Fans of the wildly popular HBO show Game of Thrones are anxiously awaiting the premiere of Season 3 on March 31^st, 2013 at 9PM in the United States. The show has become a worldwide phenomenon and in many ways re-defined what is possible for a television show.

As the fans know, core to the story are the different family Houses like the Starks, the Lannisters, and the Targaryens. Each House is represented by their coat of arms or Sigils that also bear their House Words like the infamous “Winter is Coming” words of the Stark family in the North.

At Definition 6 we are extremely excited to help launch Join the Realm, an experience that allows fans to create their own House Sigil and then download, share, and post it in a variety of formats for the leading social networks and other purposes.

Join the Realm, which can be used in 24 different languages, gives fans an interactive sigil editor to name your House, enter your House Words, and choose from a variety of backgrounds, patterns, borders, colors, and icons. It can then be downloaded immediately or saved while generating versions of it that include Facebook cover photos and profile pictures, Twitter backgrounds, Wallpapers, and Instagram versions. These can also easily be shared out to your social networks directly from the site. And if you don’t feel like taking the time to create one yourself you can always just use the automatic “Do It For Me” Sigil generator.

One very cool aspect of the experience is that HBO wanted it to be available on leading smartphone and tablet platforms as well as desktop browsers. So the interactive editor had to be designed and built in HTML5 and Canvas, allowing the full site to be used on an iPad and an optimized mobile web site version available to iPhone and Android users. This does mean older desktop browsers and older smartphone browsers aren’t supported, but in the Game of Thrones some browsers win and others must unfortunately die.

We hope you have fun creating and sharing your Sigils. We had a lot fun making the experience and working with our friends at HBO on this. It may be Spring now in the northern hemisphere, but Winter is still coming…

“It's the family name that lives on. That's all that lives on. Not your personal glory, not your honor, but family.”

- Tywin Lannister

Editor's Note: It’s that time of year again…time for Definition 6 CTO Paul Hernacki’s annual “Make Fun of Marketing People” Cartoon.  As usual, prepare to laugh… because the only other option for this kind of truth is to cry.

Yes, in my role as CTO for a Unified Marketing Agency I spend most of my waking hours squarely at the crossroads of marketing and technology. And our own marketing department at Definition 6 has been bugging me for weeks to write a blog post about the top things people should be thinking about in 2013 related to innovative use of marketing technologies. But the crazy pace of work that is so common in the agency world right before the holidays as we rush to finish up so many big projects and campaigns for our clients left me with little time to actually sit down and write something meaningful. So instead, I created this video. It's cloud-based. And cloud-ready. And cloud-enabled. With mobile accessibility and social shareability. Enjoy. And good luck to everyone in 2013... even the Mayans.

Planning the 2013 Marketing Budget
by: phernacki

The Stevie Awards recognizes American Business Awards in multiple categories, and last night Definition 6 was up for a Stevie in the App Awards (Entertainment) category for the work we did with HBO on the True Blood Facebook App. The category in which we were nominated recognizes excellence in the design and execution of apps (handheld or PC) and is divided into categories based on the theme of the app. The competition was tough, but our CTO Paul Hernacki was prepared to accept our award at the ceremony in San Francisco. We're happy to say that we took home the gold! 

Our Gold Stevie Award:

Paul Hernacki accepting the award on behalf of Definition 6 and True Blood:

It was an exciting event in an exciting city. In fact, the awards schedule had to be shifted around a bit due to an occupy movement right around the corner:

So, Paul Hernacki decided he needed to alter his warbdrobe a bit to suit the occasion: 

By every measure the Suzanne Collins’ books and the subsequent movie have been massive successes. Most of us who have read the books have found them almost as hard to put down as did the teenage girls that first made them popular. The story is riveting, fast-paced, vivid, and induces emotion. 

While the story isn’t really intended to be a lesson in marketing, it’s hard for someone who works in the marketing and advertising industry to read the books or see the movie and not recognize the key ways in which marketing and branding play a major role in the story.

I’ve always wished there was an interactive marketing version of the reality TV show Shark Tank, or something akin to a digital marketing version of American Idol or X Factor. I’ve also always wanted to be a rock star even though I have absolutely no serious musical talent apart from my claim to fame of briefly appearing as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady and Action in West Side Story while in high school. Pretty far from Rock Star status. But I recently had both wishes granted and it was an awesome experience.

Last week I had the incredibly interesting opportunity to journey to Taipei to co-host an annual event called Interactive@Taiwan. This event brings together leading interactive agencies in Taiwan to host a meeting featuring select speakers from abroad whose companies have gained some degree of international recognition for their work in order to learn from them. Each agency participating sends a cross-functional team that then competes over the course of three days to ultimately present the best concept based on a Challenge Brief. The featured speakers work with each agency team in workshops to refine their ideas and concepts in a near crucible-like environment to arrive at a final presentation, which then is judged by the speakers, with awards granted to the best concepts.

While previous years they focused mostly on the creative aspects and invited speakers like the ECD’s of companies like AKQA and W+K, this year they wanted to focus on the importance of technology in combination with strategy, marketing and creative… they looked to companies who have really brought technology and creative together in a unified manner to make a difference.

I was pretty honored when they reached out and invited me based on their awareness of the great work we’ve done for Coca-Cola on their Open Happiness campaign and the work we’ve done for HBO’s True Blood.

It was also pretty cool to be in the company of the other speaker, Nathan Martin, the CEO of Deep Local which brought the world the Nike Chalkbot and Nog Pong. I can say that in the course of the week I gained a tremendous amount of respect for Nathan and the work Deep Local does.

We set the stage for the event talking about how our agencies marry the fields of creative and technology, art and engineering, marketing and digital, all while staying true to the importance of understanding the brand, the personas of the target market, the desired business results, and the importance of the insights and big ideas. We talked to them about our different models for how we do this to come up with truly innovative ideas and then be able to execute on those ideas. From there we issued them a challenge that basically involved them coming up with concepts for one of their current clients or prospects that involved both digital and post-digital executions that were “outside the box” and leveraged technology beyond simple basics or common approaches.

For two days straight we met with every team in succession, one after the other, several times a day. They brought concepts for brands like HTC, China Trust Bank, FamilyMart, Heineken, Giant Bikes, Samsung and more. It felt like Shark Tank with the weird aspect of being one of the judges and critics. I’m definitely not always right- just ask my wife, my boss, our CMO, or our ECD. But it was amazing to see how much they valued my input and commentary on how to improve their ideas and executions.

Not every idea was great, and many took a long time to work through to something really cool and viable. But in the end, 10 teams from 10 different agencies presented amazing ideas and concepts. There were a few that were fantastic, others that were great, and others that were good and just needed some work. I definitely learned things. I learned how agencies on the other side of the planet are thinking and operating. I learned areas where they are well ahead of the West like RFID/NFC, QR, and mobile gaming. I learned how they operate against very different demands, budgets, and cultures. I hope they learned a few things from me too.

Lastly, my hat is off to the people and culture of Taiwan. I did not deserve it, but they treated me like a rock star while I was there. They are some of the most hospitable people on the planet, I have rarely felt so welcome and well taken care of, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

I only wish everyone back here in the U.S. thought I was as smart as everyone over there did.


