Top Ten Tweets That I Simply Have No Time For

10. Any tweet describing a particular play in a particular sporting event.

"Oooh, did you see that block by Bryant?"

"And in for the goal!"

9. Tweet greetings and salutations.

"Good morning, world."

"Nighty-night."

8. Air traffic controller tweets, announcing they just landed in some airport.

"Just landed in ATL."

"SFO->LAX."

7. Tweets with incredibly non-descriptive words and phrases describing a state of being, usually starting with the word "is."

"is tired."

"is feeling mediocre."

6. Links with little or no description.

"Cool. http://bit.ly/Hf9c9"

"http://bit.ly/nPZuj"

5. The only tweets from someone are shameless plugs.

"Check out this cool interview that I did with a very popular interviewer. I'm great it in. http://bit.ly/19kUOJ"

4. The self-important tweet.

"I make multi-million $ decisions on a regular basis -- why is it soooo difficult to decide what to do with my hair?"

3. The complete non sequitur tweet.

"blueberries and cockleshells."

"I swear it isn't!"

2. Hipster doofus tweets feigning detachment from popular culture.

"Tonight's the night I finally get to not care who wins "American Idol!""

1. "This is my first tweet" tweets.

"This is my first tweet."

Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and all the rest

I had a quick conversation with Dick today, and afterwards, I realized how certain social media tools have evolved in my own life.

First, Facebook

I first signed up for a Facebook account. I added friends, I added more friends, and pretty soon, I had enough friends that the chatter and updates were worth following and checking regularly.

Then Came The Twitter

When I got an invite from Jason for Twitter, I took a look, and like most, I will be the first to admit that I didn't get it. I signed up to reserve my usual username (jeddings), and that was pretty much it.

Introducing FriendFeed

When Bret left Google, and eventually started FriendFeed, I liked what he was trying to do. Bring everything out there into one place. With comments. OK, OK, I get it. And for a while, it worked for me. But soon I found it non-essential, and most of what I was seeing in there was Twitter anyway. Without realizing it, I spent less and less time with FriendFeed.

The Others

There are other services as well. Google Reader, Digg, StumbleUpon, and others. FriendFeed here is good for collecting and organizing all these. But I found the feature I cared about suddenly was that when these things appeared in my FriendFeed that they then made it to my Twitter stream.

The Emergence of Twitter

Suddenly I found that I only cared about Twitter. Everything collected there, all the people I followed and getting their status updates, interesting thoughts, etc. I'm not interested in hearing the daily thoughts of my friends from college, high school, etc. They are just too removed from my own current life, and what I find I like most is sharing my activity online through Twitter, and keeping up with what others are doing on Twitter. FriendFeed provides some of this glue, but really is more of a back-end service. And Facebook, the first contender, still exists, but only as a repository for my Tweets as Facebook status updates, and I enjoy the discussion about those status updates with friends, long-lost or otherwise.

So I started with Facebook, stumbled into a variety of stuff, before I ended up with 90% Twitter, 5% FriendFeed integration, 5% Facebook discussion.

What about others out there?

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Stupid Site Idea #47: DrunkTweets.com

First there was drunk dialing. Maybe you've done this before. You're out with some friends on a Saturday night, and you've had one too many Long Island Iced Teas, when you get the brilliant idea that you should call up your ex-girlfriend who broke your heart last year, and (1) accuse her of being the worst human being in the world, and (2) beg her to take you back. Oh come now, hands up if this sounds very familiar.

Then came drunk emailing, the 2am email that says everything you wanted to say to your boss, but alas the sober you lacked the chutzpah to say it to him.

And finally, drunk texting. This I've never done before, honestly, because when I'm wasted, fine motor skills are usually the first to go. There will be no tippity-typety with my thumbs on a small, virtual keyboard when I'm blowing a 0.8 and above.

Certainly today, this long-honored tradition must live on Twitter. A quick search for "drunk right now" revealed some choice selections, including this gem:

Classic! Misspellings, statement of inebriation, unnecessary all-caps. All the things you want in a drunk tweet.

So here's my idea: there should be a site where people can submit examples of drunk tweets. People can vote on them, rate them, review them, claim them, and potentially even respond via a tweet-of-shame.

