Below is the comment I wrote on the @adamlashinsky and @padmasree post “Another view on Twitter”

Not only do ideas get stronger when shared, but working relationships, mutual support, motivation, collaboration, etc. also explode.

One reason “microsharing” is so powerful is that it oddly mimics the dynamics of how natural human relationships form. Oblique interactions, gradual knowing, discovery of common interests and other social objects build trust and connect minds together in surprisingly powerful ways.

And by the way, I’m not too worried about what the “intended” uses of Twitter were, because I see dozens and dozens of “unintended” uses becoming deceptively powerful and helpful in people’s everyday lives.

What consistently creates professional and personal value for people on Twitter are some of the very oldest principles of success. Things like building your professional network, harnessing the power loose ties, surrounding yourself with successful people, finding mentors and collaborators, conferring on best solutions/practices, interacting socially as well as professionally (Twitter as golf course), etc.

Building personal caring and affinity between co-workers is an important part of creating a productive business culture. Microsharing has the potential to boost that and unlock some pretty compelling business value through a number of use cases (the most compelling of which we may not even know yet).

These slides are from my recent keynote on the topic at Jive software’s enterprise UI/UX Summit in Aspen: http://www.slideshare.net/pistachio/uiux-aspen-jive (see thumbnails in the post just prior to this…)

This is awesome because if you know me, you KNOW I don’t know a G-D thing about developing, coding or, for that matter, following directions.

YET,

Using NewsGator Editor’s Desk (they are a client) I just hacked together a very awkward-looking but interesting little widget AND made it into a Facebook application. It’s an ugly* little alpha-proto-pre-prototype, but it took me less than an hour with no previous experience.

This widget is showing you the two most “popular” items from each of 6 of my feeds: Pistachio Consulting, Twitter, Flickr, Brainsieve, Qik and YouTube. The popularity data is limited because it is keying off the behavior of anyone using any NewsGator RSS tool to read any of these feeds. In the case of PistachioConsulting.com that means 22 users. The other feeds have fewer - or no - subscribers. But still.

It’s also a Facebook application, should you care to install a funky-lookin box of my content on your Facebook page. (NOTE: I haven’t had anyone test this out yet. I have no idea how it will look or work. YMMV. Don’t Drink & Drive)

But this is PRECISELY what I was getting at last November when I launched Brainsieve. I wanted a way to pull together “best of” content (as defined by how people interact with the content, not what I thought was cool) from anywhere that I was “broadcasting.” I wanted to put it all in one place, and I wanted it to self-editorialize. Meaning, “observe” audience interest and self-select the pieces that are most interacted with.

I realize that FriendFeed, SocialThing and any number of web presence aggregators also come close to the Brainsieve model, but here’s the point: a totally non-technical layperson built this and made it into a Facebook Application. For that matter, the widget above can be lifted and put anywhere. So this nontech chick not only built the tool, but the tool itself self-replicates. UPDATE: It also permits you to email and rate each individual item…

How ya like them apples? I’m impressed. What could you build?

*Believe me, there are way more configuration/beautification options here, I was just going for a quick proof-of-concept.

UPDATE: The Facebook application itself is not the point. Unless you’re an avid fan, or, say, my mother, you probably don’t need a widget displaying the “best of” what I have published on 6 of my RSS feeds. It could be prettified into a “Pistachio Channel” by which you could consume only the most popular things that I post, instead of trying to follow me a ton of different places, or drowning in a “Lifestream” that sends you every item I ever publish. It’s a “sampler.” The ability to read attention data (was the item read, emailed, shared, bookmarked, rated etc?) and sort the RSS feed accordingly is really hot though.

What’s amazing is that I can’t code my way out of a box. There was No. Coding. Work. Whatsoever to build this. Yet you can grab and re-publish the widget, email any item in it to a friend, rate any of the items, subscribe as a Facebook App, etc. etc.

Put differently, you can take ANY RSS feeds, combine them how you like (by popularity or date, # of items per feed, etc.) build a widget and convert that into a Facebook Application without ANY coding ability.

I am lecturing twice today at Bentley College in Waltham, MA for Professor Mark Frydenberg’s IT101 course: Introduction to Information Technology. Mark is extraordinary in the degree to which he incorporates, teaches and uses web 2.0 tools (wikis, blogging, popfly mashups) in his class.

