Web Strategist Lab

Who Are We If We Are Not Ourselves?

Okay, I know I’m a geek, but I don’t think this description is too far off most of you.

1 Facebook Account
1 MySpace Account (soon to be unused)
2 LiveJournal Accounts
1 Twitter account
1 LinkedIn account
1 FriendFeed account (unused)
1 Plaxo account (unused)
3 personal Gmail accounts (and two work-related Gmail accounts)
1 Hotmail account (maybe: I haven’t used it in a while and it may be dead by now)
1 Yahoo account
1 Ping.fm account (haven’t gotten into yet)
1 Del.icio.us account
1 Meebo account (unused)

Even stripping out old unused accounts, that a lot of ways to connect to (and be connected by) people. That doesn’t even include my work email.

Does this seem familiar?

If so, are you the same person in Facebook as you are Twitter? Or Gmail? Or work email? Of course not. Some accounts are for certain parts of our lives. Not just including work, I have a subset of friends who only know me through LiveJournal and not by any other means. 

Here’s a great example. I have a sister-in-law who I used to only see on MySpace, which was fine because I had a handful of friends there who also felt a little too old to use the thing and it was pretty quiet. I could present the “I’m the good guy who is dating your older sister, but you can come talk to me about stuff if you want” face. She doesn’t see the work frustrations (Hi, boss! I noticed that you Twitter-friended me. This will now give me a moment’s pause every time I Tweet.), the stupid “hanging out with friends” stuff or the adult “annoyed by taxes and the complexities of adult relationships” stuff. And she’s about to turn 17, so that’s a good thing.

Except she’s moving from MySpace to Facebook, which is where a lot of my real friends congregate. Now she sees more of that stuff and I’m not 100% sure of how I feel about it. For every person I add to my network, it ads a level of complexity about what I feel comfortable saying. If you walk out of a meeting at work that caused you pain, how you complain about it to your friends, family, co-workers and boss are completely different.

How many articles have you read about people being up for a job up until the HR person reads the applicant’s Facebook page and sees the drunken debauchery? Can we assume everyone we hire is a Quaker and reads Thomas Hardy Novels until sundown before going to bed? Of course not. I know that some of the people I work with have done some pretty stupid things off the clock because I see the pictures in their Facebook (or when I run into them at bars… Hi Rebekah!).

But to some extent, we’re made to feel like we need to leave part of ourselves at the door when we go to work. Or our parents’ house. Or our in-laws’ house. That’s normal, but when we add all these connections (which are generally good), we add layers of complexity to the point where I wonder if anyone is really their whole self someone online (in a place where I can see their name).

I graduated from college in 1994.

This isn’t said to make anyone feel old (except me), but I left college just as the web and email became a huge part of our lives. When I got to grad school, I was given my first email account. Something easy to remember like joellis@chass.ncsu.edu. I joined mailing lists, talked to people around the world (mostly about music) and wrote to friends from college and high school. It was kind of amazing, being able to jot off a quick note to my best friend in Boston between classes from the computer lab.

All the email I got was for me for so long, it was quite a shock to get my first spam. Actually, I thought it was funny, probably because I didn’t think I’d get them very often. Ha!

Now, email is a futile mission to curb spam. Most people have multiple accounts just to keep spam limited (I have almost a dozen email accounts, but mostly because I’m a dork). I know lots of people who say that they’d quit email altogether if they could. Some people think RSS is the email killer, but they’ve been saying that for a very long time.

I never knew how complicated email was until I was expected to manage the uwalumni.com email system. I’m not a server geek, and we’ve got some good people who run the system as well as can be expected to make me look good, but it’s horrendously complicated.

I used to think that if I sent you and email, my email would go to the cloud, find the right domain for the account (aol.com, hotmail.com, gmail.com, etc), ask if it knew the account name, see if there were any issues (account being full, etc) and deliver the mail. Easy peasy.

Ha!

So you send an email through uwalumni.com to your cousin at hotmail.com. Well, Microsoft (which owns Hotmail) subscribes to a number of third-party services who say who’s a spammer and who isn’t. You don’t have to worry about that because you’re not a spammer, right?

Well, what happens is that someone else on the uwalumni.com system sent a few more emails that someone thought appropriate and marked it as spam. That third party may decide that uwalumni.com as a whole doesn’t do a good job punishing spam and so punishes all uwalumni.com users by putting them on a list. That list is the one Microsoft subscribes to and now your email isn’t going through.

