Um, it kindof makes sense to connect with people while you still can.

On this website, I usually talk about making connections and keeping them. Leveraging smart, sassy social network tools like Facebook or LinkedIn to ensure you and that person can reach out and keep in touch if the need arises (for them or for you)

Well, three times this week, I realized I had NOT connected with some key people that have meant a lot to me in my professional life, but we don’t work together on a regular basis, and that have suddenly (well, I wasn’t paying attention) moved on to other opportunities.

What happens if something suddenly changes in your (or their) employment and suddenly you don’t know their email address and can’t send them an easy-peasy “lets be online buddies” invitation?

I think you’ve got three options:

• Call their former co-workers and sound like an idiot asking if they might have that person’s personal email address (consider the possible watercooler conversations).
• Call their new company if I know it, and sound like an idiot asking if so-and-so works there… and then the awkward conversation if you get connected:
  

  “Um, yeah…. we used to work together, over at WidgetCo and, well, I wanted to get ‘Linked In’ with you before you left, and, well, I slacked off on that and now I am calling for your email address… if you’re interested….. yeah, it’s called ‘Linked In’…. no, it’s not a dating site…. yes, I am married…. yes, I realize you are married too…”

• Post a Missed Connections ad on CraigsList, maybe something like:

  Former Enron Exec. Looking to Reconnect with Missed Colleague - m4w - 38 (Houston)

  ---

  Reply to: pers-i-am-a-real-slacker-i-didn’t-ask-this-before@craigslist.org ^[?]
  Date: 2008-08-22, 9:11AM MDT

  We worked together for a really long time. Years in fact. You were always there to help me fudge the numbers when I screwed up my budgets or couldn’t seem to get Powepoint to make that “woosh” sound and make the letters fly onto the screen. : )

  I’d really like to chat with you more. Maybe we can linkIn sometime and chat a online bout the good old days closing the quarter in accounting. : )

  • Location: Houston
  • it’s IS ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests for convicted felons.

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Kumbaya, and all that

This screenshot from my twitter feed shows @cachedout bumming about his speeding ticket (bottom image). Seconds later, @littleidea replies in-kind (see top image). Misery loves company. Speeding ticket recipients are not immune from this most-basic human desire.

What you say is irrelevant.

Who you say it to is highly relevant.

And, the network will pwn you if you say things too far out of context, or without consideration of who you are talking to.

Yet, the network will <3 you if you show up real, human, and relevant. Using twitter for business? That’s a lot different than just using it to catch up with friends on Friday night, or to keep tabs on your family.

Crossover posts? No problem sometimes, but beware the implications. Sharing a great insight from a book to your friends isn’t dangerous. But, joking with your friends about how out of control Friday night got, and your co-workers are listening in… might come back to get you.

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If you are a business decision maker in Utah County, the Corporate Alliance team is a group of people you need to know.

The Utah County “HUB” is the original, though the company has recently expanded to Salt Lake and possibly to other markets as well.

Corporate Alliance Provo Hub (src: Google Maps)

Excellent Business, Excellent Service, Excellent Location‎

Corporate Alliance is in the business of helping business people succeed by helping them get to know the decision-makers and service providers in their community.

Their (original) Utah County “HUB” is a premium location to meet clients, to take your staff for getaways or staff meetings, and to attend their excellent pools, trainings, and JumpStarts to rejuvenate yourself and meet other incredible business people in your town.

Strongly recommended!

Directions to Corporate Alliance Provo

746 E 1910 S
Provo, UT 84606
(801) 434-8326
corporatealliance.net

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• SheGeeks’ Twitter 101 post gives pretty good clarification on following other people. In short, give people a reason to follow you before following them. The difference between a friend and a stalker is that you know who your friends are
  “When you first start Twitter, you should build up your stream first. Send out about 20 messages that actually mean something. Talk about your interest, something cool that you like, or something you found out about today. This way, people can get a better feel for how beneficial you’d be to them if they followed you in return.”
• Sarah Hurd points to Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang). as a great example of twittering “right”:
  “He uses a great mixture of providing helpful and relevant content, championing others, networking, asking questions to generate conversations, providing rundowns of events he’s attending, and laughing about life.”
• Charlotte-Ann Lucas, a journalist, says it this way:

  “Twitter is community.It can be like sitting with your friends on a coast-to-coast couch, eavesdropping on a national conversation.”

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… and tables!

7/22/08 10:24 AM
As Amit says in his post, “Control M” gets you current date and time. Clicking on the comment text allows you the option of “insert comment text into document”, so it it visible. That’s how I am getting the timestamps here.

7/22/08 10:25 AM
Finally, I am uploading images of this document as it has been evolving:

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What can you say about a beautiful girl who died?

