You know how all these bizarre yet entertaining Twitter accounts keep popping up? The character-based Mad Men account, @BettyDraper the one quoting his hilarious father (with the not-censored four-letter-word-in-the-title), the FakeSteveJobs account, and how about this insane spam one, @horse_ebooks, told in the Ballad of @Horse_ebooks? Best quote in that article, “The reason it hasn’t been shut down yet is the same reason it’s so hilariously terrible at its job: It doesn’t bother anyone who doesn’t want to be bothered.” I’m sure I don’t have to tell at least half of my readers about the Fake AP style book Twitter parody account. It’s sheer awesomeness.

I have a new fake Twitter account idea. It’s inspired from The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
by James Gleick, describing the era of the telegraph, where you were charged by the character. Yet people still wanted a sense of efficiency and value from their telegraph messages.

How about this entertaining Twitter account idea – a Twitter account entirely written in a code that you need an old telegraph code book in order to understand?

Apparently people in the 1880s wanted to be sure the receiver of the message understands manners and respect. One of the subtitles of “Bloomer’s Commercial Cryptograph” states “By the use of this work, business communications of whatever nature may be telegraphed with secrecy and economy.”

This book, Arnold’s Telegraph Codes, ensures the use of “Yes sir” and “No sir” throughout.

It would be a fun cipher each day or week, to figure out the contents of the message. Pretty sure it wouldn’t be guaranteed to be secret nor economic, but I bet we could ensure the use of Yes, sir, and No, sir.

Yes, these are the sorts of ideas I have about Twitter after using it for five years. What’s fun to me? Ciphers, information, history, and Twitter.

“Who cares about printing money, let’s print chocolate!”

–Chapter 23, Driving Wiki Development, Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate

Do you need proof that Sarah Maddox, author of Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate: A wiki as platform extraordinaire for technical communication, is a complete chocolate and wiki expert? Let me tell you, she knew that one day we will print chocolate in our (industrial-grade) kitchens. And sure enough, that day has arrived! And so has her book. It’s a wonderful addition to the XML Press family.

Sarah has an amazing knack to start at the beginning and introduce wikis in a friendly way even though she has been living the wiki life for years. She writes an introduction to wikis in an approachable way and ensures the reader knows the context is technical communication. But for me there are technical details revealed that offer the best chapters of this book. There is the deep technical dive into “building online help” especially her case study of web-based, context-sensitive online help. This solution should rock your world if you’re looking for a cross-platform web delivery of your online help. Her chapter about “a day in the life” of the wiki is just what you need to understand how this delivery and collaboration solution is different from “ordinary” technical writing. And I thoroughly reviewed and enjoyed “Giving your wiki wings.” Wikis with wings are the way technical writers will show their value to the world. I especially appreciate the chapter “Driving wiki development,” where Sarah is clearly honest about gaps in wiki functionality and how we can actually improve our experiences with wikis.

This book is an important, essential addition to the professional writer’s bookshelf. I’ve already whole-heartedly recommended it to an entire team of Rackspace writers and to all my Austin-based writer friends who have listened to me talk about the changes in the industry over the years. I want to recommend it to all of you as well. This book offers both visionary inspiration and the nitty-gritty technical details for all of us working in this web-centric world. I have so much respect for Sarah’s work on this book. Her enthusiasm for the wiki way shines through each page – web page and printed page. Pick up a copy, devour it like a chocolate bar, and drive collaboration for technical content.

Buy now at Barnes and Noble

Buy now at Amazon.com

I’m at the OpenStack Design Summit this week, and one of the OpenStack companies here, Piston Computing, created a pen that contains a scroll inside.

When you open the scroll, you can see all the commands available for the “nova” client, which is how you send commands to the OpenStack Compute API at the command line. Clever!

I’m reading new thinking from Adam Hyde, FLOSS Manuals founder, in a new book titled “A Webpage is a Book” at http://www.booki.cc/a-webpage-is-a-book/_edit/. I found the gem of a quote above in the section on collaboration. He is re-writing his book about book sprints in this new tome. I knew he had been refining his thinking after running 30 book sprints over the last five years, so I look forward to hearing his new perspectives as he shifts from “it’s editorial” to “it’s ease of production, collaboration, and reuse.”

