TweetDeck is Free!

Then I realized that I might want to separate business tweets from personal ones. And some new initiatives I’m working on such as my ReaderWar website made me want to create more separate accounts.

Too much redundancy though. I can’t be logging in and out all the time. Too much room for mistakes. I can’t be wasting that much time on them to say the same things twice and 3 times. Maybe it’s better just to post under one umbrella and let things fall where they may.  I thought that until I found TweetDeck.  It’s a cross-platform application that let’s you read tweets on your subscription and see in multiple columns your retweets and direct messages and user profiles.  It doesn’t let you read facebook postings, but it DOES let you post to both your facebook accounts, AND the business or other ‘fan’ pages you set up for yourself. If you’re an admin or owner of a fan page, you can post JUST to that page only using TweetDeck.

How do you post separately?  When you set up multiple account profiles for Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In etc., you can toggle them on or off when writing the tweet. See illustration below.

What you can do with TweetDeck

Post updates to Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In, Foursquare, MySpace, Google Buzz
View updates from these sites
Post to Facebook Fan pages (that you own or administrate)
Retweet comments from Facebook
Send messages to Facebook users
Look at Twitter user profiles
Attach Photos
Automatically shorten URLs (bit.ly is default URL shortener)
Quick Preview shortened URLs just in case
View embedded Youtube video links in tweets
View Facebook photos and through galleries
Global Filter posts or topics you don’t want to see (e.g. Justin Biebr or #fail)

So TweetDeck does a lot, it’s a fantastic app for your PC, Mac, laptop. They also have an iPhone and iPad version.

Other Applications like this

Hootsuite
Seesmic
CoTweet
Tweetie
Echofon

Intrigue surrounds this thing, not just because it’s Apple. Not because of controlled leaks. People are looking for something. They want to do new things, or do old things better. Will this thing help people do things, or is it just a device for consuming?

Many of us have realistic expecations for this. Writing and drawing, taking notes, good battery life, durability, responsive UI, games, specialized programs, photo and video viewing, reading books.  A netbook or high end notebook isn’t enough for some.  They want to interact more naturally. Some, like me want to be able to create higher quality designs using their refined motor skills and talent, not just push a mouse around.

These gadgets are personal man, they spark all kinds of debate. For some of us, they seem to run our lives, they own us as Tyler Durden would say.  But they let us work in special ways, to share, to communicate. We scupt them through the programs we use, the shortcuts we deploy and what we throw out entirely.

I was disappointed with some writers covering or commenting on these devices, who insist that they know what people want, or more often what they don’t need. Stupid.  There are enough people in the world in all niches that you could make any kind of tablet product fly if you targeted it properly.  Medical, education, logistics,  and more.  And don’t forget the technique many use to market wares to people who don’t know about them. Create the need by introducing a problem, one that people didn’t know they had.  A 9-year-old understands this brand of persuasion.  It’s a mixture of What-if? and Don’t-You-Hate personal inquiries that lead to great answers.

The must frustrating statements made to me have been things like:

• Nobody wants to lug a tablet around when they have a smaller phone
• The device won’t be any good for true serious gamers
• Smudging issues (are we still hearing people say this?)
• No one wants to stare into a backlit screen to read a book
• This won’t appeal to anyone but graphic designers
• You won’t be able to do any real work on it
• No one wants to obscure what they’re doing while touching
• No one can do anything productive without a keyboard
• If Apple makes it, I will preorder it site unseen
• Apple will succeed where others have failed
• Apple will fail where others have failed

As obsessed as I get with wanting to strike back at these with my own strong feelings about the potential for the device here. I’d feel just as energized if Apple didn’t announce a tablet tomorrow. The ball is already in play buddy. Somebody is going to take hold and run with these ideas. We all know after the media storm what many people are after.   So it’s exciting, and it feels like anyone’s game to win.

Now for my speculative remarks.

God knows I’ve listened to everyone else on these matters.   I don’t care of Apple does any of this, it’s just a fun exercise.  But I do have some personal certainties here. Take it or leave it.

