Face It, Facebook Works Well As A People Directory!

As you may know if you go back earlier in this blog, I live in South Florida and used to be an avid sailor until Wicked Hurricane Wilma wrecked my boat... Back at the time I posted a bunch of photos of the storm's damage to my home and boat on Flickr and tagged them "Wicked Wilma."

I recently received the following message through Facebook from someone who I don't know and who is not a Facebook friend:

Jeff, I sent you a message already on Flickr but I am trying to get in touch with you seeking permission to use one of your photos in our 2005 Annual Report to Congress. I am trying to find a photo from hurricane Wilma to include in our pub. Please let me know if you are interested.

I thought it was telling that I noticed the message via Facebook, long before I received the email through Flickr. My Flickr account is tied to a Yahoo Mail address that I hardly check on. Facebook, on the other hand, is always open in a browser tab, and has an extremely efficient mobile alert piece that forwards messages right to my Treo via SMS.

The Real Story

More telling was the fact that the person trying to reach me figured out that, when he received no reply to his message via Flickr, he could potentially find me through Facebook. And he did, successfully. The picture above is the image that prompted the search for Sass.

In business, it is often difficult to find a working email address for someone you don't know, and many of the services that do provide contact info, do so for a fee. Facebook provides an easy and open means of making contact with its members. A powerful feature when properly used and not abused.

Have you been contacted randomly through Facebook? Have you successfully made contact with someone you were trying to reach through Facebook? Do all these questions make this sound like one of Chris Brogan's blog posts???

Caught By Accident (Mash)

WOW. The Podcast & New Media Expo in Ontario, California was a great show. On the business side, I made some excellent contacts with Podcasters, Musicians and Companies who can leverage the Myxer Platform to create and share mobile content from their own stuff. In addition, as a longstanding Podcast listener (I was the guest, "Jeff The Listener" in show 100 of Podcast411.com), it was great to see good friends like Scott Sigler and meet many of my favorite podcasters including Dan Klass, Brian Ibbott, Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, P.W. Fenton, Lance Anderson, Adam Curry, Anji Bee, Seth Harwood, Drew Domkus, Michael Butler, Rob Walch, CC Chapman and many, many more.

I also happened to be in the right place at the right time (the BAR at the Marriott at 1am!) to bear witness to one of the highlights of the event, and one of those "special moments" that will be talked about for a long, long time. If you were one of the 30 or so noisy drunks hanging by the pool, then you know we will all share a special "I was there..." bond for life. And if you missed it... well, watch the videos and listen to the show at www.accidenthash.com, and next time... don't be such a wuss and STAY OUT LATER!

I Love Lucy! (and Twitter)

Yes, Twitter is like an episode of I LOVE LUCY...
(to find out how, read on...)

If you read through the posts on this blog you will see that I am an avid user and fan of Twitter. As a loyal Twittizen, Twitter has been fun, it has been a resource, it has been a discovery channel, it has been a meeting place, a community, a respite, a river of information and entertainment, a view into the future, past and present, and just plain cool. It truly has been a benefit to me both personally and professionally. I have met new friends and and established legitimate business leads. It has been a platform for business mashups like my TwitTones, (shameless plug: follow @myxertones for a FREE daily Indy Music ringtone delivered in a Tweet) and it has been an outlet for creativity and (hopefully) humor, such as my experiment with poking fun at my Social Networking "Hobby" as an addiction. It is truly amazing how impactful, interesting and inspiring random bursts of 140 characters can be.

So, what about I LOVE LUCY???

Yesterday @newmediajim asked how we would describe Twitter. He called it

"...sort of like if LinkedIn were having a cocktail party. "

I thought about how I would describe Twitter, and realized it is like an episode of I LOVE LUCY -- Specifically the episode where Lucy is working in the candy factory, and the chocolates are rolling by her, faster and faster... so I responded to NewMediaJim:

"Twitter is like the chocolate conveyor belt in I LOVE LUCY. Lots of great treats flying by..you pluck the ones that look sweet!"

And it is! If you have a great group of diverse folks you follow, as I believe I do, you have access to a constant stream of community consciousness you can tap into any time... from your PC, from your phone, from your connected PDA of choice. Like Lucy's conveyor belt, the Twitter machine is constantly full, and moving fast. You can scramble to catch them all (as Lucy does in the beginning of the skit), or you can slow down, observe what is going by, and pick and choose the tastiest of morsels from the Twitter train of thought. Chew, Chew (Choo Choo!)

Lucy or not, I am having a Ball with Twitter!


Photo Credit:Elena Elisseeva - Fotolia.com

Facebook Is Viral Viagra

The infamous blue pill may get things going in the bedroom, but if you want to get things going in Cyberspace it seems all you need is to get some Facetime on Facebook!

I am an avid Twitterer and a good Twitizen, but I don't get too many @sass or D sass messages. I have had a personal blog since 2004, but I rarely get even 1 comment on my posts, despite toiling over every witty and pithy sentence (at least in my mind they are witty and pithy). Yet I put a video on my Facebook profile and lo and behold, I am suddenly "viral." Granted, I put some work into the video production and I "tagged" Chris Brogan, which gave me a jump start with his active following. And now Jeff Pulver was kind enough to link to my video from his well read blog. That said, as I watch the comments grow and add many new found Facebook Friends, I can see just how well the "virality" (that's viral vitality) is built into the Facebook platform... and it really does work. When someone comments on my video it appears in their profile and news feed for all of their friends to be exposed to. If one of their friends then comments, it goes out to their circle... and on and on and on.

In many respects, this is the power of a "closed system" as opposed to the "open" Internet at large. For a "regular guy with a regular blog" like me, posting on this blog is like putting a message in a bottle, tossing it out to sea, and hoping it will drift to shore where someone may notice it and respond. Posting on Facebook is like going around your neighborhood and sticking a flyer in everyone's mailbox. The flyer in the mailbox is much more likely to be read than the message in the bottle!

Thankfully, I am not yet in need of a "virility" boost from the little blue pill, but I will happily enjoy the "virality" boost I have gotten from Facebook!

UPDATE:
(For those of you not in my neighborhood on Facebook, here is the aforementioned video)

Glass With Class (photos by Sass)

Dale Chihuly's art, taken with a Treo 650 Smartphone

The Sass Sons (and dining with an iPhone)

The boys at dinner tonight at California Pizza Kitchen. Clearly, the doofy expressions are proof positive that genetics works and more importantly, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. More specifically, the apple was quite large and hit us all in the head when it fell from the tree!

Speaking of apples, last night Sue and I dined at a quite fancy restaurant, Il Mulino on Collins Avenue. At the cozy table next to us an attractive, expensively dressed young woman sat alone and carefully lay out a Blackberry Pearl and an iPhone before her. She spent her Saturday evening dining alone, alternating between sending text messages on the Pearl and talking on the iPhone. A sign of the times? Remember when dining alone meant a corner table and a good novel? I was dying to lean over and ask her why she needed both the Blackberry and the iPhone... Was it the keyboard? Battery life? Just showing off she could afford to have both? Inquiring minds want to know!