Anyway, for this year I’ve summarized my resolutions in 3 themas:

1. OPEN
2. SOCIAL
3. PASSION

First I was gonna details these bullets but now I think they are really clear and suffices to themselves.
So feel free to ask for details, if you’re unsure about what I mean. In the meantime, let’s be an open social passionate electron in the Web Gen !

In a few words, he says “blah blah blah… it’s complicated”. No surprise! But reading the TechCrunch post about this new explanation to calm down the Facebook generation, I was a bit surprized by the metaphore used:

When you share your data with someone else, whether it be an email or a photo, it becomes their data as well. You cannot normally rescind data you share with other people in an e-mail. So why should a social network be any different

It sounds a bit easy of a comparison to me.
I send a photo to a friend, it’s right that my friend can keep this photo…  BUT

• Facebook itself is NOT my friend !
• Facebook is not 1 person I share something, it’s more about a company sharing with third parties.
• A friend is somewhat a local storage of this information. After I publish something on Facebook, who the hell knows where it can be…

IMHO, this is not a question about “let’s be more permissive, because it’s online media“, it is now time to define a basic rules set about online privacy. Facebook already benefited a lot of this ‘empty’ juridical place.

Tough times call for tough measures, and even if I understand Facebook need to secure it’s value, I think we should not tolerate such deviation in the use of personal data shared among friends.

1. Focus on Content
   A main characteristic of Twitter is the 140 characters limitation. So be sure to be concise & precise. You can say a lot even with 140 characters! And the best way to grow your followers community is to provide clean and clear ideas.
2. Be polite
   This may seem obvious but there are already some abuse reported. So think twice when you tweet, because your short text will be publicly broadcast and read before you’ve got time to fall back. You’ll find a Twitter Etiquette here or here (if you need guidance;)
3. Do not give away your password
   Last item in the obvious series, do not give your password to third parties. If you don’t know why, just ask yourself if you would like to give your phone and the PIN code to strangers. So now you’re warned, don’t cry for identity theft or messages you didn’t write yourself.
4. Control your tweet speed
   This advice can be harder to follow. When you tweet, you’re not only sending a message to 1 or 2 friends but to a whole community. As each one tends to follow more than 2 friends, It can quickly become annoying when you’ve got a black sheep twittering every move each 5 seconds. If you don’t want to loose followers or friends, keep your tweet speed to a decent level. This way everyone can still communicate instead of hearing some white noise.
5. Use @, RT and #
   There are 3 basics twitter syntax you can rely on:
   
   • @ is the common identifier for people. You’ll use it a lot in directed (yet public) conversation.
   • RT is to use when you forward a message you like and want to share with your own community.
   • The # sign is used when you want to specify an event or subject. By using #, you ease the search or filter use to people only interested in a topic.
6. Choose with caution who you follow
   At first, you will be tempted to add as many friends you can, like you do on Facebook. But the thing is Twitter is no Facebook: someone you follow will “send messages to you”. Imagine you follow 100 persons tweeting 5 times a day, it will be so messy you’ll begin to taste some “I’m getting too much spam” feeling.
7. Get an anti-spam
   You may think I’m silly, but I think security software actors could someday provide a Twitter-AntiSpam. If you think this is a joke, you probably don’t know yet: “viraltweets” or “twitter le truc du jour“. So be cautious when you receive strange tweets, sometimes it is no good to click on every link. And if you get caught by some script retwitting this spam, at least clean you account and delete this unwanted message.
8. Less is More: use shortening tools
   Due to the 140 characters limitation, you may find these shortening tools rather useful:
   • To compress urls in a few bytes: bit.ly, tinyurl.com, snipurl.com (sn.im), is.gd , tr.im,….
   • To share pictures: twitpic.com
   • To compress text: 140it.com, tweetshrink.com, twonvert.com
   • To share source code:  snipt.org

   You can also refer to this article about best practices to short-tweet.

9. Avoid pyramidal traps
   If you still think the more followers you have, the best you are… you will probably get trapped in such pyramidal scheme like TweeterGetter. This website propose some “viral” approach to get followers. But the truth is you give your Twitter account to a stranger that will automatically build a pyramid of accounts. Viral marketing should not be confused with basic chain-letter scheme.
10. Monitor and engage your followers
    Building a large and faithful community, do not hesitate to engage your new followers by thanking and trying to know them. This way you’ll build a win-win relation with people interested in what you have to say or share with.
11. Don’t forget your profile
    Once you’ve got your brand new account, take some time to fill your profile details. It can be bad and at least new followers will have some information about you and your main interests. They may even go to your website, so there is no reason to not share such details. Moreover you can also personalize your Twitter page, so visitors will appreciate a appreciable welcome note.
12. Use adequate tools
    There are a lot of Twitter related tools. Thanks to Xavier from Tweetag, you can print this handful cheat sheet card. This toolbox gather the main Twitter tools you may need. If you need more tools, you can refer to the Twitter apps db.
    My favorite ones are:  StockTwits, TweetDeck, TweetWheel and MicroPlaza (if you’re lucky enough to have a beta invite). There are a lot of others but you’ll find easily other tools lists.
13. Split personal and professional accounts
    It is considered as a good practice to have both a personal and a professional email account. And it’s the same for Twitter! If you really are using a twitter account for business needs, you may prefer to split your personal and professional tweets. I know that social media are all about the person engaging a community, but I’m not sure the “Safe at home at 6h12 in the morning after 2 vodka and 1/2 whisky bottle” tweet will enjoy your professional followers