1. I don’t see how it could possibly be called “Tablet”, “iTab” or iSlate or iPad”  Not that the name matters at all to me, but it’s going to play off the graffiti theme or will have a cool name like “Moses” just like the “Newton” was used for their first tablet, something strong. If Steve Jobs did say this is his most important work ever, why wouldn’t he break the standard and  give it a name with real pwnage.
2. I think the screen will be different in materials than anything else we’ve seen.  Or if we have seen it, we’ve forgotten about it. It won’t be like the iPhone and it won’t be OLED and won’t be Pixel Qi either(unfortunately), I think it will be something else that’s been overlooked by everyone. I’m betting a 3rd party company has been developing the substrate quietly for a long time, and it’s a key selling feature that Apple would NOT allow a controlled leak on. It won’t be unbreakable, but durable.  It will be something that works for reading and writing in daylight better than we’re used to. The screen will perform well, but don’t get your hopes too high, too many compromises are in play.
3. Lack of ports will bother me. Focus will be on wireless connectivity and against my wishes, there will be a lack of ports, thereby making the device less useful to hobbyists. Apple always does this to me, so I don’t see this changing. If there are more than 2 ports, I’m betting they will be non-standard and annoying to connect to. I’m very curious if it will have an SD slot. I’m thinking not, tragically.
4. Apple will allow docking in vertical position for pairing with a keyboard easily, and will probably have a good docking station for it (look at logitech’s dinovo keyboard charger dock for example of what you’ll get with this.
5. Screen will be 10 inches. That’s my guess. One size, 10 inches.
6. In order for this event not to end too quickly, there will be a massive amount of use cases and software revealed where all sorts of problems are “solved” in the demo. The use cases will take up a large portion of the time. Videos and testimonials in areas like design, home entertainment, commercial use and media creation (photo / video / audio).  Education will get some time, but not enough, because Steve trimmed that part for the sake of brevity.  Those items ARE most important for the device to succeed though. They’ll be more evident when the microsite goes live.
7. A few years ago, Apple changed iMovie so you could drag your mouse across clip thumbnails and it would shuttle through the video. That was killer and you will see nice UI features like that for plenty of oohs and ahhs. These things WILL get people thinking and it will drive more innovation.
8. Some kind of iPod goodies will be part of the announcements to hold interest, the 2 devices will fuel each others’ progress.
9. Special Mac software will be what sells this thing which is also where the other “failed” tablets and multi-touch didn’t grab the mass market.  Designers will get graphic software, students WILL get office. Learning software will be apart of this. This device will do more than just App Store stuff. It will allow for custom builds.  Because it has to appeal to commercial users who want to create their own lock-in for their company.
10. Price will be $899 or higher. Look at Apple’s current offerings across the board. How could it be cheaper if they stick to their pricing as usual?
11. 3G will be available, but not locked to a vendor like AT&T.  That will too easily hurt sales.  No contracts required.
12. There will be exclusive partnerships which are made to sound cool, but really are just annoying. Something about these tablets and portables that brings out the old-world corporations and their attempt to control the future by creating a false scarcity on things. Extreme content and intellectual property fascism wrapped in the guise of the simple and convenient purchase and exclusivity.

Wrapping up, It won’t be for this guy =(

I’ve been disappointed before and probably will this time too. I’m doubting the Apple Tablet will be my choice of tablet in the long run. There’s a lot out there now, with the Entourage eDGe, HP’s offerings, and I’m really hopeful for Notion Ink’s Android tablet with the pretty Pixel Qi screen.  A lot of devices are using Wacom technology for pen recognition. I think I’ll be paying for the most flexible choice.  Apple doesn’t have that reputation of being flexible or open.  But I bet it will do a few things I’ll be jealous of when I see it in the field.

I’ll give you some useful high level information on HTML newsletters so you know how it (mostly) works.  For starters, most companies are using service providers such as Constant Contact, Vertical Response, or Responsys for helping to manage the mailing lists and newsletter content to an extent. There are many companies, more every day who are providing these services.  I can’t tell you who’s the best, but given the competition that’s out there, I am certain you’ll find one at your price point with plenty of tools that will help you immensely. I recommend using a provider if you are wanting to create a newsletter to send frequently to a large list. Don’t send from your personal email account, because you risk getting flagged as spam and compromising your other individual sent email messages. You also want the join and unsubscribe process to be easy and obvious. This isn’t so with your contacts in your address book.

