So after getting tons of requests for people to either retweet, digg, reddit, vote on, stumble, whatever, I’ve decided I’ve had enough. Those of you who know me, know I RARELY ask anyone to rt my stuff or digg or spread my content. Maybe twice in the last year if that, have I asked people for that stuff.

So with that in mind, here is my new policy. If you ask me to lend my social capital to you, you have to adhere to any of the following criteria.

It must be something you spent time creating or working on
Its genuinely interesting
Its for a good cause
You’ve retweeted my stuff in the recent past (on your own accord)

If none of those things are applicable, then I will firmly say NO or ignore you.
If you send me a mass unsolicited DM promoting something, I will not retweet it, unless you are giving me a commission. Even then, better be worth my time.

Surefire ways for me to not retweet your stuff:
It is spammy
it isn’t even remotely interesting
It supports a cause I am not a supporter of, like Sarah Palin for president.

What are your rules for retweeting?

So this really chaps my ass, when I see a single tweet, a whopping 140 characters of consciousness, expanded into 2,476 characters of pure speculation. Yeah that's right, TechCrunch managed to just explode one tweet by Alex Payne of twitter into an entire blog post without bothering to verify anything first. Not only did techcrunch writer MG Siegler operate the engine of this speculation train, he managed to drag Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider onto it as a passenger. Henry in this case is no victim as he just Continue reading

Ok, so there are a few players out there trying to make forays into social media, those that come to mind are jetblue and southwest airlines, but beyond that, nada, zilch, zip. These companies are getting into one part of the mix, the open conversation aspect, but they aren’t really dipping their toes into the rest of the mix. Yeah its great Jetblue has 830k followers on twitter and dedicates a team to managing that account, or Southwest has 240k, and answers support questions, ... Continue reading

Blogs - A self published journal, newsletter, etc. Usually supports visitor comments/feedback, rss, and trackbacks. Do you need one? Only if you have customers whom you want to talk to, and value their opinion (these opinion things, are pretty important these days). If you are writing an email or physical newsletter you send out everymonth, you should be re-publishing this as a blog on your domain/site. Also things you find too minute for newsletter publishing, but are still useful or valua ... Continue reading

A LOT of hype was going around this past week as two twitter accounts raced towards the million follower mark, CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk, which was not owned by cnn until this week) and Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk). The debate was raging on as to whether or not this was a legitimate thing to be shooting for. But legitimate or not, people are missing out on the fundamental issues here (@aplusk kept reiterating it), that this is not a ... Continue reading

or why I haven't continued building on the twitter platform

As many of you may know, my team at Infinimedia built one of the most popular twitter clients out there, Twitbin, which has over 35,000 users now. We were one of the first to ... Continue reading

My completely speculative theory on the social operating system.

There is a battle for control of the next generation of the internet, and this revolves around my thesis that the current phase in the evolution of the web involves the connecting of people.  The battle is being waged by google, facebook, myspace, and a littany of others all vying for this control.

How we got to this point.< ... Continue reading

But here is what I see that made me really glad to have gone down to peru (from a developer/strategist perspective). There is a large group of people who are genuinely interested in these new emerging technologies, who have great skills in programming and development, and are really just waiting for a great project to come along. There isn't the same entrepreneurial mindset there is here in the US, but there is a spirit of creativity. I spent hours talking to the talented team behind Prezentit a ... Continue reading