The morning class was delightful and of course, we live streamed the entire thing on Qik.com/pistachio

I told my Twitter followers to follow this link to remain abreast of the students’ conversations and remarks via Twitter during the class. It is just a www.tweetscan.com search for “pistachio” so that everyone can follow all of the replies together and see the students’ individual introductions. It kept us all on the same page. Fun.

Next class is in a few minutes, I’ll return later to embed the video… Follow us live (if chat doesn’t work, there is probably just a time lag on the upload) at www.Qik.com/pistachio.

Community, duh, equals people with things in Common. Those things in common are what Hugh McLeod at Gapingvoid has been calling social objects.

Apple’s lack of “social media” efforts have been widely criticized, BUT. Who has arguably the strongest cult, err, community following of any technology company going? Oh yeah. Right.

They did it by creating things people feel so passionate about that the community arose on its own.

If your company is smart enough to value community, what can you learn from this?

Community sin #1 Community without love. iPod is a social object because people have a passionate relationship to it. How does your company stir passion?

OK, stop laughing. Your work matters to someone. There’s a headache you solve or you wouldn’t make money. Take waste management. Passionless. Yawn. Except, someone SURE cares when there’s the lack of it. And the person whose job it is to take care of personal and commercial trash disposal sure as hell cares when the service sucks.

Community sin #2 Trying too hard. I won’t even bother to google for examples, surely you’ll have plenty in the comments. Picture yourself standing in the middle of the playground at recess yelling “hey guys! let’s make an M&M Mars community!” FAIL. Instead, try “hey guys! who wants some M&M’s?”

Communiy sin #3 Community as destination (and to benefit the company only) instead of as means to something mutually interesting. Be useful. Be convenient. People have enough obligations in the circles they currently frequent. Don’t build another damned place for them to go. Build stuff that fits and goes wherever they already are.

The bottom line is that someone already cares or you wouldn’t be in business. That’s your community. Serve them well.

What are your “Community Building” pet peeves? How would you guide a company trying to generate real business value through community?

I rely on “shared items” feeds in my RSS reader. I “subscribe” to hundreds more feeds than I can follow and a firehose of ideas pours through every day. Shared items allow friends to highlight the “best of” their reading experiences and stream out little personal “highlight reels” from all the material they happen to read.

When friends share what’s exceptional, the river of incoming information is concentrated into a manageable stream. I miss alot, but I also get more value in less time. Honestly, I *like* how the “social media echo chamber” bounces good stuff to the surface to get shared much more widely.

South by So Much
Crammed with panels, parties and thousands of smart, creative people, South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSWi for the under-140 crowd) was both wonderful and (for me, almost totally) overwhelming.

Speaking with Clarence (@DYKC), CC Chapman (@cc_chapman), Steve Hall (@adrants) and others at the airport, I kept feeling disappointed about people and things I’d missed.

Shared Items Metaphor for Events
Instead of feeling sad, why not consider storytelling part of the event? What if the videos and blog posts and photos and podcasts and personal recollections now pouring from my friends and contacts are as much a part of attending SXSW as actually showing up at a panel? Nobody can absorb all the best ideas, consume all the content, meet all the people or attend all the parties. Life just doesn’t scale. And to try is to spread ourselves too shallow and thin.

Though I know from stories told that I missed important things, by seeking out what my friends noticed and took away from the experience I’m extending the depth and breadth of being there. Of *course* you can’t do it all yourself. Do your part well. Dive deep, absorb, process and reflect. Then, make it a priority to engage and exchange stories with with others who did theirs.

Your knowledge and experience is not as firsthand that way. The experience is (literally) socially mediated. Stuff will be lost in translation, sure. But tackling a conference like that head on and trying to do it all spills plenty of the good stuff too.

Comments
Tell us what YOU did a great job absorbing/learning/discovering at SXSW. Better yet, give us a link to your blog posts, media and other ideas…

UPDATE
Some gems seen on Twitter:

• SXSW Blogger Beatbox
• SXSW Sketches

As a shortcut for checking out recaps, here are some readymade Google search links:

• SXSW Recap 2008
• SXSW podcasts 2008

(aka: Tools for Parsing Your Twitter Idea Farm)
Here are some Twitter applications I’d LOVE to use. The more I think about how friggin powerful Twitter has been in my life, the more I want to be able to dig back into Twitter streams and scoop out potentially useful chunks.

Do any of these tools exist already? Can you build them? PLEASE let me know. Laura at PistachioConsulting (dot) com. Note, this is not a wishlist for Twitter itself, but ideas for tools & apps in the Twitter ecosystem.