The best part? These third party people are trying to ostensibly curb spam, but some of them are in it for the money. I had one list approach me for a 50 Euro contribution to get us off their list (we found another way, thank goodness). It’s like the wild west when anyone could anoint themselves local sheriff and make laws to fit them. 

Would these companies put aol.com or gmail.com or hotmail.com or yahoo.com on these lists? No way. They are way too big to mess with. These new sheriffs don’t bother the railroad barons, they shakedown the local merchant (that would be me, in this Western-themed analogy). 

Why did I tell you all this? Well, its come time for this local merchant to fix the situation. We are in talks to change how we manage our email so that we are no longer under the thumb of these so-called law bringers. I can’t talk about details because there aren’t any, but in the next month, I hope to be able to announce some very cool things regarding your email accounts.

So I am typing this from the lobby of the Gilbane CMS Conference, a big show for a number of Content Management Service providers are trying to tell you that theirs is the best CMS out there. They slice, they dice. They run social median features, they increase ROI. They julianne, they expand your audience. Please buy one. Please?

In interest of full disclosure, I am speaking at this conference to talk about how the WAA integrated our database with our CMS, which is about as exciting as it sounds. But after listening to a number of big-name mucky mucks talk about what the next thing is (they have no idea), I think a theme is emerging: fear.

Sure, software providers live in the same world as car makers and mortgage-lenders, but the thing that kept them going in the deepest gloom of the last dot-com bust (well, at least there’s new technology out there to play with) isn’t as obvious. 

As my colleague mentioned about Web 2.0 expo, there’s lots of great tools out there called Web 2.0, but few (if any) of them are built for the enterprise (the fancy word for “business”). CMS are all about enterprise, simply because there’s no need for them if you’ve only got a few pages. And sites with thousands of pages are not your Aunt Judy’s Cat-Lover’s site.

And businesses are all scared so they’re cutting back on new applications, CMS being the first on the cutting block. 

So everyone’s scared here. The interesting thing is that no one wants to say it. Everyone’s pretending that they have a handle on things and if you were a rational IT director, you’d buy their product. no one wants to say, “We have no idea where we’re going anymore. We’re just as lost as you.” There’s not ROI on fear here, so everyone keeps a stiff upper lip in the hopes of landing another client.

So I’m going to just say that the emperor has no clothes. But I shouldn’t have to. The focus of this conference is about integrating social media into a CMS. But social media is that thing that breaks down the walls between boss and employer, client and vendor, customer and business. But here we all are, supposedly in the middle of the social media revolution, standing side-by-side as equals and we’re all lying to each other.

If we could all embrace the idea that we are all scared and lost and have no idea what’s next, wouldn’t that be the first way to talk about what’s really next? Instead of watching Yahoo!s stock drop and lament another big name, we should be talking to each other as equals and learning what we want to do, and designing software and services around it.

I’m just surprised how little we’re admitting the truth.

For those of you who missed it, CNN’s election coverage incuded a report from a remote reporter who called in via hologram.

Star Wars references not withstanding, the elections are, like the Olympics, one of those places where a lot of money and technology comes to bear on a given idea or event.

MSNBC had many of their people reporting from a column-lined rotunda generated by computer over green screen. CNN had holograms. Everyone had super-cool touch screen monitors to zoom in and out of the country. MSNBC could flip between this election and the one four years ago. As a poli sci grad with a geek streak, you’d think I’d be on cloud nine. And I was, but for a different reason.

Twitter Election coverage!!! If you had a Twitter account and it was public, if you mentioned anything about the election (based on keywords and tags), Twitter showed it on a central page. Want to know who’s being talked about more? Here it is. Real-time. There were special tags for things like potential voter irregularities (see something weird? take a picture with your phone, tag it and send it to Twitter and it gets saved in a central spot.

For all the talk about the difference between “journalism” and “bloggers” it’s nice to see that there’s a middle-ground — citizen journalists collecting information (not opinion) in real time in case it is needed down the road. What would this collection of data done in 2000 in Florida? Pictures of ballots? Proof of who you voted for?

This is what the internet is all about: collecting data and ideas from every point on the globe at a moment’s notice. Adding to that knowledge where ever you are. Being yourself and adding to the chorus in your own way.

Speaking of which, I just want to point out that we want you to be involved in the conversation. We want your voice to be part of our chorus. Comment on our blogs and pages! Answer the Question of the Week. Send me an email. Join our Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter groups.

Join in!

So I got an iPhone last month. I was not running to it. In fact, I had already gotten a Helio Ocean (once seen as iPhone’s best competition) to avoid an iPhone. But through circumstances I couldn’t control, I landed in an AT&T store with money in my pocket on my birthday.

