Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Social Rant: I Need Twitter Channels! What’s taking so long?






My Twitter obsession started with my profession: social media. Now I’m officially connected with over 600 of the world’s most innovative social media mavericks. That’s all fine and dandy, but there’s a lot more to life than work. I want to discuss travel, entertainment, food, wine, exercise, parenting, marriage, politics and more.

The burgeoning social web brings with it expectations. Requirements even. I don’t want all of my interests and passions blended into one giant social mix that’s shared with every Tom, Dick, Harry & Sally that surfs the social web. The knowledge and technology exists today to solve this problem and damn it, I’m growing impatient. Sure a lot of people are talking about Twitter channels, but why is it taking so long?
+ People discussing Twitter channels on Twitter 
http://budurl.com/xpej
+ Google search on “Twitter channels” 
http://budurl.com/4tch

I need to be able to quickly switch between work, sports, food, news, traffic and family channels on Twitter. I’ll take main navigation tabs for a thousand Alex. Enough with birds, ratings, tracking followers, leavers and the like… give me something truly useful. Give me Twitter channels.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Social Light: Profile Photos


Profile photos are necessary all over the social web. Every time you create a profile on a web site, you will likely have an opportunity to upload a photo. Profile photos are usually displayed as small squares less than in inch in size and formatted as a .jpeg or .gif file. The most common profile images are close ups of one’s face. I keep a folder entitled “Profile Pictures” in the “My Pictures” folder on each computer. This gives me a variety of good images to choose from quickly. If you need help preparing your profile images, I suggest you either ask a friend who’s savvy with digital photos or Google “how to crop a photo online.” The results will include a variety of free online photo editing tools.