image via Robert Scoble’s flickr

Over the past 2 months I’ve made some drastic changes to how I use Twitter (which I will share below). When I was in China, as I was reading The 4 Hour Work Week, I realized that my control over my own productivity was slipping from my hands. I spent so much time on non-productive tasks and it was time for a drastic change. I realized that my Twitter habits were guilty of productivity theft and I needed to put an end to it. Here’s the experiment…

Before

At one point, I was following 1001 people on Twitter. At home on my Mac I used Tweetdeck and REACH to manage my twitter followers. The constant flow of Tweets was entertaining for sure but because of my desire to see as much as I could from the “Twittersphere” I dropped other important tasks. At work I limited Twitter but used iGoogle’s Betwittered to follow the streams. It got to the point that I couldn’t even see the Tweets from people I knew personally because of the huge number of people I followed that I didn’t know but were just interesting to me.

I have always been a huge fan of taking Twitter relationships offline. Late last year I met Ross Kimbarovsky, founder of crowdSPRING via Twitter. We had dinner one night and now have a solid, offline friendship. Same goes for Steffan Antonas, a WordPress & Twitter guru out in San Diego. When I was home I met Steffan for drinks and we now stay in touch, sometimes via Twitter and sometimes via email. Another example is Fraser Kelton, VP of BizDev for AdaptiveBlue (maker of GLUE), who I’ll be meeting up with in two weeks on my trip to NYC. These are just a few examples of many more!

There are some incredibly valuable relationships to be had out there and I’ll always love Twitter for making those relationships easier to develop and find. But it got to the point that I couldn’t separate the social networking from the social noise making. I didn’t want to lose the ability to develop those relationships into valuable ones only because I was trying to keep up with so many other people I’d never met.

Realization

As I realized that I had to make this change I first had to decide how. Another relationship that I’ve begun to nurture through Twitter is the founder of Seesmic, Loic Lemeur. I follow his blog closely and saw him post on his drastic change in Twitter usage.  He had the Twitter folks write a script that would “unfollow all”. He did this because his direct messages got out of control. He was following 23,o00 people and understandably it was overbearing. 

I realized that I wanted to take a similar action. My goal was to get back to my close friends and people I’d met in person. I wanted to see the random actions, “I fed my dog ice cream and he loved it”, from my friends (so I could later make fun of them) but I didn’t need to see these posts from everyone. So how would I do that? What would the affects be and how could I test before making the jump?

Change

In China I basically didn’t use Twitter. This was my test. I think I had a total of 10-15 posts the entire month and it was relaxing. It freed me to focus on what I was learning from my training courses and it freed me to explore China. I reduced my blog posting to ‘travel only’, and I focused on the experiences I was having. I felt freed, I felt focused, and much more productive. I knew that when I got back I needed to apply some of the Tim Ferriss (4HWW) principles to really change my productivity and focus. I would employ the low(er) information diet.

So, when I got back, I promptly got in touch with Loic and asked if he could share the script with me. He couldn’t give me the script but I got in touch with Zac Bowling (@zbowling) and he ran it for me. In a total of about 20 minutes I was following O people. I had completely started from scratch with Twitter and it was scary. I started re-adding people like my parents (yes, they’re on Twitter), my sisters, my college friends, the people who I stated above, and other people that I knew in person. It was easy to find who I communicated with most often using saved Twitter searches in REACH (coming to beta soon!). 

I definitely do need to apologize to some people because I haven’t yet added everyone back that I should. I’m doing this gradually. If I know you in person I’m probably following you (again). However, for those who I don’t know in person I’ve limited my consumption of your tweets to regain my personal productivity. Please don’t take it personally. If we have had conversations, please @reply me and get back in touch, I’d love it. I should say that there is no goal here of having a ridiculous follower/following ratio. I could careless. I only care about the value that I get out of the tool and I’ll take almost any action that will increase that value measure.

After

The results of my experiment have been pretty interesting. Right away I lost about 150 followers. It dropped from 1500 followers to about 1340. Losing those followers didn’t bother me at all. If people are following me only/just because I’m following them then peace. Then, people started following me at a much faster rate and even though I’d lose about 10 followers a day, I’d add about 11. Now my follower number is about 1360 and I sincerely hope to interact with many of those people in the future.

