FastCompany Launches Social Web Site - Then Crashes

I have been writing a post about the new FastCompany web site and went to go look at it and this is what I see …

Oh well, maybe I’ll tell you how good it is later …

Recap: Social Media Mayhem in DC

Yesterday was quite the day in DC for Social Media.  It all began with Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Breakfast and ended with the Media Rules Book launch Party last night.  Both events were a good time, but I had a great time at Jeff’s breakfast.

The breakfast was downtown at Busboys and Poets.  It was of course to see all my current DC friends and of course to meet new ones.  I finally got to meet Jim Long (@newmediajim) in person along with Rana Sobhany (@ranajune), Eric Litman (@ericlitman) of WashingtonVC , and Chris Parandian of MobileDiner.  I am still amazed how this online social media thing has lead me to meet so many great people in person.  The relationships I am building are great, it is a real sense of community bubbling to the surface here in DC and I am glad to be a part of it.  It was also great to meet other people.  Everyone has great things going on and I love hearing about them.  One cool thing Jeff had everyone do was to write their name and a personal tag line on the name tag.  Mine was “Passionate Technology”.  That could have been the line on everyones name tag.  Meeting those like minded people is great to be a part of.

I met other passionate people like Joel Selzer who is President and CEO of Ozmosis

Ozmosis provides a new model for knowledge dissemination by enabling physicians to benefit from the collective wisdom of their peers. Ozmosis delivers access to that collective wisdom by aggregating the shared insights of the community and presenting the most relevant clinical and practice management information back to the physician.

It seems like a great project and I wish Joel all the best.  I also was fortunate to meet Jeremy Epstein of Microsoft.  We had a great talk about technology and about my side project MyDropBin.  As soon as he was home later he signed up, well .. tried to, we are working on that, so are the trails of a one person side business.  But we will get him going and I look forward to his feedback.  I know there are people I am missing, suffice it to say, a good time was had by all.  Make sure to check out the pics and Jeff’s Qik videos of the event.

The last night I headed back downtown for the Media Rules Book Launch.  It was another good time and got to meet some more great people.  I was happy to get to meet Anthony LaFauce.  I have been enjoying his writing on Nick O’Neill’s Social Times and was happy to finally get the chance to meet up with him.  I picked up the book and am looking forward to reading it on my new train rides downtown.

Again, what a great time to be involved in the local tech community.  Great people doing great things.  Good to see and meet all of you !

DC Social Media Maven @shashib Featured !

I was really excited a few moments ago when I got a message form my local DC friend Shashi Bellamkonda (aka @shashib ) pointing me over to a post he has been featured in. And it was just any post, it was Shel Israel’s blog Global Neighbourhoods.

It was a great read and I am really happy for Shashi, he is a very genuine great person that I have had the please of getting to know a bit here in the DC area. I too came to know Shashi from Twitter and we hooked up at a local Tweetup I set up a couple of months back. Since then we see each other regularly around town and always stay in touch via Twitter.

He really was baptised by fire after taking the Social Media position with Network Solutions and he handled it incredibly better than I would say 99% of us would have. It was a very inflammatory situation in which he kept his cool and responded just how he should have.

I have my own story about Shashi. We were recently going to meet at a local Metro station for a ride downtown to attend the DC Blogger Meetup. I was glad to ride with him, and what struck me the most was how he said he was happy to ride with me and be able to get 45 minutes of uninterrupted attention from me while on the subway. In my head I thought “Wow, we are in the midst of a “virtual” social media world and Shashi wants to talk to people and hear what they have to say”. It was refreshing. We talked about the front running thing going on and I gave him my 2 cents worth.

Great job Shashi, keep up the good work. See you around town my friend.

hellotxt.com: Cross Platform Posting

As our platforms we interact with continue to grow, our needs to connect to those platforms also grow. But it is becoming more and more difficult to have to log into each one to submit status. I was online this AM and saw a post from a friend @troyturner asking if there was a way to post to both Twitter and Pownce at the same time. As I noted in an earlier post as well, Twitter has been very unreliable and people are looking to new ways to keep in touch and status their friends and followers.
Enter hellotxt.com. It is a great service that llows to to interface with twitter, pownce, facebook, jaiku, tumblr, as well as some others. Here is a shot of your dashboard to send messages from:

PownceMeme: Whats Hot on Pownce

I have recently began heading over to Pownce a bit more as Twitter has been becoming more and more flaky.   Since Pownce added a mobile interface a little while back, it seemed to be a viable alternative to twitter.  Anyway, we are aware of the great Twitter tools for tracking all things Twitter, sites like Twitter100, Tweeterboard, Favotter, Tweetmeme, and our local favorite Politweets.

Well now the Pownce crowd has its own Meme tracker, its called PownceMeme.  It is a site tracking the hot stuff taking place in and around Pownce.  Not only is it tracking the popular threads, but also photo and links, which is one thing Pownce has over Twitter.  They even have RSS feeds for each type for you to follow along as well.

I think that the arrival of tools like this revolving around Pownce may signal a shift toward Pownce as more of a Twitter alternative.  What do you all think?

Utterz vs Seesmic: Two Services with the Same Goal ?