Added bonus: While I was there it was Taiwan’s 100th anniversary. Fireworks abounded. Very cool to see. Watched it from the top of a building in Taipei thanks to a guy named Mouse and his company Webgene .




 

I like Google+. +1.
 
It’s interesting to see how many people are almost afraid to say so, stick their neck out, or venture to say this is going to make it. I’m guessing this is mostly because they scrambled to praise Google Wave, and Google Buzz and were later proven wrong. And they were still recovering from Marketer’s PTSD from their ventures into Second Life.
 
But I’m willing to say I think Google+ will be a hit.  

There are so many thinks I disLike and -1 about Facebook: their abhorrent privacy practices, the way they try to decide who my friends are and whose posts I should see, the way they make control over selective posting difficult (the big difference with how Google implemented Circles is usability), the way they make grouping people difficult, their immature handling of API updates, their authoritarian control over brand flexibility on their site, the minimal real estate they offer brands while still applying extensive limitations on use, the fact they insist on it being a destination site instead of an integrated part of your overall web experience, and the fact that I simply don’t trust them. Using Facebook and developing for it feels like a massive step backward in time to the days of AOL and Prodigy.
 
Google+ definitely has a lot of room for growth and improvement. But there’s so much to like. I love having a do-over on my friends list, there are many people I didn’t Friend because I barely knew them but I would connect with them on Google+ and just put them in the circle I felt comfortable with. I love the ease of control over friend/follower categorization and the ease and obviousness of selective posting. I love the ease of export and that it’s termed Data Liberation and Google Takeout, the ease of Circle views is awesome, the very free form posting ability, the fact they have made it an integrated part of your web experience, and not just a destination site with Like buttons funneling to it.  Mashable published a great cheat sheet for Google+ that you can check out, too.
 
It needs a Wall, an iPhone app, and maybe a few Profile improvements. I really want a hashtag equivalent. Lots of work to do on how brands can use it to engage their audiences. Really the main misses in Google+ are what they haven’t yet done but could easily do, what they have implemented I really like.  It lools like a lot of the stuff is already in the works, too as seen on Geek.com article.
 
I have big and pretty well founded hopes that they will be far better about how they handle API updates and major changes for those of us that want to develop for their platform. I believe they will be far more flexible about how they allow brands to build in and around their platform or just incorporate it into theirs. That alone will keep me hoping this makes it. And I think this could be a major Trojan horse for expansion of Android and Chrome market share.
 
I think Facebook will be around and competing for a good while and will remain very relevant. They’ve gained too much market share and mindshare and too many users to just go away. But I think they have a very real competitor. By contrast, you don’t hear Twitter users constantly pleading for a new Twitter or a Twitter competitor. But you hear it all the time from users of Facebook. That’s not a good position to be in, especially when someone the size and caliber of Google actually releases something that’s pretty equivalent and compelling.
 
 

It's not every day you have the opportunity to work on something that screams cool from almost every aspect. Let me see if I can summarize this particular opportunity: vampires, witches, werewolves, Alan Ball, Anna Paquin, Alexander Skarsgard, Ryan Kwanten, Kristin Bauer, Deborah Ann Woll, HBO, Social Media, Facebook, complex Flash layering, detailed motion design, great creative, great script, personalization in full motion video, high availability, cloud farms, CDN's, open source, high performance where every millisecond in processing counts, and integration with multiple SaaS providers and their API's. 

That pretty much describes what Definition 6 recently had the opportunity to work on and launch with the hit HBO show True Blood that premieres season 4 this Sunday, June 26th. We helped them launch a Facebook application called IMMORTALIZE YOURSELF that takes a piece filmed exclusively for this purpose featuring many of the famous cast as a bridge between season 3 and season 4 and using Facebook connect you'll find you and your Facebook friends are a part of the video. Some go missing, others apply to be Fangtasia dancers, and you get to be an assassin. You're all featured in the show's famous credits and opening. And when it's all over you can re-do the whole thing but pick which friends you want to be in which roles. And while the concept of using a bespoke video with social aspects may not be entirely new or unique, I feel pretty safe in saying that the level of detail we achieved in the personalization is pretty rare. Everything looks far more a natural part of the video than almost anything done previously. A lot of love went into that effort. The same goes for attention to detail in the performance of the application for something involving so much Flash, video and detailed interactions.

Plus it's just cool. It's also pretty rare in this business to do something that achieves a 99.9% positive sentiment rating with less than 0.05% technical failures in application delivery. You can check it out for real yourself here. And you can see an example of one of the videos below, this one featuring many of the team members at Definition 6 that worked on this project.

And as an added benefit, I and many of the team members had about 45 days to immerse ourselves in the brand by watching 3 seasons of a show with brilliant dialogue, and a great story that's chock full of fantastic effects, great actors, and plenty of hot vampire sex.

Our thanks to a great client. The True Blood team wrote a great script, and all the video production work and editing was done by HBO Creative Services. As always the cast and crew of True Blood were fantastic in their performances. The marketing team at HBO continues to push the edge with great ideas and non-traditional campaigns. What they have done on True Blood previously and with this piece shows how they combine innovative thinking with creative brand authenticity.

We're lucky at Definition 6 to enjoy a long-standing relationship with HBO, spear-headed by the Managing Partner of our Post-Production division, Rob Ortiz, who has been working with HBO for over 25 years. Rob, our team at Definition 6, and the great Creative Services team at HBO, especially Becca Schader, Chris Denniston and Chris Spencer, all combined to concept, POC, flush out the idea, and drive this piece with Marketing and Interactive. It's fantastic working with people like these who continue to show they are thinking well beyond the traditional 30-second spot on how to engage fans and grow audiences in a rapidly changing landscape. True Blood is rapidly approaching 8 Million fans on Facebook, and it's pieces like this that can change how you reach and interact with those fans.

Waiting Sucks. So go check out the app. And don't miss the season premiere this Sunday on HBO, 9PM EST.

 

Have you read about Facebook's Open Compute announcement?  While I have enjoyed reading about the technology, my paranoia seeped in and I wrote this post for MediaBizBloggers.com.

What are your thoughts?
 

This past week I had the opportunity to present at the Business Development Institute (BDI) Social Consumer event in New York City and speak about one of Definition 6’s great customer case studies and success stories. The event was attended by over 300 people that work in marketing and media and come from a great variety of big companies including MTV, McGraw Hill, American Express, Citi Group and many others. I’m pretty sure I was one of very few people in the room that works mostly on the tech side of things.

It was a great event. The speaker from Unilever, Senior Communications Marketing Manager Stacie Bright (@Dove), has me honestly considering trying out Dove Body Wash for Men, and Senior Brand Manager Juliet Wilson from Kotex and Organic’s Julie Lee (@julielee75) showed off some truly game-changing work they are doing and even had the entire audience in various stages of discomfort reciting the word “vagina”. But the most energetic speaker by far was Bonin Bough (@boughb), the Global Director of Social Media for Pepsico who delivered a fantastic keynote speech and showed off some very innovative work they’ve done while talking about the importance of having Digital Fitness throughout an organization.

