After reading this conversation thread on Friendfeed, I started to comment, but did a quick cut and paste into this here blog post. What follows was my original comment (not posted) that I would like to expand upon here. Then I'd like to get your feedback on Friendfeed, Twitter, or whatever stream you like to post your comments to. I really could care less where you reply, just make it findable!
Regarding my use of Linked In -
"I must admit that I have a LI account, but I have not updated it in probably 6 years. I've been working with the same team for 8+ years, having weathered 4 M&A events and countless reorgs. I've come to ignore Linked In because after having gone through the first M&A event, the only time I would get Linked In email would be when friends are riffed and forced to move on to other new positions in the industry."
*Expanding on comment here*
This became a recurring pattern after a while, where the only times I'd ever get email updates From Linked In were from people who were let go or less often just quit for other opportunities. I found myself trying to avoid accepting any of the "friend requests" or whatever their term is for adding people to your network, and I just stopped using it altogether.
I haven't logged into my account in years and if you check out my profile, you'll see that the last position I posted was "Senior Product Manager", which was 2 companies and three job title's ago.
I'm tempted to login to Linked In and update my profile, just so my stuff is accurate, but I have this recurring fear that all those people who tried to "friend" me and all of my CURRENT colleagues are going to come out of the woodwork and start picking my profile apart.
Many of my professional colleagues are not on Twitter, Friendfeed, or most of the other social networking sites I use regularly, and I'm not sure that I want them to "invade" the communities that I participate in outside of my dayjob.
I'm all for transparency, but I'm having a very hard time figuring out the right balance between personal vs my professional uses of these socnets.
What do you think? I'm very curious to hear what other people think and where I'll find the most valuealbe advice.
Just a quick post to bump my last one, as it's been a while. Just got back from San Francisco after an amazing week of fun, work, and great conversation. Met a TON of GREAT new people and made a lot of new friends. Here's a quick list of amazing things I got to do while visiting friends and meeting new ones over the past week:
- Streaming the iPhone launch from Apple Store on Stockton St.
- Buying new iPod Touch, upgrading to 2.0, loading Pandora and other apps from the AppStore
- Discovering my new addiction at the Blue Bottle Cafe. Siphon Pot coffee is unbelievable. Check out my Flickr pics.
- Super secret meetings with some very big names that I can't really talk about.
- Rocked the Mechanicrawl, met Terry Lindell (uber-master of the Mark IV TDC).
- Attended Gary Vaynerchuk's party for taping of the WLTV 500th Episode (insane energy and good vibes at that event). Ran into old friends like Scott Beale (@laughingsquid) and an old college buddy - Brad Murphy - who is VP at Revision 3. Got to meet/talk to Kevin Rose and many other notables in the local tech scene.
- Attended the Freshbooks Tweetup at 21st Amendment. Geeked out with fellow iPhone/Touch enthusiasts. Drank 9.2% IPA that was out of this world.
- Attended Social Media Camp San Francisco. Met some AMAZING people at this event. Met Erica O'Grady. Hung out with @danielbru and the Qik guys. Got to meet @Corvida and a lot of other awesome people.
- Attended Mashable SummerMash San Francisco. Met Pete Cashmore, ran into lots of friends & met new ones. Met Steven Fruchter, CEO of Stickam. Discussed some ideas / opps for collaboration.
- Dinner with Yeshi Govindas Friedland and drinks with Brad Murphy. What happens when you get together with 2 college buddies who haven't seen each other together since around 1996? A late night that ended at 2:45am this morning.
- Upgraded to First Class on Virgin America flight from SFO -> SEA and had the absolute pleasure of meeting and talking with Actor Peter Coyote (wikipedia him). Overhead voicemail on ride from SEATAC (he offered to share his driver) from Matthew Modine.
That about sums it up. Tomorrow I attend a day long course by one of my true idols, Mr. Edward Tufte.
I have a crapload of stuff to do between now and next Weds, when I fly to Albany, NY and head up into the Adirondack Mountains to a little area where there is still no mobile phone coverage. There I will continue work on one of my engines. This is a VERY exciting time for me right now.
Thanks to all my new friends, followers, and supporters!
Onward & Upward.
