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Almost everyone out there is into Social Networking, at least on some level, these days. The 2 most popular services being Facebook and Twitter. Over the past year or so, I’ve drifted away from Facebook, where my real friends post about what’s going on in their daily lives, in favor of spending the majority of my downtime perusing the tweets of people I follow on Twitter. I’ll spend a bit of time reading the casual musings of cyber-friends, but more often, searching out information on technology, graphic design and web development. It has become an integral part of my daily quest to learn more about the field that I work in. I also sort the people I follow into specific lists – Twitter lets each user keep up to 20 lists. I have lists such as Hawkeyes, WordPress and A List (I need to clean up my A List), which allow me to quickly hop from one topic to the next, eavesdropping on the topic of the day. If I’d find someone who was interesting or knowledgable, I’d follow them on Twitter while I was working during the day and then check up on them at night.

This worked great until today…Twitter told me I was following too many people. Turns out that Twitter can limit the number of people you can follow to 2,000 – based upon the ratio of people who are following you. Ashton Kutcher could probably get away with following several million people – he’s got over 6-million followers. My legion of 941 followers puts me in a spot where I’m going to need to, a. get more followers, and b. go Ginsu on the people I followed at one time, but have since lost interest in.

I’d been on Twitter for 742 days, according to When Did You Join Twitter?, and it was time to weed out, or in this case tweet out, a few people and companies I follow on Twitter – as far as I could see, there was no easy way to do this from directly within Twitter. A Google search pointed me to a site called My Tweeple, a web-based tool for managing your Twitter friends and followers.

This was the solution. I connected My Tweeple to my Twitter account and it pulled in all of the people I followed. I wanted to keep the people I’ve recently followed and My Tweeple allows you to sort Earliest to Latest, so I could take a trip back in time and see the first people I ever followed. I did a quick search of the terms “Social Media” and eliminated a good portion of the people whose primary area of expertise was “How to get 10,000 Followers on Twitter”…maybe I should have kept those people.

Image via Wikipedia

Some things will never change, other things may need to be changed ONCE.

At the risk of people inserting “Man Lands on Moon” jokes at the end of this post, I’m sharing a bit of Facebook information that I learned just this morning. Apparently, this has been around for about a year.

I’m working on a website for a client, and of course, want to include links to Facebook, Twitter, etc., so people can connect socially with this company. The problem I ran into is that the URL that would be preferred for the company Facebook Page–the company’s name–was being used personally, by the company’s owner.

When Facebook initially launched its “Vanity Pages”, each user’s chosen URL was set in stone–unchangeable, or at least I thought. Facebook certainly wanted us to think this was a one shot thing as well, hence the warning in bold red type, if memory serves me, before clicking “OK”, to lock in this name of choice for all eternity. Upon doing a bit of investigation today, however, I learned that this can be changed, but apparently only once–don’t dare key in a typo.

To change this, and several other preferences on Facebook, go to your Account Settings.

In the 1993 Aerosmith hit, Amazing, Steven Tyler screams, “Life’s a journey, not a destination…”. I’m by no means the world’s biggest Aerosmith fan, but these lyrics ring true not only in our lives, but our careers and even our individual projects. Every project deserves a process and every process deserves a system. Do you use systems in your life or business?

I’ve implemented systems and passed them on to team members to carry out the actions described. Sometimes, they’re performed flawlessly. Other times, the system is skirted, fudged a bit, or ignored altogether. You can imagine the time wasted and trouble encountered when systems are averted.

When I devise a system, it’s not a power trip, or a chance to look down my nose at an employee or associate–heck, I love it when people I work with are proactive in crafting their own systems. I’m simply providing a map to get from Point A, to Point B…or Point K, for that matter. There may be detours along the way. I’m never offended if an assistant suggests that there may be delays because of traffic if we don’t take the more scenic route–figuratively speaking, or that we may run into troublesome weather if we try to get to one point today, rather than tomorrow.

Systems are not always set in stone. They may require some sculpting, or a bit of care in ensuring their ultimate efficiency, but they should be followed as closely as possible, to the point where an amendment is made in black and white and adopted to then be followed by all team members.

Here’s the point: When you have a map, you can follow the bread crumbs from your journey back, to see where things could have been done differently. If Team Member A is using her map and Team Member B is using his map, and one or both of them ends up at the Quik-E-Mart asking for directions, how do you know where they made a wrong turn? Unless you’re just out on a carefree Sunday drive, get yourself a good, up-to-date, map – or go one step further and invest in GPS.

1. Learn PHP (better)
2. Become a WordPress whiz
3. Get proficient with Corel Painter 11

…what better time than the end of the year to list out some goals for 2011?

Goals give us opportunities to grow in various areas of our businesses and our lives. They keep things fresh and get us out of the daily patterns we’ve followed for the past year…or longer! They give us an opportunity to learn, or maybe they just provide a mini-vacation a few times a week where you can put the regular “to-do” list aside.

Why do we need to put these things on paper? It provides a checklist to refer to in March, after the snow has melted. Will you be well on your way to crossing these goals off your 2011 list, or have these goals been buried in the back of the closet, behind that old pair of Doc Martens? There’s no hiding from them, they can’t get lost in the daily shuffle and if they slip your mind, no problem! You wrote them down.

So, in 2011, take up woodworking, join a sand volleyball league or volunteer at a food bank. The time you spend away from your “normal life” will reap a refreshed outlook and a revived spirit as you return to your life’s list of priorities.

Now, let me get back to the 4th goal on my list: Read one non-fiction book per month…thanks Dave Ramsey.