My normal rules of giving away site ideas holds: if you develop this site based on the idea I've given you here, I fully expect an Easter egg somewhere on the site making fun of me for being too lazy to implement the idea myself.

The web page isn't half empty, it's half full!

Sometimes the things that annoy you most can surprise you in delighting you given a completely different context. So that's the lede -- now that I haven't buried it, let me tell you what I mean.

Blogs and other content sites are wonderful. It seems my appetite for informational input, as far as I've tested, really knows no limits, and Web sites chock full of interesting information, thought-provoking viewpoints, and insightful analyses feed the part of me that craves this stuff. But lately, I've become increasingly annoyed at the content-to-other-crap ratio. More and more, site owners are shoving things into both the left and right hand columns. Some are interesting and useful, while some are simply irrelevant and annoying. I've seen pages where the amount of space taken up by actual content is less than 20% of the screen real estate!

The primary way these sites compress the area used up by actual useful content is by fitting them into a narrow column down the page. Daily Kos is a great example of this, where despite your political leanings, everyone can agree that there's an awful lot of non-content content on the page that has questionable utility and value to the content on the page. With so little space dedicated to actual content, in what context would this be a good thing?

And this is where the "web page isn't half empty, it's half full." Because on the Web, this situation is annoying, as so much real estate is taken up by non-content. But on an iPhone, the narrow column format for content means that on a small screen like the iPhone's, once you zoom in on the content, it makes it far easier to read.

I now cross my fingers and shake my accelerometer once for good luck hoping that this next page that I want to read has a narrow column for the content on the page -- and when it doesn't, I ponder throwing the iPhone down in disgust and walking away.

Annoyance has turned into delight -- I now would love to buy the designers of these sites a beer! Of course, that glass of beer you can bet will only be half full. I still have to bear viewing them on my full-sized PC, after all.

How to host Meet the Press

With apologies to David Gregory, for whom I have a ton of respect, I'd like to recreate for you every "Meet the Press" I've seen since he's taken over:

David Gregory: "But first, our first guest is Person A.  This person represents some viewpoint that I'm now going to question by pulling quotes and clips out of context.  Person A, welcome to 'Meet the Press.'"

Person A: "Thanks, it's good to be here."

DG: "Person A, you were quoted this week as taking Postions X, Y, and Z on Topics J, K, and L.  But we've got a quote from you ten years ago stating that you took the opposite positions on those topics.  Care to explain yourself?"

A: "Hedge, hedge, wordsmith, conditions have changed, stick to my current positions no matter what."

DG: "So what you're saying is though you currently take Postions X, Y, and Z on Topics J, K, and L, the opposite positions aren't off the table?"

A:  "I oppose those opposite postions, and am sticking to my guns."

DG: "Yes, but they aren't off the table?"

A:  "I have always opposed those opposite positions, and oppose them today."

DG:  "But you're not stating outright that they are off the table.  OK, let's move on."

[repeat the above several more times until Person A's genuine smile has turned into a snarky smirk.]

DG: "Thank you for being on the show.  Next up, I talk with media pundits with whom I will skewer Person A.  Stay tuned."

[break]

DG: "Welcome back, I've invited media pundits who will have nothing terribly or

iginal to say other than to echo back standard talking points to either defend Person A's current positions, or point and laugh that they took the opposite positions ten years ago."

Media Pundit 1: "I'm the pretty one."

Media Pundit 2: "I'm the old conservative fogey."

Media Pundit 3: "My goatee represents the hip edgy contingent."

Media Pundit 4: "I will laugh and encourage the other pundits to laugh at my only-

for-Washington-insiders' nudge-nudge-wink-wink jokes."

DG: "Well, that's all for this week.  If it's Sunday, it's 'Meet the Press.'"

[cue music]

Follow the leader vs. wisdom of the crowds

"Wisdom of the crowds" is a phrase that I'm hearing more and more lately, and I knew it was more than the soundbite description of "a large group makes better decisions than any single member of that group."  According to Wikipedia[1], this basic definition is true, but it also comes with four necessary conditions:

1. Diversity of opinion: each person should have their own information, even if that information is their opinion of shared facts.
2. Independence: group members' opinions are their own, and aren't affected by others in the group.
3. Decentralization: when it makes sense, group members can rely on local knowledge or their own skills and specialization.
4. Aggregation: there exists a way to take individual opinions to form a collective decision.

