Carsonified

I was walking back to the office after grabbing a Dulce de Leche frapp from Starbucks and I spotted this poster in the window of the Orange store (a mobile phone company here in the UK):

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve got almost 3,000 followers on my Twitter account … and it’s starting to become a problem.

You might be wondering why it would be bad to have so many followers. Isn’t it perfect for building the Carsonified community and communicating with them?

Here’s the trouble - a lot of my followers ‘@ reply’ to me in a conversational, chat style. For instance:

“@ryancarson good luck with FoWA this year, wish I could make it”

I’d love to reply to this in-kind with a response like:

“@lazzurs - Thanks! Hope you can make it to the show.”

However, the problem is that replies like that are no fun for my other followers to read. It’s a bit like butting into someone’s private conversation and having no idea what they’re talking about.

I receive roughly four @ replies every time I tweet, so responding to each one would make my entire Twitter feed a series of @ replies - thus making it impossible to understand, follow or enjoy. I could ‘direct message’ everyone who @ replies to me, but that would mean I’d need to follow a ton of people, which goes against what Twitter is all about - keeping up with your friends.

So here’s my theory: Microblogging services like Twitter break down if you have more than 100 followers. People like Jason Calacanis might disagree, but I’d argue that by him following 26,672 people he’s obviously not actually interested in what those people are doing (nor would it be possible to actually interact meaningfully with them).

Thoughts?

Facebook recently announced Facebook Connect which is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site.

This latest development will enable users to log into 3rd party sites using their Facebook log in details and also to see which of their other Facebook friends are already using the site, among many other benefits.

Dave Morin , Senior Platform Manager, confirmed Digg to be the first partner using Facebook Connect and we’re sure many more will follow suit.

Distilled are currently working on a one day team building exercise, inspired by our ideas week.  I chatted earlier with Will about their project and he wrote some of our conversation up here.

As an update, when I was in Austin I ran into a lady who had Gill’s iPhone cover which is now with Andy Budd… let’s hope he keeps the chain going. The idea is that every month the hugs are passed to someone new and we’ll get them back after a year and see from the journal where they’ve been. That’s the idea anyway…

Daniel Burka - Digg’s creative director, Pownce.com and Silver Orange co-founder - recently gave an impressive talk on iterative design at the Future of Web Design. You can watch the video here and see the presentation slides here.

We got a nice surprise this morning when we found out that the team at Campaign Monitor featured our latest Fuel Conference newsletter in their Email Design Gallery. Thanks guys.

We love what the Freshview crew produce, if you haven’t seen their products Campaign Monitor and MailBuid be sure to check them out.

We’ve recently finalised the speaker list for our next event, Fuel Conference, and are privileged and excited to be welcoming the following folks to share their wisdom with us:

Read the rest of this entry »