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Most of us think of Twitter as a kind of silly application that lets people say things like “John Brian is preparing for the robot uprising” or “Brad thinks the refs blew it in the Caps/Flyers game 7.” It’s chief purpose, so far, is entertainment, with a dash of TMI thrown in.

But lately, I’ve been wondering.

A couple months ago, at South by Southwest, an interview with Mark Zuckerberg famously went awry when the Twitter-feuled audience first started heckling the interviewer, then eventually took over the microphones. (If you are interested, check out this particularly thoughtful account of the event, which includes an amazing video of the interview with a twitter overlay).

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a different conference (the IA Summit) where Twitter was again used by the crowd, but this time in a far more sanguine way, to share information amongst the audience and make insightful comments about the presentations. It probably helped that the audience and the speakers actually knew each other, even if only passingly in some cases.

I got enough value from following the Summit’s twitter feed that I left thinking, could this actually be of value in a corporate setting?

After all, I’ve been to plenty of all-staff meetings, or large team meetings, where people are already bringing their laptops. The larger and longer the meeting, the more likely people are trying to at least keep an eye on their email. So, the technology is already in place in many offices to try adopting a twitter feed. And what is the value of twitter here?

A second, quiet, channel of information.

The bigger the room, the less anyone wants to interrupt the presenter’s flow to ask a question. The more likely the group is to simply go with the flow. If information they need isn’t provided, they might (if they are lucky) get a chance to ask a question afterwards, or they have to spend extra time cornering the presenter. Having a quiet alternate channel of communication is incredibly helpful. In particular, here are a few of the things that you might use twitter for:

1. Request a resource: “Can someone tell me where to find the .pdf that Michael is talking about?
2. Expand on the content: “In addition to the companies listed, Arlene and I have started talking to Widget Co about this”
3. Gauge interest: “I was hoping to hear more about the bonus program. Anyone else?”
4. Brief side conversations: “Alan, should we be using this tool for Project Z? Looks like it might be helpful.”

In this way, having a second, quiet channel of information might increase the usefulness of a large meeting, or even help positively shape the direction of conversation without grinding things to a halt.

What do you think?

If you missed any of the sessions at NTC, you can download the session materials on NTEN’s web site. Browsing these materials won’t replace being there, but can give you some good reference materials.

RSS doesn’t get enough credit. Most people still think of some high-tech thing that only high-tech types or content junkies use. While I’ll admit that I’m an RSS addict (Yeah, I’ve super-revved up my NetVibes) chances are you, and the entire Internet-using world, are using RSS feeds more than you realize.

Anyone using iGoogle is taking in RSS feeds. Don’t believe me? Just look at the CNN widget on iGoogle. Take a look at the URL. That’s an RSS Feed. Use MyYahoo? Then you, too, use RSS Feeds.

So what’s the moral of this story? Don’t be afraid of RSS. It’s worth taking in, as well as sending out. Consuming some RSS feeds on your Web site can help your visitors find valuable related resources and keep your site up-to-date without constantly having to add content yourself. Sending out your own RSS feeds can keep your readership (both RSS junkies and light content consumers) up-to-date on your organization’s latest news.

Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved maps. Maybe I’m a little travel deprived, or maybe it’s from reading too much National Geographic, but I could spend hours pouring over them. Google Maps now lets us all take our map fascination to the next level: over the past few years they’ve given us multiple views, fantastic (and sometimes astonishing) detail, driving directions, and even the ability to create custom content. This last feature let us build a cool mashup for the National Parks Conservation Association, resulting in a visualization of places where development threatens our national parks.

There are two ways to create custom Google maps. The first and most common is using the API, a code library released by Google that allows anyone who knows a little code to build their own map, with a high degree of customization. The catch is the code; if you don’t know Javascript, the API is pretty much off limits. But don’t despair! Google also offers a user-friendly My Maps interface. All you need is a free Google account, and you can create maps with placemarks, paths, and text bubbles. You add content through the click-and-drag interface. You can even insert pictures, if you upload them to a web photo service. My Maps is the interface we chose for creating maps for NPCA, due to the speed and ease of adding elements.

