“If I said anything you disagree with, think was confusing, stupid, or just plain wrong, please tell me. I won’t take offense – don’t sugar coat it – just tell me. That’s the best way for me to learn and get smarter.
…
Honest, direct, and clear debate is so much more powerful than bullshit.”
— FeldThoughts
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New letters & numbers (and @e_olsen). (Taken with Instagram at Three West Collective)
Fan Mail. Nice feature, Tumblr.
“MEN WANTED: FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOUR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS.”
-Sir Ernest Shackleton
“I didn’t sign up for these updates!”
Users must think, say, or subconsciously be frustrated by the type of updates they see on their favorite social networks.
In the photo above, my Path friend may be making a joke (or may actually be annoyed) that I’ve recently been checking-in on Foursquare via Path. To me, it’s a nice way to update Path friends, while letting Foursquare tally and share my location. To him, it’s likely not what he thought he was signing-up for when he accepted my friend request.
In the same vien, Facebook doesn’t work for me, so I rarely use it. At the root of this is the fact that I am “friends” with a wide-variety of people; people from my hometown, schoolmates, business colleagues, community members, family, and my real life friends. These people are all connected with me on Facebook because we know each other in some capacity, not because they decided to subscribe to my every thought and event in my life.
Twitter, on the other hand, is a place where I can share my thoughts freely. Everyone (friends and strangers) who follows me has chosen to do so knowing that I will tweet my thoughts, links, ideas, and conversations. If they like my stream (or put up with it) they continue to follow me, otherwise they’re free to unfollow.
I also love Foursquare. I know what I am signing up for when I connect with a friend on the platform - their location based check-ins. And I can easily manage notifications of their activity.
These single-purpose, focused networks will continue to chip away at the value of omni-networks, as users continue to narrow what they truly care about and what they decide is just noise.
For now, I try to follow this advice:
A great visualization of Big Cartel’s growing number of stores:
“Growth
Our amazing community of independent sellers hit a couple mind-blowing milestones in 2011. First, a little over a year after hitting our 100,000 store mark, we’re now about to open our 200,000th store. 200,000! That’s enough to fill Wembley Stadium twice, and still have people partying in the parking lot.
Second, and even more impressive, is what those stores were able to accomplish. Collectively our stores did nearly $100,000,000 in sales in 2011. That’s huge! That’s more than some entire countries make in a year. (okay, really small countries)”
“While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”
- The White House, responding this morning to a petition on SOPA and online piracy
I’m excited to share a bit about a project I’ve been working on for quite some time with Jory and Mike.
It’s somewhat against my DNA to share something that is not 100% ready for you to rock today, but this web app/service, called Notabli, has somewhat taken on a life of its own and it is time to share it with the people I care about.
Notabli allows parents to capture, share, and remember the most important moments in their kids’ lives. We’re excited to show and tell more, and we’re working hard to make Notabli amazing. We’ll let you know when the time has come.
Until then, we’d love it if you signed up to be notified of our launch at Notabli.com (whether you’re a parent of a baby/child or not - hey, things happen…).
More soon.
(You can keep up with our progress on Twitter, our blog, or Facebook - whichever happens to be your tool of social media madness consumption.)