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Do you want to Tweet Somebody New? Mr Tweet is making introductions… December 2, 2008

Twitter is pretty boring until you start to follow people. And it’s also pretty boring if the people you follow don’t update more than one a week, don’t follow you back, or only tweet about themselves. So how do you find interesting people to follow on Twitter?

Enter Mr Tweet, a new service from @mingyeow and @ambivalence. Mr. Tweet looks through your extended network on Twitter to help you build relationships, and answers two very simple, and very important questions: —

* Who are the influential people I should be following?
* Which are the followers I should be following in return?

How it works is incredibly simple. You follow @mrtweet on Twitter. And that’s it. Mr Tweet will then send you a direct tweet pointing you to your personal report at the Mr Tweet web site. When I followed Mr Tweet, my report came through in about 6 hours - but due to rising popularity (Robert Scoble found it), you may have to wait up to 48 hours, especially if you have a lot of followers and / or follow a lot of people - but it’s well worth waiting for.

The report you receive (see my example report for @clarocada here) is produced online at Mr Tweet’s site, and allows you to either find influencers beyond your network or show which of your followers you should be following back.

The beauty of Mr Tweet’s reports is that you can assess whether to follow twitter users suggested to you on the basis of a great deal of information: -

• Examples of who, among those you follow, follows them.
• See how many of the people that you follow, follow them.
• How many followers they have.
• How many people they follow.
• A quick ‘following/followers’ ratio.
• A reciprocity statement - such as ‘frequently replies to non-follows’, ‘usually follows back’.
• How often they update - you may want to limit the number of ‘57 tweets a day’ people you follow!
• Link to their web site or blog as noted on their twitter profile.
• Brief biography from their twitter profile.
• View their last 5 tweets (A really useful touch).

The Mr Tweet Blog has just had its first entry, and they encourage feedback at Get Satisfaction. All in all, Mr Tweet is an extremely useful, very well-designed and beautifully easy to access service.

Follow @mrtweet and see who you’re missing…

Originally posted at The Next Web

Twellow adds more features to increase your online visibility October 1, 2008

Twellow, the ‘yellow pages for Twitter‘, has improved its utility with the ability to create your own biography entry.

As well as being able to claim your twitter profile, and classify yourself in up to 10 categories (although I’m in 14 for some reason), you can also add your own social media links to your profiles on Pownce, LinkedIn, Flickr, FriendFeed, etcetera - as well as creating a brief summary and what’s termed a ‘bio’ or biography entry.

The search facility in Twellow includes the data in your summary and pick ups keywords and links used there, and your biography information can also include basic HTML, so links and visual formatting can be added. The summary is indexed in search - the biography does not appear to be indexed yet.

Apart from being a great way to find people using Twitter with similar interests, and pinpointing interesting people to follow, categorized Twellow profiles are also becoming visible in Google and Yahoo searches. So I’d recommend making sure you claim your profile at Twellow and add your details and social links to ensure your online visibility and credibility stay high. It’s free, and there are over half a million people listed there, so it’s worth spending a few minutes to make sure you’re visible, coherent, and linked up here.

12,000 of our Blog Visitors are missing… September 11, 2008

I was checking my blog statistics just the other day, and found an unfamilar link to a story I’d written in January. I clicked through to find that Koollage, which produces a mobile version of my blog, had linked to my blog from their ‘press’ page, and someone had recently followed the link to my original story

But I was also intrigued to find that the widget version of this blog shows that is has been viewed 12,553 times since January 2008, when it was set up. That’s 12,000 visitors that never showed up on my web stats - rather more than I’d anticipated! The power of the mobile web is getting greater every day - and although this site is already optimised for viewing on iPhones, I see all of those stats through the wonderful Clicky.

The size of our audience is missing…

I think there’s a market for the company who can figure out a way to measure and pinpoint the ‘hidden traffic’ that comes to blogs and news sites through through widgets, RSS feeds syndications, friendfeed references and so on. These figures are not insignificant, certainly for a little blog like this, and knowing where an audience is coming from always helps when you’re working to address that audience - quite apart from simple curiosity.

Koollage Widget for Digital Biographer. Koollage were featured this week at DEMOFall08 in San Diego, and the beta version of their product is now open to the public.

Sorry, I don’t do meetings. I do tweetings. September 5, 2008

“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate” - Dave Barry

I don’t do meetings any more. I used to do a lot of meetings. But not any more.

The change from meeting to tweeting - where a series of brief exchanges (each a maximum of 140 characters) can make up the content - has been brought about by a variety of factors over the past 15 years or so - but here are the ten factors that I think are critical.