My Maps has some nice features: (more…)

We here at Beaconfire have used the Flickr online photo sharing website as a cost effective (ok, free) way to manage the back end of photo-based applications for clients. Flickr has allowed us do things that previously would have required a completely custom build and cost considerably more money. In these projects, we use the Flickr API to allow us to interact with photos stored in Flickr.

Flickr just launched a new site that collects all of the information needed for this kind of stuff together in one place. code.flickr includes a Developer Blog, ticket tracker and public SVN repository (for browsing the source code), and a forum with groups dedicated to the API and to the uploader.

Most of this information has been around for some time, but it’s nice to have it all in one place.

Call me a Luddite or a libertarian nut, I only share my cell number with those deep in the “inner circle.” Until recently, I had never shared it with a Web property. Until Epicurious.com convinced me the value of sharing was greater than my privacy concerns.

The quick backstory: Our home Internet connection went down. 10 guests coming for dinner in 3 hours. Printed recipe for seared scallops had gone missing. Panic.

A quick search on my Treo yielded dozens of recipes. And every one of the first 7 taps took me to Web sites that were a usability nightmare on my Treo. Even my favorite - Cooks Illustrated - failed my “this is too much of a hassle on my Treo test.” (Ok you iPhone users, no need to comment on that one, I know your gadget is superior!)

Then enter Epicurious. I tap their link on Google, they detect I’m on my mobile, reroute to a WAP version of their site and serve up a simple login screen that fits my window:

Please enter your mobile to unlock your recipes, create a shopping list, search and more.

Hmm. Why do I need to enter my phone number? (more…)

This week a few years ago, I jumped on the Facebook bandwagon so that I could compete against my coworkers in the NCAA tournament. The bracket captures the essence of healthy competition that largely fuels the social networking site. Therefore it’s not surprising that this year CBS partnered with Facebook to develop a multifunction application. What is surprising is how good it is.

Here’s why I think the CBS March Madness Facebook application is a model use of Facebook.

1. It’s a one stop shop across platforms: Unlike a lot of Facebook applications that are installed and forgotten about, CBS has built it to allow Facebookers to get all the information they need from the application. For example, each team, even those that aren’t in the tournament, has its own page that lists the scores of the games, schedule, player stats and links to team news off the site. You can also watch videos and monitor the live scoreboard.
2. It’s scored the way we like it: You can earn more points for upsets and you can even win money if you do well. There is a $10,000 prize that will be given to a randomly selected person in the top 10% (who is also at least eighteen years old.)
3. There are lots of ways to interact: CBS realizes that March Madness isn’t just about filling out a bracket and watching the games but rather a ritualistic event that spans many weeks. The application allows for creation of groups so you can compare standings amongst particular sets of friends and post on the “Trash Talk Wall.” As Greg Shaheen, senior vice-president for basketball and business strategies for the NCAA says, “…more fans now have more ways to view, follow, debate and enjoy March Madness than ever before.”
4. It is consistent with Facebook’s audience: The application plays into school spirit prevalent amongst the heaviest users of Facebook and encourages the taunting that is common sporting behavior through “TourneyPoke.” This application within an application allows you to send messages to friends like “ran Ali out of the gym” and “Ali called Paul a waterboy.”

Google Maps is a free web mapping service application that allows developers to create “mashups” with other data and embed the map on third-party websites via the Google Maps API.

Tons of groups and individuals have come up with some really interesting map tools that display everything from American Idol contestants’ hometowns to localized crime data. The best part about the Google Maps, compared to its competitors, is the high level of user interactivity that allows you to drag the map and double click to zoom (by performing asynchronous network requests using Ajax so grid squares are downloaded from the server and inserted into the page). While you can translate almost any data points into a map, the keys to a successful mashup are simple: a map should make the data more useful or relevant and there should be multiple data points that, ideally, can build over time with user input (i.e. the Seven Wonders of the World map falls a little flat).

Here are some examples of interesting Google Map mashups, including one that Beaconfire built, to show the breadth of what can be done (and what we can help you do!).

