brad garland

This may not be a recent or even an original thought but I’ve recently been thinking organizing my information flow and this idea kind of hit me. RSS was, five years ago, the next big thing until it died. Syndicating your content you read through a ‘news feed’ that people could subscribe was going to revolution the way people got their information on the Web. It took off for a while and services like NetNewsWire and Google Reader acted as the traffic cop services of all the feeds but it never really went mainstream.  Until a communication utility came, put a cutesy name and verb around it (tweet, tweet!) and everyone grabbed ahold.

Think about it, Twitter works like a RSS service with all the people, brands, and websites you care about so you can ‘follow’ them and keep updated on all their information. The information could be personal, professional, or anywhere in between but the fundamentals are the same. Subscribe to the content, and it’s pushed back to you whether its Kim Kardashian or NPR.

Couple points of note:

1) Isn’t it interesting that once again a better marketing plan and simple interface won yet again? Course, nobody really owned RSS, it was a pretty technical idea for many of those years.

2) Twitter curation - I was attempting to segment the people that I follow on Twitter from the brands/websites that I follow. I’m finding it easier to follow someone instead of finding their RSS feed and adding it to my Google Reader.  Problem is I can’t find a good iPad app that can just show me just the content I want in a Twitter list (that works well).  For example, I’m using TweetMag (side review: awesome app but highly unstable, please update! Still use it though…)

A Twitter for your Intranet

Got a lot of great responses on Twitter and I thought a short screencast could help us all.  Let me know if there are any others to add to this list, thanks everyone!

Posted from brad garland’s stream

That was my reaction when the other day I received a call from our PEO provider Administaff. Charlie, our sales contact, called me and inquired about something that I said online…on Twitter actually (see image).



Now despite me leading a pretty open life online I was still taken aback from the call since I definitely don’t connect Charlie with Twitter but obviously someone at Administaff is listening. He went on to tell me what he was sent the message and just wanted to follow-up to see if I could exbound a bit more. I told him about some of my concerns on attempts to stifle our culture and he completely understood and said he’d take the discussion into his bosses. Regardless if it was him or someone else that found it, they fact that they are 1) trying to listen & 2) follow-up with me to ensure what’s going on is pretty awesome in my book.

Lastly, if this isn’t an example of being sure you stand behind the content you put online, I don’t know what is.

For decades now the wall between the ‘celebrity’ and the common man has been tall and wide. Often only seeing them on television or at the movies or maybe, just maybe, if you could make a special event/concert you got to see them from as close as 100 yards away! Wow, they’re right there (squint)!!!

Now, times are changing. Access is changing. Let me geek out for a second as to why. Example, I watch ‘Meet the Press’ every weekend and really enjoy David Gregory. He’s smart, fair, and encourages good debates on his show. But now he’s on twitter. So I decided to send him a tweet about a guest that should be on his show and within an hour, he responded back. Publicly for all but addressed specifically to me, now how cool is that?!? But it’s already not…cool that is. Why? Because I’m having these all the time now with journalists, politicians, authors, thought leaders, and some of the biggest and brightest minds of our time because of the walls of restricted access are falling down.



Where I’m going with this, however, is this sort of interaction that is novel/cool/kinda geeky today will become standard even tiresome in the future. My daughters will not only have access to but even have conversations with any person on planet they want. Oh, and note, this conversation could take place on the computer but probably won’t. “That’s so 2000s, Dad!”

Doubt me? Welcome the single most powerful woman on the planet to Twitter as of today. Hi @oprah, welcome to the conversation.

This shows how geeky I am, I suppose, but I enjoy finding past technological innovations to be able to make analogies to current ones. In communication terms, Twitter (or more likely “short-form communications”) looks to be playing out to be a new form of email. Many people that heard about email a couple decades ago couldn’t see the point. “Why wouldn’t I just call them or leave a message?”, they said. Now email is mission critical in just about every organization. Email didn’t start an upward trend until American Online came out and gave every consumer an email address with their service. And I still remember as a kid being excited about dialing in (2400 baud modem baby!) and hoping to hear those three company defining words, “You’ve got mail!”. YES, somebody emailed me!

