drewblr

parislemon:

I recently crossed 1,000 friends on Facebook. Am I actually friends with a thousand people? No. Not even close. If I were using Facebook to only be in contact with people I consider myself at least somewhat close to, I’d probably have more like 100 friends. Maybe less.

For a long time I haven’t cared about using Facebook in this restricted way because I’ve basically been using it like Twitter — which is to say, with the assumption that just about everything is public (and I have a filter for the few things I don’t want public). The problem I’ve been encountering though is a massive amount of quasi-spam.

Read More

Last night turned out to be pretty awesome.   On my way home from work, I do as I usually do as I wait for the train…I checked my twitter.  I saw a tweet from fellow Phillyian Alex Hillman.   He had a ticket to the Foo Fighters show at the Spectrum (which I didn’t even know about) and wanted to give it away.   I tweeted back for him to email me and I gave him a ring and went.

How rad?  Twitter FTW!   Alex is a great cat who runs IndyHall, the famous Philly co-working space.

The show was great, Foo Fighters played for like 2 hours, and other than the WACHOVIA Spectrum only having one ATM, fun was had by all.   Even the guy next to me (not Alex) who thought he WAS the drummer of Foo Fighters.

That’s the power of social media.   Alex didn’t have my cellphone # even though we’re friends, and he knows a lot of people in Philly, so he just put the tweet out leaving it open to anyone.    That’s awesome.  That’s social.  So anyone who says that we’re Geeks who live in the basement of our parents house and never see the light of day because we use tools like Twitter, they’re wrong.

In between sets we had some great conversations about what he’s up to, what I’m up to, and he’s really doing some ground-breaking projects.   Smart dude.

Oh, and Big ups to Brian for the tickets! (whom I have never met)

Twitter announces upgrades now and then, and then it’s down for hours on end.   Twitter is also down a lot even when they don’t announce upgrades.

People have written about this over and over.   Complaining.  Making suggestions.   Thing is, nobody knows what is going on behind the scenes over there.   Twitter doesn’t make their total userbase numbers available.   Could be 10,000, could be 10,000,000.   Who knows.    A lot of people are saying they built it wrong, slamming them for not caring, slamming their hosting provider Joyent for crappy service.   Complaining that it went down during Macworld, and during the Presidential Debates and State of the Union address.

Will it be up during the superbowl?  Oh my goodness!!! I hope so! they say.

And what about Twitter’s lack of business model.   How will they make money?  Here’s how you make money.  I know how you can make money! Everyone is a startup know-it-all all of a sudden.

Bottom line.   This is helping Twitter.   It shows that people love it.   It shows that people almost NEED it, to communicate, share, or just vent.  

People threaten that they’ll move to Jaiku or Pownce.   Not a damn chance.   Twitter’s userbase are loyal, they’re sticking it out.   Twitter is a great idea, a great service, and it will be around for a long long time.    This will be 10x more successful than Blogger in my opinion.   The Obvious team has a real winner here.

So Jack, Ev, Biz and team.   Hang in there.   Nobody is in the office with you, nobody knows how many late nights you’ve put in.   Nobody knows what the issues are.

And everyone who is complaining?  You’re only helping the cause.  So keep it up :)

(photo by iJustine)