Matt Browne

The Great Twitter Debate: Is Twitter Ready for the Mainstream?

@jbruin and @mattsurfs discuss if the learning curve for twitter is too high? Is the mainstream ready for twitter as is, or do they need to make major changes to reach critical mass.

This session was inspired by Jenn’s post about the Real World Relevancy of Twitter.

I posted a quick video of the event, but you need to friend me on Viddler for access.

BarcampSD III was definitely the best Barcamp yet. All the ‘un-organizers’ did a great job putting the show together. The people were down to earth, the sessions looked valuable, and the games and contests were a riot. Truth be told, I didn’t actually make it to a session yesterday, but I plan to make up for that today.

However, I did participate in the Wii bowling tournament and kicked ass! I figured that if wore my Wii shirt, I had to represent! My efforts earned me a copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 which I gladly donated back to the group. (I love GTA, but I don’t have an Xbox to play it on.)

Dan did a great job organizing DefCamp II. DefCamp was a series of challenges that involved engineering (or hacking) your way through a gauntlet of geeky puzzles and riddles. Once you figured out the secret anagram, you then got a crypt that you had to open without destroying. I am interested to see who won.

I will be at Barcamp from 10am - 1pm, Saturday May 4th. I am doing a talk with @jbruin on “The Great Twitter Debate: Is Twitter Ready for the Masses” at 11am in the main room. I plan on posting a recording of the session if anyone is interested.

It was great to see the tech community leaders get together and strong a great event. To all the local companies that sponsored and made the effort to participate in Barcamp (especially Microsoft), you are rawking San Diego, thank you!

I didn’t think I’d ever admit this, but Microsoft is really winning me over lately with their involvement in the community. Between Lunch 2.0, BarcampSD, and some of the more positive things I’ve read about Microsoft lately, I’d say they are more than putting forth the effort that reflects the legion that they are.

Where is my Apple at? This Microsoft praise just doesn’t feel right.

The SDBloggers met last night to discuss their blogging experiences. We had all types of bloggers represented from larger corporate blogs like MindTouch and Hitachi to personal bloggers such as Jenn Van Grove and Chris Rodgers.

San Diego Bloggers meet once a month to network, share experiences, hopefully learn something, challenge each other, support our articles and initiatives, discuss local events, and above all else have fun.

Is your company interested in sponsoring a future event, please visit: http://sdbloggers.1landing.com/ and let your interest be known.

This morning I was rocking out to an “on the go” playlist on my iPhone with a few randomly selected songs. I sometimes find it funny how the shuffle feature delivers the perfect song for the given moment.

I’ve heard “Upside Down” by Jack Johnson before, but today it took a new meaning. At this particular point in my life, the lyrics really resonated with me. Here are some of the lines that parallel my experiences unfolding right now:

Who’s to say
What’s impossible
Well they forgot
This world keeps spinning
And with each new day
I can feel a change in everything
And as the surface breaks reflections fade
But in some ways they remain the same
And as my mind begins to spread its wings
There’s no stopping curiosity

I want to turn the whole thing upside down

Hear the whole song on LastFM

There might be some events unfolding in the coming weeks that might really put these lyrics into context.

Are you curious yet? Stay tuned.

I saw @techcrunch tweet about Twitturly this morning. I couldn’t help but think it might be cool to ‘mashup’ the Twitturly, Techmeme, and Nouri.sh to produce a daily email update with what’s really going on.

Here is what I set up:

* One email per day containing updates for Twitturly & Techmeme
* Deliveries will be sent at 4am every morning (except Sunday).
* You can opt-out easily at any time
* I promise I won’t share or spam your email, period.

To sign up for Twitturly / Techmeme updates, enter your email here.

My idea is relatively simple but could be a powerful trend.

To set the stage, think of a company with the style and culture of MooCards and the design of Virb.

The idea is a business card scanner that searches the various social media networks for the contacts you’ve scanned, and adds them to the networks you’ve chosen.

Example:

I want to a SxSW and I got 140 new cards to scan and add to my social networks. It would be nice to scan my cards and have the introductions automatically sent out. I want a social card scanner that helps me connect with all of my new contacts!

In my personal opinion, I don’t think CardScan could really pull this off. You need a smaller company with unique branding that targets these social communities.

Someone should raise some money, write a plan, and do this damn thing!

Digg it?

We are excited to announce that we are beginning the rebranding process for Integral Impressions. Even more exciting, we are going to blog about the entire rebranding process. You are going to see our deadlines, mocks, comps, debates, reasoning, and our approach- complete transparency via our blog.

One caveat, we want, and need your feedback. We’d like to hear what you like and what you don’t. Guide us, share your wisdom, and partake in a really cool rebranding experiment as it unfolds.

Please help us tweet, tag, hashtag, digg, stumble, reddit anything along the way you find interesting. We are going to be using the tag ‘integralrebrand’ or #integralrebrand (for twitter).

StartupSD was created to connect the Web community in San Diego as a platform for news, events and collaboration.

Anyone leveraging the New Web philosophy in design, marketing, development, strategy should submit news or events by contacting us. We are committed to quality content and events, so be sure to take put a little effort into crafting your submissions and requests- it will go a long way.

Background: I am involved with StartupSD as a blogger and tech adviser. Chuck Longanecker founded the group. Learn more about the group here. Be sure to grab the RSS feed to stay up to date.