Twitter is very much a two way street. Those who interact with my question type tweets I’ll follow and interact with them, those who don’t, well I guess they’ll continue to just follow my tweets. I definitely engaged in the question tweets of anyone who @replies me or that I’m already following. I’m a huge supporter of the platform and now that my Tweets go directly and quickly into Facebook it’s engaging even more friends!

My productivity has sky-rocketed due to my low information diet and reduction of Tweets to consume. Now I rarely consume Tweets and send Tweets at the same time. By doing this it’s easy to spiral into a Twitter session that lasts much longer than it needs to. I can’ t say I’d recommend this experiment to everyone, but I would recommend identifying what and who are important to you and making sure that the tool enables better communication instead of the tool becoming a barrier to solid communication. 

Below is a hilarious video about the “Twittershere” shared by my sis @taylorgraves

This is the first ad for SocialDreamium that I created last night. Please let me know what you think and how it can be improved! Feel free to steal and repost this anywhere.

check out SocialDreamium.com

Here are my summaries and thoughts on many of the opinions I’ve followed over the past few weeks. I’ve tried something new and color coded the first few words to get a scorecard on how things are/will be fore startups & VC.

-Big banks will/have disappeared and small banks who are more willing to work on a small scale projects to find quality investments will fund VCs and startups

-The IPO space is already crawling or stopped. Now as large firms lose capital the M&A space will join the IPO space at a stand still.

-Web and technology markets are probably 2 of the only bright spots in today’s global economy. This is what will bring us out of such a mess. Transparency into these markets will only exist with improvements in technology.

-If the IPO drought continues, eventually LPs will realize the VC model/system is not working properly and it will be much tougher for VCs to get that money. This will make funds smaller and thus less startups will be funded.

-In the “slumping market” VC will become introspective focusing on current portfolio much more than finding new investments.

-Funds that have already been raised by VCs can no longer be counted on. As the LPs are losing money elsewhere in the markets one of the first investments they will renig on are those that are promised but not paid, VC firms.
-this will hurt small funds first
-this will hurt LPs relationships with VCs so the big ones will be safer

-Startups who have VC backing already should be fine but will have to prove themselves to stay on the fun. Startups without VC funding will have to learn the (some what lost) art of bootstrapping. ALL STARTUPS will have to get lean, focus, find PROFIT$ now.

-Strong startups will continue to get funded. The cream of the crop will rise to the top because VC are being more careful. Survive and Thrive!

*influences of thought from @fredwilson, @infoarbitrage, @howardlindzon, Mark Cuban, @JasonCalacanis, @ericolson

Taylor: what’s Friendfeed exactly, what you’ve done online? what you’ve posted, commented, etc?
Taylor:  what’s the purpose of it, i’m trying to understand
Me:  it aggregates all of your online activity from twitter to flickr to blog posts…it brings everything to one platform.
Taylor:  alright, i can’t see that being that useful for a company, maybe just individuals
Me:  try and change your thinking… don’t think, “would this be helpful or not”, instead think, “this would be helpful, how?” You almost have to force yourself to find how a tool would be helpful first…then test it with that attitude. Then if it really isn’t helpful, then dump it…but a lot of times people aren’t able to find the value in their first glance at a tool.
Me:  make sense?
Taylor:  yeah it does!

This notion of forcing yourself to find value in new tools comes from the fact that people have a very difficult time thinking outside the box. The reason that people have to think outside of the box to find the value of many of these new social softwares, or web tools is because these tools force people to create entirely new workflows for getting things done. These tools cause people to change habits and change pre-conditioned understandings of how things are done. That’s never easy, at first! At first the re-tweaking of “how” may seem unproductive but often that re-tweaking allows for greater productivity once that new workflow becomes the “norm”.

Example: If I normally open my browser and open my top 3 sports sites, top 2 political commentaries, and my 2 family members blogs it is not going to make any sense to me when somebody tells me that I can just open Google Reader to read all of that. Without the knowledge of how an RSS reader works opening up one tool to read all 7 of those sites won’t make any sense. At first it may seem weird to just open Google Reader to read my sites but when I dive into the tool and actually use it I find that it is significantly more productive to centralize that consumption of information.

This is just one simple example of how not understanding a new technology might hide the value of it. Just as I encouraged my sister to use a technology, in this case Friendfeed, before she says, “I can’t see that being that useful…”, I would encourage you to test out a tool before deciding if its useful! I’m asked all the time how I think a growing business can take advantage of the web and the interaction it enables, and many times my response is, “try it out and you tell me”. So much of the time the value will be totally different for one person or company than it will be for others.