Let me just say that despite my reservations, I love my iPhone.

I don’t want to get into the cost or the payment structures and all that jazz, I just want to talk about what happens when you have the internet now matter where you go.

On a trip to NYC, I took pictures of the interesting and strange and posted them on a blog and commented on them from the lobby of my hotel. I responded to a friend’s question about how she should handle a delicate situation while sitting in front of a few hundred million dollars worth of art at the Met. In the airport, I saw that the Dow was struggling to keep its gains.

It’s more than texts on your phone. It’s the ability to get and give information anywhere and any time. What does that mean?

If all of my internet is on an iPhone screen (admittedly the largest screen of the smart phone/pda set), what does it matter that a site was pretty and well-designed? If there’s no Flash on my phone, that complicated interface is worthless. 

What happens is that phones are reminding us that the internet is about information. Not about the design or the bells and whistles of YouTube (though to be sure, that video of the pandas is pretty cute), but about what we can learn and what we can use. 

That’s where the internet is heading over the next 3-5 years: it’s all about the info. It’s moving around, it’s shuffling and mashing together.

What do you think?

Anybody even reading this? Or are you all watching the Dow? Or has it gotten to the point where it’s all so messy that we aren’t going to pay attention until Jim Cramer’s head explodes into little pieces of ticker-tape? 

I remember 2001 when all the tech stocks dropped and we called it the “tech bubble” bursting and at the time, it was if every geek had lost his job. It wasn’t true, of course but so many people cried out that the web was dead. What happened? Well, all the geeks who were making too much money on projects for other people suddenly have the time and space to make some cool things. Like Flickr, MoveableType, Ajax, and pretty much every cool “web 2.0″ tool you can think of (except Google, which started before the bust, but it was just a little search engine way back when). When the geeks got some time, they made some tools for themselves and.. well, it was pretty cool.

The same thing is going to happen on a wider scale for the next year, but locally (in the web world, anyway) we’re going to look at new ways to communicate and new ways for you to communicate with us. For example, we’ve finally enabled comments on this blog. Talk to me! Ask me questions! What should we be talking about? How can we (the WAA, uwalumni.com, etc) be a better us?

So relax, breathe deeply, and we’ll all get through this together. In the meantime, let’s talk.

Well, I spent most of last week getting to, attending, and coming home from Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. It’s where we geeks congregate and decide what the next idea in tech is.

Not really. It’s your average trade show, just with more laptops and tattoos.

What I wanted to mention is how this conference solidified my idea about the current trend in online stuff: more info, playing with each other.

Yes, your website has some data. Maybe you’ve even gone through the trouble of tagging it so that you know what’s a date and what’s a location and what’s a description and what’s an image. So now what? Should your data be locked up on your site? Should you force your users to visit your site to get your content (when you use the word “force” it’s hard to say yes to that, isn’t it)?

We live in a Mashable age. We can take content from Site A and some maps from Site B and mash together a whole new web site. If we’re feeling clever, we can take that new site, turn it into a widget and spread it out to other sites. At some point, your website might just be the place where you store your data, but all your users never show up to your site.

This has already been happening with RSS. I couldn’t tell you what some of my favorite web sites look like simply because I just subscribe to the content via RSS and never visit their site. RSS makes it so easy for me to read more, so why should I waste time jumping from site to site. Site owners, while they can’t really count the users who show up to their site anymore, can see more awareness or their site as their content starts to spread.

If you’re brave, go take a look at Mashable. It’s the one stop shopping for what everyone’s doing with this mashable kind of content. It may look like a lot at first (actually, because it is a lot — they post a dozen new entries a day at least), but if you look around (or subscribe like I do), you will soon find interesting tools that catch your eye.

I’m off on a work-related trip for the next week, so I might not post, but when I get back, I’ll show you the website I used to record the entire trip!

So, yes. Chrome. Google’s got a new browser and it’s got everyone a-twitter (just check the twitter logs). For those of you who remember the great Browser Wars of 1998 when that young upstart Microsoft tried to take on the monopolist Netscape for browser dominance, this is a different world.

Back then, IE4 (which is when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer got any good) and NN4 (The last commanding browser of Netscape’s before it got bought by AOL and bloated into worthlessness) completed by giving designers special tags that one worked in one browser or another (Some of us might remember the Blink tag or signs that said “This web page optimized for Netscape 4.7″ which are the “bad old days” of the internet). What worked in one wouldn’t work in another.