This makes intuitive sense, as we feel that "wisdom of the crowds" is somehow different from mere "mob mentality."  

The one that often gets muddled and forgotten, though, is "Inde

pendence."  We understand why this is important, yet often is the hardest to implement.

Take Digg for example.  This seems like the purest form of "wisdom of the crowds."  Someone submits a link, and the crowd decides via a thumbs-up-or-not decision whether this link is worthy of promoting.  But already, this is colored simply by the submission itself.  Without a true diversity of links submitted, you get a biased list of great links and content on the Web.  

But worse than this is the fact that you can always see how many other people have decided that they like this link.  This no doubt affects a Digger's propensity to first of all rate the link, then whether or not it gets promoted.  For the user who is looking to follow the crowd, they are likelier to read and rate the link.  For the users 

with independent streaks, they may see a link that isn't getting as many Digg's as they think it should, and are likelier to promote it.

Another example of this is Google Moderator, the tool that allows people to submit questions or items through a web-based interface which then are voted on by users.  Here, the submission has an even stronger effect on the bias of the output.  

The earlier one submits their question or item, the less competition it has vs. later submissions, and is simply available for a longer period of time to garner more votes.  

While it seems like only the best questions or items float to the top, in fact, this is very biased towards the early submissions.

There is an interesting research study that came out in the February 3, 2005 issue of "Nature" about crowd behavior among animals.  According to the study, large groups of animals can be affected by only a few members of that group with knowledge about the location of food, safe shelter, etc.  In fact, the study goes on, the larger the group, the smaller the proportion of informed individuals are needed to make very accurate decisions.  Those looking to turn to the "wisdom of the crowds" for answers should well understand this, and heed these pitfalls.  A very small subset of a larger group can have a huge impact on the decision that group makes, while looking from the outside as an unbiased "wise crowd."  The crowd we though was wise could simply be a dumb mob.

Perhaps there's a crowd somewhere that will help us all design better products designed to take advantage of crowd wisdom...

[1] By the way, I wanted to see what kind of an authority Wikipedia has become, so out of curiosity, I compared how many search results there were for ["according to Wikipedia"] vs. ["according to Encyclopedia Britannica"].  Just for good measure, I also compared it to ["according to God"].  The results:

• ["according to Wikipedia"] = 2,210,000 results
  
• ["according to Encyclopedia Britannica"] = 3,960 results
  
• ["according to God"] = 2,530,000 results
  

Not only does Wikipedia dwarf EB in references by 560X, Wikipedia's authority is closing in very fast on God's.  Wow.  Here's hoping THAT crowd is wise.

The difference between a successful entrepreneur and one that sits on the sidelines

Humans love reversibility. 

If we can do something and know that we can roll the tape back it if we mess it up, we are much more likely to do it.  One of the killer features of Microsoft Word (and pretty much now pervasive in all the OS and other OSes) is the Undo feature.  Arcade games are fun because you have more than one "life" to get further in the game.  How many of us would be more honest and free to speak if we knew that we could take back something we said that we didn't like after we said it?

So I think the difference between a successful entrepreneur and one who watch from the sidelines is not likely a lack of skill, talent, availability of start-up capital, or any of the usual reasons you would imagine.  No, I think the difference is that the successful entrepreneurs have a broader sense of what is reversible when it comes to building a business.  For many of these successful entrepreneurs, trying a business and failing at it is not truly the end of the world, but rather something that can be written off, and can then be a launching point for the next business.  The sideliner, in the meantime, contemplates that the risk for starting and failing is too great, it isn't reversible, and isn't worth the risk in starting.

The grain of truth hidden here beyond starting businesses is probably this:  most anything in life that we feel is a risk for which failure is not reversible is likely in our imagination.  So what is stopping you from taking that risk today?  I'm sure there's an Undo Button of Life somewhere to be found...