Of course, this made it a bit ironic that my presentation, which followed Bonin’s, essentially focused on some of the great work we’ve done over the past year or so with our customer Coca-Cola. So what’s a tech geek from Atlanta whose company does work for Coke supposed to do in this situation? Well… mostly just try to do his best to represent and share a little Happiness. You can view my presentation which is about 20 minutes long and judge for yourself. I think it went pretty well with the exception of a little technical glitch at the end where the presentation laptop froze up, though I think that happened because I was making jokes about IBM’s Watson at the time. Enjoy.

It’s December and the end of another year. We all know what that means. Christmas? Wrapping up the fiscal year? Coming up with New Year’s resolutions we won’t keep? No, my friend. No. Most importantly it’s the time of year for social media and the blogosphere to flood with Top [insert # here] of [insert random subject here] Lists! The Top 6 Most Googled Terms! The Top 10 Most Watched YouTube Videos! The Top 8 Most Popular Hashtags! The Top 12 Most Photographed Sandwiches! Gone are the days when Top 10 lists were the exclusive monopoly of the Ranking Dictator David Letterman! I don’t know about you, but it’s hard to imagine what could be more exciting. So I decided to create my own contribution to this joyous annual ranking extravaganza. And I’ve based this list on highly extensive research that includes thousands of my own opinions, hundreds of my own anecdotal experiences, and dozens of my own biases.

I’m quite certain that if all Twitter and Facebook posts with content that falls in one of the below 10 categories suddenly ceased that the entire world of social media would either collapse upon itself like a black hole or it would would see about as much use as telegram services do today... lots of RT's with cricket sounds.

10. Top X of Y Lists. I’m pretty certain that practically anyone can take about 5 minutes and write a list of X number of Y things on a blog then post it to Twitter and get a large number of click-throughs and RT’s.  I mean… you’re reading this one and I’m totally just making it all up as I go along with zero actual or real research to back it up.

9. Posting links to funny videos on YouTube. This is hilarious. This is too funny. Totally LOL! What’s interesting to me is how many of us roll our eyes at our parents for their constant barrage of forwarded e-mail humor, but we think nothing of posting our own barrage of it to social media each and every day.

8. Posting cute pictures of your kids and funny things they said. My kids are adorable, dammit. And everyone must know this. And if you don’t comment or reply with things like “Adorable!” and “So cute!” I will shun you by refusing to comment on how yummy that picture of your arugula salad looks. Take that.

7. Individual content curation: The Human RSS. Who needs trained and experienced content editors that might actually have journalism degrees and do stupid things like verify sources and accuracy of information when you can rely upon that guy whose avatar is a close up of the upper left quarter of his face?

6. Celebrity Obituaries. What?! OMG! Another celebrity died? Quick! Pls RT! And don’t forget to add in your own personal tribute or reference memorable quotes.

5. Letting everyone know what new gadget you got. I mean, what good is having some new tech bling if you can’t show off your technical superiority to people you never talked to in high school or 736 of your Followers that you never met?

4. What you “Like”, where you are traveling to, what you are eating, what you are watching, what you are reading, what the weather is like where you are at, and who you are hanging out with. I unfortunately know more mundane details of the lives of people I never actually met, seldom see or barely ever spoke to then I really ever cared to know. It also scares me to realize that I now hear real-world conversations where people refer to themselves in the 3rd person stating they "Like this".

3. Apple rumors and anticipating Apple releases. If it wasn’t for debating what features might be in the next iPhone or complaining about the lack of Flash support on the iPad, Twitter could probably reduce its server capacity by about 10%. Never before have people spent so much effort complaining about products that they collectively and eagerly spend so much money on.

2. Opinions on the daily breaking news. Because all the talk shows, pundits, broadcast news commentators, and daily water cooler conversations really just didn’t give us enough of other people’s opinions on which to base our own.

1. Discussing social media. Seriously… has any other medium ever been used so reflexively to discuss itself? Imagine if the largest percent of your phone calls were to discuss phones and phone related technology or if most of your e-mails were focused on the subject of e-mail, e-mail clients, and e-mail servers. Pretty insane when you think about it.

Of course, I just realized I forgot to include a big one: complaining about products and services in general. But I only want 10 items in my list. #FAIL

All that said, please don't think this means I see social media as worthless or a waste of time. It is an incredibly powerful medium that really has changed the way people communicate and it has connected people with each other in a way that is truly staggering to consider. It can be an amazing way to gain insights, it has forever changed the nature and control of information flow, and it has empowered individuals and movements across the globe. It can connect consumers and brands in a more personal fashion than almost any preceeding medium. It has placed the pulse of the moment in any given place from any given person's perspective at the potential fingertips of billions. And IMO it's really just the beginning. So has anyone heard what the specs are on the rumored camera that's suppose to be in the next version of the iPad?

Happy New Year!

I woke up this morning to a pretty interesting e-mail that was sent to me by way of my Google profile from someone named David Anderson:

I am making a blog for an online writing class I'm taking through UF, and for a module on search techniques I needed to find a non-mainstream website about my topic (sports bars).  I found your old site, the East Lansing Bar Review, and I loved it so I've written my post for this assignment about it.  I've only made five posts so far, but here is a link anyway: http://sportsbarjunkie.blogspot.com/

This is really crazy in so many ways. The site he is referring to is something I created back around 1995. I was attending Michigan State University and worked part-time in the MSU Network Center to make some extra cash. My official title there was Mainframe Consultant and mostly I helped professors and students to use things like Gopher, Banyan VINES, FTP, configure dial-up PPP access, and learn how to use our Unix-based ELM e-mail client. This was a time when most corporations hadn’t even heard of the web, it had fledgling use by Universities, it was being referred to as a fad, and I had just helped to get Michigan State’s own first web sites up.

I wanted to play around more with this new-fangled world wide web so using a vi editor in Unix, working in HTML 1.0 and armed with a copy of the predominant browser of the time NCSA Mosaic, I decided to create a site that offered a personal review of all the local bars and pubs in the East Lansing, Michigan area. I had a lot of fun creating the site. I had even more fun doing the critical research required to provide the reviews. But it really was bare bones ugly, used hand coded tables, some basic formatting tags, and the most advanced thing it included (which was hot at the time) was an image map that used a monstrosity I created with a copy of Photoshop 1.0.

But so it was born: the East Lansing Bar Review. For a couple of years I kept updating it and occasionally I got really interesting feedback or comments. It even got me a few free beers from local bar owners. When I left MSU my younger brother Mike took over the site and moved it (all 4 or 5 HTML files and all 5-6 images) from my student web account to his. He kept it updated for a couple of more years before he graduated. A couple of years later we got tired of being contacted about it from people asking for updates so Mike posted a note on the site explaining this and since then it’s gathered electronic dust but apparently it’s still there.

15 years from when I created the site, I’m now the CTO of Definition 6 where we create massive high-end brand experiences that include transactional sites with extensive back-end systems integration, hundreds of thousands of pages of content in enterprise-class Content Management Systems, on-line video experiences, mobile web sites, mobile applications and more in addition to spending a ton of time doing Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, On-line Display Media, and Analytics.

