SFWeekly Web Editor Alexia Tsotsis (not pictured left) spent some time early this morning trying out Chatroulette, a website that connects random strangers for a video chat. The results are unlikely to surprise you. Unless you are new to this whole Internet thing. Screen shots of some of her more entertaining chats are below the post.

Harkening back to the days of A/S/L, the random vidchat service Chatroulette is one of those online arenas where not being a white male looking to get off puts you in a definite minority. Founded by a 17 year-old Russian high school student named Andrew Ternovskiy, the service is a more successful Omegle, combining elements of the MTV show Next with vidchat capabilities.

Aspiring chatees click to play and as an escape latch you or your partner can hit Next anytime if you get bored, scared, or have to get back to work. The Report video as inappropriate button also seems to provide some comfort, but by judging by the nsfw fare served to me last night, doesn't provide much of a threat.

I pressed play last night at around 3:00 am PST and after about 45 clicks on Next encountered 5 straight up penis shots, a lot of camera disabled chats, two women who automatically clicked Next once they figured out that I too was a female, and a lot of very grateful looking guys, including a Chinese fan of Google and a French guy in indoor sunglasses, who asked me whether I was a more dominate lady or submissive woman in the hope that I would be the former.

Out of the 10,920 of my fellow Chatroulette participants, my Roulettees were a good cross section of Internet humanity. And while I did not encounter the suicide hanging videos alluded to in many of the chats, things like did you hear the one about the guy who shot himself in the bath tub, were brought up in conversation quite a few times, as examples of just how crazy Chatroulette can get.

Anywhere you get a mass of people communicating uncensored (and yes much like 4chan.org, China has not yet blocked Chatroulette) will be subject to typical groupthink behavior like urban myths and requests for interaction better left to the casual encounters section of Craigslist. Nonetheless, the service's potential for more substantial acts of communication is formidable.

Chatroulette is what you'd expect it to be, micro-interactive reality TV with a large heaping of cybersex. While most people are (whether they admit it or not) voyeurs the fact that Chatroulette lets the both participants see each other limits the site's potential user base to the weirdos and despite piquing VC Fred Wilson's interest it doesn't seem like there's currently enough weirdos to turn the humble startup into something mainstream.

One Roulettee, when asked what he thought the service was most useful for, responded, connecting with people around the world. Yeah, and asking them to show you their boobs.

To be fair, these two developments are really far apart in their delivery dates. The Gmail status update could come as soon as tomorrow, whereas the the speech-to-text-to-speech translation system is still a ways out. You can definitely see just how much work Google needs to do by trying to read your Google Voice voicemail transcriptions. (Voice search works better on Android 2.1 because you're talking slower and enunciating.) But both these features point in the same direction many of the company's other products have been hinting at. Here's a list of Google's major products, in case you forgot, and which sector of communication they want to dominate.

Google Voice: This is a big one, and it'll be the most natural interface for Google to slot in the voice-translation into. If you're using it the way Google wants you to use it, you're already piping all your voice calls and SMS through Google's tubes. And refining speech to text gives them a good idea of your interests and what you're talking about, allowing them to better serve up the relevant ads to you during calls.

Gmail: Having access to at least one end of everyone's email conversations, outside of business emails, gives Google the ability to be a gateway for most of your written communications. But that's not enough for Google, which is why they developed...

Google Wave: It's email, message boards, chat rooms and collaboration software all in one, except every participant needs a Google account. This closes that "openness" loophole that email has, and forces everyone into Google's biosphere. So this, and Gmail, should make sure that every medium-length communique passes through Google's maw for analysis. But what about shorter and longer forms? Update: Thanks commenters, for reminding me that Google made Wave open, so people can create their own Wave servers to talk to each other with the Wave protocol. The point still remains, that if you were going to use a service, wouldn't you rather use the service from the company that created the protocol, for performance and feature reasons?

Google Docs: For longer documents.

Google Talk: For short blasts of instant messaging, video chats and some audio chatting.

Picasa and YouTube: Communication doesn't have to be all text-based, you putting your photos and videos online count too.

Android and Chrome OS: By getting you down at the operating system level, Google can theoretically know every kind of communication you perform. It knows who you talk to, how you do it and when you do it. It can even shape the how by delivering the experience themselves.

Everything else. There's Checkout, Finance, Maps, Reader, News and other apps, which fill in the other forms of communication or expression that aren't quite covered by the major products above. One major missing piece is social networking, where Google basically failed before with its Orkut service (except for Brazil), so this new Twitter/Gmail hybrid might be their next entrance into the space.

But why do they want these things? Why would Google want to be the middleman between you and the world? To sell you ads, of course. And don't think Google is going to stop at just helping you talk over the internet or over the phone, they're going to reach into meatspace as well. How? One step is making that speech-to-speech translation portable, so you can do a sort of near-field communication with someone else with the same device while at the same time being able to look them in the face. Then, blast you two with the appropriate ads on the billboard next to you.

Having just experienced a seriously nerd hyped event in the last week that let me down, I'm sure hoping that Apple can live up to the hype.

If they can pull off a Twitter type coup they are set.

When Twitter launched even the nerds were saying things, I don't get it and What's the point of these short messages? And now, Twitter rules the communication buzz and has taken in over $100m in funding.

Apple doesn't need the funding but as a computer company that has become an electronics company with a few key products, this new tablet and its success are paramount for the growth of the company over the next 5 years. Even with their billions in the bank, the iPod and iPhone are getting tired.

The success of the tablet depends heavily on the user experience that can be created for it. The most important elements that create that experience will first be the form factor. Judging on Apple's reputation for impeccable industrial design, I would suspect they have nailed this one.

Next in that line of elements is speed. It needs to boot instant on with the ability to be used immediately. That goes for any software that is on the device, even if it is web connected. There shouldn't be any lag time in getting up an running. It's the real-time web and this needs to be the real-time tablet.

Lots of news on this today and we'll follow it diligently for you and throw in our two cents.

If you're looking for updates throughout the day check out @tabletville on Twitter.

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Apple Device Needs to be the Real-Time Tablet is a post from: TechStartups.com

To learn how to design and deliver better presentations, we need to pull from many educational sources. Books are good, but which ones? I don't usually suggest PowerPoint or Keynote "how-to" books, but instead recommend reading books from various design and communication fields to stretch your knowledge and perspective. Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte is great, of course, and there are many others that I've suggested over the years. Below are ten additional books I can highly recommend; three of them I have recommended before.

PRESENTATIONS & SPEAKING

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo.
Since I began this website in 2005, I've talked about the presentation style of Steve Jobs ad nauseam (for example: here, here, here, here, here, and many more). Carmine Gallo does a great job of summarizing all the many good things that Jobs does in his famous Apple keynotes, and he provides concrete takeaways. The point is not to present like Steve Jobs each case after all is very different but there are many lessons to be learned by careful observation of the Steve Jobs keynote. A very nice read that just may change the way you present. (Amazon link.)

Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun.
I met Scott Berkun in Sweden this year and spent some time with him in Denmark discussing public speaking and what it takes to be an effective presenter. Scott, a former Microsoft manager, is a great guy and he's a very experienced presenter. If you do a lot of public speaking, you'll get a kick out of Scott's stories. And if you are thinking about starting a speaking career, Scott provides a lot of interesting tips and lessons. Teachers who speak in front of people every day may also find the book useful. (Amazon link.)


PHOTOGRAPHY

Scott Kelby's Digital Photography Boxed Set (Volumes 1, 2, and 3) by Scott Kelby.
I have almost all of Scott Kelby's photography books. He writes in a very informal, engaging style and there's a reason he's the #1 computer book author for five straight years: his books help people learn. I love Scott's work so much, I asked him to contribute tips for the Presentation Zen Design book (he offers 10 tips for taking better photos). These Digital Photography books are colorful, instructive, and aimed at the novice photographer who wants to get a lot better. I found them very useful (especially for the price). You can buy the books individually or as a set. (Amazon link.)

VISUALIZATION OF DATA

Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis by Stephen Few.
I have all of Stephen Few's books he's the Zen Master of presenting data as far as I am concerned. I saw Stephen present in Seattle this summer at the Tableau Conference and we had a chance to spend some time together before the event. He's a fantastic presenter on stage and he's a very down-to-earth guy who knows how to visualize data and how to help others get better at displaying quantitative information more clearly. This is a big hardcover book with some really good lessons. (Amazon link.)

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Visual Language for Designers: Principles for Creating Graphics that People Understand by Connie Malamed.
This is a really large book that begins with a section on how we process visual information and then goes on to introduce principles and techniques that help you understand how to organize for perception, how to direct the eye, clarify complexity, and simplify visuals. This hardcover book has many excellent examples. Beginners will benefit tremendously from the book, but I think many designers will also find the book a good addition to their library. Connie Malamed's website. (Amazon link.)

Before & After: How to Design Cool Stuff by John McWade.
John McWade known to many as "the world's first desktop publisher" is the founder and creative director of Before & After and the author of numerous books on graphic design (this is his latest). John was kind enough to contribute his tips for making better slides for the PZD book. I've been a big fan of John's for a long time and this latest book is his best one yet. Loads of simple, practical, visual lessons. Check out the Before & After website. (Amazon link.)

Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual by Timothy Samara.
This is a really good book that I have mentioned before which both beginners and experienced designers may enjoy. The book does an excellent job at covering the fundamentals but also goes into some depth with many good examples. I like how Samara starts out the book by discussing just what graphic design is and what designers do. I especially like his "20 Basic Rules of Good Design." (Amazon link.)

A Field Guide to Digital Color by Maureen Stone.
There are many books on color, but this one focuses on digital color and provides a great deal of depth. This is not really a book for novices, but it's an excellent book for designers of all types. I met Maureen Stone in Seattle this summer and saw one of her presentations. She's an excellent presenter and teacher. Maureen spent twenty years working at Xerox PARC on color printing, digital color, interactive computer graphics, illustration and design systems. She knows her stuff. (She was also kind enough to contribute a nice callout section for the color chapter in the PZD book.) This is an excellent book. (Amazon link.)