Next you have your newsletter email content.  Basically newsletters need to be created using completely old school web design methods.  Table-based layouts with minimal CSS for text styling. Graphics are good, but you’ll want to keep the size minimal so the email loads quickly.  We use GIF files exclusively, but GIF and JPEG should be fine, best format for the graphics you’re using. Photoshop has a decent slicing and HTML export process so you can cut up portions of a graphic and export it as a layout. I’m talking about this as if you’ll be generating your own designs. But you’ll find plenty of premade templates from your service provider, or online.  What’s nice about designing your own is obvious. Your marketing should look like you, not like a generic template.  If you can get the information across with a template so it’s compelling and you get the outcome you want, then who’s going to argue with you.

If you want to send a test graphical email in your personal account, giver it a shot. Copy directly from a webpage and paste into a composed message, making sure the message is in rich text mode. That should copy the content mostly accurately. There are a lot of tips out there.

My suggestions for getting things off the ground:

Subscribe to 5-10 email newsletters by online and brick and mortar retailers. Your university alumni association and financial advisor and a local community center or museum will provide plenty of diverse content. See what they are doing, look at the similarities, use of subject lines, and headline text. Look at what providers they are using. You’ll often see it in the unsubscribe url links or just in the footer somewhere.  Are they focusing on one CTA (Call to Action) in their emails or providing a lot of click-thrus?  What sort of information do they have prominent above the fold, and what is their email’s footer used for?

After you’ve absorbed from these newsletters, then find a way to use these proven methods available, but setting your newsletter apart from them. Newsletters are big right now. Everyone is trying to capitalize on them. Unfortunately most recipients don’t want to receive hundreds of newsletters from everywhere,  so you want to be interesting and create value with it. Basically have something great to say.  Are you saving people money, providing good industry information or making them aware of products and services they might not know about?  Maybe you’re just entertaining people or keeping them up to date with the company or service they already are using.

I don’t claim to have any kind of statistics on email newsletter profitability.  I know that they have been very successful in the company I’m working with. They are reaching out to a lot of people with sales, events, new products and more. But they have a big list to work from though. These communications are helping them because of all the work they’ve done beforehand generating interest. And I think given the size lists that you can acquire over time, you will be getting a lot of bang out of the work you do on your newsletters.

Do you have to send frequently?  Not necessarily. I believe you should send at the very least, once every two months for informational type content and updates.  I personally like getting newsletters once in a while from my webhosts and my real estate agent friends.  Your biggest fans and consumers might want to have information on sales from you quite frequently, maybe even more than once a week, but others might be turned off on having so much unread junk mail in their box when they were kind of luke warm about the newsletter to begin with.  But then again, you might as well take the attitude of marketing your tail off and see how people respond to it after a while.  You’re going to be using a list service so you’ll gain a lot of insight on how people react to your messages, where they click the most, who’s leaving and finding out why and how often.

Ashura - A demon hunter searches for a mysterious young woman with magical powers
When the Last Sword is Drawn – a poor swordsman joins an elite band of samurai warriors
Kokoyakyu - High School Baseball Documentary – A national obsession
Pray For Death – Best title ever, terrible movie, Japanese immigrant bullied by gangsters is forced to reveal he is in fact a ninja. (obvious)
Nanking – Feature film about the Japanese invasion of Nanking, China, in the early days of World War II. Interesting story-telling convention.

And finally to round it out, a older SNL skit and a newer SNL Digital Short.  I’m not sure which one induces more cringes.

Now things are evolving even more with what may be upcoming features that will help with fixing and doctoring photos.  I don’t find doctoring photos that enjoyable really.  I love helping customers, but I wish most of this wasn’t necessary.  That being the case, if you have to doctor a photo, it might as well be pretty easy to do.