These days, we’ve learned that users don’t really care. They have a browser and just want your site to work on it. Thus, Chrome isn’t going to change the world by offering up a Shake tag or some such nonsense. They are going to be competitive precisely because they are designing a browser that already works with almost every web site.

But the cool thing about Chrome is that it is the very obvious clarion bell that signals that the rules have changed. It used to be about the Operating System (are you a PC or a Mac?). Now, since almost all the work you do is online (or will be very shortly), does it matter if you’re a Mac or a PC?

For example, I’ve been a PC guy since day one (Yes, I remember Microsoft Windows 3.11), but I’m considering buying a mini-notebook that runs on Linux (have you seen the new Dell Mini 9’s? Great googly moogly!) because I don’t need anything except a very powerful browser. Why?

Here’s what I do online:

Email (Gmail and Zimbra for work)
Notes (I have a work wiki and a personal wiki)
Tasks (I use Zimbra for that, but I used to use Basecamp)
News
IM (Gchat and Twitter)
Social (Facebook and Livejournal)
Project Management (my vendor keeps all our shared documents on a Google Docs account)
Music (Rhapsody)

Frankly, the only think I need to do my job that isn’t internet related is Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

So Chrome, which is faster, built clean from the ground up (the reason why it take 45 minutes to upgrade IE6 to IE7: legacy code), more secure, and is more efficient with memory (the only flaw in Firefox for me at the moment), is a hot browser. It will push us more towards the idea that the computer isn’t the key: it’s like arguing over the difference between Visa and Mastercard. Who cares? Buy what you want.

I’d recommend giving Chrome a little time to flush the final bugs out, but it’s definately worth upgrading to.

A number of years ago, I read a book by William Gibson Called Idoru (Gibson’s the guy who coined the term “cyberspace” in 1984 and is the only scifi I read) about… well, the story of a missing rock star and the fan sent to find him land them both in intrigue doesn’t really matter. What really struck me was this idea that the protagonist had a personal computer.

Not like the Dell I have at home or the Macs that run rampent in our office, but a rectangle the size of a large paperback book that was handmade by… someone. The idea was that the shell was individual because the pieces inside were commodities: the hard drive and memory were the same as everyone else’s, but that computer was personal because she hand it built in such a way that it was individual to her.

I mean, yeah that Mac is pretty (so pretty…) and there are some pretty cool and slick looking laptops that would rock the office, but… is it personalized? Is it me? If there are 100,000 in various shelves at Best Buy and Circuit City and Target, then is it really mine?

Which brings me to the place where things can get truly personal: the web. (Wow, that sounds like the intro to something you might want to avert your eyes from, right? Don’t worry, this will be fine.)

Many of you use Gmail (I know I do… I have three accounts, not counting a few for work). And it’s excellent. Except for one thing: it’s kinda ugly:

What if you could make it look like this:

(Gmail2)

Or this:

(Gmail 2 Fe)

Or this:

(BurnOmania Style III)

Using a tool like Stylish you can make your favorite pages look however you want them to. (Yes, you’ll need to be using the newest version of FireFox 3, but you should be already… trust me.) There’s a whole community devoted to people who want the Facebook and MySpace and Amazon and Wikipedia to look a certain way, even if it only their computer. They post their styles for you to use and you can make your Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail like theirs do. They are making their browsing personalized. They are making it their own.

How is this possible? Because on the modern web, the content (the stuff you really care about) is separate from the design (the stuff that isn’t “important” but can make you like or dislike a site in a split second). This has been going on for a while, but is starting to become a huge deal. Well, maybe making my Gmail cool looking and a little easier to read isn’t a big deal, but what if you could take content from multiple web sites and mash them together to make something your own?

Well, I’ll show you how that’s becoming a very common occurrence next week.

So, yes, I watching the Olypmics this week and as always, I look for how the technology is changing how we understand things while cheering for Michael Phelps and Bela Karolyi. (I think Bob Costas and Bela should take their act on the road. They could explain the nuances of tort reform in the most excited way possible.)

I mean, how many times have you seen that “one frame every hundredths-of-a second” underwater camera watching Phelps sneak the Gold out from under Cavic? How did they watch the Olympics 8 years ago (let alone 40) without such amazing advancements (side note: did you know they only measure swimmers’ times in hundredths of a seconds instead of thousandths because its impossible to “build swimming pools in which each lane is guaranteed to be precisely the same length”? Talk about technology outpacing in one area more than others)?

I wanted to mention an article that talks about how some of these photographers take those amazing shots.

None of this has anything to do with the WAA or this website, but I thought it was cool, so I am passing it on.