. Also, “Places” having names is very, very important for people figuring out exactly where you are and where something was posted. Being able to view posts on Brightkite from specific locations (rather than specific coordinates) is much more human and fun. I won’t even mention how marketable Places are in contrast to coordinates.

For Twitter some of the benefits include a much more accurate dataset. Each tweet is geocoded individually. Move a foot in any direction and the metadata for your next tweet will reflect that. Again, little or no friction. That lack of friction has always been Twitter’s modus operandi and if they can pull it off with geolocation it will presumably bring more geocoded data to the Web than any other service to date.

Brightkite’s main differentiators, however few there have been, are about to all go away. Save, perhaps, for one. Places. I believe that Twitter’s forthcoming success in this area should be Brightkite’s opportunity to capitalize on what its already learned. There is value a lot of value in Places.

If Brightkite could somehow become the best Twitter client for checking in to, searching for, and viewing the posts at specific Places (even simply addresses) I believe Brightkite could see a huge ramp up in growth and value. Any Twitter account should work at Brightkite, period. Any geocoded tweet that falls within a specific area range around one of Brightkite’s already found Places should be attributed to that Place. Brightkite should no longer consider keeping its own community but rather expand itself into Twitter’s community.

Using Brightkite’s Places dataset, which it has been building and refining for a long time already, it could become the very best way to interact with the new geolocation-enabled Twitter.

That is if they want it to be. Or, they could just keep chasing teenaged girls.