I Kickstarted Diaspora - Step 1 in Quitting Facebook
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I'm The Mayor of Your House - #crime
At the end of the year, I read Michael Fertik's great post, 2010: The Year of Atomic Branding on my friend Jennifer Leggio's blog. I file this under 'scary - interesting' and I thought that was the end of it.
A couple of weeks later, I'm in the city for the weekend with my family. We had just trudged through the rain and were sitting in the bar of the St. Francis. The kids having hot chocolate, me having a martini and I checked in on Foursquare. The act of checking in on Foursquare when I'm with my family delights my kids because they like to know the Mayor of places. The act of checking in on Foursquare pisses my wife off to no end and has been the cause of many a shopping spree.
This time, she simply said "So now everyone that follows you knows that we aren't at home and we are over an hour away. How many people follow you and how much do you trust them not to rob us?' I wish she would have stopped there, but of course, she follows that up with "How often do you check in, telling the world that you aren't home, but maybe me and the kids are?"
Flashback to Michael Fertik's article, the potential threat of oversharing on social networks.
Of course this got me thinking about how safe location based social networks are. How vulnerable are we?
I've heard interesting stories about people & stalkers and being dumped or being fired because of FourSquare. I haven't heard about people being robbed. Yet.
A week or so later, I did a simple check to see how vulnerable we really are. I did a quick search for people in San Francisco sharing their status on Twitter and checked in on FourSquare or Gowalla. It's a simple query using Twitter's advanced search capability.
What I found amazed me. People checked in all over the place. FourSquare was living up to it's reputation. However, an easy cross check from Twitter - where people tend to put their full name and where they live, with WhitePages.com let me easily figure out where people lived. I don't mean just the city, but also their exact address and even a nice little Google Map with directions to get there.
Of course, not everyone is easy to find on WhitePages.com, but my quick little informal experiment yielded about a 25% hit rate. I got freaked out. No more FourSquare for me. In the old days, burglars would prowl around neighborhoods looking for empty houses. Today, they simply need to search for affluent neighborhoods and look for people who have checked in at places more than a few hours away. The movie theater for example.
I took it one step further. Here is a feed for people who have checked in or are posting "I'm at" the key phrase for both Gowalla and FourSquare. When people say where they are, they also say where they aren't (home, for example).
Glad I have an alarm system. How long until someone really malicious does a nice little Twitter / WhitePages mash-up?Photo by Johnny Grim.
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Twitter, Voyeurism & Small Towns
I don’t buy the idea that Twitter will be like the invention of the phone, cell phone or computer, where this narrow set of first adopters paves the way and then a floodgate of regular people follow. That time has passed. It’s actually the masses that have (ironically for a social technology) revolted from Twitter because it’s been crammed down their throats in the media and on the Web, and regular people have balked at it. They are happy to say “I don’t get it, and I don’t want to get it.” Facebook happened more organically in dorm rooms because people saw a need for it. People immediately find their friends there, and that matters.If Chris is talking specifically about the brand Twitter, I would say that it is too early to tell whether or not Twitter is the 'it' application that mass media portrays that it is. Micromessaging, though, is here to stay. I look at Twitter like the Friendster of micromessaging. There is a chance that Twitter could devolve and become irrelevant like Friendster did, making way for MySpace which faltered making way for Facebook. But I don't see micromessaging dying anytime soon. In fact, I only see it getting more and more prominent. People by nature are egotistical and everyone believes that they have something vital to say (bloggers especially). As soon as the printing press became common, people were posting bills and handing out fliers sharing their ideas & opinions. I'm quite sure that there was some guy on a high hill smoke signaling his ideas. There was ham radio, CB's, fanzines on photocopiers, CompuServe forums, email lists, blogs and now Twitter. To further show my point, I looked at the town where I grew up. A small, not very technologically sophisticated town of about 3,000 people. A simple Twitter Search of the town name reveals that people there are using Twitter. These are real people, not some new-media elites grabbing on to this medium. They have a small community and Twitter offers the easiest way to reach them with their ideas and opinions. People love to shout out their thoughts and people love being voyeuristic. Yelling and watching aren't going away anytime soon. Neither is micromessaging. What do you think? Is Twitter a flash in the proverbial pan? Leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts. Photo by Fuffer - who has great cartoons.
Crush It - A Review of @garyvee 's New Book
I'll admit upfront, I'm a big GaryVee fan. When he announced his new book, Crush It, I ordered it no questions asked. I knew that it would be that good. Plus, I've mooched off of his unbelievable content for the past 2-years, it's the least I can do for the guy.
I first heard about Gary when he came to San Francisco and my friend JJ invited me to go see him do a live taping of WineLibrary.tv. Of course, I was a dummy and turned down the offer. I had never heard of Gary, I don't really drink wine so I passed to hang with my family. A few days later, I watched the video and kicked myself for a couple of days more.
If you've ever watched Gary, even once, you know the voice. That unmistakable, semi-hoarse, kind of screaming, enthusiastic voice. That voice was in my head the entire time I read this book. I thought that was cool. Here is a book about building a personal brand and I can't even get this guy's voice out of my head. Talk about brand.
The book itself, like his videos, is pretty short (total read time was only about 2 hours), easy to digest and extremely motivational. You can't read this book and say ho-hum, I'll stick that on a shelf for a rainy day. Hell, it's even got me blogging again. It's also got me thinking about how I can help my dad in his pending retirement and my sister with her new pet store and my buddy the artist. You just want to go out and spread the gospel.
If you're pretty savvy on the social media front, a lot of this will be second nature to you. You'll know all the tools that he talks about. You'll probably have them all set up and you're using them from time to time. If you've spent anytime with anyone that has built a good personal brand, you'll know a lot of the strategy that Gary lays out, but what you won't know is the hustle that he describes. As he points out in the beginning, this isn't a get rich quick scheme, this, like all good schemes, it's a get rich slow with a lot of work one.
But he spells it out for you. In the book, Gary shares with you everything that he did to build his own personal brand. It isn't rocket science, it's work. It isn't get a million twitter followers over night, this is get them over 2 - 3 years of hard work and brand building. But the directions are there, all you've got to do is follow them.
