Currently finished:

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (2nd reading)

Groundswell by Christine Li and Josh Bernoff (2nd reading)

The Moral Animal by Robert Wright (TERRIBLE book, btw)

On the nightstand:

Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Planet Google by Randall Stross

Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior by Geoffrey Miller

Rules of Thumb by Alan Webber

The Power of a Positive No by William Ury

On Order:

The Fourth Turning by William Strauss

The Extreme Future by James Canton

The Transparent Society by David Brin
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore; Regis McKenna
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

What is on your must read list? I have a few projects coming up that require researching and studying a variety of theories and viewpoints, and I’m actively seeking books I have not considered yet. Do you have a seminal work not listed here you rely on for future theory or psychology/sociology of technology? Does one of these works speak to you? What resonates with you?

note: links in this blog may be Amazon affiliate links

I’m big on the idea of helping people and networking at a hyper local level. I also believe that your network is most effective if it also reaches far and wide – across borders of city, state, country and nation.

Think about it for a minute. If your network is made up of only your existing friends and family and a few existing coworkers, you have built a walled garden. What’s inside my be your own lovely garden, with prize-worthy flowers that are well tended, but any bad weather or difficult event can shake it up.

What happens if you move for an illness or a job? Have you built a network that will follow you? If your company is ready to expand, will you have the support outside of your existing world view to do so? What if the perfect job is a tweet or status update away and you miss it because your eyes aren’t open?

People often wall themselves off out of fear. Fear of change, fear of failure, fear of harm… there are a hundred different kinds of fear. Don’t let it rule you or your company. Add a gate to your garden and see who comes in. You’ll be surprised how it grows your network and where it takes you in life.

What I mean by that is that aside from the annoyance factor of watching normally sane people grow ever more wacky about pseudo “milestones” on Twitter; there is the fact that by focusing on these false metrics, people are missing the chance to connect, to listen, to have fun, to learn. While tweeting about “what should I do for my 500th follower?”, “what should I say for my 10,000th tweet?” or “I am only 2 followers away from 200!! Help me out?” people are missing real conversations.

The only numbers that matter on Twitter (and on other social networks where you have followers and friends you connect with) are the number of good, worthy conversations you are having. These translate into real, valid metrics – conversions to sales, referrals from clients, better customer service ratings, better overall blog readership and more. Your number of followers does not matter in the big picture, not really!

It’s true that the larger your network grows, the more eyeballs you are potentially reaching. Here I stress “potentially”. If all you are talking about is your own links, or these fake milestones, or the latest bitchmeme, your network is tuning you out. I promise. It gets awfully old to follow someone who never says anything more substantial than what their latest tweet count or follower numbers are. Your network may not be unfollowing you in droves out of politeness, or in the hope that you may one day have value for them again. Eventually, they will tune you out to the point that you may as well be back at the beginning, with two followers, hoping someone would talk to you.

The flip side of that coin is that your time is valuable! @Replies may drive some people who have not figured out that Twitter is a la carte and personal crazy, but at least they signify involvement in a two way conversation. Whether you want to connect over something personal or something professional, you joined Twitter to connect, not to waste time taking into thin air. If all you spend your time on Twitter doing is counting tweets, watching fake stats and begging for followers to reach some imaginary milestone, I’d say that was time wasted, wouldn’t you?

If you never looked at your follower count or your number of tweets, how would that open your conversational possibilities? Would it challenge you to pay more attention? Would you listen more to the quieter voices in your stream to see if they had something to say? Would it make you think more about participating and being genuine? What do you think about these false metrics? I’m interested in your opinions on this theory of mine.

Mobile social is the new hotness, but most mobile applications and sites still get it wrong, reducing function for users. Having full featured applications available for our favorite sites is key to the continued growth of the hot mobile social sector. Everyone from FaceBook (iPhone App) to Verizon (SocialLife) seems to be picking up on the importance of the mobile social arena, but FaceBook may be one of the few who have gotten it right with this upgrade to their iPhone App.

The new app includes the full news feed now, which is nice for following many friends – it helps you keep up with the ones who are active. It also lets you add and request friends from your iPhone now, an essential component to using FaceBook. The fact they launched the first version without this feature floored me.

The folks at FaceBook also improved photo functionality, and made it easier to handle your FaceBook inbox and outgoing messages. They even included a better attachments model. also included is photo tagging and other options previously left out of the application. Overall I think this new version is a vast improvement on the original. Now if someone would just get on a decent mobile app for Twitter and for FriendFeed we’d be set with the big three.