Of course I have been hearing a lot about Seesmic lately, as many of us have. I finally received an invite code for Seesmic in my email the other day and finally got around to checking it out.  It seems very easy and intuitive, although I must say I need to do a bit more exploring to really get what it is all about.
That being said, I also logged back into Utterz for the first time in a bit and was pleasantly surprised to see video Utterz being posted.  A quick look over the the Utterz blog and I saw a post from Jan 23rd announcing the video capability.

So this got me to thinking a bit, is Utterz like Seesmic, or vice versa, and if not what is the difference?  It seems to me that both are vying for the “social” video microblogging thing, would you agree ? Seesmic seems very conversational from what I can see so far whereas Utterz seems a bit more of video blogging.  While it is true Utterz has channels and also a Topic of the Day where people respond to, I am not sure it seems to be built around a conversation as Seesmic is.

As is stands now, I think Utterz is a bit more mature, I understand Seesmic is in Alpha mode, but it is has been much easier for me to find friends and search for people on Utterz.  I watched this post on Geoff Livingston’s blog tonight where he used and commented on Seesmic and how he has been impressed on how Seesmic has grasped the development of communities through the use of video.  Utterz does have “My Circle” where you can see who you are following and who is following you.  The more I look into this, the more I am starting to see pretty deep similarities.

I am really curious to see how this all develops and plays out.  How about all of you, whats your take on this?

How Many Times ..

Does a web service have to go down and be very unstable before we all decide to leave their sandbox and go play in someone else’s ?

As I am sure all of us Twitter’holics are aware, Twitter has been a bit of a dubious uptime record. Especially lately with the growth in users, big events like the primaries, etc. We touched on this back in an earlier post. Lately it seems however, that I have been seeing more and more of the “Something is wrong” message when I go to access Twitter. According to the Twitter blog they have been undergoing some much needed infrastructure changes, which is a good thing, but with continued downtime, it is not.

The good news is we finished a major infrastructure project tonight, which we’ve been working on for months and that we think is going to help a lot. I’m sure there will be some glitches in the coming weeks, but we’ve laid some important foundation that’s going to help us build toward the future.

We Web 2.0 people can be a fickle bunch. We have latched onto Twitter with a vengeance and use it in oh so many ways. It has the potential to be a foundation for many things to come, but how long will people tolerate the instability before moving to the next great thing ?

So what do you all think ? How much longer does twitter have to work it all out before people start heading for the exits ?

UPDATE:  Just after publishing this, I went over to Twitter to find the following “Something is Technically Wrong”

DC Flickr Photowalk

I took some time and headed downtown yesterday to check out the flickr DC Group and do a little photowalking. The group met at the RocketBar at Gallery Place. At around 4:00pm people started hitting the streets for a few shots.

Go check out here for some of my shots.

PodcampDC: Registration Open

I saw today that the PodcampDC event registration has opened up.  Head over to the event’s registration page HERE and sign up. Here is a brief description according to the event page:

Podcamp DC is an “unconference” focused on educating participants on how to use, implement and share any/all new media tools including, podcasts, videocasts, blogs, Second Life, Facebook, and YouTube.

It is great to see some cool events coming up in the area.  The other day Geoff Livingston announced BlogPotomac in June and that looks like a great time as well.

Here are the details for the PodcampDC

Begins
Friday, April 18, 2008 at 7:30 pm ET

Ends
Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 2:00 pm ET

Location
Art Institute of Washington/ Rosslyn Spectrum Theatre
1820 Fort Meyer Drive
Arlington , VA 22209

Make sure to get over and sign up and add your name to the growing list.

January 30th: International Delete Your MySapce Account Day

I have never been a real MySpace user, mainly because it was spam riddled, etc.  Well apparently it has hit critical mass.  A blogger Simon Owens of Bloggasm, has gone and proposed January 30th as the International Delete Your MySapce Account Day.  He has a list of things for why you should delete you account

1. You rarely log in to Myspace except to delete spam friend requests from nude webcam girls.

2. You spend five minutes writing a wall post only to hit an error message when you try to post it because of all the website glitches.

3. You’re a girl who constantly gets marriage proposals from random men in the middle east.

4. You visit someone’s Myspace profile only to suddenly have music start blasting out of your speakers. Bonus points if it happens to you while you’re at work.

5. You have to make redundant clicks to perform simple tasks because Myspace keeps taking you to advertisement pages where you have to click on “return to myspace profile” in order to continue what you’re doing.

6. You visit someone’s profile only to have your eyes bleed because of terrible page layout with non-matching designs and font colors.

7. Your experience is hindered because of intrusive banner ads that either talk to you or try to reach out and block your view of what you’re trying to look at.

8. You read yet another news account about how some child predator using Myspace has abducted a little girl or that some hoax myspace account has caused a teenager to commit suicide.

9. You’re frustrated with the fact that Myspace doesn’t allow you to post your contact info, meaning to contact someone you can only use Myspace’s glitchy Instant Messenger, message/email system, or wall commenting.

10. You’re tired of seeing Tom stare out at you from millions of friends lists and just wish he would change his fucking profile picture.

If you are as fed up as Simon, then mark it on your calendars !

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