--Brian
- ∞ +
Ok. I saw a little bit of this break earlier today, but I'm just now catching up. I guess the word got out that John Culberson and Tim Ryan are using Twitter, Qik, and other socnets to interact in near real time with their constituents. Now apparently, there is a growing uproar of objection to using Twitter, Qik, and other social media outlets by representatives in Congress
Aaron Brazell has a post and conversation on going on Friendfeed on this topic. We need Scoble and the rest of the crew to blast this out to make sure some attention is paid to this alarming development.
UPDATE: looks like this got micro-blogged a bit out of proportion. Just read this post and this conversation.
While we're at it, I REALLY REALLY don't think I can EVER EVER EVER vote for a PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES that does NOT know HOW TO USE A COMPUTER.
A couple hours ago Marshall Kirkpatrick over at RWW posted about Identi.ca, a new open source Twitter clone. Check it out here: http://identi.ca.
My profile is here: http://identi.ca/infinitelymeta
A few first impressions:
- Logged in for first time using OpenID. Worked great. Then had to create "local" account to get new profile/handle, etc setup.
- Adding friends is pretty easy. Basic search and follow.
- Timeline - posts up to 140 characters. View Personal timeline and Everyone timeline.
- RSS - Dave Winer says it sucks. Add /rss to any url and you supposedly get RSS.
- XMPP - I'm just setting this up now. Will see how well it works.
- UPDATED: URLs - No auto-tiny URL (yet). I sent @evan a feature request.
I also downloaded the source code here and am actively picking through it to see how well written it is. Would be great if this were the start to a framework for a microblogging socnet platform that can scale. I could really use such a framework right now for one of my "engines".
That is all.
UPDATE: There is a "Coming Soon" FAQ here: http://identi.ca/doc/faq
UPDATE #2: Some now thinking it can't scale due to sql table / schema design. http://identi.ca/notice/4085
I think Bezos stepping up and backing Twitter is probably the most significant bit of news about Twitter in recent months (aside from all the well, you know, the WHALE episodes). I think it will be very interesting to watch and see if, with Bezos' backing and support, if they can successfully re-launch Twitter completely in the cloud. It could be the first real test to see if this type of social network can scale using cloud computing techniques. I am going to be watching this closely, as one of my engines will place similar loads on the cloud.
Today happens to be the nicest day of the summer thus far here in Seattle. It's roughly 80 and sunny with a light breeze blowing in from the Puget Sound. Pretty much woke up did some light work, cleaned up my place a bit (it's still bordering on out of control) and then headed down to Elliott Bay Books for the Gary Vaynerchuk book signing event @ 2:00 pacific.
Got there a bit early so had nice iced american and half turkey sandwich in the Espresso and sandwich bar. They set up a nice room for Gary with about 50 or so seats. I went and grabbed my seat in the back right corner and setup my gear - Ultra Mobile PC with Logitech Quickcam Fusion as I was planning to stream the event live (and record it) on UStream. Elliott Bay Book actually has free wifi, so initially I was psyched to be able to stream it over wifi as its a bit better than using my Cradlepoint 802.11 > Verizon 3G EVDO USB card. Unfortunately the room the signing was in was pretty much in the basement of a brick building and I lost conection to their wifi and was unable to get a signal with my Verizon card.
No worries. I setup both my Logitech and my Panasonic AVCHD HDC-SD1 video camera to record the event *offline*. I was able to get about an hour of HD content that I need to import and also the recording from my logitech, which was at much lower quality.
I'll do my best to get it posted soon. I'll let you watch the whole thing as soon as I can get the videos posted, but let's just say that Gary killed it yet again. He is so much fun to watch/interact with. I'm looking forward to tonight, where I'll be heading to Gary's drink up event at Purple, a wine bar in downtown Seattle. I've never been there so will see what its all about. Looking forward to a great evening.
Oh I almost forgot - Debbie (tenant) stopped by to drop off her check. Her boyfriend works at Hales Ales in Fremont. They offered to "sponsor" a free keg of tasty Hales Ales for our 2nd Annual Eastlake Associates Tenant Appreciation BBQ! I LOVE MY TENANTS!