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition) by Steve Krug.
You might think a book on web usability design has little to do with presentations, but the lessons in this simple book have applications beyond the web. If you have even just a small interest in how to design websites that minimizes cognitive strain and make information clearer, you may find this book helpful. This classic is only about 200 pages and is a quick read with many good lessons that will make you a better judge of what works and what doesn't in a website. Steve Krug's website. (Amazon link.)

CREATIVITY

If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit by Breda Ueland.
I have mentioned this book before, but it's a must-read. This is not only a book about writing. In fact, it's much more a book about the imagination, spirit, and creativity. We need more art and creativity in our personal and professional lives; this book gets you thinking. A lot of people, including myself, have found this simple book to be quite inspirational. It was first published in 1938 and it's still a very relevant book today. (Amazon link.)

Are you the sum of your thoughts? It's a hard question to answer, right? I'm trying to sort this out and would like your help.

The dissonance between the physical and ethereal nature of disembodied communication like the internet is a minefield for human interaction. Primarily because we rely heavily on physical cues and environmental variables to base our levels of connection with a person. We rely on their actions, not just words.

My assertion is that social networks exacerbate this inability to fully understand the people we are linked with in these networks due to experiencing their random thoughts.

Sure it is interesting to read what someone is doing throughout their day, but the only value is what the reader places on that thought to make it a reality in their own mind. Maybe that is the nature of connection?

What I am really trying to understand is that if a person can create real bonds simply through sharing their thoughts in social media?

I've personally been at what turned into social media for over 7 years. I've become many things to many people based on the types of content that I was producing. Much of that content was dependent on what I was interested in or experiencing at that time. Like this piece.

The sum of interactions in social media are related to those fleeting thoughts. When shared repeatedly with networks of people a notion of who that individual is are created. This give us the ability to create baselines for who we think a person is. A baseline for example being, they're nice or they are a jerk.

Again, we are only dealing with thoughts to create these notions. They are assumptions as to the true nature of a person that most have yet to meet. I would posit that what happens in social media and across social networks is the connecting of thoughts. If you like someone, you like their thoughts. If you dislike someone, you dislike their thoughts. Any judgments are based on these and most likely very little on physical actions. So, if you met them in the real world you would need to attempt to ascertain all over again who that individual in front of you is.

Maybe we're connecting thoughts first and then people with social media?

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Social Media: Connecting Thoughts Not People is a post from: TechStartups.com

I am a huge fan of unconventional problem solving and taking approaches to situations that aren't populist. Doing so often requires inspiration from another source unrelated to the matter at hand.

Finding that inspiration is as easy as looking around for a place to stand that you have never stood before. A simple change in perspective is all that it can take to trigger something within you.

.

Example: A Place To Stand

About twice a year I to get some inspiration I stand in a different place online. Since I spend most of my time in front of a computer and the ambient transiency in my space is pretty static I'll stand on the corner of internet and Jeff Bridges dot com and visit his latest posts.

Bridges' website is an exercise in the basics of human communication with static images and image map links to other content but the simplicity is amazingly effective. Why? Because the web has come become a complicated mess of information and displays that vie for attention while Bridges keeps it simple. The site is art.

The effectiveness is deduction of distilling a message down to a graphic is reminiscent of something that Madison Avenue creatives would crank out for a print campaign. With simple copy in the images that he creates they're easier to grasp than a Tweet. The visual tapestry that Bridges creates is linear like a blog, textured like a painting and conversive like asking your grandmother about her past.

What Bridges has done with his personal site is so far from the norm that it has taken me nearly 250 words to describe. I should have done it with an image instead!

Whether you are planning your next startup, in the middle of one or looking to do a site redesign it is helpful to find the right sources of inspiration. Often they are at the very edges of your comfort zone and occasionally just beyond it. Let them gestate and the assimilate them when the time is right.

Photo credit: Screen shot from www.jeffbridges.com

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

How To Get Inspired is a post from: TechStartups.com

Update: Threadsy is offering Tech Startups readers access to the private beta get your access on! Thanks @dskendall.

The story here really is theory vs. utility. Wave is a tool that comes from a part of Google dedicated to R&D and future earnings, Google Labs.

Threadsy comes from a startup with an agenda like making money in the short term with its software.

Both applications are ambitious in trying to solve a couple of problems at once.

Centralize tools that we use to communicate

Online communication tools are decentralized because most of them are products of individual need. They are solutions to problems that certain users were having with other ways of communicating. It wasn't a lack of vision that caused this. It was market demand. The same demand that is making it necessary to begin to centralize these tools.

Twitter, Facebook and email are the dominant players right now. Sure I know email isn't really a player but it is a mode of communication that is decentralized. It is really a collective of the GMail, HotMail and Yahoo!

This new aggregation of the communication modes makes it easier for end users to locate conversations and friends across networks. Think of it as that nebulous space between AT&T and Verizon where there networks connect. The difference in this case is that Wave and Threadsy are destinations where these connections are made.

Organizing the diaspora of personal brand

Users of the social media tools that are integrated into Wave and Threadsy have worked countless hours building a brands on varying sites. By combining the communication mechanisms they essentially combine a users online brand by centralizing a the users identity.

A users communication styles do vary based on the tool they are using but when centralized into one application it forces users to organize their collective into a single brand. It is a necessity of using the tool, Wave or Threadsy.

At this stage of Google Wave vs. Threadsy, I'm placing my bet on Threadsy to produce a tool that quicker than Google that will meet market need simply based on utility.

Google has a long way to go with the theory of Wave, especially on the front-end if they choose to compete in this space. I would assume that they will continue down a path to make Wave the platform that powers other real-time applications like Pulse from Novell.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Google Wave vs. Threadsy is a post from: TechStartups.com

In part 1 and part 2, we looked at how the real-time Web is a new form of communication, creates a new body of content, is real time, is public, and has an explicit social graph associated with it. A final characteristic of the real-time Web is that it carries with it an implicit model of federation.

Sponsor

A number of sources both generate and consume real-time streams. As a result, many of these new companies are becoming communication carriers, passing their users' real-time threads through their networks to other networks. This is more than simply being open (i.e. more than allowing data to be imported and exported). Just as in shipping and transportation and other communication industries before it (telephone, Internet packets, and email, to name a few), the real-time Web is developing a federated model of transmission whereby companies formally or tacitly agree to facilitate transmission and perform actions on behalf of end-users within the eco-system.

It's hard to say whether this model has arisen because of a conscious strategic effort to build a new industry, or because building a fully closed world would have required just too many resources, or because of a collective effort among business friends and acquaintances to develop open products and open interactions so that cool new things could be created. It's probably a combination of all three, but considering the history of the people at Twitter and FriendFeed (Paul Buchheit, one of FriendFeed's founders, is credited with coining Google's unofficial "Don't be evil" slogan), the open and cool factors are probably a big part of the equation.

At this point, there seems to be a general willingness to accept and transmit messages from outside sources (carrying costs are not significant, and transmission is automated via APIs, and so overhead is minimal). That said, infrastructure costs are bound to increase, competition will heat up, illegitimate companies will spot opportunities, and monetization strategies will be devised, which will all put strain on this truly open exchange.

As in the past, formal carrier agreements could be set down, governments could decide to regulate markets, or other forces could come into play that would transform what is now essentially a free-for-all bazaar into a marketplace with hierarchy. All the same, the expectation of openness and transparent transmission will be difficult to counteract or stop. So, new companies that enter the space, even bigger and better funded ones, will have to adhere to the same model of federation that these pioneering companies have established.

Summary

Whether Twitter will remain the focal point of the real-time Web or be supplanted by another or several companies (as happened in the social network space, first with Friendster, then MySpace, and now LinkedIn and Facebook) is unclear. The underlying characteristics of the real-time Web, however, are defining the next major stage of the Internet and will spread throughout its infrastructure in years to come.

Broader trends on the Web point to users having discrete data and services follow them as they move around the Web. Fred Wilson, a principal of Union Square Ventures, has called this the "de-portalization of the Web," and John Borthwick, CEO of betaworks, has co-opted Chris Anderson's phrase "small pieces, loosely joined" to describe the fast-moving risk-taking small companies that work in the space. Both individuals are leading investors in Twitter and other real-time Web companies.

The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information (e.g. people, organizations, articles and videos, product offerings, store listings, and blog posts) and associated meta data (e.g. images, addresses, reviews, ratings) that move seamlessly around the Web, being slotted where appropriate. These units of information can be organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences.

In some cases, locations are integrated into these units as supplementary information. For example, Google and Yahoo now include map locations and reviews as part of their search listings. Their search engine algorithms read markup formats in the form of microformats and RDFa that are embedded on Web pages. These formats contain tags denoting names of people and organizations, geo-locations, and ratings and reviews. Both companies report great results from the inclusion of this data, both in increased click-through rates and reduced bounce rates. Support for other structured data is almost sure to follow. Reading tags on a page and doing something useful with them in a search result is not a novel concept, but the rapidly growing support of these tags across the Web is a clear sign that data is becoming much more identifiable and actionable.

This trend towards open and accessible data is even more obvious when you consider the real-time stream for all of the reasons mentioned above: atomic real-time messages, public accessibility, attached social graphs. In a sense, this is similar to the vision of the semantic Web. Tim Berners-Lee said at the TED conference in the fall of 2008, "Twenty years ago, I asked everyone to put their documents on this Web thing... Now I want you to put your data on the Web." The difference is that the effort to make data accessible and more actionable on the real-time Web is being made through methods and interactions not necessarily prescribed by the W3C.

Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C use the term "linked data" to refer to the latter's initiative to expose data and make it accessible. "Actionable data" might be a better term to use for the real-time Web because it doesn't imply a particular approach but merely refers to the concept of making data more identifiable and independent. Linked data refers specifically to using RDF and other W3C protocols to link important concepts, a prescription that is overly complex and not likely to address many of the usage cases on the Web.