1. IN GOOGLE TIME
   I no longer have a phone book, business directories or yellow pages. Those were essential when I started my first corporation in 1993. But now, I use Google. As a result, I have less patience for slow ways of doing things - I am impatient. I demand speed, efficiency, and immediate results.
2. HOLA FONEROS 
   I have a laptop computer and a mobile phone, I can work from a cafe terrace in Banyalbufar just as easily as anywhere else. As a result, I don’t have the need to restrict myself to doing business with those who are within easy reach of where I live or work most of the time.
3. HOME OFFICE DRESS CODE
   I don’t need to have an office in the city centre to get my work done - I can do it from my home office. As a result, I don’t need to spend time travelling, and so I use that saved time productively. I also find wearing a suit in my own kitchen a bit pointless, so feel there has to be a very good reason to dress up to go somewhere - and my carbon footprint’s lower.
4. MY ONLINE VISIBILITY
   Whereas I used to have to push information out to people in brochures, newspaper interviews, in meetings, at trade shows, I now have online profiles at LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy, Facebook, Hyves, Flickr, Friendfeed, MyBloglog etc, and I have blogs and web sites that I can update easily in seconds. As a result, I don’t have to spend so much time introducing myself, and explaining what it is that I, or any of my enterprises provide - people find out about me before they meet me, or get to know me through following my activities online. People can meet me at airports because my photo is online. They can also decide whether they need to waste their time meeting me.
5. I HATE COFFEE 
   I don’t really like coffee any more. And I especially never liked paying £3 for a cup of it unless it was refilled all day and came with free wi-fi. As a result, when someone says - let’s have a chat over a coffee, I say “No. Let’s save the time and money, and spend five minutes now working out if we need to meet - and if so, what items on the agenda we can dispense with before we need to have a meeting”.
6. MEETINGS ARE GETTING SHORTER
   I arranged a meeting in London (yes, I do still sometimes meet people) with guys coming from Amsterdam and from the USA without ever using a phone - and although  we’d not met before, we have already shared dozens of pieces of information that made the business of the meeting last about ten minutes - and then we ordered some food and drinks. We then talked about other interesting stuff and new possibilities - not just ‘the business we need to discuss’.
7. CUT THE CHIT-CHAT 
   I can get to know people online by following their updates - or by looking at what they’ve said, or who they’ve been talking with, or who’s been talking about them - and so with this background, a lot of ‘chit-chat’ becomes unnecessary. As a result, I can filter out people, or filter them in.
8. YOU CAN DO THIS TOO
   You are reading this blog. You can send me emails, you can send me stuff without a courier, you can clarify things in Skitch, you can speak on Skype for free, you can send an instant message or a twitter. But you can do this as suits your agenda - and not be dragged into it by another party with an unknown agenda who wants 100% of your attention - NOW.
9. I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU
   I can now have customers who I never meet. That used to be very difficult. But now, I can see people, talk to them in real time, swap messages and files, send them sound files and presentations, have a video-conference with them… whether they are half a world away or live around the corner. 
10. LIFE’S TOO SHORT
    A friend of mine died suddenly this year. David was 42. He did not suffer fools gladly, and could summarise biblical volumes of information in a pithy, witty phrase. But he ran out of time. We all will.

“I prefer email and tweets and other online communications over telephone and face to face meetings because it allows me to manage my own time. When I’m meeting face to face the other person will automatically assume they have an hour of my time, which seems to be the standard meeting length, and will take all of that time to talk TO me.

In an email I might grasp their concept within 2 minutes and be ready with a reply. Other times I need to think about their message overnight. All of this is impossible in face to face meetings where an immediate reaction and 100% dedication is demanded.” 

- Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten 

So if you want to have a meeting with me here’s how to start the conversation:- Let’s tweet.

But what about you - what’s changed the way you handle meetings over the past few years?

Hot diggidy, here’s Dipity! Great free interactive timeline toolkit. August 20, 2008

Sometimes, a name escapes you. This name escaped me when I was referring to an online tool that let you create your own private or public timeline of data, images, or references. Digiddy? Diggedy? Dittley? Bo Diddley? It just did not come to the front of my mind.

The name I was looking for was “Dipity“. Below, you can see how the increasing online-savvy LiverPool Post has made a timeline of 20.08.2008 to celebrate Liverpool’s year as City of Culture.

The service from Dipity is a great way to share images, text and video, and place them into a contextual container which automatically assumes an interactive timeline format. It’s an excellent way to tell a story about an event in a linear patten, but with non-linear input from amny different sources or individual contributors, and it’s worth visiting the site to see some examples of how Dipity is being used.

I’m working on some projects that involve usind Dipity and some of its associated ‘mashup tools‘ to illustrate an individual’s biography and ‘lifestream’ as outlined at British Blogcasting Corporation - and this is, of course, almost made for anything you’d want to call a ‘digital biography‘!

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Digital Biographer Blog by David Petherick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 UK: Scotland License.
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