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Today I went out mtn biking at Lake Crabtree in Apex (I think). It’s always a great time out there, the trails - amazing! Some great stuff, it’s a lot of fun. But the other reason why I love that place is the wildlife. Every time I go I see something beautiful, even if it’s just the lake or the trees.

Today I saw probably the best scene so far, a doe with her fawn, I stood there for about 5 minutes, ended up being joined by 3 other people while we watched the two of them. The shots I got with my camera phone make me wish I had a real camera with me.

Well, it was quite a view, but if you want to see a better picture get out there for yourself!

Last Thursday I went to the second Triangle Tweetup, held at C[Capstrat]], a local media agency. It was quite a nice location, though we did fill it with the 60+ twitterers who showed up. As always @waynesutton did a great job of organizing interesting presentations, among which were:

• Twitter Movie Reviews, a cool app by @JazzyChad that aggregates twitter movie comments to catch the vibe about a movie.
  My thoughts:Pretty Hip, but I can probably get the same info by just listening to my feed, many trends seem to emerge from small groups and be echoed by the masses. Aside from that, I know which of my friends to trust on this front. Listening to the masses might end up with me watching the next jackass movie, no thanks. Either way, it is a great way to show the power of twitter to find what has buzz and what the crowd likes - crowd sourcing at it’s most pure.
  The big downfall I saw to this tool was that it was almost completely manual, and that just won’t scale. However, Chad seems to be on top of getting things automated, if he can sort that out he may be able to branch out to other areas instead of just movies. What about restaurants, hotels, vaca spots, or products. There could be money to be had here…
• The latest in media devices from @shepherdfx (Francis Shepherd). This was a review of the latest in mics and cameras mostly at the pro and semi pro level. Quite interesting to see where the market is going.
  My Thoughts: All this stuff is out of my price range, but it’s great to see everything is getting cheaper and cheaper, which means it could be in my price range soon.
• @critter, the local colorful twitterer, did a presentation on C[seesmic]]. I think Critter actually talked about this at the last tweetup as well. This time however, the app has grown more into its own, and I now better understood that it is more about interactive movie chat. Like a video twitter. A huge improvement is that there are threads.
  My Thoughts: I don’t do much video chat, it feels like the futuristic world that every wonk was predicting 20 years ago. It’s not that it isn’t a cool site, I’m just not hip to video posts yet. Maybe I’ll try it out soon, if I did, it would definitely be at seesmic, the site is slick and looks quite easy to use.

After the presentations we had some group chat, I didn’t take notes, but here are some major convos I recall:

• C[brightkite]] - cool or annoying?
  A lot of people have picked up on brightkite, a site that lets you broadcast your location in a twitteresque way. So twitterlike, that you can have it actually feed into twitter as well. A smooth integration that many were quick to jump on. The downside of this is that people are now getting spammed with everyone’s location, most of the time I don’t care that much, and many of the people aren’t remotely near me. Besides that, the locations are in address form, some one could be 50 feet away from me, but I wouldn’t know because I am horrible with street names.
  It’s a cool site, geolocal twitter, neato, but I think it still has some work to do before it is truly answering a pain.
• What if twitter goes down… I mean for good
  What will we all do?! Ok, it’s not that bad, but a common reply was “Get work done!” Sad but true. Pownce was brought up, a common complaint being that no one is there - not so true if twitter is dead. I threw IRC out there, because often times the only difference between the two is I’m a little more trigger shy on twitter.

After that the group mostly split up and headed over the bar Capstrat has across the hall (sweet!), some great conversations where had there as well, here’s a bit of what I took part in:

• @jessmartin mentioned that C[Startupweekend]] is coming to the triangle, with a background of coding and a love for startups, this sounds pretty enticing.
• Would C[brightkite]] be better if it were built into the phone, I see the possibility of more great innovations with android coming. Side note, why the heck did apply ruin the iPhone by stifling innovation and not allowing third party developers free reign? If it were built right in then I would have to do anything to tell people where I am, GPS coords could be sent back automatically, and if a friend is within X meters I could be automatically notified.
  
  The question was asked whether or not twitter should do this. Some argued that part of its essence is simplicity and that features like that would muddy it. I agree that the simplicity is key to bringing in new people and getting them addicted. I think the real challenge with any product is adding new features without adding complexity. Twitter’s vision isn’t clear, they may stay 140 char text box or they may branch out, only time will tell.