The real-time stream is a massive body of continously created and authentic content that by itself would be significant. But when it is added to and integrated with other information on other sites, and when derivatives can be created in a number of dimensions, this concept of actionable data reaches the tipping point. In non-Silicon Valley business circles, Twitter is criticized for not having a solid revenue model. Those on the inside (investors and advisers), however, believe the criticism is short-sighted. As with most communication platforms, the value of the network increases exponentially as the size of the network increases.

By having a low barrier to adoption, the network is able to grow quickly. Only after a critical mass has been reached, and after other companies and communities of interest have helped shape how the platform is used, will it become clear what people are willing to pay for. While they may not have a solid grasp yet of exactly how to make money, those who are building companies and investing in the space do know there will be opportunities. In their minds, the real-time stream is at an early stage in its cycle, one that will likely last 5 to 7 years.

If the real-time Web and its fundamental characteristics are widely understood, its benefits and opportunities can extend throughout the Internet and across all industries.

Read part 1 and part 2 of this series.

Guest author: Ken Fromm is a serial entrepreneur who has been active during both the Internet and Web 2.0 innovation cycles. He co-founded two companies, Vivid Studios, one of the first interactive agencies, and Loomia, one of the top recommendation, discovery, and personalization companies. He has worked at the leading edge of recommendations and personalization, interactive development, e-commerce and online advertising, semantic technologies and information interoperability, digital publishing, and digital telephony. He is currently advising a number of startups and looking at the next big thing in Web 3.0. He can be found on Twitter at @frommww.

Soren Gordhamer is the author of Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected (HarperOne, 2009). His homepage is www.sorengordhamer.com. You can follow him on Twitter.

As a company, Whole Foods has impressively embraced social media more than most, gathering over 1.2 million followers on Twitter and 123,000 fans on Facebook in the process. While it is easy to understand why a relatively young company or one started by a tech-savvy founder would so completely embrace social media communication tools, it is quite a bit more remarkable for an almost 30 year old established brick and mortar company with roughly 50,000 employees and over 270 stores worldwide to have done so.

I recently visited the Whole Foods headquarters in Austin, Texas to meet with members of their new media team, including Bill Tolany, the company's Senior Coordinator of Integrated Media, and Winnie Hsia, who oversees the @wholefoods account. I wanted to know how Whole Foods integrated social media tools into their communications strategy, and what lessons had they learned from doing so. Below are five of the lessons that Whole Foods shared with me during our chat.

1. Make Content Increasingly Relevant

Whole Foods started initially with just the @wholefoods account but as it gathered followers, they realized it had limitations: while it was useful for news with national appeal, it was less so for sharing local information or addressing specific interests of customers. A percentage of their followers, for example, might be interested in an event happening at their New York City store or reviews of certain food items, but many others would not be interested.

To address this, they encouraged all their stores to start their own accounts and tweet about events at their store and news related to that local area. They also created separate accounts for specific issues, such as one for wine and one for cheese, where the head of those departments post and interact with customers. In fact, with over 150 company Twitter accounts and new ones added regularly, they likely have one of the largest corporate presences on Twitter. The goal with so many different accounts is to create increasingly relevant, and often local content.

2. Go Where Your Customers Are

When asked how they initially decided to use Twitter as a platform, which was pre-Oprah and before most other companies their size had done so, they emphasized that their goal has always been to interact with their customers no matter where those customers are. As Twitter gained momentum, they realized that a presence on it made sense, though they never foresaw that they would get over a million followers and how much staff time it would take to manage.

The conversation with customers, however, is essential to the company, whether it happens in person at a store or on a social network. Whole Foods, in fact, is active on numerous social media communication channels, not just Facebook and Twitter: they also have a Flickr page, an actively updated blog with videos on cooking healthy meals, and have employees responding on the customer feedback site Get Satisfaction. The goal is not just to pick one place and force customers to come to them, but to meet customers on their home court, wherever that may be.

3. Loosen Control from the Top

Likely the most difficult task for any large company when embracing social media is learning to let go of control. On one hand, most companies will want millions of followers on sites like Twitter, yet on the other hand, large corporations also tend to be cautious when taking risks. They're unsure how much control they are willing to relinquish when it comes to governing how social media is used.

Whole Foods seems to really understand that such a top-down approach does not work in the age of social media. In fact, I was initially surprised that several people I interviewed while at the company headquarters that managed different corporate Whole Foods Twitter accounts used them quite differently from each other. Some, for example, shared personal information while others kept posts strictly to business. When I asked Tolany, who oversees the department, about it, he said that it did not surprise him at all. While they encourage some basic guidelines, Whole Foods has learned that for social media to work well, whoever is managing an account needs to be authentic, allow his or her personality to come through, and have fun in the process. If management tries to exercise too much control, the account will be less likely to succeed at engaging people.

4. Decide What Channel to Use for What Purpose

With a presence on so many social networks, Whole Foods tries to figure out how best to use each service. For example, they have found that for customer service, Twitter is much more effective than Facebook. On Twitter people can easily @reply a question and they can quickly respond. On the other hand, for rich media, including embedding videos or longer posts or responses, Facebook tends to be better. Likewise, for posting original content, their blog serves as the hub, allowing staff from various departments to share material. The company also created a nifty iPhone application with 2,000 searchable recipes and a store locator, which is a great platform for disseminating static information.

5. Let the Conversation Happen

My visit to the Whole Foods headquarter came at an interesting time. The previous week, Facebook, Twitter, and various blogs were ablaze with (mostly negative) comments in response to Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey's, Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal titled The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare. We did not dive too much into the Mackey Op-Ed issue, but we did talk about whether having such a strong presence on Facebook and Twitter has allowed people to more easily express anger at them. During our conversation it became clear that Whole Foods realizes that people are going to talk about the company, both positively and negatively, whether they are have a presence on social networks or not. It is helpful, though, to know what people are saying and to be able to respond if necessary.

In fact, when Mackey responded to some of the criticism on his company blog, rather than turn off comments to the post, they encouraged people to express their feedback, and greater than 3,000 people did.

Conclusion

The central take away I got from my visit was the importance of engaging with one's customers no matter where they spend time. When I asked Tolany and Hsia what advice they would give to companies thinking of using social media channels like Twitter, they seemed to both agree that the first task is to know if your customers (or the potential customers you want to engage) are present there. Then and only then does it make sense to invest time on a site.

I also got that part of what has motivated Whole Foods' efforts in social media and what can account for much of their success is a willingness to be bold and take risks. Such boldness can of course have its dangers (such as when writing Op-Ed articles about delicate social issues) yet this has also helped them plow ahead in social media while other businesses their size waited cautiously in the background to see if it was safe or if these sites would gain in popularity.

Of course, any time a company opens up and has a presence on a communication channel like Facebook or Twitter, users can use those sites to criticize as much as to praise. Dealing with negative feedback, however, is better than not having a presence at all. I think Whole Foods is showing that the companies who keep such channels open, and listen to the unpleasant along with the pleasant feedback, will better know what matters to their customers and what company policies may need to change, which is likely to win them support in the end.

Whole Foods, like many other companies, is still finding its way in this age of social media, but they are showing that a non-technology company of their size can engage and innovate in this area.

More social media resources from Mashable:

- Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy?
- 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy
- 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy
- 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business
- 7 Secrets to Tweeting Your Corporate Culture

Tags: blogging, business, engagement, facebook, social media, twitter, whole foods

But first lawsuits first.

Advertise.com, which was purchased by ABCsearch.com earlier this year and rebranded as such a few months ago, is a variation on AOL-owned Advertising.com, the beleaguered Internet company claims. In legalese, that translates as follows:

Advertise.com recently commenced use of the virtually identical and confusingly similar designation Advertise.com and design in connection with the same and complimentary services as those offered by Plaintiffs under their federally-registered Advertising.com name and marks and their Ad.com name and marks.

Update: looks like Advertise.com sued AOL first (August 17, 2009)

A search of the USPTO database shows that AOL does in fact have three registered trademarks for Advertising.com, but all are design trademarks, which means they stand little chance of exercising trademark rights over something as generic as the domain name advertise.com. Granted, the logo looks vaguely similar, but virtually identical and confusing' it ain't.

Note that AOL doesn't even effectively market Advertising.com as a business unit anymore - although it may soon recommence doing just that - and redirects the domain name to its Platform-A website instead (AOL rebranded it to the name of this whole-owned subsidiary in April last year and now prefers AOL Advertising as the overarching denominator).

So why would anyone confuse Advertise.com for an AOL property? It just doesn't make any sense to try and claim ownership over any domain name with a variation on the word advertising' in it. What's next? Ads.com? Advertisement.com? In the court documents, embedded below, AOL even boasts the fact that Advertise.com has only about 25,000 unique visitors per month, so what's really at stake here?

The second case is even more bizarre: although often used in its communication, Ad.com is apparently not a trademark owned by AOL, although the company has filed an application for it in the past. But that domain name is actually owned by a Marcos Guillen, who recently sold it to Directi and Skenzo for $1.4 million. Well, almost sold it, because the deal fell through after all, according to industry watchers due to the fact that the mark has not yet acquired distinctiveness for any of the applicants - including AOL - following a recent examination. Guillen has now filed a lawsuit against Directi and Skenzo for backing out of its auction purchase of Ad.com, seeking $1.4 million, prejudgment interest, and/or damages according to proof.

Aol

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Based on the 4 defined criteria, all sculptures are comparable in their form, size and expression. A particle system, which represents a persons interests, spreads in space until it is bal anced. The speed of this expansion, the thickness of the created hull and the starting point of the drawing process is connected to the factors age, activity and communication behavior. The work is accompanied by a nicely illustrated book.