In an effort for this blog post to have a point and not just be nostalgic rambling or reflection on how far we’ve come in terms of the web and on-line advancements, what really stands out to me is considering how high this site shows up in results for major search engines. If you search for East Lansing Bars it still comes up as one of the top several results on Google. And if you search as David describes he did in his blog post it’s number one. Keep in mind the site was originally written and posted before Google even existed and at a time when Yahoo! had just come onto the scene as a start-up. The very concept of organic search engine optimization didn’t even really exist let alone was it the means of livelihood for the legions of people that practice its art today. I’m sure there are some things to be said for how today’s algorithms treat a site with such a long tenure favorably as well as the tenure of links to that site. And I’m all but certain that the same site published today would not be treated so favorably. But it is probably worth noting that a site hosted at relatively bad URL by today’s SEO standards with no meta-data, no thought to Information Architecture, and bad file naming practices still shows up high for certain not uncommon searches when the content was meaningfully written and relevant to the subject matter of interest. I’ll leave the rest of the analysis to the real SEO experts out there (and my apologies to our Creative Department for even publishing a link to this relic of a site on our blog).

Thanks, David, for the trip down memory lane and for giving me some interesting things to think about this morning.

I hear it said at least several times a week. I see it posted on Twitter pretty frequently. It’s the simple statement that’s become cool to utter: PowerPoint Sucks. And often in the same breath I hear people extol the wonders of Keynote or Prezi.

I’ll be the first person to admit that I have seen countless horrible PowerPoint presentations. I probably see at least one PowerPoint presentation per day that is a crime against humanity. I’ve seen more poorly laid out slides, absurd overuse of ridiculous transitions and animations, badly-utilized effects, slides with so much text that Tolstoy would complain, more bullets than Rambo can fire off in full-length movie, and more light-colored fonts on yellow backgrounds than should be legal.

But this is not the point. It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools. Just because you produce your presentation on a MacBook Pro (and I’m typing this post on one right now) with Keynote it does not somehow imbue you with some sudden, instantaneous and deity-like powers to produce an amazing presentation. And using Prezi mostly just increases the likelihood of inducing motion sickness and nausea in your audience while reducing the reusability of your content and failing to add anything meaningful to your corporate knowledge base.

Here’s a news flash: a good presentation requires having a good story to tell and a good story teller. Period. The tools you might use are irrelevant, but if you do choose to use tools to add to your story you need to have a clue of how to use them and then use them in a manner that supports the telling of a great story. That’s it. A great story teller with a great story to tell doesn’t even need a series of slides popping up behind them. Great visuals, content and media that reinforce key messages and enhance the story can be tremendously helpful and effective when used properly. But they are still not the primary and most important element in a successful presentation that connects with the audience. You are.

Prezi and Keynote do not grant you mystical and magical powers. They do not make you smarter and better looking. They are not powered by Skynet and constructed on top of a positronic copy of the brains of Steve Jobs, Bill Buxton, Martin Luther King, and Zig Ziglar. They do not think for you. They do not know who your audience is, they do not know the purpose of your presentation, they do not know the message you are trying to convey, they do not know the desired outcome, they do not know how to connect with the people in the room. Neither does PowerPoint for that matter.

There are absolutely some minute feature details that can be argued about the different tools. I’ve used them all. Though if you actually take the time to learn them you find that for the most part each has their shortcomings and things they can’t do well, and each has capabilities the other doesn’t. But it still all comes back to you. Saying “PowerPoint Sucks” is quite simply a short-cut to thinking. It doesn’t suck. You do. Instead try focusing on coming up with a good story and learning how to tell it well.

And just to illustrate my point, here's this entire blog post re-done very poorly as a hack-job Prezi. It's a horrible presentation. Just makes you want to cry. Enjoy. http://prezi.com/4_muqjahha-g/powerpoint-doesnt-suck-you-do/

(Image Credit: Niall Kennedy)


 

Almost every week I continue to be shocked at some aspect of how Facebook is treating the privacy of their users. While I think Facebook has done some amazing things to redefine the landscape of connection and community in the digital age, the way they auto-opt-in users to new policies and settings that unwittingly further expose them in a manner that is beyond confusing for almost everyone is driving me crazy.

It seems to be a total disregard for privacy that leverages "confuser interface design" tactics and misleading redesign functionality alterations to extend their dominance at the unknowing expense of most of their users. They actively seek to get you to enter as much personally defining data as possible. They make it incredibly complicated to manage your assorted privacy settings, then they go and make significant changes that auto-opt in users to new options like making all of your posts available to search engines or to share your personal data with applications and sites using FaceBook tools. All of this while presenting typical users with a perception of communicating and sharing with their "Friends." Maybe FaceBook is just working towards a Nobel Peace Prize by wanting everybody on the planet and every corporation to be Friends? Ummmm.... no.

Conversely, while not exempt from scrutiny, Twitter takes a much different approach. They begin by having an established perception that what you post is public, they have one very clear and simple blanket option to make your posts private, and the information they ask you to enter for registration is extremely limited.

I'm also driven crazy by the constant changes to FaceBook API's that make the lives of developers miserable as they struggle to work with this juggernaut of social media and the fact that they employed algorithms that began to selectively decide whose posts among my friends they thought I should see (and even excluded my wife's posts from my stream until I manually added her back in)... but that's a whole other couple of blog posts to write. The following is a short list of things I actually find less annoying than FaceBook's treatment of the concept of privacy:

15.       SPAM e-mail

14.       People who post their every Foursquare or Gowalla check-in to Twitter

13.       The mere existence of Farmville and Mafia Wars

12.       The first time I saw Clippy

 
      11.    Developers that hardcode and use auto-code generators out of laziness

10.       Requirements documents for a web site or app that say: "should work in every browser"

9.       Web sites that dramatically over-use Flash for everything they possibly can

8.       People that show up for an interview and haven't read and reviewed your company's web site or have any ability to articulate what your company does

7.       People that text or use mobile devices to tweet while driving (or drive while talking on their mobile phone without using a Bluetooth or hands-free device)

6.   People that call themselves "Social Media Gurus" in their bios or otherwise

5.   People in busy airports that obliviously stop walking out of the blue and then wonder why everyone crashes into them

4.   Every scene on the Fox TV series 24 that ever involved Kim Bauer

3.   Stupid people (as one of my friends is fond of saying as he quotes his old high school football coach, "Ya can't fix stupid.")

2.   The continued existence of IE6

1.   The constant deluge of Top <insert number here> Lists

I recently overheard several discussions and have seen a number of social media posts mocking virtual MMO world Second Life. Many declare it and its ilk dead. People are openly cynical towards it. Laughing at it seems like the hip and trendy thing to do unless you want to appear to be an idiot. And you're not an idiot, are you?

When Second Life first came onto the scene it was the shiny new toy with all the typical hype. You couldn't swing a dead virtual cat without hitting a marketer or interactive technologist that wanted to talk about Second Life. People ran to it like moths to a flame and then they got burned. I once heard Second Life brilliantly described as marketing's Vietnam. No one wants to talk about it or how bad things got screwed up there.

