David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start & Design for Hackers.
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.
Tried everything to save battery life on your iPhone? Disabled the WiFi? Disabled Bluetooth? De-cluttered your desktop? Stopped checking e-mail every five minutes, and still finding yourself tied to the dock with the headset just to have enough juice to make all of your phone calls for the day? Try the kadavy.net Battery-Saving Wallpaper, which you can download right now! Not only will it save you battery life, it will reduce your carbon emissions for the year by nearly half a pound!
Where do you usually go when you’re selling your car, looking for an apartment, etc? Craigslist, right?
And Craiglist works great for alot of things, but let’s say you’re looking for a roommate. First, you’re going to get a shitload of e-mails. Many of those e-mails are going to be totally irrelevant: from incompatible candidates, or people who generally didn’t read your post. You’re also going to get some spammers and scammers. When you finally sort through all of that, you’ll set up some appointments to meet with a few candidates. Many of them are not going to show up at all – they have no prior relationship with you, so there’s no damage to be done to their reputation by just not showing up. If you do finally find someone whom you’re comfortable living with, ultimately, they’re just a stranger – even if you get references, because those references are from strangers.
The problem is that something like Craigslist isn’t socially intelligent. It’s just a huge sea of anonymous listings. It’s oblivious to your social connections and doesn’t employ current methodolgies for building trust amongst members. With the influx of social networking over past years, people are able to maintain larger and larger networks of friends. It’s not uncommon for someone to have 400+ friends on Facebook. Shouldn’t these social connections be of some use?
Methinks also that as we start to have larger and larger networks of friends, we have less and less time for people whom we aren’t connected to in some way – thus the problem of the Craigslist “flake factor.”
If you’re looking for a roommate, you could let all of your friends know about this by sending out an e-mail to all of them. But nobody wants to be “that guy,” and you’re just being unrealistic if you expect your friends to forward that e-mail on to your friends. The trick is, getting that information in front of your social connections without annoying them.
So here’s a conceptual model of what such a system would look like. People’s needs are ported through a mechanism that understands their social connections. Those needs are then broadcast to those social connections through their “leisure portal.” What’s a leisure portal? It’s the “playground” of the internet. Huh?
People are very protective of their e-mail inboxes. It’s their territory. So when you bug them with something that is irrelevant to them, they take offense.
Imagine you hated playing basketball. All of your friends know that you hate playing basketball. It’s okay to not like to play basketball. But there’s this one friend that comes by your place unannounced and says “hey, let’s play basketball.” and you say “I hate basketball, you know that” and then he says “well, I’m going to play basketball, tell your friends that I’m going to play basketball.” If he did that enough times, he probably wouldn’t be your friend for long. Getting impersonal e-mails from your friends is a bit like that.
So if e-mail is like “your house,” then a “leisure portal” is more like a “playground.” It’s not your home, you’re there in public space by your own volition. To the right of you, some of your friends are on the monkey bars, to the left, some others are playing kickball, behind you, they’re playing red rover, and in front of you, some other friends are playing chess. You aren’t obligated to join any of them, but you’re certainly welcome to – and you can always just go home.
Get it? A leisure portal is something that people come in contact with every day, usually during their leisure time. The technical equivalent of a playground. Something that, when you broadcast to it, doesn’t give your friends a sense of obligation to act, the way that a mass e-mail does.
Right now, the closest thing to a leisure portal on the internet is Facebook’s news feed. Hopefully you aren’t on Facebook trying to get some real work done – you’re just there to kill time and see what’s up with your friends. If you see in your news feed that one of your friends is looking for a roommate, that may be of interest to you. You may be able to help out, or know someone who can help out, but you may not. It’s not likely to bother you.
Sound familiar? Yeah, this is the conceptual model behind Through a Friend. Right now, Facebook provides the best system for bringing this model to reality. But hopefully it can be scaled up even further at some point.
Over the past 18 months, and through 15 Flatmate Meetups, I have listened to your questions and concerns. You have found the roommate searching process to be frustrating, laborious, and sometimes even lonely – exactly the same reasons I started Flatmate Meetup in the first place. The main tool that you have all relied upon has been Craigslist. The problems I experienced with using Craigslist, and that I have heard from many of you have included 1) having to sort through too many irrelevant e-mails from incompatible candidates, spammers, and scammers 2) “flaking” and no-shows when it did come time to have an appointment with a potential roommate, and 3) feeling all alone in the process, and not having any sense of progress until the mission of finding a living situation was suddenly complete.
Through a Friend broadcasts your needs to your friends up to three degrees away. This way you can find a roommate who is compatible with you, and who will be more likely to keep their appointment with you. Best of all, Through a Friend’s “support” feature allows your friends to get involved with getting your message out, so you won’t feel all alone.
So, if you’re a Facebook user, go check out Through a Friend, and post your announcement to find a roommate you can trust.