See also Dream Keeper and the more "abstract" data sculptures from Loren Madsen, Nicolas Lobo, Joshua Callaghan and Pravin Sathe.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a ban on a stock market practice known as "flash trading," where supercomputers get access to information milliseconds before other traders and can rapidly buy and sell in ways that are argued to influence the market unfairly - thus discouraging mere mortals from participating.

Many bleeding-edge trends in the consumer web play out writ large in financial markets; as all of us look at the growing prominence of real-time information on the web, the debate over flash stock trading raises issues worth considering outside the stock markets as well.

Sponsor

If the real time web at large grows up open and democratic, then we're likely to see innovation, understanding and growth. If it's priced out of reach to all but marketing and state interests, then an experience analogous to that of small-time stock traders today could become what the web at large looks like.

It's easy for technologists to say that this is progress and rejecting the advantages technology brings would demand a return to time before the abacus. It's not so easy to explain why we have to take an all-or-nothing approach to judging technologies and their implications - why not look at them one at a time and evaluate them intelligently?

Here's how the introduction of real time information is being debated regarding financial markets, followed by some thoughts about the analogous transformation going on around the web.

This isn't just a story about robot stock traders and the SEC; it's also a story about Twitter, Facebook and the Pushbutton Web.

Robots in Financial Markets

Last month the New York Times' Charles Duhigg wrote a high-profile story about the practice of high frequency trading, including this juicy description of the practice:

Powerful algorithms -- "algos," in industry parlance -- execute millions of orders a second and scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously. They can spot trends before other investors can blink, changing orders and strategies within milliseconds.

High-frequency traders often confound other investors by issuing and then canceling orders almost simultaneously. Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading. And their computers can essentially bully slower investors into giving up profits -- and then disappear before anyone even knows they were there.

Rich Miller, writing at Data Center Knowledge, a blog that tracks the powerful computers that high frequency traders (among many other industries) use, called the article one-sided and inconsiderate of the argument that "this activity provides liquidity to execute trades that would otherwise not be possible, making the market more efficient." He also said the press was widening the debate over the practice by bringing it into the mainstream.

Now U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) has sent a letter to the SEC this week, calling for action to be taken against the practice of flash trading in particular, the act of selling for a fee access to trading information milliseconds before it is otherwise available. He argues that the practice "creates a two-tiered system where a privileged group of insiders receives preferential treatment, depriving others of a fair price for their transactions. If allowed to continue, these practices will undermine the confidence of ordinary investors, and drive them away from our capital markets."

Schumer focuses on the early access to information, but always in the context of the computer-driven trading that occurs based on it.

Trader John Hempton writes that critics over-estimate the financial impact of flash traded stock, needlessly complicating a situation that he describes with the following, fascinating, story:

We trade electronically at our fund. We were recently trading in a stock with a large spread. I have changed the numbers so as not to identify the stock - but the ratios are about right. The bid was about 129.50, offer was about 131.50. We did not want to cross the spread - so when we bid for the stock we bid $129.55. Within a second a computer (possibly at our own broker but it makes no difference which broker) bid $129.60 for a few hundred shares. We fiddled for a while changing our bid and watching the bot change theirs. We would have loved to think we were frustrating the computer - but alas it was just a machine - and we were people up late at night.

Actually obtaining the stock required that we paid up - and when we did so it was probably a computer that sold the stock to us.

...It is always there - even when buying defaulted debt that trades once per month. We simply ALWAYS find the bot.

What About Real-time Robots on the Web?

Could the real time web give some people such an unfair advantage over everyone else that non-early adopters of new technologies or people outside of marketing firms could be left out in the cold? Presuming we're talking about important, actionable information online and not just real-time chat and fun - it's possible. The question is: will the most important parts of the real time web be open and democratized, or proprietary and shared only with those who can pay a high price for access? That question hasn't been answered yet.

If you were among the people who purchased the new Breaking News Online (BNO) iPhone app (released an eternity ago, yesterday!) then today you probably found out about the two US journalists being freed from North Korea and the shooting in Pennsylvania at least 45 minutes before almost anyone else did. (CNN posted a link to local PA news 45 minutes after the BNO network published.) That notification system costs $1.99 to purchase and $1 per month to stay subscribed.

If you've visited Yahoo's social-bookmarking turned real-time news service Delicious since this morning, you've seen that hot news links are now found not just by vote counting, but with a new method augmented by tracking the open, rapid conversations on Twitter.

These are innovations built out of elbow grease and publicly available feeds of data. Yahoo might be, but the scrappy guys at Breaking News Online definitely aren't, using software something like IBM's new stream processing software, for which it will charge "at least" hundreds of thousands of dollars.

No, this real-time public web is very low cost and increasingly both open sourced and decentralized. It's akin to what Anil Dash calls the pushbutton web.

Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.

As long as it's open and low cost, real time information on the web should be as democratic and fair as computer use is. It's not perfect, but it's no longer the David and Goliath-on-steroids fight that critics of high frequency stock trading say that market has become because of real time stock data.

The Risk: Facebook

The real time web is a shimmering mass of conversation and data, but there's no guarantee that it's going to stay open, free and democratic forever. Already, in fact, there's no bigger river of the real time social web than Facebook. Facebook is simply huge, it holds huge sums of information and so far it allows aggregate access to no one. As far as we know.

If Facebook, or some other equally important site of the real time web, began offering access to its data but pricing mere mortals out of that market - then we could have a situation where individual software developers and social scientists were like grandpa reading the stock pages in the newspaper and huge marketing firms and government agencies had the kind of advantage that high frequency traders are alleged to have in financial markets.

Anil Dash puts it this way:

Pushbutton technologies are not just free and open, they're decentralized, which is a serious threat to the "lobster trap" model of social software. We can expect serious competition from the centralized networks that are currently building these sorts of systems. If a threat arises to Pushbutton's adoption, this is the most likely source. Worry? Definitely.

In addition to development concerns, there are also analysis concerns. If stock trading equals liquidity and knowledge is the new currency, then open access to aggregate data could be the equivalent of high-powered stock-trading tools for all instead of for just the already-richest few.

Some research has already been performed on the connection between communication on social networks and real-world events. The Information and Language Processing Systems Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam, for example, correlated mood messages on LiveJournal closely with world events. ("Mass increase in the level of worriedness around major weather phenomena, such as hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005 - Excitedness around global media and culture events, such as the release of a new Harry Potter book on July 15, 2005 - Mass increase in the level of distress and sadness after terror attacks, as witnessed by the response to the London bombings on July 7, 2005.")

Analysis of real time mass communication could lead to a world of innovation and understanding - if that communication is an open fire hose of data and not shared only with deep pocketed commercial partners.

Everything is Complicated, Some Can Afford to Ponder It

Is high frequency, low latency, computer executed, "flash" trading unfair? It must feel that way to individual and small investors who can't afford killer number-crunching robots - but it's also pretty awesome technology and is said to provide liquidity that the markets depend on.

Could the real time consumer web be made undemocratic by being priced out of reach for edge-case developers and social scientists outside of government and the corporate world? That could happen.

As we speak, though, there's a lot of innovation going on in the real time web that's open, based on standards and available to all of us. Let's hope it stays that way

People routinely use the Internet to find former classmates or individuals with similar interests.... there is no reason why law enforcement should not use this same resource to find fugitives or encourage members of the public to use social networking sites to report sightings of criminals.

If you haven't heard the story yet, a Chicago real estate company called Horizon Realty Group filed a lawsuit against one of its tenants on Monday. She apparently made a snarky remark on Twitter, claiming that the company didn't care about mold in her apartment.

Horizon is suing her for libel, looking for $50,000 in damages to their reputation.

She only had about 20 followers, so this looked like a pretty harsh David and Goliath story. Unfortunately, Horizon's legal and PR teams forgot what happened to Goliath.

By Tuesday afternoon, the story of Horizon's lawsuit had hit trending topics on Twitter. Which means that a peevish remark made in front of 20 people has now found its way to hundreds of thousands.

That megaphone is a lot more powerful than you think it is

Think you just have 20 followers? Think again. Your tweets are findable both on Twitter search and Google. And it's a routine practice for any smart company to look for its name regularly using both services.

Think the customer who just infuriated you has just 20 followers? Think again. Angry tenant Amanda Bonnen's megaphone was tiny, but the social web can't resist a juicy story. And the social web really can't resist a juicy Twitter story.

It's not about what you think is fair

Horizon Realty might be the most loveable, fair, decent and true company in the world. Right now, their name recognition has about as much appeal as Saddam Hussein. With mold.

Whether fair or not, Horizon has made a worldwide name for itself virtually instantly, connecting its brand with callous disregard for its tenants, or worse.

(Yes, there is such a thing as bad publicity. This is what it looks like.)

Do social media users read all the facts carefully before flaming? Of course they don't. Are there dozens of inaccurate accusations about Horizon flying around Twitter at the moment?

Absolutely.

Is that fair? No. Then again, filing a $50,000 lawsuit against a customer for a snarky remark made to a friend isn't going to strike many as entirely reasonable either.

The Meatball Sundae has no mercy

Horizon's Jeffrey Michael, trying to explain his position to the Sun-Times, said that Horizon has a good reputation to protect. His company says they can prove there wasn't any mold in Bonnen's apartment, and they couldn't let Bonnen bad-mouth them. So they took a traditional route. (Although it would have been somewhat more traditional to ask her to remove the remark before filing the lawsuit.)

A year and a half ago, in a post about Seth Godin's book Meatball Sundae, I wrote about my take on a nice little company called Kryptonite Locks.

Kryptonite got knocked down hard when they tried to play by old communication rules in a new communication environment. They hadn't actually done anything wrong, but they looked clueless, unfeeling, and arrogant.

You don't get to play by the old rules any more, and it doesn't matter what business you're in. You don't get the old privilege of anonymity. You don't get to bury your story on page 47.

There is no more page 47. Every story is somebody's page 1.

As a matter of fact, it isn't your story any more. It belongs to everyone, and they'll do what they please with it.