So fast forward to 2009 and we have Twitter.

It’s been out for a few years but it really hasn’t taken off until now. One of the key differences that I see between AOL of old and Twitter of today is that AOL’s email was interoperable . AOL emails worked with Prodigy emails or CompuServe emails. What does Twitter work with today? Email was built with a decentralized network in mind but Twitter doesn’t appear to want to play nice. Considering their exponential growth why would they want to though, right? It’s a lot like Facebook in that way I suppose.

Twitter may end up, if not acquired first, to be the new AOL and is definitely put itself on the map for future technology historians.

I have never had the desire to write my congressman or representative because I knew what the end result would be. It has a greater than 50% chance of being thrown straight away and if by some miraculous occurrence it got opened, it would’ve been by a staffer that would skim over it real quick, and then they would proceed to wad it up and work on their twenty foot jumper towards the trashcan. What’s the point.

But today, I changed all that. I actually wrote my congressman and a state representative…but by using Twitter. I came across TweetCongress.org today and realized that I could have access (even direct access) to those making decisions for me. So I rattled off a 140-character tweet (which would more likely get a read than a long letter) and sent it to both John Cornyn and John Culberson of Texas. Here it is:



It’s only been twenty minutes since I posted it and no response yet but both have ‘followed’ me on twitter (could be an auto-follow script) but the fact that I can get direct access to these type of people instead of working channels makes me a bit more intrigued about potentially making a difference in our government and for our country. A bit naive perhaps but a tweet is better than nothing, right?

Side note: To date, there are currently more Republicans(41) than Democrats(24) on Twitter. And who said social media is only for the Liberals? :)

I have never had the desire to write my congressman or representative because I knew what the end result would be. It has a greater than 50% chance of being thrown straight away and if by some miraculous occurrence it got opened, it would’ve been by a staffer that would skim over it real quick, and then they would proceed to wad it up and work on their twenty foot jumper towards the trashcan. What’s the point.

But today, I changed all that. I actually wrote my congressman and a state representative…but by using Twitter. I came across TweetCongress.org today and realized that I could have access (even direct access) to those making decisions for me. So I rattled off a 140-character tweet (which would more likely get a read than a long letter) and sent it to both John Cornyn and John Culberson of Texas. Here it is:



It’s only been twenty minutes since I posted it and no response yet but both have ‘followed’ me on twitter (could be an auto-follow script) but the fact that I can get direct access to these type of people instead of working channels makes me a bit more intrigued about potentially making a difference in our government and for our country. A bit naive perhaps but a tweet is better than nothing, right?

Side note: To date, there are currently more Republicans(41) than Democrats(24) on Twitter. And who said social media is only for the Liberals? :)

You hear that statement a lot, right? People don’t scale. Whether it’s stories of endless email or having to ‘trim down’ their RSS feeds or Twitter followers, people can’t keep up with it all. So my thought today was to take the contrarian view and ask, “So what, is that the Web’s fault?”

As everyone knows by now, anyone can post content (regardless of quality). I think the Web community does a good job of filtering the best stuff to us whether through Twitter, delicious, Banktastic, etc. But now, every time I either consider adding a new feed or following someone on Twitter I do a double check:

“Do I really want to do this?”

“Do I really want to muddy the waters with new content?”

That stinks. It’s not the Web or these services fault that I, the individual, can’t process it all. We have this beautifully decentralized ‘service’ that allows the tapping into the most brilliant minds in the world with a click of a button but we don’t because we “can’t keep up.” How sad really…

I guess my question is, how do we overcome? Is it the 10% stuff that Google’s Marissa Mayer was talking about at the Techcrunch52? Semantic search via service like Twine?

The Web is leaps and bounds better than what we had before it but now with the firehose busting at the seams, how do we continue to process more efficiently? Come on, you’re smart, let us know what you think.