If you're in Seattle and you want to come watch the fireworks over Lake Union from our prime Eastlake, stay tuned. I'll be sending out more details in the coming days and will post the event to Upcoming. Parking sucks, but all are invited. The whole neighborhood basically turns into a 6+ block neighborhood party. It's really quite fun. 
Awesome day, trending on awesomer.
As I tweeted here, "I love it when a plan comes together!"
- ∞ +
As you can probably tell, I recently switched from my old Blogger-hosted blog to this nice clean, self-hosted WordPress blog. While I was doing some cleanup on Blogger a couple weeks ago, I noticed that my old blog URI was now redirecting to some strange new page/blog after I had previously changed the root prefix from "bdeseattle" to "infinitelymeta".
Now, when I go to http://bdeseattle.blogspot.com, I get someone else's page with an odd post about Cameras. If you view the source of this page, there is some very interesting meta buried in the code.
From the source code, I'm able to see that the userID who claimed the blog URI is: braeden
Towards the bottom of the source, I also see the following script block, which appears to be a for loop with some very cryptic variable names.
I'm not so concerned about the name squatting thing, as I did abandon my old blog URI, but it just seems a bit odd that someone else snapped up my blog URI and put this page up in its place. Here's another site that is referenced by some of the script blocks in the source: http://oedemera.com/
A quick traceroute and whois reveals the following information:
OrgName: HopOne Internet Corporation
OrgID: HOPO
Address: 3311 South 120th Place
City: Tukwila
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98168-5125
Country: US
ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.hopone.net:4321
NetRange: 209.160.0.0 - 209.160.79.255
CIDR: 209.160.0.0/18, 209.160.64.0/20
NetName: HOPONE-MULTI-SITE-1
NetHandle: NET-209-160-0-0-1
Parent: NET-209-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.HOPONE.NET
NameServer: NS5.HOPONE.NET
NameServer: NS3.HOPONE.NET
NameServer: NS2.HOPONE.NET
NameServer: NS6.HOPONE.NET
NameServer: NS4.HOPONE.NET
Comment: HopOne Internet Corp.(R)
Comment: The Foundation of Internet Success.(R)
RegDate: 2004-02-04
Updated: 2007-05-08
OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE958-ARIN
OrgAbuseName: Abuse Department
OrgAbusePhone: 206-438-5909
OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@hopone.net
OrgTechHandle: HJ48-ARIN
OrgTechName: Jass, Haralds
OrgTechPhone: +1-206-438-5909
OrgTechEmail: hjass@hopone.net
Should I be concerned?
I highly recommend you go to http://whoisi.com and type in your name, handle, whatever you use online as your username. If nothing comes back, create a new entry for yourself. I suggest you use your real name. you can add your aliases, alter egos, and imaginary friends later.
Then start searching for friends. If your friends aren't on there yet, you can fill in their details for them. It's like that whole community driven wikipedia-like model thingy.
Here are links to the origins of Whoisi. Here's a blog post that explains things in a lot more detail. All in all, I'd say this is some very nice new socnet tech. I approve.
- ∞ +
I've been waiting a long time to come up with a good logo / concept for my personal brand. Thanks to some creative thinking I've done over the past year, and with a little creative help from @kibmcz, I'd like to introduce you to my new personal brand: Infinitely Meta. - ∞ +
Here's what it looks like:
I'm a big fan of geotagging photos, but I'm not quite sure how I feel about location-based social networking sites. The only real way to fully understand the implications of geotagging your location and blasting it out to your "friends" (cough cough *stalkers*), is to take these shiny new socnets out for a spin.
I signed up for Britekite when it first went into beta, but it took me just up until about a week ago to spend some time figuring out its inner workings. I've finally mastered the basic sms techniques for "checking in" and I'm able to more or less geo-tag myself as I see fit. Here's a recent map of where I've checked in:
There are countless implications for broadcasting this much meta out across the internets and I'm sure this is even more of a problem for women with stalker types, ex-bff's, and other wacko's. Security is of the uptmost importance in these geo-location-based socnets, and as soon as the "friend circle" is breached by unwanted lurker/stalker types, the whole thing could implode. Personally, if I don't feel like broadcasting my location, then maybe all I need to do is just send bogus geo data when I checkin, but that would defeat the purpose.
For now, I'll continue playing around with Britekite. I've got invites in case anyone wants in.