People spent tons of effort on research around it, heralded it as the next big thing, many even asked their employees to start playing it in a rush to become subject matter experts on it and figure out how to pitch their clients on creating branded virtual islands and experiences in this brave new 3D immersive world. And truly, the potential was staggering, nobody was wrong about that. But the results weren't what everyone had hoped for. Far from it. The technology and interface still had a steep learning curve for many users, there were numerous barriers to entry that made it unwieldy for many potential customers, the experience was still a stretch for the vast majority of mainstream users who were just beginning to figure out FaceBook, and the ROI for the required effort simply wasn't there beyond some immediate PR value. But more than anything, there was a conundrum around the openness and lack of control over the experience, namely that Second Life was (and still is to a large degree) rife with adult content, porn, virtual sex and many other things that most brands simply didn't want to be associated with or risk exposing their customers to as those customers struggled to navigate their way to BrandXYZ Island. So people left in droves, most corporations that had tested the waters began their mass exodus. Those that jumped on the bandwagon (who still had their jobs) shook their heads in embarrassment and apology vowing never to make that mistake again.

But here's the thing. They weren't wrong about the potential. People were simply overly zealous, reckless, and so anxious to be ahead of the curve to appear innovative and be early adopters that they just made bad decisions on timing and failed to do their homework. They invested far too much effort into something that was still far from being ready for prime time and the mainstream. They wanted to be bleeding edge and guess what? There was blood. And now people either talk about it hushed tones or openly deride it.

But did you forget the part where I said that it's full of porn, sex and adult content? That industry and genre of society is so all over it and advanced in its use of it that it's crazy. That's right. The same industry and users that were the first to embrace newsgroups, web sites, e-commerce, paid-subscriptions for content, cross-channel branding, and on-line video. And they are always months to years ahead of the mainstream adoption and monetization. They happen to have a user base that will go to great lengths to extend their experience and be willing to deal with early shortcomings of the technology. It's a multi-billion dollar industry that time after time leads the way.

Meanwhile, another massive industry, Gaming and Entertainment, has continued to embrace the technology. MMORPG's like World of Warcraft and many others plus the continually enhanced experiences offered via services like Xbox Live leverage incredibly rich and immersive interactive 3D gaming and social experiences. Project Natal from Microsoft even looks to change the game further by enabling more physical interaction without the need for a handheld controller to interface with games and virtual environments.

The technology continues to advance. The processing speeds to accommodate these environments continue to increase. The typical memory of average computers continues to increase. Broadband keeps getting broader and the average technical proclivity of users keeps getting higher.

Second Life continues to evolve with a large number of improvements for user experience and better content ratings to segment world areas that are more "adult-focused" from those that are not (a move which has even been protested by some of the Adult-Content focused current users of the platform). By some reports the amount of Adult content is even growing in lesser proportion to more mainstream content. And their parent company Linden Labs has been hard at work developing the Second Life Grid that enables companies and organizations to have and create private worlds that are independent from the mass Second Life world. Companies like Unity are doing amazing things to enable 3D games and experiences to be easily developed and require nothing more than a browser. More powerful game engines are coming out every day. And Windows Phone 7, coming out soon, will enable Xbox Live right from a phone.

So it's not that Second Life is dead. Far from it. It didn't want to go on the cart. What's dead is the spirit and vision from some whose egos were crushed because they were burned by being reckless in pursuit of the next big, cool thing. Note to these folks for the future: if it's full of little besides porn and sex it's probably not yet right for most brands. But you're crazy to not see that means it will eventually make its way into the mainstream. It just takes time. It's probably not going to happen tomorrow. But when it does, don't call it a comeback because it'll have been here for years. If you're smart, you're still paying attention to what they and others in this space are doing. And you are smart, aren't you?

I recently had the opportunity to attend MIX 2010, Microsoft's annual conference for web designers and developers focused on building great user experiences, in Las Vegas, along with Definition 6's two interactive Creative Directors from Atlanta and New York.

MIX 2010 is highly unlike most other Microsoft conferences where the topics frequently focus on .NET, Exchange, Office, and Windows. Instead it's chock full of design and UX goodness - a geeky love fest for all the cool tech that goes into creating great web, mobile, desktop, kiosk, and other assorted technically enabled experiences using the Microsoft platform.

It's hard to argue that this isn't an arena in which Microsoft is still playing a lot of catch-up. Adobe Creative Suite and Flash/Flex are still easily the staple of most creative and design departments. And many people definitely hug their MacBooks and frantically wave their iPhones about when asked to provide examples of great user interface design. But if there was one thing abundantly clear at MIX 2010 it is that Microsoft has no plans to cede the battle on these fronts, they are rapidly catching up in many areas, and even appear to be leading the way in a few. Seriously.

Microsoft is a marathon runner, not a sprinter. And as Steve Ballmer said at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference last year regarding questions as to why Microsoft doesn't cede such battles as Search and Advertising and retreat back home to their core Windows, Office, or SQL Server business lines, "We. Don't. Go. Home." Anyone who doesn't believe him should have been at MIX. And do you really have to look further than an example like the Xbox?

Probably the hottest subject of discussion and presentations was Windows Phone 7 Series. I am, admittedly, an avid iPhone user who stood in line the first week they came out. I happily ditched my old Windows Mobile device and it's BlackBerry predecessors back then to live in Apple's world and I've never been seriously tempted to use something else until I saw WP7.

I really believe WP7 is a game changer for Microsoft and the mobile industry. Sure, it has some shortcomings. I don't know how they could decide to not include copy-and-paste as a feature in the first release. And like iPhone, they also do not have application multi-tasking and they appear to have similarly stringent plans regarding their app store.

But the interface is fantastic, I love the "hub" metaphors, streaming video and even Xbox Live over the phone looked amazing. Not sure exactly how badly those things will kill battery life, but they sure looked impressive. For heavy Outlook users, the Outlook mobile experience on WP7 may alone be enough to get you to switch. Just awesome. And there's a chance it could finally be the breakthrough that Zune has been looking for.

Silverlight 4 is definitely another big step in the right direction. They continue to slowly chip away at adoption and now claim that it's at 60% market penetration, probably mostly attributable to the Olympics and adoption and rollouts of Windows 7.

Tools like Expression Blend keep getting better, and Sketchflow may even be better than the competition, it is simply cool. IE9 beta demos also got big buzz. It appears they have surpassed Firefox on overall performance, are coming close to Chrome in many aspects, and for certain functions like handling of video and HTML5 they could end up being even faster and better (when running on a Windows platform of course) by taking better advantage of your computer's processor and using a form of background hardware-based acceleration. The head-to-head examples showing some really slick use of animation and video in HTML5 were really amazing.

The one thing that Microsoft has which no one else can offer (not Google, not Adobe, not Apple, not anyone) is an end-to-end story on tools and capabilities in this arena. The depth and breadth of their tools and services is truly staggering when you put it all together. And I'm not just talking about the typical story of Windows + Visual Studio + .NET + SQL Server. On top of that throw in Expression Studio with SketchFlow + Project "Dallas" + Azure + Silverlight + Surface + Windows Phone 7 + OpenData + IE9 + Bing Search and Maps and on and on. Sure you can poke certain holes in individual pieces versus their competitors. But the cohesive power of all that together makes for a truly impressive lineup.

