Add Instapaper, RSS feeds, Evernote To Do lists and more and then listen to them played back to you while you sleep.  As you sleep the BrainFeedMixer brings together a synthesis of all the data and plays it back to you.

When you wake up, you’ve caught up on all your reading material and are ready to start the day – completely informed and ready to go.

Note: not yet approved by the US FDA. Patent not pending.

I think I’m starting to finally deal with the idea of following more than a few hundred people on Twitter and:

1. Not being overwhelmed by it
2. Getting something out of it
3. Still having a life (mostly work, but it’s still life)

I’ll explain a bit why I’m crazy enough to follow more than 1000 people.

It comes down to three main areas:

– People who post things that are useful to me in my work
– People who post things that may be useful to my colleagues in their work
– People who I think are just interesting and worthy of a follow (subjective rather than objective)

The Additions
I call these people my additions. It’s a brain bank of knowledge as well as a barometer of what’s going on int the things I’m interested in. One-by-one they add a bit to what I know. All together I feel enriched and encouraged.

The Multipliers
Then there are the networkers who are voraciously active on Twitter and act as super-nodes connecting thousands or tens of thousands of people. In and of themselves they may not be fascinating or that useful for my work, but they act as a bridge to others.

Twitter seems to use these people as markers of legitimacy or popularity and by them following you, you get seen by more people. When you’re seen by more you get followed by more and in turn that presents a nice problem.

Taming Twitter
The problem is that Twitter etiquette says you should follow back people who follow you.

I break with this etiquette and only follow back those who interest me (see above). I’m no celebrity or big thinker in social media or marketing so there’s no fan base.

However with more numbers that follow me because of what I do, post and like, I’m more likely to follow some people back.

Until recently I tried to keep the follow back number low – around 500-600 – something I could handle.

Then I updated my core follow list. Instead of being immersed in a flow of 1000 people chattering away, I’m now linked to c. 100.

Bus vs street
That’s more like a crowded double decker bus.  Okay, so the numbers don’t quite match, but I’ve reduced my exposure to a manageable number. I liken this to having all the people you care about, want to hear from and correspond with all on a bus. This bus is going down the street and you know everyone – at least a little bit – on the street.

You couldn’t possibly know all of them but you can recognise and appreciate them. Then in context you can identify and engage with them.

Off the bus, into shops
My next task is to organise all these special interest groups (design, WordPress, eCommerce, social media, UX, IA, etc.) into lists. Reading these lists will be like popping into a shop to browse around, catch up and find what’s useful. You’re not compelled to go in and can forget about it for a while if you want.

The Twitter stream as the street
Sometimes – a couple of times a day – it’s just fun to go out on the street and see what people are doing, saying, posting. You can hang around a bit, interject into some conversations and move on, but if you were there all the time you’d not get anything done. You’d be a street bum.

The next 1000
So, now that I’m following the Multipliers I’m finding that the follower numbers I’ve received have increased too.

In the last month I’ve generally accepted a higher percentage of follows – or rather converted those follows into a two-way bond – by following back. With somewhere in the region of following 500-600 people (who post interesting stuff instead of dog / lunch / relationship drivel) that doesn’t seem too bad.

Double that and you start to go a bit mental.

The brain just can’t take it any more – or at least my Generation X brain – can’t.

Double that again and it’s even more important to be disciplined and live in the list rather than being a street (or stream) bum.

I’ll report back on how it goes.

It’s coming from the ‘Follow People You May Know on Quora’ section on the right hand side and it’s just one follow after another. There’s now even a ‘Follow All’ – which for me will make me follow 36 people in one go. That’s a huge amount of follow spam.

I thought that there must be a way to deal with this without setting up a filter in my email.  There is.

You CAN change the Quora settings so that your inbox isn’t inundated with Follow request.

1. Go to http://www.quora.com/settings and log in (if you aren’t already)

2. Select User related (View x settings)

3. Un-tick ‘Someone starts following me’

4. Click ‘Save’

That’s it.