Here is a video of Improved Seam Carving and PatchMatch, both of which were part of an Adobe/Princeton/University of Washington project.  To my knowledge, nobody said explicitly this WILL be in Photoshop CS5. But it is shown operating in the Photoshop interface and take from it what you will. As an aside, I like this website I discovered.  CS5.org. Despite it’s authoritative look, it appears not to be an Adobe site. Granted I could be wrong, but it’s showing Youtube Videos rather than using an Adobe player, and it’s showing a white paper using Scribd rather than an Acrobat-esque flash paper embedded PDF viewer.  Still that doesn’t mean it’s not all great information.

Adobe does have a video from a few members of their user experience UX design team re-published on the CS5.org website.  It features some discussion and examples of multi-touch and how they can leverage it for their graphics creation tools.

Ron Paul Emerging As More Of A GOP Contender

This is from a CBS Denver Affiliate December 21st 2007. I can agree with it based on my own heavy news reading, although I believe he’s already well “emerged.” Considering he’s done well for months and months of smaller polls and of course all the money he’s earned from a hundred thousand or more individual donations.

Now here’s how you demonstrate your bias and bullshit agenda (from a day earlier than the above):

Will Ron Paul Play Spoiler?

And you know what’s really great? This is CBS national news. So we have an affiliate that must have seen the national headline and editors said, “our program and site is better than that, better than our parent company.” Denver has had a reputation of a good news market in the past. I don’t know if it’s true always, but here it definitely is. CBS national news is also following leads from elsewhere. Yahoo guilty, along with the AP this time, which makes me ready to drop their email all together. Bye Bye Yahoo Mail!

Paul shaping up as spoiler in GOP race

I’m not going to spend time analyzing this. What’s the point? I’ll spend the time writing letters. Let’s just identify something. The Yahoo story is from an AP feed. Who wrote the headline? And why is the headline, not part of the URL? Instead the URL uses a quote from the biased story “news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071220/ap_po/anti_war_asterisk.” In the story, it states that Ron Paul was not long ago, an Anti-War asterisk in the race for republican nomination. What exactly does that mean? Can somebody tell me if this comes from common political jargon? An asterisk. And don’t get me wrong, if you write Hillary Clinton, blah blah “asterisk“, I’m still left wondering if that’s like “special candidate” or footnote? It’s anything but an informational label for someone, we know that. And we know that news is supposed to be facts, not labels and stereotypes. Why is this allowed, and then even worse, tolerated.
Let’s get something straight here. There are no such things as spoilers. People still believe that there are, and stories are manipulated that way. When you have two shitty candidates, you simply have voters in a 3rd, 4th and 5th group that just don’t vote. And they still have something called a write-in vote. Mickey Mouse is still doing well there too. So to say that one candidate has a function of merely pulling votes away from another, is false.

I don’t believe that it’s best for any individual to take the burden of the world’s problems to bed with him every night. When I say that I also must stress that we all must practice compassion, truly practice it daily. We can’t ignore suffering because “hey at least it’s not me this time!”

Even having compassion, can we still understand the complexities and hidden arguments of so many issues we’re exposed to. Sometimes the right choice may be to throw it out entirely. Let others work it out. There is no foul on ignoring one thing in order to focus on more meaningful choices. Here is my matrix for dealing with the burden of media, news and world issues.

You may find that effectively dealing with the over-abundance means cutting out everything that falls outside the marked category in the matrix above. If it affects you and you can do something about it (and you actually will) you will feel better overall, and experience less drain. Outside the marked realm, you are consuming interesting news stories that might cause pain or eat at your valuable time. Practice ignoring things outside the marked realm, yet remain compassionately detached.

Quick Example:

You read a story that a man dies by suicide, having jumped from a major city landmark near you. (This actually happened yesterday.) Unless you knew the person, it falls outside the realm of the matrix. It’s very sad and tragic, AND has the components of a newsworthy event in many people’s minds. Even geographically, you want to even say that it affected you. This story carries a burden with it. But instead of carrying the burden, you spend time interacting with one of your neighbors, creating a positive experience that you can take to bed with you. A lift instead of a burden. It’s an interesting life question isn’t it? Are we better off not knowing about tragedies? One can’t measure what the knowledge of a tragedy does to a person, when that person can’t do anything about it.