An old boss of mine, in fact, my first boss outside of my Dad back on the farm, used to say “don’t say something to a customer that you couldn’t add the word ‘Grandma’ to the end of”. You wouldn’t say “you’ve got the wrong person, you’re gonna have to speak to another department, Grandma”, you’d say, “I’m sorry, but I’d be happy to transfer you to our kitchenware department for them to take care of you, Grandma”.

Sometimes, it’s not what we say, but how we say it. One way may earn you a few brownie points, the other may get your mouth washed out with soap. One may land a customer for life, the other may have Grandma tweeting about the terse customer service until she heads out for the early-bird buffet.

We’re always telling our children to think before they speak. This should apply even more so in our personal and business lives. People want to spend their dollars with people they like, people who treat them well. Think before you say something, manners matter.

I couldn’t help but notice the logo for the newest installment of Apple’s iTunes. Pretty ugly actually, but that’s beside the point. After further inspection, I detected that it shares some similarities to Apple’s latest QuickTime logo, an application which I believe has become lost in a world of seamless media integration. It also made me wonder if Apple may have something up its sleeve for the two applications.

QuickTime doesn’t serve a lot of purpose anymore. Somewhat of an obscure program, it could be used to record and edit audio and video, but it lacks the horsepower to do much heavy lifting in these areas. It could play various formats of video files, but in a PC world, Windows Media Player and RealPlayer dominate this venue. Apple uses it to display video content on its own website, but I really don’t see it used anywhere else…2005 is long gone. Apple calls it “powerful multimedia technology”, but apparently no one else has gotten the message. It does allow high-quality video, in a very compact, bandwidth-friendly package–H.264 is great, but I see QuickTime as somewhat of a branding issue. No one knows what it is! It hasn’t reached the masses, and it has been surpassed by other industry standards.

I used to create video tutorials in QuickTime’s native export formats, but it often confused people working on a PC…”what’s QuickTime–do I have to download it?”–the answer was yes, unfortunately–we’ve since transitioned to Flash Video format, “used by over 3 million professionals and reaching 99% of Internet-enabled desktops”, according to Adobe. We’ve had no problems since.

Image via Wikipedia

iTunes is a part of nearly everyone’s computing repertoire, whether you’re a Mac or a PC. If you’re on a Mac and right-click a .MOV file these days, iTunes will appear as an option–it was actually the default for a file I downloaded just this morning, to my surprise. I opted to open it in iTunes, just months ago, I probably would have used QuickTime.

With the added function and video capability that Apple has packed into iTunes, I just don’t see QuickTime as much of a contender any more. That and the fact that iTunes will sync any videos viewed with my iPhone, so I can take them on the road.

The visual similarities between the two applications could be mere coincidence and Apple may opt to keep QuickTime around for many years to come. I could also see Apple re-branding QuickTime as iPlayer or something more in tune with Apples “iEverything” line of products and brands. I’ll keep QuickTime Player in my dock for now, but an eviction may be pending in early 2011.

If you’re like me, you’ll stumble across all types of interesting articles online that you just don’t have time to read right now, during your work day. Also, if you’re like me, you spend more of your leisure time surfing the web on a mobile device, rather than sitting in your living room with your laptop. What a great time to catch up on those articles you flagged from earlier in the week, right? Enter: Instapaper.

What is Instapaper?

Instapaper is an easy to use app for the iPhone and iPad that allows you to read an article you found earlier, when you have time to. One of the best features of the Instapaper app is that it formats the content of the article in plain text, for your device, eliminating zooming and side-scrolling.

To use Instapaper, there are 4 basic steps.

1. Register for a FREE account at their website.
2. Add their Read Later bookmark to your work computer’s web browser.
3. When you find something you want to read, click Read Later.
4. Grab the iPhone app and access your articles when you have time.

Your bookmarked articles can also be accessed and organized by logging into your Instapaper account.

Very simple, but useful app if you’re a sponge, with no time to absorb all the information staring you in the face.

Is anyone else amazed at all of the mobile phone (or are these things now called “devices”?) companies that introduce the new, latest, greatest model, seemingly EVERY month!? Each installment: faster, sleeker, brighter and more powerful than its predecessor.

I’ve never owned a BlackBerry, a Palm or something called an HTC–anyone figure that acronym out yet? The Droid just seems too complicated, although I loved all those Teminator movies, and did you realize that Motorola actually pays royalties to George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, for the use of his copyrighted name “droid”?

I resisted “Smartphones” altogether up until about 3 years ago, despite being a pretty savvy technology and computer user. Why? I like simplicity. I don’t care, as the viral Xtranormal video suggests, if the new HTC phone will build me an island and then transform into a jet and fly me to it–you can search HTC vs iPhone on YouTube and make sure the kids aren’t in the room (earmuffs). I don’t want something that is going to be obsolete, or yesterday’s news, next week.

Apple has this one figured out: release ONE new model every year or so, implement the necessary improvements to the previous installment–faster, bigger screen and resolution, etc.–and make it EASY to use. My 5 year old daughter can get to what she wants on my wife’s iPhone 3G (yes we’re still using the phone from 3 years ago–I’m not renewing any contracts with the pending iPhone to Verizon rumors).

These same principles should apply to your business. State your message clearly, produce a lights-out product (or service) and make it easy for your customers to apply to their current workflow or lifestyle. Don’t try to reinvent yourself every month, or bring in so many features that the overall quality of your product becomes diluted. Target your strengths and deliver them to your customers and clients.

…now just give me the iPhone on Verizon.