• Will twitter sell?
  Will they sell, or maybe the better question is after which milestone will they sell? Some postulated that they need to prove the monetary value of a user first, has facebook done that - I’m not sure. A good question was asked here, what if they try to make some money but do a bad job, because it’s not their specialty and by doing so falsely generate a lower valuation. Perhaps they won’t try at all.
• SMS marketing on mobiles
  I think this will take off in USA at some point, but several people brought up not wanting to be spammed. I think if it’s done right it will be more like a service than advertising. C[APML]] (I believe this is what people said) was brought up as a good start to making sure this was done right. Definitely a sticky bit that needs to worked out, exciting!
• How to start using twitter corporately
  I mentioned that I had obtained a few twitter names for Bronto, but that I haven’t done anything with them yet, since I haven’t figured out the route I want to go. @Justis said that was a great idea, think it through before you start a feed that is useless, confusing, or just not a good reflection of your company. Good point. Also, make sure to grab your company’s name and any variations on any new social network right away or some one else will, even if you’re not sure what you’ll do with it yet.

Other tidbits that got thrown around: Why C[Bronto]] is so cool (shameless plug, I know), how to open a beer bottle with your ring, SAS has great benefits, and I need to get into Raleigh for beers with @jefftippett and @Dimambro, among many many others.

Then we got tossed out at 10:00 so the Capstrat folks could go home. A fun night of stimulating conversation spent with some hip local people. After a couple years down here, I’m definitely starting to understand why the triangle is such a great place to live.

 

I thought I’d just throw a quick plug for a great new shirt I got: Twitter Overload! I thought it was pretty nice… I got the shirt from startupwear.com, check it out.

@cpengel just posted a twittered about this amazing app phun that was created by Emil Ernerfeld as some sort of phun w/ physics tutorial. From the sample video it looks like he stumbled across a very cool, addictive, and from the looks of it extremely intuitive app.

Having spent most of my waking hours over the last 3 days thinking about how to make complex concepts simple, intuitive, and efficient, this is definitely right up my alley.

Too bad there is no OS X version…

Hey all, here is a few videos and sites that I love. They are from quite a while back, but they are good none-the-less.

Channel 101

There are a slew of off the wall “shows” that I used to watch on Channel101.com. All of these shows are somewhat of a parody of modern tv shows - weak plots, worse scripts, and overdone special effects. In the fashion of TV, each month the creators whip up a new ‘episode’ of their show. The shows are screened and the top 5 are carried on, while all others are cancelled. I don’t suggest checking these out if you are easily offended.

• The ‘Bu - As mentioned in a recent blog post, was my first introduction to The Lonely Island crew and (sometimes) features Elliot from Scrubs. Episode 1 is a good intro to this strip, I suggest going straight through, but if you are rushed for time then skip right to episode 8, the month where they “didn’t make an episode”. CLAP - CLAP
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• House of Cosbys - HoC to those in the know. If you lived through the 80’s and remember Jello, Picture Pages, and of course the Cosby Show, then this is the show for you. It had a great first few episodes but started to slide into the obscene, luckily it was saved from implosion by an unruly Cease and Desist.
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• There are many more: Yacht Rock, Most Extraordinary Space Investigations (often featuring Sarah Silverman), and so many more.
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Homestar Runner

Ok, this is definitely an oldy, and you shouldn’t need me to introduce you to this, but if you haven’t heard of Homestar Runner, or perhaps his more well known buddy - Strongbad, then please check it out right now. Below I’ve picked out a few of my all time favorites, but there are hundreds of fantastic videos on that site, you can lose days there. One of the best things about these videos is the easter eggs, you can find out more about them on the Homestar Wiki.
The intro to the site is available below (sorry about the bad audio), one of my favorite strong bad emails is anything. The side shows are pretty hot too, like Teen Girl Squad and many others!

Just got a link to this great video from phillymac on twitter. Definitely worth checking out if you’re still not sure what twitter is or why it’s for you.

Twitter in Plain English | Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English

I like to think that twitter is almost like having some friends and aquantances in the room with you. You can choose to listen in and respond or ignore them, but they are all there, just keeping you posted.