If I were super clever, I’d describe each function in 140 characters or less, wouldn’t I? Sorry.

Download. Twitter is cool, Ev & Sara were a pleasure to meet. I trust & love you the company. BUT. I want my complete database to play with and have as a backup.

Search. I want to search my entire Twitter stream (but just mine or just X’s) to extract stuff by keyword and or thread. Bonus points if the tool threads possible responses, repeats, etc. that may have rippled through Twitter. Using the timestamp, follower status, @reply function and/or keywords could help make that threading possible, couldn’t it?

Import/export. This would give a clean way to pull a mass of Tweets out of a twitterstream and into a text document. I’d use this, for ex., after LeWeb to harvest conference “notes” including session notes, mini conversations, who I met, etc. Sure I can use a search tool to collect all the tweets, but the copy/paste from that is a big old mess. I just want the clean text, please.

Keyword “Notes.” Combining the first two, search and extract, I can quickly pull notes on everything I’ve ever tweeted with “present*” in it. I’d examine how my ideas in a topic change over time, or pull notes for an article, blog post or book chapter fast and easily.

Followee extract (by time period). Another conference fantasy. If I meet someone at a conference I would like to get to know better, I add them on Twitter (and/or plead with them to try it out, so that I can add them.) Would love to arrive home, pull and export the list of people I added in a certain time period.

Command line interface. I want my socnets and social tools/applications (open social, anyone?) to be easily addressed from Twitter. Ex: Dopplr. I book a trip. I tweet @Dopplr Paris, France 9 Dec 2007 to 13 Dec 2007. My Dopplr updates. Dopplr could send me DMs too, when there was relevant outbound info.

Point is, I get to use YOUR app right at “home” where I live (in Twitter). It’s less work for me. Hint: if your social app is less work for me, there’s a better chance I’ll use it. This is also a non-Twitter idea because the same thing can work via SMS and email. Give me a low attention investment & high utility return and I’m yours.

@erator. Analytics tool built along the same lines as TweeterBoard, except it examines your twitter archive for the ideas that got the most responses. (It could factor in which tweets got favorited too.) Includes a “scaling” variable so that if you got 4 responses to a tweet when you had 100 followers, that has the same weight as 40 responses with 1000. Otherwise your earliest ideas get automatically discounted.

[Favorited?: Tell me if any of my tweets, and which ones, have ever been starred as favorites. By whom? This must already exist, right?] Since I drafted this Favotter by @ono_matope has surfaced. Yay @mdy for letting me know. Tool doesn’t scale yet, only tracks the “top 950″ by number of their tweets that have been starred.

Groups. I know there are some hacks for this. Rounding 1,000 followers in Paris made me sit up and take notice on this issue. I need ways to keep a closer eye on closer connections without losing any voices that might have something to say. The days of “keeping up” with peoples’ tweets are long gone, and I can go weeks without “seeing” folks I truly care about because I care about so many. Halp!

Group Twitter streams. @Kosso has an excellent hack from Gnomedex & PodCamp, and he was kind enough to do it again for @peaple, but the buggy Twitter RSS streams can throw it off. The idea is that an account is set up that anyone in the group can post to. It’s supremely powerful as a tool at an event or conference.

Amazon Gets Into MMO-Powered Crowdsourcing - GigaOM

I found this really interesting. Amazon, whose tools for surfacing, associating and recommending content (products) fascinate me, is pulling in incentives from the MMOG world to encourage its “experts” community to assist other shoppers.

To me Amazon is way ahead of other players in establishing and developing the kind of socially-mediated marketplace that I envision for the future.

Wagner James Au explains:

With Askville, users who provide helpful answers are given virtual gold as they rise in status (called “levels”) — two metrics familiar to anyone who’s ever played massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. Questville will take this to its logical conclusion, offering adventures and Quest Coins to helpful Askville users. With a game like WoW, you become more powerful by killing monsters and completing fantastic tasks; with Questville, you’ll get virtual rewards for providing helpful real-world information.

Think about it: how can businesses of the future encourage their communities to “invest all that time, ability and creativity” that goes into gaming into helping people source and buy the things that they truly want and need.

PS: Alice Taylor of Gaming blog Wonderland got the hat tip and had this delightful quote: “We humans are such reward-oriented critters, aren’t we!”

(Via I am so sorry but I forget who tweeted the link .)