Daniel's Place

I started writing a long review of the Dulli/Lanegan show. The one where I discovered that the grunge movement is aging, balding, selling insurance, and raising children on the Eastside. I went on about the middle aged man reduced to tears amid a mosh pit that died before it started; a lifeless dead audience shifting from one foot to another in disinterested mediocrity. I’ve filed my complaints with the appropriate parties and sworn to move on.

For your benefit, I will not post that review. It is long, and some may construe it as offensive.

Grunge is, for better or worse, best left in 1996.

Dulli on the left, Lanegan in the middle. This world isn't the one that we once lived in.

Parts of the show were good. And I’ve moved on to exploring Seattle’s current music culture.

Matt and I recently unveiled yet another Web 2.0 social media thought driver. After much toying with Twitter and recognizing that buzz tracking is important, we have developed what should be a memorable service.

Never forget

Remnd.me is a link shortening service that adds click tracking to your links. Use Remnd.me to track the flow of your ideas as they spread across the internet. Sign up, log in, create links, and watch the buzz grow.

Shorten URL's, track clicks. It's aweomse.

Google sends me daily alerts about the status of my good name on the Internet. The FBI has recently released a press statement with the name “Jurek” in the second paragraph. Beneath a set of insider traders, seems someone has been soiling the Jurek name with white powder in envelopes.

… special agents and postal inspectors arrested Richard Leon Goyette, a/k/a Michael Jurek, 47, yesterday at the airport in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on a charge in a federal complaint related to his mailing 65 threatening letters to financial institutions in October 2008.

What leads a person to select the name “Jurek”? And didn’t carefully packaged flour sent through the postal system go out of style back in 2002?

Goyette, some advice: put as much creativity into your crimes as you did name choosing, and you might be arrested for something less trivial than the criminal equivalent of parachute pants.

Almost a year ago, April 2008 to be precise, my mom came to visit me as I settled into my new place. Along with a tire iron, some oil filters, cookware, and other small essentials, she included a novel little book: A Complaint Free World.

It looks like this:

A Complaint Free World: The book

Now, I’m not one for self help books, mostly because my experience with such books is far from helpful. (Such books invent their own language (e.g. love/fear) or attempt to reduce the world to a juvenile perspective.) This one had similar self-empowering rhetoric. However, the methodology described in this book is both interesting and helpful.

I started reading A Complaint Free World after my mom left, but have yet to complete it. The premise is simple and I won’t go too far into the philosophical conversations on the definition of a complaint. Sufficed to say, I have come up with my own definition and I find it to be very effective.

This challenge is harder than it seems at first. I work in software, so that usually speaks for itself.

I started on Sunday 2/1. At the time of writing this, I have just completed one day without complaining. I wonder if I can go two days.

The Scoble Effect has not died, surprisingly, I’ve just been busy. I have a couple new conclusions to make as I wrap up this little research project. I’ll continue using @scobleeffect for necessary twitter networkings, but I don’t intend to totally flatter Scoble with such an endearing moniker.

So checking out the latest statistics, you can see that @scobleeffect’s popularity is on the rise, even though (at the time of this posting) I have neglected to turn the feed into one of thoughtful idea productivity.

Observations

A couple behaviors caught my eye and would like to note them while maintaining a complete lack of empirical thought.

Attrition

Many users were quick to follow me, but they stopped following me after some time. I would assume this is because I was not contributing any tweets during that period. These users have the right idea to proactively filter out potential noise as it becomes apparent.

Lack of Usability

@scobleeffect’s feed is a near useless stream of noise. This promises two things: the person who tweets the most will receive the most recognition in this scenario, and it is nearly impossible to develop a useful interpersonal connection with anyone in this torrent of tweets.

Monetization Strategy

Are you looking to increase your influence in Twitter by engaging many followers at once? Do you need a platform from which to spread your ideas and a guide offering best practices? Is your message time sensitive, or do you need a head start on your grass-roots/viral growth? If so, send me an email or leave a comment and I can get you started.

Remaining Thoughts

Twitter is a great application and its simple API creates a great amount of value for developers and users. As Twitter matures and its user base grows, users will find new ways of leveraging the platform to distribute short thoughts and messages. Demand will grow and popularity will create “The Future of Twitter.”

The Future of Twitter

Expanding buzz and the notion that mutual following creates value in a linear scale will drive Twitter users to follow each other with an almost irrational exuberence (you haven’t seen it happening already?). As the follower matrix increases in size, the amount of noise will increase proportionally as users attempt to extract linear value from Twitter by tweeting incessantly and employing automation whenever possible.

Two things will happen.

There will be a contraction of followers as users switch accounts, dump most of the users they are following, or dump their accounts all together in an attempt to escape the noise.

Demand will grow for filtering software that allow users to follow everyone while filtering tweets by relevance to interest, social relationships (e.g. those defined in Facebook), growth of community buzz (i.e. breaking news), and other important categorization methods. If Twitter is so valuable in the social space, then users would likely pay a nominal fee for such a service. Hey! What a cool business idea!