UnHub – quickly aggregate your social media profiles

I just finished playing with UnHub, a social profile aggregator.

Here’s the problem that UnHub solves: If you’ve got more than a couple of online profiles on social media sites, there’s no easy way to provide a centralized place that showcases all your profiles.

Sure, there’s FriendFeed, but the “lifestream” model doesn’t really work for sites like Facebook or LinkedIn that some of us don’t update that often. Or, you can build a custom widget on your blog, showing your different profiles, as I did. But that’s a good chunk of time writing HTML, definitely not easy.

Enter UnHub. It’s dead-duh-simple: you enter in your social media profiles, and it displays a permanent iframe with those profiles across the top of the browser, with your various social media profiles underneath. Once someone’s found your UnHub, they can look at all the stuff you’ve created online, just by going to your UnHub URL. These are short and simple — mine is http://unhub.com/alsargent/

This probably isn’t making too much sense in words, so take a look at my UnHub page. A demo is worth a thousand words.

What do you think — is UnHub something you’d use?

Trying out P2, a new WordPress theme. Think of P2 as “Twitter meets WordPress”. Short-form blogging is what it’s called. More here: http://tr.im/hfFk

I like this. A lot. Because it addresses shortcomings in both traditional WordPress and Twitter:

My gripe with traditional WordPress themes is that they encourage “long form blogging”. To create a well-formed long-form post takes me 30-60 minutes, including first draft and edits. It’s hard to find that time in the day, especially given other priorities.

But Twitter has its own shortcomings, too. The 140 character is great because it encourages short form posts that one can easily knock out. But crunching down a meaningful thought down to 140 characters is hard. And nuances get lost.

So, there are a number of posts I simply don’t make since they won’t fit into 140 characters, but I don’t have time to express them in the long-form blog comment. That’s the conundrum.

Let’s see if P2 changes that.

Use Twitter and Tweetchat for your next webinar

I just finished watching a webinar from Hubspot, unlike any I’ve watched before. Here’s why:

All too often, typical webinars drone on and are pretty boring. My typical experience is to listen while perusing blogs or cleaning out my inbox. As a result, listener engagement is very low. I’ve conducted webinars with 500 attendees and got maybe 12 comments — just 2% audience participation.

This webinar was different. At the start, the moderator told everyone to follow #hubspot on Twitter. What happened was amazing: a firehose of realtime commentary on the webinar. Literally hundreds of comments. Which made it much more engaging and useful. I stayed tuned in to the content, and hundreds of others apparently did as well. We’ll probably remember this webinar far longer than others. And that makes it a more effective event.

As a bonus, this firehose of tweets drove #hubspot to be featured on the home page of Twitter Search, as one of the top four trending topics. This was free advertising that lead to even more webinar participation.

So, next time you do a webinar, start off by picking a unique keyword to follow on Twitter (e.g., #yourcompany). Then show a quick demo on how to use Tweetchat to let the audience follow in real time. Only after that demo should you dive into your actual presentation. You’ll get more attendees, higher audience engagement, longer recall, and a slew of good questions to make for compelling Q&A.

Why do I like Tweetchat for webinar audience participation? It automatically inserts the keyword into every post. Unlike Twitter Search, it updates automatically, AJAX-style. It’s better than Tweetdeck (my default Twitter client) since there’s nothing to download.

Have you participated in a webinar that had Twitter audience participation? How well did it work?

twitrratr is a great tool for product managers

Just now read about twitrratr on TechCrunch. How they describe themselves:

Discover what people are really saying on Twitter. With Twitrratr you can distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.

This is a great tool for product managers, marketers and anyone who wants have their finger on the pulse of a market. It lets you quickly determine people’s overall sentiments about any topic being twittered. For instance, here are twitrratr summaries for Obama and McCain and twitrratr itself.

Twitrratr isn’t perfect. It could use some improvement in terms of how it recognizes positive and negative sentiments. But even with these warts, it’s still a useful service with a lot of promise. I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter acquired twitrratr, like they did with Summize.

But, please, twitrratr — get a name that’s easier to remember and type!

Preparing for the inevitable

If you deliver an application over the web, downtime is inevitable. Much as we try to prevent downtime — through redundancy, bug fixing, monitoring — it still happens. The recent — okay, a couple of weeks ago, this isn’t a real-time blog — fiasco at 365 Main shows that even the "world’s finest datacenter" can still have its problems.

It’s been interesting to see how companies with web apps are using Twitter (and Jaiku, etc.) to provide status reports when their sites crash.

And talking about disasters in the physical world, people are starting to hear about them first on Twitter, etc. Here’s a story about how the Los Angeles Fire Department uses Twitter. Here’s one about the Minneapolis bridge collapse and Twitter.

People can debate Twitter’s usefulness for everyday events. But no one can deny that Twitter’s becoming the killer app for disaster management.

Which brings me to my main point: how long will it take companies that drive revenue through web apps to setup alternate communications channels using Twitter and other microblogging services?

For example: suppose customers can’t place an order via your website. The sooner you can tell customers that you’re aware of the problem and trying to get back online better. The sooner you can post an estimate of when you’ll be back online, the better. The sooner you can inform that you are back online, the better.

I’m no expert on disaster management, but it seems like one of the things that separates good disaster handling from bad is the quantity and timeliness of communications.

It seems natural that companies will eventually post their Twitter URL on their "Contact Us" page. And perhaps a Jaiku URL, too, in case Twitter goes down! This seems to be one of those standard requirements that product managers should prescribe for any Internet web app.

If companies adopt Twitter for disaster management, this essentially makes it a mission-critical application. Could Twitter charge companies for this service? Perhaps. Every company wants to look as competent as possible during a service outage — fumbling a disaster could cost a CEO or CIO their job — and Twitter would help here.

It will be interesting to see whether Twitter starts to offer something to address this market need.

Note I’m talking about the possibility of Twitter charging companies, not individual users. I can’t see any reason for Twitter to charge individual users. What I’m talking about is Twitter possibly going with a freemium pricing model.

Can Twitter streamline Agile Development?

I’ve been thinking about if and how Twitter can be used by businesses to streamline their operations. Specifically, for software businesses, which is where my experience lies.

It seems to me that it can. Here’s one way:

Product development teams can use Twitter as an an "accelerator for Agile Development". Let me explain. One best practice of Agile Development is to a have a daily meeting, called a scrum. The meeting typically lasts ten or 15 minutes. It’s very informal. Every member of the development team briefly explains what they’re working on that day, and any blockers they face.

For instance, a developer might be waiting for product management to clarify a requirement. Or a tester might be waiting for a developer to check in a software component.

It sounds simple, but daily scrums are very effective in making problems known to the entire team, and consequently, getting problems fixed faster. With scrums, a blocking problem is unknown for only 24 hours max.

Now, what if a product team used Twitter to maintain a "continuous scrum status stream" — or scrum stream for short? Update your Twitter status once a day to declare what you’re working on. Update your Twitter status whenever a blocking issue comes up.

You would still need a daily scrum meeting, of course, to give everyone a live forum for raising issues. To be clear, I’m proposing Twitter to be used as a way to complement, not replace, existing Agile practices.

I think there would be at least two benefits to this use of Twitter.

Product team members would know about blocking issues even quicker. Problem resolution time would drop.

And, scrum meetings would be shorter, since they’d focus on exceptions, not day-to-day reporting of status.

In terms of security, Twitter already lets you restrict you can see your updates. So, if an engineering adopted Twitter to provide scrum streams, they would not have to worry about everyone on the web seeing those messages.

What do you think? Are there other ways you think Twitter can be used to make businesses work better?