It is similar to the notion of ‘innocent before proven guilty’. You have to give new technologies or tools a chance before judging them

Blogs

I’ve included my personal blog Ryan A Graves.com and also my start-up ActionsTalk. I included ActionsTalk in this category because it uses a vlog (video blog) template and because it is a site where I am the sole (with my co-founder) contributor. My blog is used not as a one way tool but as a platform to start conversations. I encourage readers to leave comments (and video comments) in order to leave feedback and thoughts. And I always reply to them!

Micro-Media

Twitter is the obviously dominant tool here. Users basically answer the question, “What are you doing?” For myself, Twitter has proven to be the most effective networking application of all of them. They have had some serious problems however with keeping their site up. The surge in users over the last few months has taken servers down an uncountable amount of times. Plurk is basically a Twitter copy-cat formatted in a horizontal time line fashion. Where Plurk struggles most is that the size of the user base, Twitters large advantage, is significantly smaller.

Livecasts

In this space I only use Ustream.tv. Ustream.tv is accepted as the best livestream tool and is used by “livestreamers” like Chris Pirillo who many times has thousands of people watching live. Another user of Ustream.tv that I follow is Jake Marsh.

Rich Media

Rich Media consist of things like video and photos. I’ve held a pro account on Flickr for a year and I will definitely continue to use this service. The quality of photos shared on Flickr is phenomenal. For video I use Viddler for uploading and sharing Ryan G TV episodes. I think that the video quality is highest, the player is clean and simple and it is very customizable. Then there is the obvious Youtube. I don’t upload many vids to Youtube but I do watch a ton! You tube has recently given blogger and founder of Seesmic, Loic Lemeur tons of trouble.

Aggregators,Activity Feeds

Aggregators or Activity Feed sites pull in the changes or activity from all of your other social software. Pulling in things like Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm and many many others. The dominant service here is FriendFeed. It is so dominant in fact that many think that FriendFeed will take over as the dominant mircro-blogging service in place of Twitter.

Audience, Communities

MyBlogLog is probably the most popular service for keeping track of who reads your blog. MyBlogLog allows you to embed a widget on your site that shows an avatar (small image) of everyone who has viewed your site. I use my blog as a platform for conversation and MyBlogLog helps me connect and converse with readers.

Social Graph

The social graph or social network is the most common type of application in the web 2.0 suite. Facebook and LinkedIn are networks that allow you to stay connected and share mediia between friends and contacts. Facebook started at Harvard and works its way around the countries colleges, while LinkedIn helps to promote business networking.

Content

In the content category its all about sharing. The internet is obviously huge and some of the most efficient ways to find good content is to see what others are reading. Sites like Digg and Del.ici.ous help people share and find the best the internet has to offer. Digg is set up in a voting format so people submit content and other users vote the content down or up the popularity scale. The cream of the crop rises to the top.

Music

I love listening to music but I’m not good at finding or sharing so the web 2.0 music apps are the ones I use the least. Last.fm allows you to share music and find friends with similar music preferences. The coolest thing about last.fm is that it suggests music that you will like based on what you ‘favorite’. Pandora does the same thing, you create a channel based on a song or artist and the following songs will be similar to that song; another great way of finding new music and bands.

Travel

Dopplr is the only tool that I use for tracking and sharing my travel.  I have a widget embedded on my blog that lets people know where I am currently and what trips I have planned in the future. Dopplr is very simple and very useful. They also ask what your mode of transportation is for each trip and calculate your use of carbon in all of your trips.

Events

I don’t create many events. But tons of events come to me, so its helpful to know what is going on and when. Because of the wide use of Facebook that seems to be the tool of choice for sharing a party or conference but recently Upcoming.com has create a stir in this space. Upcoming is great way to keep event goers informed and is also a great way to publicize an event. When ActionsTalk was first starting up we used Upcoming to promote the first ActionsTalk meeting and it worked wonders.

Niche Networks

Ning allows users to create very simple social networks. People can sign-up and share very easily. I don’t have a Ning network that I created myself but I belong to a few. The networking group in Milwaukee called Spreenkler uses Ning to organize events and the group and the simplicity of the site is what makes it so appealing.