Your Friday Quote
He that is afraid of bad luck
will never know good.
Twitter: Not Just for Over-Texted Teens
OK, let's settle this right now. I get a lot of incredulous looks from my friends. You're on Twitter?? Who cares what I'm eating for breakfast? Sounds like a waste of time.
Well, I could argue the benefits of sharing the details of your life with friends and family, but that's another topic - and I use Facebook for that. For now let's just say that I agree with you. I don't use Twitter that way, and I wouldn't follow anyone who did - friend, family or favorite deity. For me, Twitter is a business and learning tool. I use it to stay abreast of what's new in my profession, and likewise to share with other interested parties. And I get a LOT out of it. Twitter is a realtime live feed of all the best tips, tricks and discoveries made by people with similar interests as myself, pre-filtered and delivered straight to my hungry brain in a tidy, little package. Awesome.
I said that the feed is "pre-filtered" - What does that mean and how does it work? With Twitter you can "follow" anyone you want. It's up to you. Simply put: I don't follow people who tweet about breakfast, movies, moods, concerts, or any number of other uninteresting, "teenagery" topics. I am strictly interested in finding the little gems that make my work better, faster, more relevant, etc. It's a learning tool. I follow people who post useful, interesting or educational things. If you start talking about Will Smith - you're dumped in a heartbeat. Don't waste my time.
About that - Isn't weeding through all the "bad" feeds to find the good ones time-consuming? This is the beauty of Twitter. First of all, this isn't really a problem, if you only follow people who say interesting things, as stated above. Second, every post is limited in length to 140 characters, so I can tell in 5 seconds or less if a post interests me. In 1 minute, I can scan all the morning's updates and move on. Most useful posts include a link to an outside article, blog, etc. If there is something worth following, you can chase it down. If not, you don't follow the link, and you've lost very little of your precious time.
What kind of "gems" do you really get out of this? As a graphic designer and aspiring web developer, I get all kinds of useful content. A link to an artist's blog can be inspiring for days or weeks. Maybe it's a link to a website full of free fonts, plugins, or texture files. Maybe it's a how-to page about using a feature of my favorite Adobe software product. I get a lot of useful information for educating my clients and language for communicating expertly about my profession. Sometimes it's a link to an industry event that I might like to attend. Web developers find and share snippets of code, online resources, the latest technology trends, updates and how-tos. I'm telling you. It's a goldmine - if you follow the right people.
So how do you find the right people? Start with people you know, in the business. Look for Twitter links at the bottom of your favorite blogs. Filter the Twitter feed for relevant topics with a tool like Tweet Grid (highly recommended). Publish your Twitter username on your website/blog/Facebook profile, and start tweeting valuable content yourself. When you start gaining followers who are interested in what you are saying, they are likely worth following back. As they say, if you want a friend, you have to be a friend. Network, share, inspire, learn. Go forth and tweet!
Online Privacy: Does Anyone Really Care?
Everyone likes their privacy, right? None of us want people peeking in our windows at home, watching us. Orwell gave us nightmares of the government watching us through our televisions.
As technology has advanced and so many of us have given more and more information (from names and addresses to credit card information), technology has also started to gather information about us that we don't explicitly offer. Safeway knows when I buy bread but not milk, and they know how much more likely I am to purchase milk when they put bread on sale. Amazon knows enough about my preferences to make recommendations in music and books based on purchases and what I've viewed. Google knows what I search for and where I've been online.
Of course, I know they know. But do I know how much they know? And does it matter to me if I do?
Google has become not just dominant (in that it's the search engine used almost 70% of the time) but pervasive. Google ads, powered by Google AdWords, are on seemingly every site. Google Analytics ties into Google AdSense, letting Web sites optimize and monetize. And the visitor sees ads that she actually is interested in, ideally, because of the use of data collected by Google about the user.
If we ignore privacy as a concern, it's a pretty good deal. A win-win-win for users, content providers and advertisers.
But we like our privacy, right? Are we afraid of what they know, or afraid of not knowing what they know?
Google has to make sure that there's no huge backlash against its market share, and it has come out with the Google Dashboard, which allows users to monitor settings and see what Google knows about them across its myriad of services (including YouTube, Google Docs, and others).
Is it enough? Is it too much? Will we even care enough to use Google Dashboard?