The best motivation to collaborate on writing a book is a desire for the book to exist. To quote Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

My current thinking about how to get collaborative writers to long for the endless immensity of the sea, the journey from uncoupled thoughts and notes to a knowledge transfer device, is threefold:

1. Make your writing events fun and relaxing, like a writer’s retreat. The tool should disappear into the background while you just write productively. They desire for the book to be a part of their lives.
2. Give the writing group plenty of reputation building – teach them to long for the recognition that being an author on the deliverable will bring. They desire for their writing to be recognized.
3. Recruit people who already practice reciprocity – they get a kick out of being helpful. They know others helped them. They want to help and have been helped. They desire for their writing to be helpful.

Of course it’s not really this simple, but it is calming and inspiring to think of riding ocean waves to explore collaborative authoring. Holding a seashell to my ear now… ahh.

Courtesy flickr: novecentino

I’ve tried quite a few different twitter clients – and most of the time I talk about Hootsuite as my client of choice.  It made sense to talk about how I got to this point (and to be honest there are still a few things about Hootstuite I don’t like).

Platform: Adobe Air ∴ Windows, Mac, Linux
Website: www.tweetdeck.com

Tweetdeck was one of the first twitter clients and I believe led the way for what is now a very crowded market.  It provides a columnar style interface allowing you to create different columns for searches, users, lists, mentions & direct messages.  It’s initial color scheme is a little off-putting for some, it’s primarily black and yellow, however it can be easily changed.  I find myself visiting a color scheme generating site to find a good mix of colors to re-skin the interface.

Tweetdeck offer good integration to all the features of the twitter service include list management and retweeting.  Additionally it also provides preview functionality for links and images.

My personal experience with tweetdeck is that I found it very useful however also found it a little unreliable.  There were time when columns that I had added like mentions or searches simply weren’t populating.  There were a couple of other reports of people having similar problems – with no real resolution.   In all fairness I haven’t tried tweetdeck for a little while and so this issue may well be rectified by now.

Pros: Multiple twitter accounts (plus Facebook, LinkedIn), Broad Functionality

Cons: Download/Install required, Not very intuitive (subjective)

Platform: Adobe Air ∴ Windows, Mac
Website: www.mixero.com

At one point in the past I was an avid Mixero user – in retrospect I wonder if it was only because I had a beta login to it.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good tool, but the learning curve is very steep.  Mixero takes a different approach to other twitter clients, rather than a column based approach it lets you build ‘contexts’ that represent different combinations of users/searchs/lists.  So you could for example build a context that lists 15 specific twitter users combined with a search for ‘iPhone’.  This provides a very powerful environment if you are will to put in the hours to figure it out.

A nice feature that I haven’t found in too many other clients is the ability to configure filters – so you can easily remove tweets based on a rule set you define.  It also provides previews of images and links in the same way tweetdeck does.

Pros: Very functional, filtering of tweets, ‘different’ to the rest

Cons:Download/Install required, steep learning curve

Platform: Web based – I use Firefox
Website: www.hootsuite.com

Hootsuite is a web based twitter client which is a benefit if you are in a locked down environment where you need these tools.  Some IT departments (rightly) choose to deny you the ability to install software, hence this is a great alternative.

Hootsuite uses a columnar approach to twitter management, integrates to Facebook and LinkedIn and allows you to send one update to many accounts and services at once.  The color scheme is a little harsh sometimes with the blue and green – but you can look past that.

Hootsuite provide a business friendly function which allows you to have a number of different people managing the one twitter account – which I think is a huge benefit for many organisations starting in this space.  Additionally hootsuite includes it’s own URL shortening service (ow.ly) which works fine and integrates the statistics well however also presents an in-browser toolbar at the top of the viewed page which some people don’t like.  It does sometimes make it hard to grab the actual URL of the page and additionally doesn’t seem to work so well with tools like instapaper.

Hootsuite is only missing one or two elements to make it perfect (for me anyway).  I’d like the ability to add in my own URL shortenning service and additionally would like it to support the true twitter retweet functionality as opposed to the current “tweet with quote” approach.  However right now it’s my twitter client of choice.

Pros: Nothing to install, Multi-user support, good stats on your links

Cons: Minor functional deficiencies, Only one URL shortenner supported (it’s own)

There are dozens of other clients out there – let me know which one you use (and why).

Sorting (courtesy flickr: CC BY-ND 2.0)

Last year Twitter introduced a new feature called ‘Lists’ that I think a few people are still not sure about.  To be honest – using lists on the twitter website is a bit wasted, the real value of lists is when you combine a dedicated twitter client with a mobile twitter client.

