Web 2.0 and Your Organization – Event Hosted by Eventbrite

Coming to Toronto in July: the workshop that I developed with Jason Mogus on how organizations can effectively use social media tools. Join us, and please encourage your friends and colleagues to attend.

Turn It Off! British Columbia – The Pledge | 30 Days of Sustainability

On May 16th, I’m turning off…

1. My hair dryer (so no cracks about the ‘do, ok?)

2. All the #@*!!## beeping, noisy kids’ toys in our house. Let them play with carbon neutral, quiet blocks for the day.

3. My TV. I can read the American Idol results online. 😉

Why would I live without all that electrical goodness, even for one day?

Because May 16th is “Turn It Off! BC” — a day for people across the province to turn off their lights and other non-essential electronic and electrical devices. We’re going to show the world that BC-ers don’t just talk the talk on sustainability — we’re prepared to talk in the dark.

Please join me by:

1. Forwarding this message to three (or more) of your Facebook friends (instructions below)

2. Joining the Turn It Off! BC Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2263583834&ref=mf

3. Taking the Turn It Off! pledge at http://30daysofsustainability.com/pledge

To turn YOUR friends off….

1. Select this message (everything down to where it says THANKS!), copy it, and then hit the “share” link (above if you’re reading this in a profile, below if it’s a message in your inbox).

2. Choose the “send a message” tab, and paste this text into the body of your message.

3. Edit the list at the top of this message to replace one of my pledges with your own (or replace all 3 items).

4. Enter the names of 3 of your friends in the “To” field (Facebook will help fill it in), slap on a subject line (“Can you turn it off?”) and hit “send”.

And while you’re at it, why not post to your profile or your wall, too?

Falling for Facebook

I'm besotted with Facebook. I can see it becoming the primary way that I — and many other people — interact online. So if you aren't on Facebook already, join now. Now.

Still here? Don't tell me, you need actual reasons to join. Fine, here goes:

  • It's huge, and it's growing. While Facebook started as a network for college students, it opened up to anyone who wanted to join in September 2006, and grew more than 75% — to almost 25 million users — by February. I haven't found numbers more recent than that, but I can say that between 1-3 people in my own personal address book (1500 email addresses) are joining every day.
  • Your friends are already there. If you import/connect to your address book when you sign up , you'll discover all the folks you know who are already on Facebook. This is a great way to keep in touch with them. You can even find out who in your universe is already on Facebook, before you sign up yourself.
  • It mixes business with pleasure. Unlike LinkedIn, which feels like some sort of massive résumé swap, Facebook brings a personal side to its user interactions. More than half of my Facebook friends are colleagues or professional acquaintances, and now I'm finding out about their personal passions as well as their professional pursuits.
  • It's one-stop shopping. Facebook offers blogging, photo sharing, messaging, web-to-mobile communications, social networking, and groups.
  • It's a window on your world. Once you've added your contacts to your list of Facebook friends, your Facebook home page will be the best place on the web for you to find out what's going on with the folks you know. My favourite part of Facebook — the thing that makes it truly addictive — is checking in to see what's going on with all my friends and groups. I can see my friends' latest status reports, their latest new friends and groups, their notes, their photos….all in one place. The best way to get how cool this is is to take a look, but I don't think I can really share a screenshot because that would mean sharing details on my friends' activities. And that underlines what is so great about the Facebook feed: it feels far more personal than what you'd normally see on the wide open web.
  • It's pretty. God knows, I've fallen in love with my share of social media tools, but most of them have required me to look past a barebones or even downright ugly interface in order to appreciate the inner beauty of content sharing, social networking, or whatever. In contrast, Facebook has a very polished interface.
  • It can help you connect with your community. Facebook has now got an API — application programming interface — that lets people extend Facebook with all sorts of little applications and enhancements. (Check out some of the options so far.) And that API is going to see Facebook integrated into more and more 3rd party sites. If you find it easier to connect with your members, supporters, customers or friends on Facebook than to lure them into registering on your own site (and for most organizations, it will be MUCH easier to connect via Facebook) you need to start thinking now about how you can integrate Facebook's community and functionality into your own site.

I'll have more to say about Facebook — and especially about the options for integrating Facebook with external web communities — in the coming weeks. But if you want to understand why this matters, you need to join Facebook now. And once you do, be sure to add me as a friend!

Twittering to myself

Twitter seems to be the new addictive social networking app on the block. (For those new to the phenom, it’s a site that lets you tell your friends what you are doing RIGHT NOW, and to see what they’re doing, too.) But I haven’t been able to get into the addiction cycle, because I don’t have any friends. 🙁

Why? Because unlike other social networks — Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster spring to mind — Twitter doesn’t provide a way to mine your address book for fellow Twitter-ers. As far as I can tell, if I upload my address book to Twitter, EVERYONE gets an invitation to be my Twitter buddy, whether they’re Twittering or not. I can see how this helps to spread Twitter, but since I don’t want to annoy my entire contact list with invitations to all the social networks I check out, it makes it very hard to get up and running on Twitter.