If you want to influence the conversation, you've actually got to get into the conversation. Respectfully. Meaningfully. Just because that's a social media clich doesn't mean you get to ignore it and hope it goes away.

The one-to-a-jillion aspect of social media means that any of us can hit the equivalent of the front page of the New York Times at any time. All that has to happen is that we find ourselves in the middle of a really interesting story.

So what's the story about you going to be?

(And if you work for a company, be sure and warn your legal team about Twitter users. You don't want to mess with those people we're crazy.)

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication. She also offers a pretty darned good free class on email marketing.

Background

The most interesting area of new development on the web is the innovation happening around realtime messaging, the ability to deliver updates to a website or application in one or two seconds. While various systems like Yahoo News Alerts or feed readers like Google Reader have offered some simple ways of delivering fairly fast notifications, they are still built on an infrastructure that relies upon requesting a web page repeatedly. These systems do the equivalent of hitting the "reload" button in your web browser over and over.

While those systems have been using these inefficient methods to deliver updates, newer platforms like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed have focused on building the infrastructure for efficient large-scale delivery of updates using their own proprietary networks. A lot of attention has been paid to Twitter's 140-character limit, or Facebook's News Feed, but the compelling technology that enables the user experience on these platforms is the immediacy with which updates are delivered. Earlier systems like instant messaging or chat allowed realtime messaging on a one-to-one or small group basis, but it's been harder to deliver those realtime messages to anyone in the world who wanted to receive them unless you had a lot of money, expertise and infrastructure.

Another barrier is that, while there are many different programs and clients that let you connect to Twitter or Facebook with your own applications, there haven't been any free and open options for delivering realtime messages to a large audience if you couldn't, or didn't want to, rely on those companies.

But recently, a few key pieces have fallen into place that make it inexpensive and relatively easy to add realtime messaging as an incremental upgrade to existing websites and web applications. This set of related technologies, which I'm calling the Pushbutton platform, will yield a broad new set of capabilities for users, publishers and developers on the web. Best of all, Pushbutton technologies are free, open and decentralized, meaning that the arrival of realtime on the web will not be owned or controlled by any single company.

Defining Pushbutton

The concept and potential of Pushbutton is a lot like Ajax it's not a single technology or invention, it's a whole family of technologies, some of which have been in development or deployment for nearly a decade, that together enable this new realtime web. Pushbutton's foundation is built on these systems:

• Atom and RSS: The most common feed formats, for syndication on the web
• PubSubHubBub and RSSCloud: Powerful new "hubs" for distributing messages
• Web Hooks: Simple web services for receiving messages, rather than sending them

Pushbutton systems rely on the web's fundamental HTTP protocol for communication between these component parts. The architecture of Pushbutton message delivery is also simple to understand. Before Pushbutton, in today's systems, when you create a message (a blog post, tweet or other update) that's published in your RSS or Atom feed, every application or site that wants updates from you has to repeatedly request your feed to know when it's updated. You can optionally notify ("ping") some applications to tell them it's time to come collect your new updates, but this is time-consuming and resource-intensive on both sides, especially if you want to notify a lot of people.

In the best case, the system we have now is analogous to a person coming by your house and saying "Hey, there's a new edition of your favorite newspaper today. You should go get it." And then you have to go to the newspaper's printing plant to pick it up. In a Pushbutton web, that person is delivering each story to your house the moment it's complete.

That's because Pushbutton-enabled applications will improve upon the current state of affairs by proactively delivering not just the notification that there's a new message, but the content of the message itself. And instead of requiring all those applications to come to your site to read the update, it uses a hub server in the cloud to pass along the message directly to all the receivers that are interested in it.

1. You, the Sender, create a message to be delivered via RSS or Atom
2. Your application gives the messsage to one or more PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs, which reside in the Cloud
3. The PubSubHubBub or RSSCloud hubs deliver the message to any Receivers, the applications or sites that have requested updates from you

In this way, each time you create a new message, a large number of Receivers can consume that message in near realtime (usually less than a second) without a lot of complexity. This kind of messaging has been possible with custom-built or more obscure technologies in the past, but the Pushbutton ecosystem is a breakthrough for a few reasons:

• Sending messages just requires a minor change to an RSS or Atom feed, and a simple, well-defined update notification, instead of major changes to the application where you create your messages.
• Receiving messages is also very simple, only requiring a developer to handle incoming notifications of updates.
• Most of the system's complexity is handled in the hub servers, which are well-documented, implementable in a variety of programming languages, and built around open code that will likely attract a large developer community.
• Most of the scaling effort and expense happens at the hub level, and all current hubs are designed to run on inexpensive cloud systems like Google App Engine or Amazon's EC2.
• The software for Sending, Receiving or running a hub is free, open source and available on almost any platform.
• Messages sent on Pushbutton platforms are delivered via HTTP, which is familiar to any web developer and runs well on any hosting environment. All requests between the different layers of a Pushbutton system can be made as simple REST calls.
• Pushbutton technologies can be adopted incrementally, so that features can be added piecemeal on either the sender or receiver side, without requiring a wholesale upgrade to infrastructure or application architecture.

Who's Behind Pushbutton?

Pushbutton technologies have been created and advocated by some of the most credible and experienced developers of social web technologies. Here's a brief overview of the impressive pedigree of these components:

• PubSubHubBub was co-created by Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin of Google. Brad was founder of LiveJournal, and created or co-created fundamental social web technologies like Memcached, OpenID and more.
• XML-RPC update pings, RSS and the RSS Cloud ideas were pioneered by Dave Winer, who has been actively developing open implementations of each of these technologies.
• Web Hooks have been evangelized by Jeff Lindsay, and have been deployed by a variety of different companies and platforms which all independently developed the technique.

In addition, Google has supported Brad and Brett's development of PubSubHubBub, and enabled it on the Google FeedBurner service. A number of smaller companies are deploying large parts of this infrastructure as well. In short, some of the best reputations in developing open web systems have made Pushbutton possible, from the biggest tech companies to the most steadfastly independent developers on the web.

Related Ideas and Prior Art

There are a lot of existing technologies that have influenced the creation and evolution of Pushbutton technologies; If you're familiar with any of these systems, you're probably already ahead of the curve in understanding part of what Pushbutton is trying to enable.

• Twitter Firehose, FriendFeed SUP, TypePad Update Stream: These realtime delivery systems offer up the content of their respective platforms as an unending stream that developers can consume and use in their applications. At the present time, they all have varying licenses and degrees of openness, and slightly different formats for delivering updates, but have proven the utility of the "sending" part of Pushbutton's realtime functionality.
• XMPP (Jabber), NNTP (Usenet), IRC: These older internet protocols all delivered various degrees of realtime messaging and distributed messaging capabilities, and can form a very useful base of experience for Pushbutton developers to learn from. In some cases, fundamental architectural choices about security, authentication or architecture were made when the Internet was less populated and less complex, making them inappropriate for today's applications. In all cases, these protocols are less-known by most contemporary web developers, and thus lack familiar toolkits and development resources, which make them quite challenging to deploy in common, inexpensive environments.
• TrackBack and Pingback: These systems for delivering updates between blogging systems were very effective in enabling rich distributed conversations in the early days of the blogosphere. These have declined in usefulness due to poor or missing implementations of authentication, which led to spam problems, and a general lack of understanding of their utility by a lot of newer bloggers. Pushbutton may offer an opportunity to restore some of the value of the idea behind these systems.
• Reverse HTTP may end up being a useful component of some Pushbutton deployments, as a complement or companion to Comet and related techniques.

What should we worry about?

• A format war? If you're familiar with the communities around technologies like feeds, you may know they have a deserved reputation for being contentious and even breaking into heated disputes over arcane details. I don't think that's likely to happen this time, because there are only one or two viable formats for each layer of the platform, and the creators of each part have shown some consistent good-faith efforts to promote interoperability where possible and peaceful coexistence where necessary. In the Ajax community, for example, the "X" in Ajax often stands for JSON instead of XML, but this hasn't hindered its broad adoption at all. I'm also willing to personally commit to try to prevent any kind of interpersonal conflict that would inhibit the adoption of Pushbutton technologies. Worry? No.
• Scaling issues? There will inevitably be some learning to do about how to scale the resource-intensive hub layer of a Pushbutton system. But because the hubs live on cloud systems that make enormous amounts of computing resources easily available, because the coders creating the reference implementations of the hub software have great experience making web-scale systems, and because it's relatively simple to introduce new hubs as needed, this will likely not be a gating factor for adoption of Pushbutton. Worry? No.
• Intellectual Property Concerns? I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice. But there has already been a great deal of interest in these systems, and it's likely that any bad actors who were interested in throwing their patent lawyers at this sort of system would probably already be suing people left and right. And the main players who are already involved have shown a consistent desire to make truly open systems that don't have IP encumbrances. Put simply, I think anybody smart enough to invent these kinds of technologies is smart enough to not want to look like jerks by suing somebody for using them. Worry? Probably not.
• Competition from centralized systems? Pushbutton technologies are not just free and open, they're decentralized, which is a serious threat to the "lobster trap" model of social software. We can expect serious competition from the centralized networks that are currently building these sorts of systems. If a threat arises to Pushbutton's adoption, this is the most likely source. Worry? Definitely.
• Bad user experience? One of the worst things we can do in making use of new technologies is to ignore the social, personal or even political implications of their use. Messages that are immediately delivered can't, by their nature, be erased from all the places they appear. The idea of permanently archiving these types of messages is unfamiliar to a lot of less technically-savvy users. And whenever we see something shiny and new, we have the temptation to use technology for technology's sake, whether or not we're solving a real problem or providing a real value. If Pushbutton gets a bad rap early on despite having tremendous potential, this will be why. Worry? Hell, yes.