For some time most of the dedicated twitter clients for your desktop computer have had the ability to organise tweets into columns.  One column for your main feed, another for your replies and mentions, another for your ‘favorite tweeters’ and another for ‘clients’ (as an example of course).  Similar functionality crept into mobile tools also, however the problem was that there was no way to synchronize your columns between your desktop client and your mobile client.  So in simple terms – if I added you to my favorites column in hootsuite, then I would have to do the same on tweetdeck on my iPhone.  Crud!

Twitter lists solve this problem.  If I add you to a specific column (or list) on my desktop then you are automatically added everywhere.  Next time I look at that list on my phone then I see your tweets there also.

If you’re anything like me you also have many different interests however want to stick to one twitter account.  Twitter lists also provide you the ability to organise and sort your twitter friends into different groups based on those interests.  As an example I have a twitter list called “Know in real life” which is a list that I add people to once I have actually met them. I have another list for people that talk about social media, and yet another for participants of my seminars.  This makes it easy for me to see tweets based on what I’m trying to achieve, if it’s work time then I’ll watch the social media list – if it’s weekend time I’ll watch the people I know in real life.

For many people twitter is unfortunately about getting as many followers as possible, and I can’t help thinking that twitter lists may fall into the same category.  I’m expecting someone at some point to exclaim how many lists they are on on twitter and hope people are impressed.  Twitter makes it easy to see if a user is on a list (anyone’s list) and also allows you to see which lists a user is on.

The final element of lists on twitter is that as a twitter user you have the capacity to follow someone’s list, which is altogether different to following an individual twitter user.  When you choose to follow a list – you get to see tweets from everyone in that list (even people you may have blocked).  It also means that if the list creator adds and removes people from the list then that also affects the tweets you see.  This is good and bad – in that you may follow a list and start to like tweets from a few individuals on the list (good) but then the list owner may remove those users and you no longer see that valuable information (bad).

Finally… right now you can only create 20 lists – but 20 is plenty.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/

I feel I’ve spent the last 12 years of life, my career, trying to help people do things better.  Helping them make better systems, better experiences, better websites.  And I would expect that there are other people like me doing similar things for similar organisations.

But still I see so many organisations just getting it wrong, and I think I’ve figured out why.  Fundementally these organisations (I’m going to just say ‘people’ from now on) are making flawed business process decisions.  The decisions they are making about what to do on their website are being made with the concept being “how can I make this easier for me”.  Wrong!

So what do I mean by ‘you’ – who is ‘you’?  You is the organisation you work for.  ‘You’ is the one making decisions about your business, your products and services, your communications and strategy.  ‘You’ might be the CEO, it might be the IT department, the marketing department, the membership team, or perhaps the worst offender – the accounting/finance department.

When you make decisions with ‘you’ in mind what you are doing is leaving out the customer altogether.  You are forgetting about their experience with your organisation and forgetting that without ‘them’ there would be a ‘you’ in the first place.

Put your hand up if your website has a ‘contact us’ form of some sort, perhaps something like the one used by the Zoom Teeth Whitening Centre right here in Melbourne.  My goal was simple – get an appointment.  If only the process was simple.

Firstly I found this organisation by doing a google search for teeth whitening melbourne, and at the top of the results was an advertisement for these guys.  Now I know a little about advertising on the web (in fact I know alot about it) and I know that anything that has a customer value of $495 is a highly competitive keyword search market.  Suffice to say that this organisation would be paying considerably for each and every click on that advert.  And to be honest it’s being waisted right now.

After taking a few seconds to look around their site I decided to hit the contact us form.  Alot of information requested but hey – if they’re asking for it then it must be important right?  And if you take a second to actually look at the form – it even asks when I’d like to have my appointment, day and time.  Hit the go button and sit back.

And then you wait.

And you wait some more.

And nothing happens.  Days go by and nothing happens.  Weeks go by and still nothing.

I don’t think my expectations are too high here – I think if I take the time to fill in your online form – provide all the appropriate information and follow the rules – then it’s common courtesy that you would take the time to respond to it.  I’d be happy to wait perhaps an hour, perhaps two, and reluctantly wait a day.  Anything more is just waisted time, effort, and dollars.  Not my dollars, yours.

Shouldn’t the response be instant?  Shouldn’t the receptionist be getting an email or an alert that says “someone did something you need to pay attention to?”  If I chose to pick up the phone then they would get an alert – a black box on their desk would ring.  Why is it so different with web forms?

I’d love to hear your experiences, good and bad.

This just has to stop.  At some point organisations operating like this need to realise that the thousands of dollars they spent building their website, optimising it for google and paying for the click through adverts is completely waisted if they aren’t taking the customer experience into account.  It’s not about ‘you’, it’s about ‘me’.