If you’d like to follow me, feel free.

The guys over at google are always introducing great new products and apps. But it’s not always the products they introduce, but how they introduce or educate you about them. Check out this video from Google Russia showing what you can do with gmail. It happens to be in russian, but it’s still a great video to watch.

For more info and detail into this video, check out the blog post from google’s blog.

I’ve been playing with Twitter clients over the past few days, trying to see which one would best serve my needs. Here are the results of what I’ve found. Oh yeah - obligatory twitter page pimp.

Before I dive into the various clients, I’ll first say that I found them all to be pretty easy to use as well as pretty much the same. There really aren’t any big differentiators. They’re all bubbly, web 2.0, with pretty much the same interface right down to the icons. There are differences in how you configure them, but with how infrequently you go through that I don’t see that as a differentiator.

• Snitter - http://snook.ca/snitter/
  
• This was my first client and I found it pretty intuitive
• Text entry bubble is at the top
• Interface is a little bulky and there aren’t really any options aside from color.
• Requires Adobe Air -which sometimes has issues with quiting properly




• Twhirl - http://www.twhirl.org/
• This is a bit tighter on the interface, which I like
• Good icons for conversations, as you can see on the top tweet (click through to larger version of the image)
• This can hide the text entry bubble (as shown here), but when in use, it’s at the bottom
• Ditto on Adobe Air issues




• Twitterific - http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific
• Has integration w/ Growl
• Doesn’t let me type more than 140 chars, v. annoying. I often go a bit over then edit my message down to 140
• Does have good graphics for direct and reply messages
• Didn’t show up in the apple dock or spaces, I don’t like that voodoo
• It’s a free trial, it’s fully functional though




• Instant Messaging
• Quick and easy for posts
• Known interface and already installed - who doesn’t have an IM client?
• Most clients don’t tell you your character count, major downside, I’m too verbose
• Only usable for posting and receiving direct tweets
• Text Messaging
• I did this quite a bit from the EEC Email Evolution conference -very effective
• Really the only way to twitter on the move, it’s good to use this in conjunction with a desktop client
• It’s a bit slow because I don’t have a keyboard on my phone
• It’s costly because I don’t have a good text plan
• Twitter.com
• Easy to use, very straight forward
• Nothing to install
• No auto refresh - which would be helpful

So where does that leave me? Well, no one is changing the game here. I’m not sure that you need to, but it definitely means that I’m not willing to pay for a client (Twitterific) if they’re only selling point is that their graphics are cuter.

I’m currently using twhirl because I like the more compact client than snitter, which otherwise seems nearly identical. Twitterific’s OS X issues and text entry limit were deal breakers for me. But I’ll keep my eyes out for any other clients that may pop up.
Did I miss any great clients? What is your preferred twitter tool? Let me know in the comments.

I’ve been using twitter for a bit over a week now and it’s quite nice. I am still trying to find the right cadence for my tweets (posts to your bloggers). I’m not the “Getting a short, skinny, hazelnut, cappuccino at starbucks”, “Just got up, hope it’s a great day!” kind of person. I try to pass along a bit more value with each tweet. To each his own.

With my short time using twitter I’ve found that they’ve done a good job with the interface, so I decided to do a bit of a review. Check it out, let me know if you agree.

It’s my first foray into this type of post, but I really liked doing it, I think you’ll be seeing more of it.

As I eluded to in my last post, I’ve been into running recently. I’ve never really been a huge fan of running. It seemed pretty pointless to me. However, lately I’ve been going to the gym regularly, free membership for those who go at least 8 times a month is a good motivator. Going to the gym has been pretty good, though I usually hit the kickboxing class, which is great.

Anyway, a buddy of mine sent an email asking if anyone was up for a half marathon. I laughed, then I thought, “What the hell, I could do that.” I told him I was in.

A week later I was out running on duke golf course. I have to be honest, my new ipod (thanks Dan and Justin!) has really helped. I also go Nike+ipod, which is sweet. It keeps track of my pace, mileage, and helps me keep going. Aside from that, the website is v. cool.

Honestly, that is awesome, and that’s just a taste. I mean, if there is ever a way to get me into something, it’s definitely to create some gadget that goes along with it, especially if it involves letting me listen to my music at the same time.