Don’t forget to check back occasionally to see who else you can follow, but at least it sets you free from the Quora avalanche of follows – unless you like to feel important.

Surely there’s a better way to deal with it.

This was my response:

True, but on Twitter you can do it in a constructive way. It doesn’t have to be accompanied by #fail tags. Here’s an example of a bad way of doing it:

Hey @acmecorp you suck. I’ve been on hold to your call centre for years. Sort it out will you. #acme #fail

Why is this bad? All of your followers see it. Everyone rolls their eyes and some say ‘Well done’. It accomplishes nothing as it only shows that someone is annoyed, not what the problem is.

Here’s a good way of doing it.

@acmecorp I’m having a problem with your blue widget usb connecton and have tried your call centre. Who should I contact to get help?

How is this different?

• It directs it at the company, and only your followers that also follow that company see the question. It’s polite and there are no hash tags which means it doesn’t crop up on trending searches.
• The polite tone means it’s more likely to be answered in a constructive way.
• The extra detail means that they can direct you to a resource first and then get you more information.

I’ve found the same thing with quite a few companies where I really was getting to the end of my tether. I couldn’t get a proper response from their call centre, their support documentation didn’t make sense and I wrote the first tweet. The trick is to not send the first one.

The key is to delete it (you’re venting your frustration to yourself) then write the second one.

From there you’re done – you’ve done what you can. If they don’t respond to you on Twitter then leave it. Kicking up a fuss in social media channels isn’t the best way to get a business to consumer result.

How do you deal with companies on Twitter who have messed you around?

Diplomacy or death by hashtag?

(Image credit: Creative Commons Wikimedia user Avala)

Great Apps + Geolocation = Engagement
First we had the iPad and some great apps like Wired Magazine that sold more online subscriptions in its first month than magazines.  It had a great interface and was duly shown off by more than a few people.

It occurred to me then that the ad revenue currently taken up by big ads in a magazine would surely be a target for geolocation.  Put simply, geolocation is a magical piece of electronics that can tell where you are on the planet by working out how close you are to mobile towers. Some kit actually have GPS in them. Here’s a sexy link (Apple) and a more practical one (Wikipedia)

So rather than seeing an advert for Tag Heuer watches or Jaguar, I’d see an advert for a local restaurant or a film at the cinema near to me.  If it was really clever it could then show time specific offers.  The thought was that the more personalised the advertising, the more likely I am to buy.

Surely Google would get into this… picture based AdSense?  We have immersive apps, surely we’ll see immersive local advertising (HTML5 video, forms, book a table, etc.)  But how?

Show me what I like … already
Around the same time – if not before – I got a bit freaked out.  BT were running a test of an advertising product called Phorm.  There was a lot of fuss about invasion of privacy around the concept of tracking what your browsing history and then showing you adverts based on that history.  I thought this was a great idea.

Then I was browsing on Asos.com one day and left to go to Facebook.  There on Facebook instead of the normal ads was an advert for a selection of clothes I’d just been looking at on Asos.  Woah – too much and no warning!

I went back to Facebook later on and saw ads for posters I’d seen on a poster site.  This felt like an invasion of my privacy – exactly the point made by those who opposed Phorm.  However looking at it from the retailers point of view (part of my job) I realised it was showing me content I’d already been engaged with.

Facebook Open Graph
So, if that wasn’t enough, Facebook came along and added the Like button.  Not only did they add the button, but they added what they call Open Graph. This is a way to capture the data of what you like and pull it into Facebook.  It starts to build a picture of what people like on a site and marry it up to social trends.

Some say it’s a further invasion of privacy. Facebook and online retailers say it’s a way to enhance your user journey and deliver content to you that you want to view.

The key is that it opens up the social share arena to show you what your friends and contacts like. Recommendations from friends carry much more weight than reviews.  Favourable recommendations and reviews are a powerful combination.