Conclusion

I have tremendous excitement about the new realtime era of web applications. While I'm fundamentally an optimistic person, I have great skepticism when it comes to mindless hype about new technologies, so it's with a bit of reluctance that I indulge in some hype myself. But I think the Pushbutton web has the opportunity to give individuals and organizations with distinct and passionate voices the ability to be even more immediate and expressive on the web, and after ten years of publishing on the web, that's the part I love the most.

I have no doubt that some skeptics will say "Pushbutton is just PubSubHubBub by another name", just like they said "Ajax is XMLHttpRequest by another name", and if that's what the super-geeky guys want to believe, I'm fine with that. And I'm sure there will still be some significant technical details to resolve. But I think by giving the overall concept an approachable, understandable name and (hopefully!) an explanation that can be understood by anyone with an interest, it can catalyze interest in a whole new area of innovation on the web. And to be honest, when I see folks like Brad Fitzpatrick and Dave Winer hacking on the same set of problems, I can't help but think something interesting will come of it.

Over the next few days, I'll be outlining some of the opportunties around Pushbutton, espousing more of the philosophy that has the potential to imbue Pushbutton with a bit more meaning than most new web tech, and providing some simple explanations of how you can get started both learning about and taking advantage of these technologies. Most of all, I hope you'll offer your pointed criticisms, thoughtful critiques, detailed corrections and even better ideas. I'll be following the conversation here in the comments, across the blogosphere, and on Twitter using the tag #pshb.

Apart from those, I consider an RSS reader to be such a vital tool for me as well, both on a private as a professional level. As I wrote before, I quickly fell in love with Streamy for that particular aspect of sifting through mountains of information on a daily basis, partly because it allows me to both track blogs and news sites I subscribe to and keep track of what Twitter and the people I follow on there as well as on Facebook and FriendFeed are buzzing about.

Add to that Techmeme, which has an algorithm in place designed to weed out the best and/or most talked about news stories related to the tech industry out there, and you can tell I have a pretty solid set of tools readily available that enable me to keep tabs on what I want and need to be tracking closely. Techfuga was another one, but it recently ground to a halt.

New to the arsenal of tools at my disposal free of charge is Tech Investor News, which despite its not-so-sexy name is exactly what it sounds like: a news site that investors in tech companies - plus industry pundits and reporters - should be made aware of. Glad to be of service.

TIN complements the websites and services described above perfectly, and competes with neither one of them. If anything, it saves me a lot of time and rids me of the pain of going to Google News / Blogsearch all the time to learn what the most recent stories in tech or centered around a company in particular are.

What I like about it? The big fat stock quote in the upper corner, the fact that you can filter down to 20 of the most discussed tech companies (note the Google Investor News screenshot below), the decent search function and the speed with which it updates news feeds (every 5 minutes or so, with some human editing involved). But what I also like is the fact that you can narrow your news consumption down to a specific set of categories which makes it very easy to find specific information (for instance, you can opt to display only stories about Steve Jobs' or Rumors' when browsing for news on Apple).

TIN is a project bootstrapped by a self-described media nut' / investor called Frank Cioffi, who spent decades working in such media as radio and television and turned to the internet after many years of consulting and trading stocks. Cioffi got the idea for Tech Investor News to scratch his own itch, and that's always a good way to start something that other people - like me - could also find interesting.

Bookmarked!

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

(From my Marketing News column.)

There are two kinds of brands in the world. If you are a marketer, you know what I mean. There are brands people like to talk about, and brands they don't.

Brands of the first kind the brands that marketing thinker Rohit Bhargava calls talkable are uncommon. Apple's iPhone is a talkable brand. So is Harley-Davidson. If you market a talkable brand, you have the luxury of tapping into customers who love you, but you'll have to be careful those customers have already decided what the brand stands for, and woe unto you if you go against their wishes.

Brands that people don't like to talk about I'll call them boring brands are everywhere. If, like most marketers, you market a boring brand, then you're really earning your living as a marketer. That's because you are trying to get people interested in something they don't really care about.

I've been analyzing social strategies for both kinds of brands, and they form an interesting contrast.

Let's start with the talkable brands. In a recent survey [Forrester report "The Social Tools Consumers Want From Their Favorite Brands"], we asked online consumers whether they'd like to interact with various forms of social application with their favorite brands. Forty-two percent said they would, but the types of interactions they preferred were varied. About one in four consumers would interact with these brands in a discussion forum, one in five would watch videos, and one in six would be interested in connecting with them through a social network profile, like a Facebook page. Only 12% want to read a blog about the brand, which reinforced the earlier research we'd done, showing that blogs are the least trusted form of communication between companies and customers.

What does this mean for the marketer? It means connecting with those enthusiasts is going to be more than a full-time job. First, examine the applications they've already set up on their own their discussion forums, their blogs, their own videos and social network groups. Figure out what you want to join up with, and what you want to create. And you'll have to create multiple applications, because as this research shows, your customers don't agree with each other about where they'd prefer to connect with you.

As a result, you'll probably have make sure they all to those social network profiles, communities, and videos connect with one another, and with the sites your fans already have. We recently worked with a B2B company that faces this exact problem its customers use its products, love them, and have already set up user groups online. The good news: whatever the company does, it will have active participation. The challenge is not messing up the relationships already percolating in the existing user group.

The boring brands have different problem, but social applications can help them, too. [Forrester Report: "Social Technology Strategies for 'Boring' Consumer Brands".] The key with boring brands is to get people talking about their problems, since they won't talk about your brand. In advertising, you can force messages on people watching other things. In a social context, this fails miserably.

Applications that talk about customers problems create borrowed relevance, since you generate talk they care about, then make yourself a part of it. American Express (credit cards are boring, face it) created the Members' Project, a contest to choose deserving charities, since it realized that charity would generate more passion than credit cards. And in perhaps the most dramatic example, Procter & Gamble knew girls wouldn't talk about tampons, but would talk about music, cliques, and school, so it created beinggirl.com as a vehicle to deliver (very quietly) the occasional feminine care products message.

Borrowed relevance is a versatile strategy. Liberty Mutual (in another boring category, insurance) wrapped itself in relevance by creating The Responsibility Project, a community about moral decisions. Johnson & Johnson built a Facebook page for mothers of ADHD kids because, as with all medications, its ADHD drug is boring but its sufferers generate interesting problems. Doritos invited its customers to make ads in the 2007 Superbowl, since an ad contest is more exciting and more social than a corn chip.

Regardless of whether your brand is talkable or boring, as you launch these social applications, you'll generate something very valuable people who care about your brand, or at least the problems it solves. I've begun to ask brand marketers a question: who are your most engaged customers? I don't want an answer like women 25 to 34 with at least one child. I want an answer like Emily DiBernardo, she lives in Kansas and she just can't stop talking about us. With social applications, you'll find Emily.

If your brand is talkable, your social efforts will surface the brand enthusiasts who have the most influence. If it's boring, your social applications will help you find your rare but valuable brand enthusiasts, or even generate a few. Pay attention to these people. Because as advertising clutter rises and word of mouth becomes more important, they're about to become some of your most important corporate assets.

We're not only losing journalists, we may be losing journalism, according to Copps.

Some blame the Internet and bloggers, and that's certainly a part of the story. All that consolidation and mindless deregulation, rather than reviving the news business, condemned us to less real news, less serious political coverage, less diversity of opinion, less minority and female ownership, less investigative journalism and fewer jobs for journalists.

The decline of traditional print and broadcast outlets is the primary focus of the report. The report also loks at possible ideas for addressing these issues.

How about journalism? asked Copps. Will anyone figure out a business model to support in-depth, investigative journalism or must we develop something completely new, perhaps based on philanthropy, non-profit models or public media?

Google Voice, the innovative invite-only telephone communication control service, is readying a iPhone version of its mobile phone app, which just became available on Tuesday for Android OS-based phones and Blackberries.

But will Apple and AT&T let Google sell such an app without hobbling it?

For instance, Google Voice offers free SMS services that appear to come from one's Google number rather than one's mobile phone number. That means users could text all they like, without paying AT&T $20 a month. That money is virtually all profit for the telecom giant, since the messages use almost no bandwidth and even travel on a special channel separate from voice or data.

So the motive is clear.

The answer to whether they will is unclear, but history suggests it's a strong possibility.

AT&T and Apple together have blocked video applications that compete with approved ones and forced the low cost phone calling company Skype to disable its most powerful feature free phone calls using a phone's data connection if it wanted to be included in the iPhone marketplace controlled by Apple.

AT&T has said that it expects Apple to block products that compete with its services. It puts the kibosh on some other apps that might be hard on a network Slingbox's video application for one, though it is fine with other streaming media apps, like Major League Baseball's, for one.

Such practices are part of the reason that Congress, public interest groups and the FCC have all been looking skeptically at U.S. mobile carriers, wondering if they need to be regulated more closely.

A Google spokesperson declined to answer specific questions about a potential app, but did say that it was working with Apple to bring similar functionality [as the Android/Blackberry apps] to iPhone users.

Still in an invite-only beta, Google Voice lets users combine work, home and mobile phones all under a single Google number. Voicemail can be sent to all of the phones, all calling histories are combined, voicemails are turned into voice files and also machine-transcribed, and users can set custom call handling rules for every person in their address book. Users can also make free conference calls, record calls and even switch phones during a call.

Apple, per usual, ignored a request for comment.

AT&T declined to comment on whether it considered the app as competition or if it was even talking to Apple about it.

In the meantime, Google says the Google Voice mobile website is optimized for the iPhone, and that it will continue to improve the user experience for the iPhone users.

There's also already an unofficial Google Voice app for the iPhone called GV Mobile.

Photo: Flickr/Cloneofsnake

See Also:

• Google Voice Now Available for Mobile Phones
• Google Voice: Revolutionary And a Bit Unnerving
• Google Voice Speaks of World Domination
• Google Turns Voicemail Into E-mail

Photo: Flickr/CloneofSnake

Some fans objected to Reznor's claim that Topspin Media (video interview) got it right with its re-release of the Beastie Boys album Ill Communication, which offers a wide array of merchandise in just about every conceivable format at a wide variety of prices. It's become a well-worn criticism of the independent distribution model that fledgling bands need a helping hand in order to make it in the music business. Not so, says Reznor. According to him, giving away digital music while charging for scarce, premium edition is the best way forward for artists of all stripes not just Radiohead and his own band, Nine Inch Nails.

Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales, wrote Reznor on his message board. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY [as DRM-free MP3s] Collect people's e-mail info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods.

It's a play straight out of Anderson's playbook (and, in fact, Anderson cites Nine Inch Nails as an example of a business that understands Free).

To put it into practice, Reznor advises that bands distribute through Amazon, TopSpin or Tunecore; set up a simple, Flash-free site outside of MySpace (which he says is dying and reads as cheap / generic); never abuse their mailing list; use free tools from Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube and SoundCloud; and give people a reason to keep coming back to their site (Reznor's own forums are an example of this strategy).

However, Reznor says the strategy of giving away music in return for e-mail addresses, then marketing pricey box sets and other premium goods to those e-mail addresses only makes sense if a band wants to keep all its money and stay in control of its image.

If you are looking for mainstream super-success (think Lady GaGa, Coldplay, U2, Justin Timberlake), your best bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical mass these days, you'll need old-school marketing muscle, and that only comes from major labels.

Good luck with that one.

See Also:

• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
• TopSpin Lets Bands Ape Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails
• Video Interview: Ian Rogers, Topspin Media
• SoundCloud Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era
• Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson on the Future of Free
• Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead Dominate Amazon MP3 Chart
• It Just Got Cheaper To Sell a Song on iTunes
• MySpace Music: What Went Wrong, and What's Being Done About It

Photo: Andrea Veraart

Luckily, in the last second, I made the cut without time to spare. By this time, I had a whole plan worked out as to how I was going to approach a possibly difficult client situation. Instead of wasting my series of steps and never thinking about it again (hopefully), I decided I'd turn it into a post. Truth be told, the first thing I did was jump on the Internet and run a search on, how to handle missed deadlines. I didn't get much help and I kept thinking, Why are there no better resources for this kind of thing? What am I supposed to say?

Now, if you're in the position I was in last week (and hopefully you aren't), my prepared plan may serve as a resource for you.

1. Notify the Client

Probably the most difficult of all of these steps, but telling your client as soon as possible is a must. I probably should've told my client my worries early on. Luckily, it ended up working out, but I'm willing to bet this won't always be the case. By telling your client you won't make the deadline, they'll be able to create a plan B. Of course admitting to them that the deadline won't happen doesn't mean that procrastination can begin. Do everything in your power to come as close to the deadline as possible while the client handles things on their end.

2. Apologize

If the deadline was tight in the first place, or missed due to the client's actions or interference, this may not apply. But if you committed to a deadline and missed it based on no fault but your own, it's professional to admit your mistake and apologize sincerely. This is where good customer service comes into play. While there is little an apology can actually achieve, it does demonstrate good manners and an appreciation of the client's needs at least.

3. Identify What Went Wrong

Show your client that a missed deadline won't happen again. I was prepared to actually create a document containing a brief on what caused the missed deadline. By identifying these factors, we may be able to work around them and prevent them next time.

4. Create an Action Plan

Show your client how you intend to avoid these pitfalls next time around. Your dedication and take-charge approach to problem solving should prove to your client that you're serious about your working relationship and don't take missed deadlines lightly.

5. Don't Let it Happen Again

There will always be unforeseen circumstances and random occurrences that could get in the way of meeting a deadline. Do your very best to ensure it's met though. Don't procrastinate, keep on top of your timelines and document your communication with your client. Two missed deadlines with the same client is likely a cause for designer-client relationship termination.

Social media provides an inexpensive and powerful platform for regular people to make their voices heard to a massive audience. Unfortunately, people don't always use that power in reasonable and positive ways.

When a business faces an attack on its brand through social media, what is the appropriate response?

For instance, what about party-goers who have a few drinks, get out of hand, and are expelled from a club? When iphones come out and the club brand is ravaged online by angry tweets and videos about poor service, how is the club supposed to respond? Is the club supposed to publicly admit wrongdoing when none was committed and set a precedent for others to complain so they can get free stuff? It's a slippery slope for both a brand and the consumers that enjoy it.

Consider: A video in which country singer Dave Carroll mourns the damage of his Taylor guitar (supposedly) during a flight on United Airlines:

On his website, Dave Carroll moans the saga of his flight with United Airlines and the discovery of his damaged guitar. After getting the runaround from low-level company representatives about a damage claim, he concludes:

I realized then that as a songwriter and traveling musician I wasn't without options. In my final reply to Ms. Irlweg [The United Airlines representative] I told her that I would be writing three songs about United Airlines and my experience in the whole matter. I would then make videos for these songs and offer them for free download online, inviting viewers to vote on their favourite United song. My goal: to get one million hits in one year.

It's an interesting marketing plan for a small time musician in need of some publicity. He finished his diatribe with,

I should thank United. They've given me a creative outlet that has brought people together from around the world. We had a pile of laughs making the recording and the video while the images are spinning on how to make United: Song 2 even better than the first. So, thanks United! If my guitar had to be smashed due to extreme negligence I'm glad it was you that did it. Now sit back and enjoy the show.

And so he launched his show with website updates and a youtube video that continues to gain leverage through social media.

One of the drawbacks of social media is that most users have short attention spans and little use for fact-checking. I did a bit of my own fact-checking about Dave Carroll and his #unitedbreaksguitars experience: It turns out that United explicitly states on its website that it is not liable for damage to fragile items and includes the type of cases approved for transport of musical instruments.

Dave states that he witnessed ground crew throwing his band's instruments and yet he neglected to check his ostensibly-beloved Taylor guitar upon arrival. He says, The guitar case looked ok and we were tired.

Now, take the perspective of the United Airlines representative dealing with this situation: A guy complains to you that his expensive guitar was damaged but that he didn't notice it until a day after his flight. What is your first thought?

If your silly claim/fraud detector went off, good. It should. There are many ways a guitar could be broken in 24hrs and it would be ridiculous for an airline to welcome a suspicious liability.

Dave admits to filing a claim after leaving the airport. I'm familiar enough with shipping claims to know that once you leave the location of a business you're filing against without confirming damages, your chances of successfully settling a claim dramatically dwindle.

But all was not lost for Dave Carroll and the Sons of Maxwell. They had social media, some production talent, and a desire to embarrass a company into bending its rules just to shut them up.

United Airlines responded via Twitter to the barrage of tweets directed at them concerning the video:

Is this a step forward for social media? I don't think so. Dave Carroll and his Sons of Maxwell get some cheap publicity but at what cost to the rest of us?

We encourage companies to engage their customers through social media but little is said about how to deal with rogue campaigns bent on embarrassing a brand into cooperation.

It's tempting to jump on the UnitedBreaksGuitars bandwagon and gleefully watch as social media is used to force a company into action. ( This in spite of legitimate reasons for inaction.) It's tempting to say the customer is always right and ignore the need for policies meant to protect companies from fraudulent claims. It's tempting to get caught up in the seductive power of social media and forget that some people are interested only in promoting themselves.

Did United Airlines break Dave Carroll's guitar? Perhaps. But the only person he should be singing to right now is himself for not checking his guitar for damages when knew the rigors of its journey.

If social media is going to be a sustainable conversation between consumers and brands, it's important that we show respect to the brands that bravely step into this space. We need to be responsible participants in social media and use the powerful tool we've been given for good causes and not for senseless complaints.

Social media need not be about consumers whining to get free stuff. It must not be.

How do you think United Airlines and other companies faced with a similar situation should respond?

Share this post on Twitter

photo: dave carroll music

Hat tip to Stuart Foster for alerting me to this story via twitter.

Related posts:

1. Sexual Harassment And Social Media
2. How Do You Deal With Trolls? Trent Reznor (NIN) Walks Away From Social Media
3. A Tale Of Two Business Models

Perhaps the thing I hated the most was that I rarely talked with the people who ended up using my software. I was given a list of requirements, told what was expected, and that was it. I never found out whether my work met the needs of those using it, never got to ask them how I could improve it, never knew if my software was a blessing or a burden to them.

Apparently that was smart business, because the companies I worked for charged their clients an obscene amount for my work. But it was a lousy way to write software. The whole point of writing software is to create something useful to create something that, even if in a small way, makes someone's life better. And how can you know whether you're doing that if you don't talk with the people who use your applications?

I broke out of corporate development by getting lucky with HomeSite, which I never expected to become as successful as it was. Looking back, it's clear that its success wasn't because it was a killer application (it wasn't), but because I opened the floodgates and directly communicated with my customers. HomeSite wasn't a very polished application (honestly, the UI is hard for me to look at now), but by talking with customers I ensured that it met their needs, which is the best any developer can hope for.

It seems so obvious: if you want to develop software that's useful to people, you've got to talk with them. But too many developers take the anti-social approach and consider customer support to be beneath their status. Besides, talking with customers would distract them from important code-slinging.

Look, I can understand that viewpoint, especially if you're working on something that's very popular. You can't create anything if you spend all your time doing support. But avoiding support completely is a big mistake.

If you've never supported your own software, spending just one day doing tech support will be an eye-opening not to mention humbling - experience. You'll have to keep your ego in check, because most people who contact tech support do so because they're having problems with your software, some of whom will use colorful language to describe the annoyances they're running into.

But that's the stuff you need to hear. You need to hear it because you're the one who can solve those annoyances. You're the one who can get rid of all the things that prevent your software from being that kick-ass program that people recommend to their friends and co-workers.

You also need to hear an unfiltered view of what people want your software to do for them. If you rely solely on your tech support team to tell you the features that customers want, chances are you'll develop those features without really knowing why people want them.