I hope you enjoyed this best practices and feel free to propose more… See you soon on Twitter @Wavyx.

A new media

When you read the homepage of Twitter.com, you may still wonder what so different about this communication tool. You can read more about “How Twitter was born“, but I’ll give here my vision of what is this media.

Let’s put it like that:  blog + instant messaging/sms + tribe = Twitter ! It sounds simple but the combination of personal content (blog) and immediate limited messaging (sms of 140 char max) into a social broadcasting platform is getting more and more attention. After early adopters, mainly geeks and tech people, PR and news agencies are now trying to get into the boat. Even advertisers are slowly offering solutions to monetize these 140 characters (here and there)!

So what’s really new in Twitter? It is a fresh, reactive and fast communication channel. It also have some “RSS like” aspect because you are pulling the updates from your friends. At least this is the first aspect, because with tools like Twhirl or TweetDeck, we are becoming more and more addicted to this IM based community. In such a way that you are no more pulling tweets when you want to read them, but you use this monitor/scanning application to always be aware of the last tweet of your virtual friend.

So in a few words, Twitter is a short broadcast messaging system. To me, it is a new mail system only you’re limited at 140 characters and forced to broadcast publicly your message. Hence, one may ask if Twitter has a real purpose or filling a real communication need… but let’s get back to this later. For now, we’ll cover a couple of limitations of such messaging systems.

Limitations

Like I said, Twitter is really a mail like system with almost the same problems or limitations:

1. Load and scalability
   One of the first issue Twitter encountered was scalability. In the early days, the website and notifications suffered notification delays and off-times. This seems in order for now. But think about how Twitter is built… it’s a pyramidal scheme. You know a bit like this never ending mail chains. Each time someone tweets (and is possibly retweeted), all his community has to be notified. This results in a fast growing function, moreover since people are now followed and following thousand of people.
2. Privacy
   The starting point of Twitter is like public broadcast. You have no real way to contact a specific group of people. You may either broadcast to everyone following you, or use direct messaging. Replies are in a middle ground: public message but intended to one person. A last remark, if you are “public”, you’ll need to clean your new followers from time to time.
3. Authenticity
   Like blogger identity theft, there is no way to really authenticate a Twitter profile. And if you think “Who cares?”, do not forget about the emerging business uses of PR agency or branding.
4. Spam and virus
   Last but far to be the least, Twitter will suffer spam issues (and maybe virus). I was wondering when I would see the first attempt of spam, and here it goes (DO NOT USE THIS!). There are 2 related concerns. First, you don’t have practical metrics to know if a threat is really widely spread (unless you’ve got some friends working on some alpha project)  Second, Twitter makes great use of tinyurl.com or bit.ly services, making it harder to filter spam messages.

The first and last problems are really the most important to me. And I think that if Twitter do not offer soon a reliable way to handle these, it will become a really messy place where you’ll keep blocking user to keep your account clean.

Content

It is now time to think about the What? What content do you think Twitter messages contain? Here is my personal short list:

• Personal status: hello world, I’m hungry/tired/sad/happy/…, I’m going to the movies,  and so on
• Weather or Earth related news: snow, rain, hurricanes, earthquakes, …
• Twitter itself: a lot of tweet are about the platform itself, talking about twitter status, features or discovery of a new twitter tool
• Funny and ephemere URLS like youtube, vimeo, slideshare, …
• Notifications: blog posts or alerts

I maybe forgot some typical use, but do you find any of this kind of “news” relevant to you ? Yes, it’s funny like a mail forward, and it’s also quick like IM. But nothing in there really sounds like a business or work related feature. For the sake of argument, I should mention the presence vertical markets around twitter, community-based like stocktwits or monitoring tools like tweetag. Eventually, a lot of people consider Twitter being the same as FaceBook status (there also has been rumor about twitter buy out).

With such frivolous content in a very limited messaging container, isn’t Twitter about massive noise production overall the Gen-Y generation of blogs and IM ?

Next step?

