Earlier this month I posted on how I used Twitter for a real business outcome, networking with Luis Benitez who I met through a shared interest in Lotus Connections.

Recently another examples of the power of Twitter occured that I thought I’d share.

There are many uses for Twitter (surprisingly many for something that only supports 140 characters), but one of them is kind of like the office water cooler – it’s for that off-the-cuff comment that you don’t neccessarily expect anyone to reply to, but you’re happy when they do.

Recently, I tweeted “Is it just me, or is FF3 really unstable?” FireFox (FF) 3 is currently my preferred browser and I use it for anything I can, only falling back to IE when some internal sites won’t support FF but it’s been very unstable and driving me nuts!

When I got up the following morning, I had the following answer from Ricardo Sueiras (who follows me) “yup, FF3 crashes for me on a daily basis.”

Now this isn’t THAT amazing, I mean Ricardo follows me, knows me in RL (Real Life) and also uses FF. However when I re-connected I received a Tweet direct from @Firefox_Answers “Firefox crashes can be from add-ons Try Safe Mode http://is.gd/PCw If fixed, disable add-ons one by one to find the culprit”

When did you last feel that you were being listened to by a technology company (without paying huge support), and wouldn’t you love as a corporation in any industry to be able to turn the negative vibe of the water cooler into a positive experience for your brand? I’m impressed.

How do they do it? Well Twitter search (formally summize) lets you search key words across all public conversations. It’s how I keep track of Lotus Connections and what’s happening out there and have made lots of useful contacts in IBM.

Unfortunately despite following all the advice, completely de-installing and re-installing, FF3 crashes multiple times a day and remains highly unstable for me personally, although many others don’t have my experience so I wouldn’t let it stop you trying it if you haven’t yet.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 - 1962)

It’s been a little while since I’ve returned to this series, but with a few minutes to spare I thought I’d continue on refactoring your digital life.  To recap, the steps so far are:

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

Step 3: Update your blog software and template

Step 4: Be consistent and be you!

Step 5: Evolve your digital life

Step 6: Interoperate and connect

What does all this mean? Well if you can’t be bothered re-reading all the posts, my steps towards digital re-factoring are essentially around updating your tools and your on-line identity.  Put yourself out there with your best foot forward and don’t be afraid to be you and use the best available tools to make your life easy.

At this point, much of what I’ve been suggesting has been internally focussed on streamlining your own identity and resources.  With this in place, you’re now ready for step 7; reach out and connect to new people.

There is no easy answer to the question “How do I build my online network?”.  Ultimately you need to figure out what works for you; still I have a few tips that you can explore.

1. Join Twitter, then use Twitter search.  Twitter is an micr-blogging service which is a little confusing until you get the hang of it.  If you’re new to Twitter, I recommend that you set-up your account, download Twhirl (a good Twitter client that makes it a bit easier for a newbie user to get their head around Twitter) and start following people.  If you don’t know who to follow, then use the twitter search to look for things your interested in, then start joining the conversation; before you know it you’re part of a bigger community and participating in ongoing conversations.
2. Use a service like Technorati to find other bloggers who are writing about things you’re interested in.  This can be a challenge (because you’ll be hit by a flood of content) but find a few interesting bloggers and again, join in the conversation by commenting on their blog and providing links back to your own.

Let me know how you’re steps towards re-factoring your own digitial life are going and if there is anything in here of interest.

Some of the earliest posts on this blog were about how powerful location aware services could be.  I spoke about Mobile Mashups and SOA, as well as Location Based Services (LBS) and AGPS and finally the value of Location (and how I thought it was relevant, but not quite sure what to do with it).  You’ll notice this is “so long ago” in Internet History (last year) that I refer to Touchstone, now called Particls.

So it’s with great interest that I can see some of the things I was blogging and thinking about beginning to become a reality.  I was a user of Plazes for a while, but ultimately gave it up because to some extent I just didn’t get it and I think having seen BrightKite now, it was missing the fine-grained access I needed to feel comfortable at that time (it may have it now I haven’t re-checked).

BrightKite is a very compelling and interesting service, provides reasonable privacy settings, but also links in to Twitter by default to set either your location or tweet it.  I’m going to see how it evolves, but I can see BrightKite becoming part of my tweeting in the future (especially when I get a new phone in the next couple of months).  It will potentially be my photo-log of where and what I’m doing, auto-feeding this in to Twitter as appropriate, while I’ll use Twitter directly through it’s various other clients for my 140 character tweets on the world and the community.

Another interesting feature of BrightKite is FireEagle. FireEagle sounds like it’s the DataPortability answer to Location Based Services, an open exchange for location information and the fact that a player like Yahoo is making a move in this space suggests we are at the cusp of big things to come.

Dopplr also adds to the picture of location based services, although in this case Dopplr fulfills a “Where am I going” rather than a “Where am I” feature.

I speculated early on, that LBS would potentially be of use for the Enterprise, but I couldn’t quite touch on the use.  The big area I could see is staying in touch with the people who are part of your Enterprise as they move around, with BrightKite and it’s GEORSS feeds, Dopplr and it’s “where am I going to be” and services like FireEagle, I can see that in the next 6 - 12 months, this will start to become a reality.

To paraphrase myself from over twelve months ago:

As Architects, understanding how location works and what location information is needed to tie the system together will be critical steps that can be taken now to ensure early mover advantage when it finally becomes a reality.

Gia Lyons tweeted “[can someone tell me] the value of the data portability movement for enterprises, i mean. Not consumer sites”.

I thought I’d put my thoughts down here, not least because I know that Elias Bizannes and Chris Saad, both players in the Dataportability movement occasionally stumble across my musings and will no doubt carry the conversation back to Gia.

So, while under time pressure to watch a movie with my wife, here are three reasons to describe the value the dataportability movement brings to the enterprise.  Chris has also blogged on this just recently and I have appropriated some of his themes here.

1. Dataportability provides a language to combine previously disparate standards.  As an Enterprise Architect, I love standards and I love them even more when my two largest vendors, Microsoft and IBM are expressing interest and supporting at least some of the same ones.  Some Enterprises may not care about dataportability as a whole, but they will care deeply about the artifacts it produces and helps drive, like APML, OPML, OpenID etc.
2. Enterprise Social Networks are rapidly evolving.  Todays solution may not be tomorrows winner.  To be able to move and migrate easily between Confluence, Jive, Lotus Connections etc. etc. at will is always appreciated.
3. Enterprises will begin to break down the firewalls.  Ultimately Enterprises want to work with their clients; it won’t be tomorrow, but Enterprises will realise that clients don’t want to fill out yet another profile form, but want to share their own data in controlled ways with them.

There will be bumps along the way, but while the dataportability debate may not be critical to Enterprises today, the outcomes will be crucial.