And that's not meant as a criticism of your tech support team. When NewsGator was still doing tech support for FeedDemon, they did an excellent job of answering people's questions and forwarding feature requests to me. But I would still follow-up with customers to figure out exactly why a feature was necessary, and quite often it turned out I didn't really need to add a new feature, but instead needed to change how an existing one worked. A lot of feature requests were the result of people being annoyed with how an existing feature worked, and they wanted some way to get around it.

If you really want to write useful software, stop spending all your time keeping up with technology. Don't worry if your resume isn't filled with the latest buzzwords. Instead, invest your time in talking with your customers. They don't care what programming language you use - they only care whether your software meets their needs, and the best way to ensure that is by breaking out of your cone of silence and opening the lines of communication.

The fact that I have to explain and articulate this drives me insane. However, a lot of companies, agencies and people are completely ignorant to what social media actually does/is. Therefore I felt that I needed to clarify the differences between social media and magic.

Social Media Will Not:

• Walk your dog.
• Make your inferior product better.
• Turn lead into gold.

Social Media Will:

• Make your company more human and transparent.
• Lead to crowdsourcing, better communication and rapid adoption of new tech.
• Be the New PR. Although the term will end up being Social Relations or Relationship Management.

What inspired this? Companies using social media as a sales tool and not a solution/tool. Social Media gets us in the door is not the right way to approach a useful tool/platform.

The problem here is that people still view social media as the new tool, the gimmick or the shiny piece of tinfoil that they want to chase around the room. Not the factual, metric driven engagement experiences and community creating that produce tangible results.

To many people are obsessed with getting everyone to use social and then not having a fleshed out plan when they actually begin to do so. Guess what? Using the tools and understanding their purpose isn't enough if you aren't going to utilize them effectively.

If you can manage the expectations for the product effectively and articulate what social media is and isn't, you will save yourself lots of time and headaches.

Social isn't anything new. It's just something old wrapped in a new package with better technology to cut down on lead time. Keep this key concept in mind and try to maintain your sanity when working with recent adopters.

On a good morning there's no alarm clock. I wake up with the sun and do my best to resist the instinctive urge to look at the computer or check email for at least an hour.

My vice of choice isn't coffee, but the Kindle. Its electronic shelves are filled mostly with the business books I read in order to grow up to be a real businessman (before someone figures out I'm not). At any point in time I have about 120 books downloaded. Interspersed between Drucker, Godin, and Buffett are classics like Seneca, which I wish I could read more often but only get to a few times a year.

Automattic, the holding company behind WordPress.com, finally got an office late last year at Pier 38, a beautiful open-floorplan space right on the Embarcadero. It's about a five-minute walk from my apartment, but my preference is to work from home. We're very much a virtual company where everyone primarily works from home (or their coffee shop of choice). The half dozen of us in the Bay Area will go in on Thursdays to have a little company, but six days out of the week the space is usually empty. But we throw some great parties there.

The team communicates mostly via P2, something a little like Twitter but password-protected, with real-time updates and threaded inline conversations. P2 is almost like a chat channel, but structured like a blog, and we've evolved to have almost a dozen across the 40 people at Automattic serving a variety of purposes. We fill any gaps in communication by IRC, Skype, and, in a pinch, email.

In my home office there are two 30-inch monitors a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard using Synergy so I can copy and paste between them. The Mac is mostly used for email and chat, while web stuff and coding happen on the PC. The keyboard is, of course, Dvorak, a more efficient keyboard layout that I switched to 10 years ago. I also have a Sony Z90 laptop with me all the time, whether I'm going overseas or just to the doctor's office. I'm pretty rough on laptops, sometimes going through two a year. At home I like to geek out with home servers and networking, and sometimes find myself doing IT support for family, friends, and colleagues.

One of my favorite programs that we didn't make is RescueTime. Hackers all know that you have to profile before you can optimize, and RescueTime runs in the trap of my computers and tracks how much time I spend on different things, sometimes with surprising results. My biggest time-suck is email, and to help out I wrote a WordPress plugin that filters people into folders based on their email address and priority settings which helps keep my inbox relatively clean. Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, advocates checking email only twice a week but that's too severe for me. I'm currently trying Leo Babauta's approach from The Power of Less, which suggests small steps like checking email five set times a day instead of constantly. It's like dieting: People who binge diet gain it all back. That happens to me with email.

Music is my muse and I listen to it all day. There's a lot of jazz Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins but I'm also a big fan of Jay-Z, Beyonc, and Method Man. I have an analog Shindo stereo that was hand built in Japan and the aural experience is mind-blowing. When you're coding you really have to be in the zone so I'll listen to a single song over and over on repeat, hundreds of times. It helps me focus. The other best way to focus is to turn off email and instant messenger. The moment that little toaster pops up and says you've got mail you're taken out of the flow. You're juggling variables and functions and layouts and the moment you look away it all falls to the ground it takes you 10 minutes getting it back in the air again.

A big part of my job is to manage the support, usability, and product development people who are scattered all over the globe, from Alabama to Ireland to Bulgaria. My management strategy is centered on hiring: find extremely self-motivated and curious people and then give them the autonomy to succeed. There's no manager looking over anybody's shoulder, so everyone needs to be self-directed. For every person we hire there are hundreds of applications. We always start people on a contract basis first; that way we mutually understand what it's like to work with each other. One of the most important things I look for in rsums is a history of contributing to Open Source projects, because I know these people will understand our ethos.

For four years I was the only developer on Akismet, our anti-spam service. It started because my mom had wanted to start a blog but I was scared she'd be bombarded by spam for Viagra and worse, think that's what I looked at all day. We finally added a second engineer to the project at the end of 2008, which was weird for me but was necessary for growth, especially as I'm pulled in more and more directions.

I go out for lunch whenever I can, which fits well with my preference for no meetings before 11 AM. There's something very personal about sharing food with someone; it's a deeper connection than shaking hands in a boardroom. Often when I'm in town I'll have lunch with Toni Schneider, my CEO. He and I get along super well which is one of the reasons I think the business has worked. He brings gravitas because he's a digital native but also has great startup experience including being the CEO of Oddpost, a webmail company Yahoo acquired in 2004. Sometimes we'll go to lunch at 12:30 and stay until 5.

In general, I'm pretty darn disorganized, late as often as not, and really bad at keeping a schedule. My PA is now focusing on office and event tasks so I'm in the market for someone new. Last year I was on the road 212 days and clocked 175,000 miles, which is seven times around the globe (according to Dopplr, a great travel journal I use). The bulk of my travel is to WordCamps, which are educational and networking events that celebrate blogging. Automattic held our first annual WordCamp in San Francisco in 2006, thrown together just a few weeks before the event happened. Now they've exploded all over the world and I've been to over 30 community-organized events from South Africa to the Philippines. I say they're a great bargain: a full day of quality speakers, BBQ lunch, a cool t-shirt, and a party for $25. We just wrapped the largest WordCamp ever here in San Francisco with over 700 people. Though I'd love to, if I went to every WordCamp I wouldn't have any time to actually build WordPress, so I'm cutting back and trying to go to every other one. They are great fun, though; it's a chance to be a rockstar for a day. In the Philippines after the conference was done I stayed almost two hours afterward taking pictures and autographing badges and laptops. I've even been asked to sign body parts. Really.

To document my experiences when I travel I use my Nikon D3 camera. My photos are autobiographical my memory is so bad (and the travel pretty grueling) that I'll forget everything about a trip, and the photos help trigger my memories. On the plane ride home I'll process and edit the photos as a narrative of each day, a visual diary. On my trip to Vietnam last February I took 2-3 thousand photos. I've heard that the difference between an amateur photographer and a pro is that the amateur shows you everything they shoot. I'm somewhere in between I'll post maybe a quarter of what I take.

I used to think constantly about building an audience for my blog but now my attitude is that if I'm not blogging for myself it's not worth it. I don't force myself to post once a day, I just do it when it feels natural. Sometimes people complain Write more about WordPress; we don't want to see photos of kids in Vietnam but I don't really care. For my 25th birthday in January I published a list of 2009 goals on my blog. It included learning Spanish, learning how to cook, and posting 10,000 photos. Cooking has been a total fail so far; I go out for every meal. If you open my refrigerator you'll find Girl Scout cookies and barbecue sauce. Photos are blazing along, half-way through the year and I've taken 20,000 photos and posted about 4,000 of them.

My blog is fortunate enough to get lot of comments and I read and manually approve each one. I think the broken windows theory a broken window or graffiti in a neighborhood begets more of the same applies online. I'll happily approve a comment from someone who completely disagrees with everything I believe in, but if I get a positive comment with a curse word in it I'll edit it out. My blog is like my living room: If someone was acting out in my house, I'd ask that person to leave.
I look at our numbers every day, usually after 5 PM PST when GMT goes into a new day. We have an internal dashboard where we track 500 to 600 statistics about everything from how often people are logging in to WordPress.com to how many words they're pressing per day. Almost all of the numbers are real-time.

I do my best work mid-morning and super late at night, from one to five in the morning. Some people don't need sleep, but I actually need a ton. I just sleep all the time, catching naps in the afternoon or a 20-minute snooze in the office. Our business is 24 hours folks in Australia start their day around 4 PM my time and our guys and girls in Europe get going around midnight. Sometimes I'll go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 AM, and then go back to work.

For WordPress we're trying to set up a community that will be around 10 to 30 years from now, one that's independent from the whims of the market. My role is somewhat like Linus for Linux or Shuttleworth for Ubuntu, affectionately referred to as BDFL, and it's my responsibility to meet as many users as possible and direct the software in a way that reflects their interest. Last year I probably met 5,000 or 6,000 WordPress users, about half of them who make their living from it. We want to be like Google, eBay, Amazon they all enable other people to make far more money than the company captures. That's ultimately what we're trying to do, we're trying to create a movement.

My Mom started a blog a couple of months ago. Six years into this, and we finally made it easy enough for my Mom to use. (She hates it when I say that.)

If you ask questions in the comments, I'll do my best to answer them.