There definitely were a few other good tidbits at MIX. Announcements around Orchard, freely available tools for WP7 development, great live streaming of Channel9 straight from the event, strengthening support for JQuery, and a surprising number of atypical logos on screens being talked about as friends (e.g. Wordpress, Drupal, PHP, etc.).

And the keynotes included fantastic sessions by Scott Guthrie (@scottgu), VP of Microsoft's Developer Division, and great demonstrations by consummate tech presenter Scott Hanselman (@shanselman). But for me, the highlight of MIX was the opportunity to see Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher Microsoft Research, speak live. He is simply brilliant and one of the most passionate people alive when it comes to interface design and technology.

If you've never seen him speak it is worth your time to google (or bing) for videos of his speeches and spend an entire day just watching them. As the conference organizer, Microsoft's Thomas Lewis (@TommyLee), put it in a tweet during Bill Buxton's keynote: "OMFG! Buxton's brutality has destroyed Vegas! Only zombies, mushrooms & lavender frogs have survived! DESIGN IS GOD!". I couldn't have put it better myself. Buxton's speeches are often too filled with memorable lines to count, though my favorite at MIX included "The most important thing in the system is the wetware... the human being" during a segment where he described the importance of taking into account all the users different prior experiences within the specific environmental contexts of where, when and how they will use a system that you are designing.

Side note: I still don't understand how such an amazing guy who lives and breathes design and is considered the Father of Multi-Touch can have such a horrible personal web site, but I can only assume it's a "cobbler's children" thing.

And last but not least, the overall crowd and dynamic of the attendees at MIX was fantastic if not a bit quirky. It was a great group of highly intelligent people that are all passionate about great design and truly unafraid to ask the hard questions of Microsoft and dole out praise as well as tough love in person in the sessions and in torrents over Twitter. Unlike typical creative and design conferences it's definitely rooted in a true developer core (e.g. more guys still talking about compilers as opposed to a more mixed-gender crowd talking about heuristics and having used many tools like these for years), but unlike normal Microsoft conferences it's a large group of people who love great creative design and have been dying for Microsoft to bring these kinds of things to the table.

This conference in Vegas was more WXSW for geeks than it was the concurrently running SXSW, but Twitter and Foursquare definitely reigned supreme there as well as the tools that joined everyone together digitally during the sessions, into the evening, around the bars, and throughout the event. Sunday evening even kicked off the conference with a massive tweetup at the MIX Lounge at THEhotel at Mandalay Bay. There is a real embrace of Twitter showing through by Microsoft that is really uncanny with regard to how they normally react to any tech service that they don't build and own.

At Definition 6, we do use a lot of tools and services across platforms including a very significant amount of work in the Microsoft platform. And we do use tools and design for platforms that are competitive to many of those that were showcased at MIX 2010. But there is no doubt that what we saw there has given us a lot to think about, some great ideas, and a few new weapons to put in our arsenal. We look forward to using many of these to create great solutions for our customers and to seeing them continue to evolve and improve.

Last week Interactive Marketing Agency Definition 6 launched TwitterINGO, an online game of sorts that leverages Twitter. I won’t go into all the details of how it works in this post, but essentially it’s a free downloadable desktop widget you run in the background while working (or at least trying to work… the game is a bit addictive to watch) as the game is played each Tuesday at 3PM EST. The tweets of all the people you follow stream down the left hand side while you get a 5x5 game board of keywords. When someone you follow posts a tweet containing a term you have on your board the square will highlight and fill in with that person’s tweet.

I am a bit biased of course in thinking the game is cool, I helped create TwitterINGO. The idea came from watching multiple columns of twitstreams in Tweetdeck and thinking how it almost felt like modern-day BINGO card. After a couple of brainstorming sessions we arrived at the current design. It has several premises.

1.       If you use Twitter to really, effectively follow the pulse of news and information that you care about you typically have to follow a fairly large number of people (typically at least in the hundreds and often in excess of that) and learn how to organize those people into groups in addition to creating effective searches for subjects.

2.       Finding the right people to follow who discuss the subjects of interest to you beyond your immediate circle of friends and colleagues takes some time and can be a bit of an art form as you sort through the clutter

3.       One of the real powers of social media is in how we help each other to find great people, pearls of wisdom, diamonds in the rough, etc.

4.       It can be really hard to identify the holes in your Following (you often don’t realize that you aren’t following certain subjects that interest you as well as you could be).

With this in mind we created TwitterINGO. With over 100 keywords “baked in” to the cards (all of them relating to popular and highly relevant subjects in the areas of interactive marketing, technology, media and advertising, application development, and social media), plus 20 current “terms of the week” on trending subjects sent out at the beginning of each weekly game, your card populates with a randomized selection of 24 of those terms, the middle square is free of course. Then you can simply sit back, have some fun and see what happens.

If you follow only a handful of people you will invariably become quickly disappointed as you realize none or few of your squares are populating. This can be a quick hint that you aren’t yet following the global conversations on tech and interactive or current events very well. On the other hand, if you follow a few hundred people who do talk about these subjects you’ll likely have a very different experience. I found myself fascinated watching my squares fill in (and unfortunately being less productive than I should be). It was amazing to see who I follow that randomly starting giving me the keywords I needed as I sought to get a row, column or diagonal completed to win. Every 5-10 minutes I’d get a square. First I got my “SharePoint” square filled by SharePoint Samurai @Gannotti. Then my “Brand” square filled by a post from @TobyDiva. Then Sun Microsystem’s Social Media guru @Sumaya posted a tweet with the term “open source”. I was off to a great start and saw another 4-5 squares fill in. And I came close to winning. But as I looked at what terms I needed to win (without cheating), I stared at the empty square with the word “Linux” in it. Why was nobody that I follow mentioning the word Linux? Hmmmm… there it was. A hole in how and who I Follow. I realized that I follow a lot of people on a lot of subjects but perhaps only a few that talk about Linux. To quickly rectify this I searched on the term Linux on Twitter and looked to see who the major contributors were and began following them. It was too late for me to win TwitterINGO this week, but it helped me do a better job of following that rather important part of the global technology conversation. The same can be said of many other terms I saw on my card that sat empty, I set out to see who was talking about the terms and found some really great people to start following.

While the game itself was rather fun, the real value was in seeing how it could help me. Plus I could then go look at the Leaderboard to see who the major Tweet Contributors were and who won and who they are following. The game is helping me to be a better user of social media to benefit my professional and personal interests and awareness. And I found a few extremely interesting people who played the game and won, people I’d never met before but that I certainly follow now. That's a game worth playing.

