Daniel.Hjelmtorp.com

Twitter addiction

The years 2008 and 2009 are the years everyone talk about Twitter. Before it was blogs and social media like Facebook, but now its all about micro-blogging. Everywhere I look on the internet there is news about Twitter, on how to utilise it best for business, connecting or marketing. Everyone seems to tweet, but is anyone really reading them, or do we just want to send out messages and not read others? I have found that it can be a great way to filter what news I want to read and  get it all sent to me. Also how I can connect all my different web service like Facebook, my blog and Twitter. I even setup one of GamersGate were that automatically create a tweet everytime we add a new game. 

Twitter have definetly become the number one micro-blogging platform. To view a great presentation about Twitter go to TED.com. A form of extension of blogging were you simply write a 140 characters on what you do that moment. Now comes Flutter the next evolution of Twitter. Is it for real or is it not? Its up to you to decide

Its been a while since i took the time and watch some inspirational TED presentations. And last time I viewed the latest presentations one found my interest. Simply one word, Twitter spoke to me.

Twitter, a relative young service that created the expression Micro-blogging. Looking at the popularity of text messaging on cellphones and combined it with the blog technology, spawned a service and phenomenon now wildly adapted by many many people. I would like to see any numbers on how many Twitter accounts exist. Many view it as the next evolution or extension of regular blogs. And there are a big variety of different microblog services now. But Twitter is by far the biggest.

The speech by internet entrepreneur Evan Williams, one of the Twitter creators some points really struck me. He mention how Twitter have evolved and the users have found new ways to use the service than the creators ever though of. And I think one of the key for the success is how simple and open the service is. Twitter is  very open for users to develop new services outside of the original platform. With an easy to use API, the users and fans get great tools to build new applications. Open API for new services becomes more and more important. Developers today are used to have access to great APIs for them to use their imagination.

This isn’t anything new. Facebook have received much attention from developers, companies and users for all the Application available. And I believe this will be even more important in the future, not to develop a complete service, but rather build the groundwork and then let the users develop it further. Maybe, not even have a clear image of that the service should be used for. Let the users decide what is should be used for or how. Its been showed time and time again, that users can come up with new ideas for a product, service or brand that the owner or creator never had in mind. But often (still) do the owner or creator hesitate to take advantage of those ideas and are very quick to send out their “assassins”, their lawyers.

Twitters openness are totally in line with the principle of the web, easy, accessible and open! Lets just hope more new services follow the same concept. But, in all cases the first thing is to have a killer app that people love and want to help develop further.

Over the last couple of days I’ve searched and experimented with different Wordpress plugins to improve the blog. Its not really so much improvement to talk about, more fun experiments from my view on how to work with different new features. Almost all the changes/add-ons have happened in the sidebar widgets.

• The size on the text and menus on sidebar to the right have been decreased.
• RSS feed from my Facebook account have been added with automatically retrieve my latest Status change and displays it. (I’ve also connected my blog to Facebook, so every blog post published is noted and displayed on my Facebook profile page)
• I found a plugin that create a fairly good looking link to my LinkedIn account for people to go and view my profile there. (Now I just have to update and really look after my account which I’ve been lazy about til now…)
• I have wanted to find a good way to show books I recommend for a long time. An Amazon/Wordpress plugin have come to my aid. By simply enter the ASIN/ISBN number for a book, the widget retrieve the cover, title and author from Amazon.com and displays them.
• And finally… Ads! Yes, I’m not famous for believing in ads, but this I just wanted to try out to learn more about. By signing up on Google Adsense and creating and automatic Ad and inserting it on my blog, I can explore and gain more knowledge. I already work with Adwords, and here theres the option of allowing your ads to be showned on the Content Network, which basically means Adsense. This i more of a experiment than some new features or improvment.

So far I’m really happy with the improvments. Its always fun with some changes and something to spice up the site.

Can blogs contribute to generate new inner mental energy? Yesterday I finished reading a book on the subject of personal economy, self images and the flows of money and inner energy. The book contained a lots of excersices and many good ideas which, naturally let my little brain to started to spin.

How does my inner energy flow? What are my biggest energy revenue and spending? After some thoughs I realised my biggest (small) energy revenue comes from the little things. One of those is writting and posting good thoughtfull blog posts. The creative feeling I get when a idea sprots in my head and the evolve as I write. And to finally push the “Publish” button, I just get a relaxed feeling of accomplishment.

Another interesting topic the book rasied was related to new ways to increase the money revenue. They talked of how we usually have to invest much time and energy in the beginning, and have good patience. The result or reward is often harvested long after the investment. And therefor people who want to make a change have to expect to “sacrifice” (invest) their spare time, only to harvest the result after a while. I began to analys my own spare time, and realised I invest much time finding and reading news of the topics I’m interested in and I wanna work with. And there it hit me, my blog is sort of my investment in my self and my future. Not only did the blog became a great place to store my thoughs, ideas, interesting news and a great channel for me to market myself. But most importantly I can use it for my own inner development. To have a place were I can start working with my ideas and develop them. Take a idea, shape, evolve, store and share it with other. Afterwards I realise how much the blog has contributed to my own knowledge evolution. To retur to old posts and view how I though of things and stuff. Not to mention how I evolve writting in English (I hope). Sure, starting to blog created stress to constantly produce new better post. But thats part of the development. The pressure to write a better post than the one before, to outdo my self and be better than myself. I never had that in my system, but it came with the birth of this blog. And for that Im grateful.

So yes, I have had great results from blogging, even if it brings pressure. But to win you have to bet, and usually, the higher the risk the better retun on investment!