1. NetDoc.com: This mash-up shows hospitals around your zip code and their performance on major standards of care measures (Heart Attacks, Heart Failure, Pneumonia, and Surgical Infection Prevention) set out by the US Department of Health and Human Services.
2. We’ve all heard it: Location, location, location - the most important thing when it comes to real estate. Housing Maps is a marriage of Craigslist and Google Maps makes it easier to search for housing based on neighborhood preference and also makes it easy to search by pictures, price, number of bedrooms, city and date posted.
3. Ironic San’s Guide to Ghostbusters: Photographer David Friedman was apparently just playing around when he developed this virtual tour of the filming locations of the classic Ghostbusters.
4. Campaign Tracker: The Washington Post’s Presidential Campaign Tracker “uses information from campaigns, media reports and other sources to compile a listing of events involving presidential candidates and their spouses.”
5. This virtual protest map (which is a replica of one that Beaconfire built for a client) is a great example of how to use Google Maps for online organizing, advocacy and supporter engagement. The message was “Join the online march. Pick your sign. Get it on the map.” helping supporters see how they connect with other people standing up for the cause.
6. Like the Ghostbuster map that is a virtual tour of a movie, BibleMap.org facilitates a virtual tour of a book, The Bible. Interesting concept though I had trouble finding a book and chapter that actually had points on the map. If you want to explore it yourself, try Genesis chapter 13.
7. Unfortunately only available in the UK, Bar Crawl allows you to pick your area, rank of the bars you’re interested in going to and how many you want and it will plot out a pub crawl on a map for you, complete with address and phone number of each. An Americanized version Pub Walk doesn’t appear to be as good, mostly because I live here so know they are missing a whole lot of local bars.
8. With the tagline “Make it personal. Explore options. Find Providers,” The Funeral Site map tool is done by the national registry of American Funeral Homes. I am fortunate to have no use for this one but I imagine in a time of need, this is more useful than a phone book.
9. Washington Post’s Local Explorer: On this map you can search for practically anything in a DC-area neighborhood: crime, schools, places of worship, post offices, gas stations, metro stations, you name it. I’m not sure if there are maps like this for other cities but it’s quite comprehensive and useful.
10. Safe2Pee.org is a resource where people who do not feel comfortable with traditional public restrooms can find safe alternatives. It is part of a larger advocacy and research project tackling gender free, inclusive bathrooms and another good example of a public policy issue being addressed using Google Maps.
11. GolfFinder.net and CaddyMap.com are perfect examples of how a mashup is only as good as the data in it. I looked at six separate golf course locator tools and these had more than twice as many points on the map for the DC area, though I still can’t figure out from the two which is better.
12. Though definitely not the most attractive mashup, Hurricane Information Map is a concept well worth highlighting. It is “intended for the use by people affected by Hurricanes Katrina or Rita who have or are trying to find information about the status of specific locations affected by the storm and its aftermath.”
13. MapSkip: Launched in August 2007, this tool “makes the world a canvas for our stories and photos” and is very well done (and my personal favorite). Though they have only collected 200 stories so far, their mission is to “create a weave of stories about the places in our lives” because “…many of our stories are about places. Where we fell in love, had the dream vacation, took that great picture or, well, joined the rebellion.”
14. BookWormz, Starbucks Finder, GymPost, Bank Anywhere and Gawker Stalker can help you find your local bookstore, Starbucks, gym, bank and celebrity respectively.
15. Despite all the useful things you can do with mashups, I found a handful of odd but amusing maps that I’ve lumped together to share: “If I walk in a straight line around the world, where will I pass?”, If the Earth were a sandwich?, Who is sick?, and OurDumbWorld

For more, check out NetSquared, Google Maps Mania blog or this website.

Editor’s  note: Each week, we do a survey of Beaconfire staff to get impressions on a variety of non-profit technology issues. All opinions expressed here are solely those of their authors. RSS is becoming ubiquitous, and with the sheer volume of content on the internet, more users are finding that they need a way to manage their content. This week, we asked the Beaconfire staff: How do you consume RSS content?