So this is IMHO the big picture of the current Twitter world. A last note worth mentioning is how Twitter has still not clearly defined any business model. This has already been widely discussed in the twitto-bloggo-sphere and you can find plenty of resource on your favorite search engine.

As for now, the last approach seems to be “Buy a friend” model. This is far to be stupid but it is based on the assumption that tweet does actually contains relevant or useful information. This may be true but I’d rather doubt that for the time being. Do not forget the Burger King experiment with Facebook: WhopperSacrifice showed up how really your virtual friends are important to you.

Let’s hope Twitter does not end up in an alternative spam-full media.

At first, back around 1996, I discovered the web pre-1.0 and started to use my wonderful netscape browser to store bookmarks for every website that took me more than 2 minutes to find with altavista or yahoo. Yeah that sounds like some old tale for the web 2.0 generation, but anyway at this time there was no google (and life did go on) and sometimes it was really easier to save your almost unknown favourite website in some mozilla html file. Of course after a while, this wild storage needed some folders, subfolders, subsbufolders, … and there you go for bookmarks tree with so many entries and levels that the most trained gamer would be in real pain to click on the right link. But the worse was….I didn’t really go back to these bookmarks!

Why? When there are too many things to read, filter and sometimes analyze (due to lame bookmark’s titles), you just scan-read or skip and then go back and loose a great amount of time and effort to find something you knew before.  So I broke up with my bookmarks toolbar! I kept only a few links, didn’t update the others and eventually deleted all of them. Go back to square one :s

Here come the long period between 2000 – 2007, where I didn’t use any bookmarking tool. Well, that’s not entirely true, I did use time and scope limited lists of websites, e.g for my thesis. But I regularly deleted any obsolete bookmarks folder. It’s like a Bookmark Zero Principle. And guess what, that worked pretty well…because you basically remember the websites you need.

At this time, my theory could be summarized as: Bookmarks are like post-it… when you got you fridge totally covered, it defeats the purpose! Then the new 2.0 websites with the social theme printed all over in capital letters  “came to the rescue”. They added the wisdom of crowds effect to the already messy bookmark problem. The usual belied is that a collective approach can help to filter and auto-organize information through tagging, sharing and popularity. Now is the time of folksonomy applied to bookmarks and del.icio.us is probably one of the most dominant service.

So far, I’ve used del.icio.us as a replacement of my traditional bookmarks in firefox. And I got 3 phases:

1. First contact: I only saved a couple of new websites I discovered. At this time, I used as few tags as possible… in a way I was recreating a kind of taxonomy. I also never bookmarked my most popular websites since I was used to remember them.
2. Long distance lover: after the first day of passion, I merely used delicious for a couple of months. The old UI was also not the best argument to keep early adopters. But in the end, we didn’t broke up
3. Sharing everything: now I share almost every cool or new website I discover. I try to add more tags than before (but I often converge to the same keywords) to increase the “wisdom of crowds” aspect.

My current use habits are covering 2 main use cases:

1. Share and Store websites with services or  information about these main topics: development, finance , fun/entertainment content, startup, 2.0, …
2. Find and Discover new websites based on specific tags. (and sometimes I use a subscription or follow a specific user)

But I still have 2 issues with the bookmarking concept.

First, I regularly bookmark again a website I already saved in delicious. So what’s really the point of saving information, If you never use it back and/or cannot even remember you already read or see this website ?

Second, to find interesting websites, the social tagging of a large community is useful. But, is it really the popularity I’m looking for ? Let’s assume it is, delicious still do not offer a way to sort multiple tags search by popularity! The only way is some GreaseMonkey script that reorder the results.

That’s all for this firts post. Stay tuned for the next one

But you’ve got to be honest one second, no company is absolutely perfect. And along with the exceptionnal growth of Google, maintaining such values is really an hard (if not impossible) task in any company whatsoever.  Not mentionning that Google is now in almost every single parcel of enterpreneurship. Every time you look around and try to build some new concept, you may face a huge Goliath (funny that starts with G too) already owning or launching a massive web application, that you can definitely not compete with in term of scalability or load or marketing resources. There is still a chance you can be David, but it’s becoming more slighter after each Google acquisition.

But with time and tough economic condition, it seems for the first time that some informations leaked out. I just read a couple of the answers to “Why Google Employees Quit“. This is really interesting, because IMHO it will help to figure out the real face of the G word. I even think that this more human presentation could really attract (more) people into working for Google, but this time for the right reasons and knowing what they are jumping into.  Another aspect, one should monitor is how Google will handle this recession period in term of communication about layoffs: 30 000, 24 000, 20 000, … ? who relly knows how many people work in these undergrounds of search (see 10 000 layoffs and 6000 layoffs). So time will tell, if the “do no evil” can hold against rough conditions.