According to recent studies and surveys over 50% of all smartphone traffic in the U.S. now comes from iPhones (AdMob Mobile Metrics, March 2009). And it’s growing. Other platforms are starting to catch on, but Apple truly succeeded in building and proliferating a means for people to have a vastly improved mobile web experience. Add to that a rabid user-base and the result is that iPhone’s Safari browser now starts showing up more and more on the overall analytics reports when companies review what browsers are accessing their sites. As an avid iPhone user myself since the first version I’ve been amazed at how I could navigate sites on this platform despite site designs that still required extensive zooming in and out and scrolling back and forth. I was so enamored that Apple designed UI mechanisms to help accommodate sites not designed for mobile that for a while I was simply excited to be able to use them at all. But slowly some sites began creating better mobile versions to make navigation even easier on the iPhone and other browsers. Now I grow greatly annoyed when I try to access a web site from my phone and find myself staring at a microscopic version of the homepage which makes it difficult to even find the buried link that says “Contact Us” just so I can find their address or phone number to get directions and a map while I’m out and about. Or even worse, the site is built in Flash with no HTML version and for whatever divine reason Apple has still not decided to support Flash on the iPhone. So the site is essentially useless on my phone and in some cases looks uglier than a Nip/Tuck season finale. I found it funny when I tried looking at the web sites of some of our competitors, some large digital agencies, and found they had sites built in Flash which are rendered useless on my device.

Numerous solutions exist for creating mobile presentation layers for even the most complex and transactional web sites to handle every different mobile device under the sun. We’ve helped many of our customers do exactly that. But there wasn’t a simple, fast and inexpensive way for a large majority of companies who just have a typical web site with typical CMS needs managed by a small number of people to easily publish and manage simple mobile site versions. With all this in mind, Definition 6 worked to build some simple scripts, toolsets and templates that integrate directly into a Content Management System enabling re-purposing of content by a non-technical marketing manager to easily deploy a site that looks great in an iPhone Safari browser. It leverages iPhone navigation mechanisms, and helps you to offer mobile users with the experience they desire and the information they likely need while mobile which is often quite different than what they want when they are sitting in front of a laptop or desktop computer. We’ve also packaged it all up in a simple series of offerings to make this an easy decision for our current and future customers so they can cost effectively begin to meet the needs of a growing market. If you don’t have an iPhone you can test to see what your site looks like using an iPhone simulator which we have posted at http://www.definition6.com/our-services/mobile.aspx and if you do have an iPhone just visit www.definition6.com now on your device to see an example.

In the coming weeks and months we’ll also be releasing the same kind of CMS plug-ins and templates for other mobile browsers as add-ons to these tools. But we thought we’d start with the one that represented the most traffic. For a quick and simple way to manage mobile sites in a CMS we think this new toolset makes great sense for a large number of businesses.

I had an extremely interesting experience last week that forced me to undergo a thought exercise that I think can be extremely valuable for everyone to consider using on a regular basis. We all get so hung up in our particular expertise and the advanced nuances of our individual focus areas that we often fail to think about the basics and even more frequently we end up failing in our communication to others. My recent experience went something like this-

My wife came over to the Definition 6 offices along with my two year old daughter Mika to bring me some lunch. After lunch Mika began running around the office exploring a bit. I followed her as she ran into our main floor executive conference room. Now, I’m a bit biased, but for a child that just turned two she’s pretty impressively conversant with a great vocabulary. Here’s the conversation that followed:

Mika: What is this room?

Me: It’s a conference room.

Mika: What’s a conference room?

Me: It’s a room where people meet to discuss things.

Mika: Can I sit in one of the thinking chairs? (The “thinking chairs” reference is from her favorite show Blues Clues)

Me: Sure

Mika: What are we thinking about?

Me: Well, in this room we are usually thinking about interactive marketing?

Mika: What’s marketing, daddy?

Me: Hmmm… well, marketing is doing things that get other people to think a certain way, do certain things, or to buy things you want them to buy.

Mika: (thinks for a moment) I don’t understand marketing, daddy.

And there you have it. The question, my particular answer, and her response are in many ways less important than the thought exercise itself in my opinion. Try it yourself. Without thinking for more than a second or two, blurt out your definition of marketing as you’d answer it to a two year old. Try it again with “technology”, “managed services”, “open source”, “.NET”, etc. etc.

I’ve noticed in countless meetings how often people make assumptions about the level of understanding the audience has regarding certain terms or shared meanings. And also how often people throw around terms and concepts that they don’t seem to understand. I can’t count the number of people I have interviewed who list certain expertise and terms on their resumes only to be incapable of defining it in an interview. Go ahead- next time you interview someone lists the term “web services” on their resume ask them to define a web service, it’s components, and what exactly a web service does. You will be amazed and bewildered at the answers you receive.

Quite a few years ago when I worked at a different company and .NET first came out I recall the CEO asking via the discussion group email lists for people to explain to him the value of .NET. After dozens of convoluted and complex answers were offered he finally replied to all with the single line “Someone explain it me like I were two years old.” It’s not that he wasn’t an extremely bright and technical individual, he’s one of the brightest people I know. But it wasn’t until he asked the question in this way that people finally gave answers that culled things down to the key points and basic value.

Take this all for what it’s worth. I plan to run a lot more of my ideas and future presentations past my newly appointed diminutive advisor. There’s nothing like a two year old to keep you honest, accurate and off your high horse.

I’ve been a fan and follower for years of the series “24” starring Kiefer Sutherland. The first season was nothing short of amazing, it was absolutely a ground-breaking television series. The action and suspense is always top notch as Kiefer’s character, special agent Jack Bauer, pulls off amazing feats and defies death again and again to save millions of lives from terrorists and rogue forces from around the world. And of course it requires some degree of suspension of disbelief. I’m good with that, though as the series continued over the years, like most series, it’s stretched things further and further and has accordingly become less and less believable. This year, I think they have finally jumped the shark. And as a technologist I’m having a really hard time even watching the show at this point when I try to swallow the storylines they are feeding us.

I’m not even going to dwell on the fact that the beginning of the season featured several shows where terrorists had created a “CIP Device” (I won’t bore anyone here with what a CIP device is, but picture a small piece of hardware that you plug into a network) that gives them absolute access to every government controlled system and allows them to bypass all firewall protections. With ease they begin to take over air traffic control, override safety precautions in chemical plants and according to government officials could take over just about anything. They go on to say that it would take 7 days to restructure their firewalls and security to guard against the device. And since the whole season is supposed to occur within a 24 hour period that definitely presents a problem. Luckily, within a few hours/episodes the device is destroyed. The whole concept that such a device could exist is a bit beyond ridiculous not to mention how easily and quickly they created it. And that doesn’t even take into consideration how preposterous it is that some of the agencies and installations out there are even close to being advanced and well networked enough to be so easily connected to and controlled in the first place by those who are supposed to have such access.

But the most recent episodes didn’t just jump the shark. They circled around and had a pyramid of leather-jacket-clad Fonzies jump 100 meters over an entire school of sharks. In the show, a group of about a dozen terrorist commandos from a fictional small African country called Sengala manage to break into the White House and take the president hostage. To do this they go underwater (in a river about a mile from the White House) and drill a hole to enter the sewer systems, then march right up to underneath the White House where they drill another hole only to be confronted by a series of glowing laser beam motion detectors criss-crossed in front of them. Their “inside guy”, a lowly janitor, then cuts the power to the detection grid so they can rush across the tunnel, emerge on the other side in the White House and begin their assault. Really? I mean… seriously?