Facebook are close to announcing a geolocation based API (a way to do things online) which will likely tie into Open Graph to provide location specific suggestions to what you may want to buy.

Enter Flipboard
Then came Flipboard, the amazing iPad app that shows you your Twitter and Facebook streams – opted in content rather than random stuff.

It creates a magazine out of your social network and is of course quite unique. It’s very clever, very intuitive and in the week after launch too successful for its own good.  There will be imitators and eventually more of us will have access to create apps that do the same thing – that’s already started.

However within Flipboard came the  first signs of bringing this all together:

1. It’s a magazine format with the flip of a page – familiar format that doesn’t shoehorn ads at you in odd places
2. It has things you want to read in it because it’s shared content from your friends or people you’ve opted to follow (Twitter) or like (Facebook)
3. With Facebook it’s going to have the ability to take in Open Graph so you can start to see content in the form of products, entertainment and services that your friends not only share, but recommend
4. It knows where you are – so you’re a sitting duck. Ads aren’t there yet, but they will be.  It’s a significant way for Flipboard to monetise their investment.
5. More significant still is engagement within advertising. This is where it gets interesting.

Really persuasive calls to action
With any eCommerce website the holy grail is the conversion.  Everything is aimed at getting you through the website,  add your product to the basket, pull you through the checkout and part you from your cash as smoothly as possible.

Amazon is the master at this and runs 1-Click checkout to great effect.  I won’t implement it as I don’t trust myself to it.

Now imagine the scene.

You’re browsing Twitter updates on Flipboard on a Saturday morning with a cappuccino. A friend mentions a DVD.  Flipboard is smart enough to serve up the image of the cover (that’s where we are right now).

Flip the page and you see an advert for the DVD with embedded video content and a buy button.  It’s an Amazon 1-click button and underneath it it shows you all your friends who own that DVD and rate it.

Suddenly you are one click away from joining your friends.  You’re facing peer pressure.  The barriers to entry are down.  When you buy, you’ll join that smiling grid of friends.  You may even get the download instantly…

Be prepared
This is to prepare you.  This is what’s in the minds of the retailers, those trying to make money from the medium and the space.  It will be incremental, but you’ll look back and wonder where that came from all of a sudden.

Doing some good
What will be exciting, will be delivering this same mechanisms to  smaller companies – location based – so that we can be encouraged to buy local.  I live in Edinburgh and I’d love to have ads for local companies appear in mainstream media.

I don’t need a fancy watch or a fast car, but great food, drink and entertainment that match my likes and my location? Now you’re talking.

So after hunting around for the right model, making sure we didn’t infringe on copyrights, we came up with a concept.

We’ve built a prototype and here it is.  A video is still to come and we’re talking with a certain iDevice manufacturer about producing it for release for the Holiday season.

If you’d like to find out more, leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.

• I can follow back
• I can ignore them
• I can do something else

I always check them out and see what’s in it for me.  This morning I got a follow from @mobicart and I went to check them out.

First I looked at their Twitter stream.  Wasn’t that interesting, so I decided not to follow them.

I didn’t want to ignore them so I looked up their site.  They make mobile commerce apps and they’re based in Newcastle, so that makes them more interesting straight away.  They have a great looking site and so I’m intrigued even further.

From there I can do three things to engage with them:

1. Go back and follow them on Twitter and see what turns up
2. Call them and have a chat – they are in my time zone
3. Subscribe to their email newsletter and see what they send

Their site made it really easy to subscribe – no nonsense, probably based on their experience with making useful interfaces for mobiles.  So now I’m connected to them.

Not by Twitter, but by email – an infinitely more powerful information tool that allows them to track whether I actually look at what they broadcast.

So, based on this, do you follow people to get a contact?  Is it a legitimate way of building your email marketing list?  What do you want people to do when you follow them?

I suspect I should follow them now…