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!

Non-Anonymous (Say THAT 10 Times Fast!)

The times they are a changing... at least for me. I have come to realize the value of being "non-anonymous" and it has been somewhat of an awakening for me. I am learning to embrace transparency, and so far I think that's a good thing. As someone who has frequented the Internet since long before the World Wide Web (I got my first Compuserve Account in 1982, along with my Commodore 64) I was sort of weened in the ways of anonymity. Going "online" meant going online with a "screenname" (a "handle" to put it in CB Radio Terms) so that no one knew who you really were. This was especially useful when using a 300 Baud Modem to log onto a strange bulletinboard with a long distance call to San Francisco in the middle of the night (a bulletin board you found in the classified ads in the back of BYTE Magazine...) This pseudo self was very effective for flaming people on the boards with stupid and inane comments, a practice that was practically an art form in the day. Years later, upon getting divorced and finding myself suddenly single, I embraced the world of online dating... once again protected by the Scarlett Letter: In this case the "A" was for "Anonymity." I could flirt and chat and charm, all under the guise of an anonymous profile. In the business world, running several Public Companies, I further honed my skills for secrecy, with fear of "selective disclosure" training me to keep things close to the vest (even though I hadn't actually worn a vest since my Bar Mitzvah!)

Even this blog, loosely launched in 2004, was first published under my anonymous dating screenname and had no public connection to the real me. Of course that has all changed. Now you can get my contact info, my detailed bio on LinkedIN, my Twitter updates, my professional info, pictures of me and mine, and a wealth of peeks at my person that surely must border on TMI -- too much information.

Why the change?

Two words. Social Networking. To truly leverage the power of today's amazing tools of communication and connection, you cannot be nameless. You cannot make a mark if nobody can recognize your mark. With so many touchpoints and vectors, so many avenues to access -- each overlapping and interlacing in so many ways -- every blogpost, comment, update, email, IM and text message you post, leave or send, has a residual value that will only inure to your benefit if it can be attributed to YOU. If you are going to flitter on Twitter, pounce on Pownce, write Haiku on Jaiku, make facetime on Facebook, have a fling on Ning, take up space on MySpace and just be a part of the Community... then you must stand up, open up, take off the the Kimono and take CREDIT for your words, thoughts, opinions and actions. Will you make mistakes? Sure. Will you say something stupid, or overly obvious, or ten minutes after everyone else in the world has already said the same thing? Sure. But that's ok, because you will be in the game, and to be in the game that's part of the game. And in time you will gain both confidence and credibility, and the value of your connections will far surpass the fear of being non-anonymous!

Geeks vs. Romans

I recently went on a vacation to Italy. Although it was purely a vacation, I wanted to have Internet access, and stay in touch with home base. I did NOT want to schlep my laptop along, and as a longstanding Sprint customer, I don't have a GSM phone. (My girlfriend does have an AT&T GSM phone, but, when in Rome I wanted to do as the Romans, but not PAY for the Roamin'!) Always looking for an excuse to acquire a new gadget, I picked up a NOKIA N800 for Internet access and to stay in touch with email, twitter, etc., as well as to use it as my European phone, taking advantage of VOIP with the slick N800 version of Gizmo Project. (Still waiting for the long promised N800 SKYPE client).

First off, I love the N800 and when you have wi-fi available, it is a sweet little Internet demon, making web based email and content a pocketful of fun... Did I say when you have wi-fi available? That's the hitch! I think my expectations of wi-fi proliferation in Italy were grossly overestimated. My first night in Rome, I was thrilled to see that my hotel had wi-fi in the lobby. After we settled into our room for the evening, I rushed downstairs, N800 in hand. The hotel wi-fi service was not free, and the onscreen login instructions were in Italian, so it took me several tries and finally some translation from the concierge to get the right info into the right fields in order to buy an hour for 3 Euros. At a different hotel in Florence, I had to join with yet another wi-fi provider, this time for 25 Euros, for a block of five hours, good for a year. Of course, the rest of the trip, I never encountered another hotspot where I could use the remainder of my time on the 25 Euro account.

I became hot for hot spots, and everywhere we went, I whipped out the N800 to see if there was a wi-fi signal... Note to self: Saying, "Hang on a minute Honey, I want to see if there is wi-fi here" is a surefire way to take the romance out of any quaint and charming Tuscany cafe... I even found myself piggy backing a signal from a nearby office building while our Tour Bus was stopping to pick up passengers... only to lose my email as the bus pulled away...

So the net, net, is that the net is not as pervasive as I wish it would be. And my girlfriend's $400 phone bill was proof positive that Geek or not, when in Rome we paid for the Roamin'!

UPDATE: Skype for the N800 is now available and it is SWEET! Kissed my Gizmo goodbye...