David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start & Design for Hackers.
Today marks the fourth blogaversary of the kadavy.net blog. Much more has happened with this blog than was originally expected. I started it with a simple barf-out post that was written just to get myself past the perfection paralysis and intimidation of staring a blog.
There are the ways we want to live our lives, the things we want to achieve, and the things we would like to do better, and the things we need to do. It’s important to make distinctions amongst these things, not only in understanding them, but in managing them.
You’ve decided that working in an office isn’t for you. You don’t like doing the same tasks over and over again, you can’t stand the politics, and the commute is killer. More than anything, the idea that you have to sit in a certain spot between certain hours of every day is just asinine to you. So you go it alone – maybe you’re a business consultant, a writer, or a freelance designer.
The main problem the beginning Twitter user encounters is that they can’t manage all of the activity on their cell phone. Once you are following a few people, the number of updates coming to your phone will be overwhelming. Many people end up turning off their updates to their phone entirely – and then probably abandoning Twitter altogether – but it doesn’t have to be this way! You can still participate in Twitter and have the relevant stuff go to your mobile device while the less critical stuff is waiting for you on your Twitter home page. keep on reading »
As a society we are obsessed with goals. Searching on Amazon for “goals” will bring up over 400,000 books. People are paying thousands of dollars for life coaches to help them achieve these goals. We want to get married, we want to have kids, we want to lose 20 pounds, we want to become millionaires. Imagine if we focused only on achieving these goals, regardless of the means. Our miserable marriage, resultingly screwed up kids, low blood sugar, and the stress of our high-paying job wouldn’t have us very happy in the end.
Kadavy.net has redesigned, and boy are we excited! This is our first redesign in years, and it’s a doozy.
I have a foot injury right now. The bottom of my foot sort of hurts. I could go to the doctor, but I don’t because of a couple of reasons. 1) I already know what he’ll say: “stay off it, keep it elevated, ice it regularly, and take ibuprofen” and 2) because while I’m one of the lucky Americans who has health insurance, my insurance totally blows. A simple checkup would probably cost me about $150.
I was once at a party where everyone had the name of a celebrity taped to their back. We all then went around the party, asking people yes or no questions to gather information to guess which celebrity we “were.”
“Am I a male?” “Yes.” “Do I wear a suit?” “Yes.” “Do I live with talking inanimate objects?” “Yes.” “Pee Wee Herman?” “Correct!”
This is usually called an “icebreaker,” but it dawned on me that it’s not so much that this activity broke ice, it was that it made the ice much thinner than it might normally be when talking to strangers.
There’s alot of Ego Capital at stake when first interacting with someone. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Never. How will they interpret your actions and words? What will you talk about? Will your interaction with them be welcome? When there’s an “icebreaker” involved, the answers are: as part of the icebreaker, the conversation pieces provided by the icebreaker, and yes – unless they are a very closed individual. Icebreakers reduce some of the biggest sources of social anxiety in interacting with a new person – the “ice,” if you will.
Successful social media sites employ Thin-Ice Interaction to reduce the psychological barriers to interacting with a new person. Here are a couple of good examples:
So you’re browsing around to figure out where to go to dinner tonight, and you see a Yelp review that you really like – thus you really want to contact the person who wrote it. Or, maybe there’s – ahem – an ulterior motive. With this feature, not only does Yelp give you a plethora of options for just what to compliment them about (Thank You, You’re Cool, Hot Stuff, etc.), they even present you with a canned message so you can go about doing so without having to come up with something clever.
This make it easy for you to interact with the other user, but it also reduces your upfront investment of Ego Capital – your “out-on-a-limb-ness.” They know they’re receiving a canned message – they’ve probably received a similar one before – so your ego isn’t at as much risk if they would rather not interact with you. Imagine if these canned messages didn’t exist, and you received word-for-word the same thing in the form of a private message – the interpretation of that message would be entirely different, and sending it would involve breaking through much thicker “ice.” Instead, you can break the thinner ice by giving a canned compliment to the other user. If they respond to you, then you can move forward to another interaction layer (messages you write yourself, meeting for coffee, helping them move, etc.).
This is about as thin-ice as dating gets. Remember how people got together in grade school? “Do you like her?” “I like her if she likes me…” Oh, if only you could find out if she likes you before you show your cards and risk rejection. This is just like that.
When you see someone who interests you, you click “yes,” “no,” or “maybe.” If you click “yes,” JDate will discreetly make sure that person sees your profile at some point. If they click “yes,” you both get a “click alert” e-mail. So, this feature finds out if both parties are interested, without either of them having to deal with that oh-so-dreaded rejection. If only they had this in grade school.
Here’s a couple other examples of thin-ice interaction on successful social media sites:
Facebook’s “poke” feature: Don’t want to send a message? Just poke. The ego of the user can hide behind the ambiguity in the intended purpose of this feature.
Match.com’s “wink” feature: Why spend an hour trying to craft a witty first message when you don’t know if that cutie will respond at all? Just wink to test the waters.
Analyzing this phenomenom makes these features sound like crutches for social degenerates, but really, getting your users to interact with one-another is key to creating a vibrant online community where real relationships are eventually formed.
Every Movable Type user’s favorite little script for publishing their tweets to their blog has been updated. For the longest time, my tweets showed the wrong time. I figured Twitter would fix it sooner or later, but it turns out my Atom feed now displays the correct time. My RSS feed still does not, and TwitBlog was written to pull from RSS feeds. Well, I changed the code a bit so it now works with your Atom feed instead. Sorry for the lack of versioning, but the changes aren’t that complex anyway, so if you must know the specifics, just shoot me an email: david at kadavy.
Download TwitBlog (Magpie RSS required).
UPDATED; 10 minutes later: looks like Twitter now provides a very nice HTML badge. I’m not eating my own dog food on this one anymore.
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