The MatriX Files

One of the people I’m following on Twitter (who shall remain nameless) recently commented: “Prefer getting updates from my friends via Twitter. Much more efficient and I don’t need to see them.”  Hmmm….

I don’t know about you, but even though I love Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, yada, yada, I still really like getting together with my college buddies, grad school buddies, fellow DC Web Women, fellow volunteers for Doorways, etc.. Yes, it’s “efficient” to get updates from friends in far away lands via their social network pages, and I have strengthened ties with folks via Twitter and FB, but will my social networks ever trump my traditional networks?

I don’t think so.

A recent article in The Economist maintains that “(o)ld-style networks… are usually stronger than online ones, , and the trust between their members facilitates transactions of all sorts.”  Transactions like doing business together, hiring staff, and lending money.

For me, however, it’s not a black and white issue.  Here’s what I think is happening:

• Family networks will probably trump all networks because “blood is thicker than water” although we all know that families are also our craziest and most dysfunctional networks.
• School, fraternity and work networks will remain the strongest because these are ties that get developed over time and involve shared efforts. So for me, my Stanford and Matrix Group networks will continue to be my strongest networks.
• Offline networks that involved shared interests will remain strong because members have a common interest. These networks, however, will be expanded to include online members.  In fact, I expect these networks to be strengthened by the ability to connect with others worldwide, in different languages.
• Increasingly, we will use our online and offline networks to make connections for work and play. For example, I may access the SAIS alumni network for a contact at the White House, but once  find a contact, I will continue to mine that person’s network through LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Across all our online networks, we will likely target a few people with whom we will establish a meaningful offline relationship. I have “met” and networked with dozens of people through Twitter but I have singled out a few for further cultivation and even a face to face meet up.
• We will rely more and more on our social networks to initiate and nurture our relationships. My school (grade school, high school, college and grad school) friends are all over the world.  Where I would have relied on phone calls, letters and emails to stay in touch in the past, I now use FB to stay connected and certainly connect with more people on a regular basis through social networks.

I actually feel that my offline networks are enhanced by the addition of online network capabilities.  And I love being able to share stories, photos and videos with family and friends in one fell swoop.

How about you?  How would you rate the strength of your traditional vs. online networks?  How are they competing or complementing each others?  Which is stronger?

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• Tags: Facebook, social networking, Twitter

Cloud computing is hot, hot, hot.  Early this year,  PC World predicted that cloud computing would shape up as a big trend in 2009.  We all know Amazon as a giant Internet retailer, but its newest business is cloud computing; you can now buy processing power and storage from Amazon!  Last year, Google launched Google App Engine, a service that lets developers write applications and host them on Google infrastructure.  SalesForce has a similar cloud that lets developers build and host systems on top of the SalesForce engine.

But what exactly is cloud computing and why does it matter?

Wikipedia defines cloud computing as “a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.”  Whatis says that cloud computing is different from traditional hosting in three ways:

• It is sold on demand, typically by the hour (this is why cloud computing is often called utility computing)
• A user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time
• The service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a PC and Internet access).

Just imagine this: your organization has 1,000 boxes of documents to scan and OCR and you need to get the work done in one week.  By hosting your application on the cloud, you could have as much processing power as you need. Hundreds of servers could be deployed to your project at once.  When the work is done, your hosting obligations go to zero.
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• Tags: software development

I love Twitter.  Yes,  it’s information overload and there’s a lot of noise, but I love the commentary and the interesting links.  I also appreciate the updates from friends and family.  More recently, I am loving the Twitter visualization sites that are popping up everywhere.

So, what the heck is a Twitter visualization?  If you’re on Twitter, you know that there are millions of individual posts, replies, and discussions every day.  Figuring that people out there would want to do things with this flowing data, Twitter publishes an API (application programming interface) that lets developers have real-time access to tweets and some user information.  The result is hundreds (thousands?) of sites that let you search, map and analyze tweets, relationships between users, and topics.  Here are some of my favorite Twitter visualization sites.

• Twistori is my favorite.    Click on the words love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish and see a real-time stream of posts that contain these words in the tweet.
• WeFeelFine is a visualization of not just tweets, but blog posts and images as well.  Explore Murmurs and see a flood of tweets with the words “I feel” in them.
• Twittervision shows tweets from around the world, overlaid on a world map so you know where the tweet are coming from.  Twittervision is even available in 3D.
• Having an event?  PepsicoZeitgeist shows real-time tweets about Internet Week in New York City.  I especially love the top words from IWNY tweets.
• TweetStats lets you enter your Twitter username and see a bunch of statistics about your tweets, including when you tweet, average daily tweets, who you tend to retweet, etc..  Did you know all this about yourself?
• Twitter Friends Network Browser lets you see your Twitter network and click and drag to do fun things.
• Hashtags shows you the top hash tags on Twitter right now.
• MyTweetMap lets you see tweets from the people you are following, overlaid on a map.
• Dipity lets you explore tweets in a timeline format.

What’s fascinating to me is how Web designers and developers have found countless ways to transform the universe of Twitter data in new and different ways.  Each site introduces me to new people to follow and gives me insight on new topics.

How about you?  What are your favorite Twitter visualization sites?

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• Tags: social networking, Twitter, Web Design

In reviewing the usage reports for this blog a couple of weeks ago, I realized something startling: the majority of visitors are NOT using Internet Explorer. Check it out:  since January of this year, 46% of all visitors use Firefox, 40% use Internet Explorer, 9% use Safari, and 3% are on Chrome.  In the last 30 days, Safari users were 11% of all traffic, while IE users went down to 39%.  Yeah, okay, this traffic is probably skewed because of the audience, but I’ve got Google Analytics configured to block traffic from the Matrix Group office where most of us use Firefox as our primary browser.

An analysis of traffic on Matrix Group client sites shows that IE is still the primary browser but Firefox, Safari and Chrome are gaining ground.  For nearly all clients, IE commands no more than 75% of the total audience; this is still a dominant number, but it means that 1 in 4 users is not using IE.  Sorry Microsoft, but the browser wars are far from over and any giant can be toppled (that means you, too, Firefox!).

All of this makes me thankful that my staff, many years ago, convinced me that Matrix Group should not be an IE-only shop. I still remember the staff retreat when the staff had a heated discussion about Web standards.  A few of us argued that writing standards-compliant code was expensive because the dominant browser, Internet Explorer, was mostly not compliant, which meant we had to do double html work to make sure our sites behaved properly in IE, Netscape, Mozilla, etc.  But the vast majority of the staff rightly argued that standards compliance was the right thing to do, it would give us a competitive advantage, our sites would stand the test of time better, and someday, Microsoft would come around.
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• Tags: Browsers, Design, software development