#himum

“My mum told me she is now following me on twitter so she knows what I'm doing as i don't ever tell her, lol. Hi Mum if you are reading this” 8:51 AM Mar 11th from web

So I posted what I thought was a rather unremarkable tweet back on the 11th March.

I’m so busy at work, and spend my life talking to people about what I do, I always fail to devote as much time and effort in communicating with my parents as I should. It has become a bit of a running joke in the family. “How can you stand up and present to hundreds of people, yet when you speak to me you can’t manage more than a mumbled sentence”, you must know the kind of thing I’m talking about?

I do often feel like Chandler from Friends, where no one quite understands what he does for a living.

Anyway a few weeks ago I was literally stunned when my Mother tells me, “Oh I’m following you on twitter as it’s the only way I can see what you are up to” This from parents who are not exactly technology leaders, and only had Broadband installed in the last few months.

Quite how she had discovered Twitter, and then found me I’m not quite sure. I will have to quiz her this weekend. (Mothers Day and all that). May be we can tweet each other from across the table when we go out for a meal!

I was equally surprised yesterday at the O2 Innovation Day when @tonyfish said he has starting seeing people including “hi mum” in tweets after my original message. I’m not sure if I truly am the trend setter Tony positioned me as, but thanks Tony anyway! If this is all old hat with you Twitter Vets, then apologies, I am fairly new myself to the Twitsphere. (Is that a term??!)

Still, spurned into action by my cyber stalking Mum, I will be including #himum in all my whereabouts status updates from now on.

So I wonder how many of you find yourself in a similar position via your use of social media, and I guess examples like this reinforce Twitters move into the mainstream.

Friends Electric or Billy No Mates?

What I noticed this last weekend was just how much of my online time I now spend managing lists of friends I have scattered across the various sites & online services I use. Every time I update my personal website I have to remember to post in four different places to ensure the people that have indicated they are interested in what I'm producing get to hear about the update.

I don't know about you but I feel I'm at breaking point and now refuse to join any other social networking type service, not because I don't enjoy exploring a new innovative product, it's simply I just don't have the time to invest in building up yet another isolated island of friends. It will have to be a one in one out policy from now on.

I'm not the most prolific online friend maker, but here's an idea of what I'm faced with managing, by service and number of friends / contacts:

LinkedIn (686), MySpace (505), Outlook / Blackberry / SIM Card (383), Twitter (202), Plaxo (187), Facebook (160), Hotmail / MSN (118), My Forum mailing list (25), YouTube (12)
That's a total of 2,278 people.

How many of these are duplicates? How many of them are "engaged" and regularly contacting me or visiting my site? How many of them are connected to other contacts I know? How many could introduce me to the killer contact to achieve my next business objective? I have no idea!

This isn't an exercise in "how many friends have you got?", just to request for someone smart to come up with a way of managing this mess from one simple interface, a one stop friend shop in essence.

Islands without interoperability have been proven to hold back the potential of great ideas time and time again. The internet has brought great innovation and services to the mobile industry, but the mobile industry has some learning's to share back.

We got some pretty basic things right. Going on a business trip? Well I can travel around the entire world and my phone will just work, however to charge it I need a bag of power adapters because the folks in the power companies never sat down to work out what a plug should look like.

Phone calls, text messages, and increasingly picture messages (but admittedly we have some work to do there) wouldn't be as useful or as prevalent if you could only communicate with people on your own network. It's the crossing of boundaries and universal communication that drives adoption.

So there's the tip. Feeds, RSS, mash up's are only the first step in making this stuff easier. FriendFeed is a step in the right direction, aggregating together various service updates and feeds, however it's the friend management that is burning all my time and limiting what I can do with these services.

I need a single site that can aggregate all these islands of friends together, which can be manipulated to show different views like "service of origin" e.g. Facebook, YouTube, plus handle updates and messaging from a single interface.

Taking it a step further can we achieve a single online address book serving all of our digital needs, accessible from your mobile phone, PC, online services, car, TV / set top box? I suspect technology is not the issue here, probably more an issue of trust, security and ensuring provision of consistent, reliable network connectivity.

Get this right and suddenly your "friends" become a really invaluable tool and asset to get stuff done. Friends become electric. If it carries on like this I can't afford the overhead and would prefer to be Billy no mates!

Twitchhiker

Just a quick post...

If any one is still left in any doubt about the power of social networking, even as something as simple as Twitter (micro blogging / status updates limited to 140 characters per update), then checkout http://www.twitchhiker.com/ and start following @twitchhiker now!

See the power of the network spreading before your eyes!

Good luck Paul :)