Cut off from many info sources, means extra time and life experience gained elsewhere. Be mindful over the next few days when you are reading or watching news. Where does each story fall within the matrix? Is there a sense that much of the “conflict” of the news is contrived, manipulated to appeal to your senses? What does this do to your well being? Is it time to detach from that source of news? Might you live better without it? My bet is that I probably will.

Things I’m doing:

Not watching TV news (Already do this)
Removing 60-80% of news sources from feedreader
Being mindful as I read the stories that filter down to me, fostering selectivity.
Meditate on what I can and can’t affect.
Reading books, to gain more complete knowledge to facilitate good decisions
Focus on benefits of experience with a person over reading news of past event I can’t control.

Juri and I frequent this mall. We probably walk the same path as the shooter did once every two weeks. Starbucks, Target, and several shops in between. We might have been there today if it wasn’t for the trip to see my parents. But I’m not dwelling on that. I’ll be back at that mall in a matter of days. I’ll see Spiderman 3 or stock up on some cotton swabs. I don’t let my perception get too skewed by things like these. Why? Because reality is, there is more to be concerned about in my neighborhood in regards to smaller crime than there is with something random like this. When I went on a ride with the Kansas City Metro Patrol last year, the officers told me that they wouldn’t want to take their family to the plaza because it’s a dangerous place. Crime happens all the time there, in the garages around corners. They said “You know why you don’t hear about it right? Because the city wants you to keep shopping there, so the stories get buried or killed.”

That’s comforting!

Actually, our mall has done an excellent job over the past 24 months. We’ve lost our bookstore there, but we’ve gained several cosmetic upgrades, Old Navy, a big shoe store, several parking lot beatifications and the mall-goers have always been pretty pleasant. Security is also quick on the job there. While shopping on afternoon, I watched a man, having some sort of mental episode, shove a clerk at a kiosk onto the floor. It took about twenty seconds for two guards to show up and check on the guy and the clerk.

*Update*

I met with some public officials in Kurashiki, Japan this past week. We are preparing for a large exchange of close to 500 Japanese later in the summer. We talked about security and ensuring safety of the younger folks going on the trip. They immediately brought up the only scary Kansas City story they had heard about, the Ward Parkway shooting. They wanted to know how far the shopping mall was from the dormitories they are staying in. I assured them that they were safe as long as they didn’t watch the news.

The project is: Me and Tracey Zoeller are combining the photos we took at a coworker Mike’s lovely little outdoor wedding and putting them into a printed hardcover book created through blurb.com. What a cool thing you can do and for under fifty bucks. Blurb gives you some decent software to put your book all together. We’re really excited to see what we can make. My friend Susan pointed me to an article on slate.com about some of the new online photo book creator services that were reviewed. I wanted to take a look at the review to make sure we were making the right choice.
My favorite quote from the article:

“All the Web sites promised that the books were easy to make. They lied. The simplest site required two hours of pointing and clicking. Some books took as long as four hours to create.”

Tragic isn’t it that the author had to endure such an ordeal? I mean really, how awful. You might compare it to the fate of Nelson Mandela, or Senator John McCain in Vietnam. Next you’ll be telling me that it’s going to take a full thirteen days to rebuild the World Trade center. She had to point AND even click for two hours to create her book. Reminds me of that really difficult day I had at my job recently. To complete a task, I literally had to get out of my own chair and walk down a flight of stairs. God I hope I don’t have to do anything like that ever again.

Being part of the publishing business, I know that books are rarely simple, but we must strive for efficiency and ease. There shouldn’t be any barriers to finishing your project quickly right? The other side is, I have no hope for future customers if people can no longer spend a few hours on a project, personal or not. Every video I’ve ever spent time with was a minimum of ten hours, personal or work. Even blogging this takes a couple minutes.

Perhaps the author would like to step back in time about fifteen years and see what it takes to put together a hardbacked, full color personalized photography book. About ten grand I’d say, with a minimum order of 500 copies. You have to draw it on layout paper, then take a cropper ruler and make the grease pen tick marks to every cropped image. And gasp, no world wide web. I’ve heard how the world is so advanced now that people from yesteryear couldn’t survive in this fast paced climate. I think it’s the other way around.

Read my Video Tips article.