I can tell you that when I read this news, I cried off and on the rest of the day. I can also tell you that Kaycee Nicole did not, technically, exist. She was created and portrayed entirely by her “mother”, Debbie Swenson, a middle-aged Midwestern housewife with some serious issues. For nearly two years, thousands followed and supported this fictional construct as she fought a deadly disease, an astonishing run when you consider the challenges involved.

Social media, by definition, pulls at you and draws you in. You *want* to trust, you want to believe, you want to participate… and when someone needs something that you might have (money), you want to give.

The old rule still applies to Social Networks, as well as the Internet at-large… and ANY PUBLIC COMMUNITY (even your neighborhood): “Trust… but verify!”

Be safe out there.

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If you follow me on Twitter, the ultra-easy status-update app would have told you that I’ve been camping at Bear Lake last week… but you wouldn’t have known exactly where. That part of the picture is left out.

But more important than you trying to find me, it is still very difficult is to find out what is around you when you are at a place unfamiliar to you–to access the world of knowledge about a place–in a easily digestible map-based, easily transportable format.

For example: Two things I wanted to do this week included getting to the beach, and going for some hikes. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money for access to the beach, and at least one of the hikes I wanted to be enjoyable for some of the people with me who can’t hike treacherous terrain.

To accomplish this, I did the usual–but had to do it all from my Blackberry because my laptop was unavailable–I googled it. I searched phrases like “Hikes near Bear Lake, Utah” and “Good Beach Bear Lake, Utah“. Both turned up promising results, but I had to DIG for them:

Beach Access at Bear Lake:

• There is a State Park at the South end of Bear Lake [Lat Long: 41.965633,-111.3995 (google maps)] that charges $8/car/day for access. Seemed like a reasonable option if a free beach couldn’t be found.
• Bear Lake.org’s Watersports page gave me some good ideas, and I found that there’s a Bear Lake State park on the Idaho side of the lake too (which, honestly I didn’t even really understand we were so close to the Idaho border)
• Finally, I found a PDF file (not mobile compatible, but my Blackberry handled it with a little effort) that shows free beach access all along the South West edge of the lake, just South of Ideal Beach Resort and RV park. Right along the road, at Lat/Long 41.893149,-111.366026 is free, public beach access which is pretty nice.

The bottom-line is, we were able to find things after searching, but there was no clear way to search one place and say:

• Here I am (GPS would be nice, but Verizon disables that in Blackberrys! FAIL)
• I want to ______________________ (insert activity)
• All from a MOBILE interface

And have it provide results.

You’d think we would have figured this out by now!

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Just another reminder to be human in all that you do, and don’t forget to feel and care.

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But, I don’t really think this will do anything about the real CORE ISSUE with twitter reliability: Scalability of a push framework around self-forming groups. It has to do with the number of processes needed to send one message to someone with, say 20 followers:

1. Who are each of the followers?
2. For each follower, are they listening?
3. If they are listening, how do they want updates?
4. If they want updates, send the update to them.
5. Make sure, if they ever come online, this message gets shown in their personal timeline… in the right order.
6. Make sure, if an API ever requests this user’s messages that this one is included in the reply.
7. Check to see if this tweet was a reply to someone/anyone.
8. For each person it was a reply to, repeat steps 2-6 to send each of them the reply.
9. … but don’t send them the reply if we already sent it!
10. For. each. word. in. the. tweet, see if anybody on the entire earth was tracking that word.
11. Repeat steps 1-6 and 9 for each of those people.
12. Get ready for the very next tweet, since you’ve had so much downtime

More than all of that tech-speak, twitter is just cooler than the others:

• Identi.ca doesn’t allow SMS yet. Fail.
• Brightkite isn’t universally accessible (and kinda serves another purpose). Fail.
• Jaiku can’t be pronounced in English. Fail.

End of the day, I think my friend Matt Reinbold said it best amid the furor and uproar (on twitter, of course) about identi.ca’s launch yesterday:

“I am wearied by the supposed “twitter-killers” that have no mobile support. the any-input/any-output beyond-a-browser IS the killer feature.” about 17 hours ago

The twitter-wanna-bes will come and go, but none of them will match twitter because:

• There’s ANY interface: web, mobile web, widgets, IM, SMS, API, RSS–you name it.
• Its wicked easy to start and just “go”
• When you’re changing locations, because of the ubiquity of access, the conversation follows you–from web/app to IM to SMS and back again.
• Its simple to learn/execute commands, like DM, add/remove/block, etc.
• Other apps can be built on top of it, like, easy.
• The people I want to talk to are already there (I already went through the rough days on twitter what back when @jasonalba was the only other person on the network. I don’t want to do that all over again!

So, boycott twitter if you want.  Or not.

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