At Definition 6 we host and manage web sites for a large portion of our customers, including sites that see hundreds of thousands of users per day and process millions of dollars in transactions each day. Very important stuff, though not even close to the value of the White House and the President of the United States. We have so many different mechanisms in place to guard against power outages (like enterprise class data centers with more power backups than you can shake a stick at including diesel generators that could run for weeks… power isn’t interrupted for more than a millisecond without back-ups kicking in, alerts being shot off and warning boards lighting up like Christmas trees). We have monitoring and alerting systems that tell us the moment a site or system is down and even proactively look for warnings that a system is degrading. We have monitoring systems that monitor our monitoring systems to make sure they are up. Tiny outages launch alerts via several different mechanisms to an army of engineers who receive instant notifications. And even if someone on our own team who has all the needed admin access and knowledge wanted to maliciously take something down and try to obscure this from others it would be amazingly difficult. There would practically need to be collusion amongst all the top engineers with some pretty impressive and clandestine planning – even then they would only be buying themselves minutes. And given the work we’ve done over the past couple of years related to helping our customers with PCI compliance the processes, procedures and training (and in some cases even background checks) we’ve put our teams through and implemented it makes it even more unlikely anything like this could ever happen.

So as much as I love a good action TV show with outlandish plot lines, as soon as you try to make me believe White House security is that poor I’m faced with either having to change the channel, or I need to consider they could be right in which case I’m packing my bags and moving my family to rural Montana to build a bunker. In this case, I think I’m going to put my bunker plans on hold. And for web sites and their security I’m going to keep my faith in the engineering teams of Definition 6. Keep up the great work guys, and maybe we can get you some work as technical plot advisors with the Fox Network. They could definitely use some help.

In my role as CTO of a company that utilizes technology as part of everyday life not only in how we work but in what we build as solutions for our customers it is of constant interest and concern to me how people use technology and emerging technologies. But equally important is how people misuse technologies. As a heavy consumer of social media, social networking, communication and collaboration technologies I am intimately aware of the value these can provide. Time saving communication technologies that also let you expand your reach, do more with less, and be more effective are wonderful but only when used appropriately.

Particularly, as more and more of the masses of people who are not necessarily technically elite or savvy become daily consumers of this same technology we begin to see confusion about what technology is appropriate for what use, and a reciprocal amount of misuse or lack of understanding of appropriate etiquette in their use.

That’s all my really, really, really nice way of saying that a lot of non-tech people are using these amazingly powerful communication technologies and driving me and many others completely crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled they are using them and that adoption is becoming so widespread. But many of these users jumped the adoption curve of predecessor technologies or aren’t aware of surrounding technologies and are thus left with no notion of how to use them properly or make discerning variances in how they use them. The results are creating scenarios that threaten to kill the use of the same technologies that can be so valuable to us. The digital highways are becoming littered with the early adopter corpses of people once enamored with micro-blogging and social networking who found themselves unable or unwilling to withstand the barrage of misuse. They have either abandoned use, retreated to more secretive and closed usage, or moved on to lesser known emergent technologies. And that’s a shame.

I’m going to address two main things in my upcoming rant: using the right communication technology for the right purpose, and good etiquette when using these technologies. I’m absolutely certain many will disagree with my assertions on both of these areas. That’s fine. We all have our perspectives. If you disagree, go write your own blog. This is mine.

I’ve noticed widespread use of one technology for a purpose another was intended to serve. Different communication technology is intended for different purposes and we need to be aware of this. Misuse leads to discontinued use. I’m sure we’ll eventually see some consolidation in the marketplace among vendors and tools leveraging capabilities of one platform and another into a combined format. But the ideas I’m talking about still apply. You need to take into account a number of principles in your communications before selecting a means and technology for that information dissemination: is it short form or long form, one-way or 2-way with dialogue, intended for the masses or reasonably private, one-to-one or one-to-many, synchronous or asynchronous, personal or business, welcomed as a constant or desired as occasional? All of these factors dictate how you should communicate your information and what medium you should use to communicate it.

To put it simply: I don’t want you to be my friend on Facebook if I just met you at a networking event or in a business meeting, that’s what LinkedIn is for. You are not my friend if we just met and I don’t care to see constant updates that you just enjoyed a great latte. And even if you are my friend I don’t need to see an update of every 5 minutes worth of a conversation you are having or a presentation you are listening to. I’m not saying you shouldn’t share it. I’m saying Facebook isn’t the right forum for it. Nor is text messaging or e-mail. But Twitter probably is right for that purpose. I could subscribe to your tweets and read them all day long if I wish. If you create more clutter in people’s lives which are already overloaded with digital information then you will become worse than noise and static, you become a negative force.

I recently opened up my Facebook page to see the same persons face staring at me 10+ times in a row. It was a series of updates on what they were doing, all centered around the same subject. I wanted to scream, “It is possible to comment on your own thread!”. It could’ve been a nicely condensed thread that people could expand if they wished. In this instance I suspect it was someone who’d tied Twitter to Facebook and didn’t even realize what kind of end experience they were inflicting on their friends and followers. Don’t get me wrong, the material was of interest and I’m ecstatic to see people engaged in sharing information so instantly and constantly. This kind of communication is making things extremely interesting. But consumers of these technologies need to really get to understand them from both their perspective as well as others. And unfortunately you simply can’t expect the providers of the technology to make everything 100% immune to improper use.

I don’t want to see a personal argument or discussion between people on a social media site. Do it in email or even better… call each other and talk! If you want to espouse your personal political, religious and social beliefs in long form then use a blog and tell people on MySpace and Facebook and Twitter to go visit it, keep your Status posts short and to the point. If you want me to know every web site you think is cool just let me visit your del.icio.us account. You can still post killer links in your various social networking forums, but if you find yourself posting a half dozen links a day I might suggest you are cluttering up a lot of people’s reading material who don’t necessarily care.

Text people when it’s important. Use email when it’s interpersonal, inter-team or intercompany and long form. Twitter to the masses. Facebook with your friends. LinkIn with your business connections to find out how far you are from Kevin Bacon and reach out when you need a job or need to reach that key client that you are just 2 degrees away from! Yammer to your business colleagues from atop the highest mountaintop from which you still get a signal!

And there is still something called a phone you can use to talk and avoid countless back-and-forths. You can still pull up a chat client like Skype and have a great textual conversation in real time. And you can still hop on a web meeting conference to work more collaboratively.

Now it’s one thing when an individual gets confused in this communication quagmire, there is a lot to take in and learn. I fully understand that my mother may have just heard from her friends about this new fangled Twitter thing and wants to know what her grandkids are up to so she can be a part of it and that some degree of misuse will occur in the valid purpose of moving to ubiquity. But what shocks me more is when I see companies failing to do their homework before embarking down the social media highway. These technologies can be tremendously powerful in helping drive sales and furthering your brand in the minds of consumers. There are great case studies on how companies effectively use social media and networking. But there are far more examples of those that do more damage than they do good. Use must be metered, highly targeted, and seen as useful and welcome by the receivers. Companies need to have more of a plan for their social media communications, just like they do for their websites, press releases, TV advertisements, and e-mail marketing campaigns. It’s a very different medium and you need to understand it well instead of playing ready-fire-aim. To do otherwise is to become noise, static, or much, much worse: an annoying nuisance who simply detracts from my effectiveness like that guy in Nigeria who keeps sending me e-mails so I can help him move his millions of dollars out of the country. Damn, I hate that guy.