So consider this a triple request:

  1. If you’re using Twitter, ping me or add me to your friends list.
  2. If there IS a way to make Twitter scan my contact list for fellow Twitterers, please let me know.
  3. Twitter, if there ISN’T a way to scan my contact list for fellow Twitterers, could you add it? Or could you at least allow me to scan my buddies on other social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook — not just LiveJournal, which is the only one you currently connect to?

Vancouverites, please try CareSquare

One  of our small supply of trusted babysitters has fallen in love with someone in Nanaimo (hint to fellow parents: DO NOT encourage your babysitter to go visit that ex-boyfriend in another town). So we're back to searching for fresh blood, and wondered whether there might be room for a web app to help. 

Turns out, someone else has already thought this all through. CareSquare is a well thought-out online community that helps parents find available caregivers, and lets you rank trusted caregivers and see those who are trusted by your friends (or their friends). There are a few hundred caregivers already in the network, but surprise surprise they're mostly in the San Francisco area.

So fellow Vancouverites, hear my plea: if you are a parent, caregiver, or sometimes babysitter, please add yourself  to CareSquare. If we can get a few dozen Vancouverites using the tool, it could turn out to be really useful.


Welcome aboard, Catherine Winters… as Social Signal takes on Second Life

A few months ago, Rob and I decided that Social Signal was ready to expand its development team with another web services consultant; Aaron Pettigrew has had such a transformative impact on our business that we realized another Aaron (as though there could be such a thing) would allow us to serve that many more clients that much more effectively.

And we decided that while we were adding another web geek to the team, we might look for someone who knows a little about Second Life — a virtual world that is the Internet's hottest new home to online community. (Find out more about Second Life here.) So I sent an e-mail to a leading Second Life blogger who blew my mind when we met at last year's SXSW. Here's what I asked him:

since I keep hoping that our business may eventually involve doing some Second Life projects for folks, I have the idea that our ideal next hire would be someone who's an experienced Second LIfer – probably not someone who's doing Second LIfe stuff professionally yet (though possibly) but the kind of person who'd be thrilled to make that part of their work. Basically we're just looking for a bright, energetic, progressive and tech-impassioned person who would enjoy bringing their social commitments and tech passions together. Do you happen to know any SL types in Vancouver who'd fit that description?

Lucky for us, he had an inspiration: a Vancouverite whose SL name is Catherine Omega. He pointed us to Catherine's bio on the Second Life wiki, and that was enough to convince us to get together with her.

A couple of weeks later, we met up with Catherine (known in real life as Catherine Winters) in a local Vancouver restaurant. Over the course of a lively lunch we covered everything from how she first got into Second Life (on a computer she built herself from scavenged parts) to the larger significance of Second Life and other virtual worlds (as a way of bridging social differences and disparities).

That was the first of a series of meetings in which Catherine coached us out of our SL newbieness and started talking with us about how Second Life could support a socially sustainable business approach. We were dazzled by Catherine's brilliant and thought-provoking take on Second Life's social significance, by her strategic insights into how organizations could make innovative and effective use of an SL presence, and by her exceptional clarity and good humor in making Second Life accessible to new users. And we suspected that as one of the co-authors of the new Official Guide to Second Life, she was in a position to take a leadership role in bringing more people to the platform.

Today, we're delighted to announce that Catherine Winters is joining Social Signal as our Manager of Virtual Worlds. Catherine will be leading a new Second Life practice to help businesses, non-profits and government agencies establish innovative, effective presences "in world". This practice will focus on working with organizations that want to create a profoundly interactive presence that stands out in Second Life's every-expanding world, that want an SL presence that integrates with a web-based online community, or that want their SL presence to advance a sustainability or social change agenda.

We'll have more news to share in the coming months about our plans for Second Life, including the forthcoming launch of our own island. Catherine's creative ideas and scripting powers will be put to good use as we introduce new opportunities for organizations to make compelling use of Second Life as a new medium for strategic communication.

Meanwhile our web site can tell you more about Catherine and our new Second Life practice. We also hope you'll join us for an open house to introduce Catherine to our clients, colleagues and friends, and to introduce Social Signal to the Second Life community. The open house will be held from 2-4 pm Second Life time (aka Pacific time) on Wednesday, January 3 at TechSoup's space on Info Island. (Many thanks to CompuMentor for lending their space to us for this event) If you've yet to visit Second Life, this is a great excuse to download their software and try it out (it's free to download and free to register) for yourself.

If you'd like to learn more about Second Life, or about how Social Signal's new practice can help your organization establish an effective Second Life presence, please call (778.371.5445) or e-mail Catherine (catherine [at] socialsignal [dot] com), me (alex [at] socialsignal [dot] com) or Rob (rob [at] socialsignal [dot] com).

We owe that blogger a huge thank-you for making this inspired connection. And yes, this does mean we're still looking for that web services consultant.

Discovering Second Life

We’ve recently started exploring Second Life, a virtual world that constitutes an exciting, immersive form of online community. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.

Tales of a Mac media server

Earlier this year we purchased a 32″, HD-ready Philips LCD TV. So when our DVD player died a few months ago, we found ourselves staring at the PC input on the back of the TV and wondering whether our next DVD player should in fact be a computer. About eight...