Eric, Senior Consultant: I aspire to have a complete set of Yahoo! pipes to perform elaborate analyses of of the blogosphere and social media about the the people and issues of importance to me, translates snobby foreign news sources into English to make me seem smart at parties, and otherwise leap tall buildings.

But in fact, I use the built in reader in IE7 to keep track of about 2 dozen environmental and tech/marketing blogs.

Ali, Marketing Consultant: I’m a fan of Google reader. It’s one of the easiest readers to set up, I can access it from any computer and I can track all the marketing and technology blogs I follow.

Amy, Functional Consultant: RSS is everywhere but I pro-actively consume RSS in two ways.  One is iGoogle – I use Google as my browser home and have set up a HOME tab with news (CNN, Top Stories), Weather, Moon Phases, HowTo Wiki and, of course, the BeaconfireWire feed.  My iGoogle also has an IA/UX tab with my favorite industry feeds (Boxes & Arrows, A List Apart, UX Matters, etc).  

I also use Bloglines to manage RSS feeds.  Bloglines has more advanced functionality than iGoogle in terms of managing feeds and I like how it lets me save articles in the feed queue for later so I can go back and re-read them when I have time.

Paul, Software Engineer: This may brand me as a neo-Luddite, but I don’t use RSS.  I’ve always preferred to actively seek information on a website rather than subscribing to a feed and having it delivered to me.  The moral of the story?  Make sure content that’s available in RSS feeds is conveniently indexed in HTML format on your website as well.

Marissa, Functional Consultant: RSS (like Web 2.0) is one of those technologies that isn’t really new, and has really always been around in some form. And everyone who uses the Internet probably consumes an RSS feed in one shape or another, even if they don’t know it. If you see a list of “latest news” on a web site in the past few years, you’ve likely consumed RSS content.

For my personal RSS use, I love Netvibes. The tabbing and rearranging let’s me keep my most important RSS Feeds up in the forefront, while allowing me to easily organize secondary feeds that I like to read from time to time.

Kate, Administrative Assistant: I’m obsessed with tracking the weather, both on my home laptop and on my iPhone. Especially since I’m new to this whole “East Coast Weather” thing, and I don’t have any windows at my desk, I use my iPhone to see what the weather’s like downstairs at least 5 times a day. I also check the weather in my hometown, as well as in Paris, London, New York, and Portland. I just like to see how we stack up. I also track stocks on my iPhone that I’ve not invested in, but I think I get some sick pleasure in watching other people lose their shirt. I guess a touch of schadenfreude’s good for the soul.

Kristin, Project Manager: Honestly, I don’t consume any RSS. I can’t even keep up with email (which is my primary "dashboard") so why add another "feed" to my list of things to try and keep up with.

John Brian, Marketing Consultant: I use a single Netvibes page as my portal at both work and home - it’s the only way I can avoid getting buried in content. I triage my content into pages - must-read items like my email, a couple political blogs, weather, and, most importantly, Beaconfire Wire live on the first tab, fun and goofy stuff, including Digg and my comic alert feed on the second (when you get the rest of your newspaper online a la carte, it’s important to get Dilbert and Doonesbury that way too), clients and other non-profits on the third, work-related tools, like Central Desktop and Basecamp on the fourth, and occasionally interesting, but non-required reading on subsequent tabs.

The key is making use of preview tooltips and titles to quickly and ruthlessly mark items as read - I’m not someone who deals well with unread items, either in my inbox or my feeds. But in the net, using RSS keeps me from having to check more than 100 sites several times a day, so it’s a real time-saver.

It’s been just one year since Yahoo introduced Yahoo Pipes, the most powerful, flexible, useful, and yet underutilized free utility available. Pipes’ techie-oriented interface, combined with the fact that many still don’t have a full understanding of feeds might explain its under-utilization. However, as we come to a better understanding of the “Power of the Feed,” Yahoo Pipes will become an indispensable tool.

So what is Pipes? Pipes is a data aggregator and manipulator. Why use Pipes? So you can take all the information you ever seek on the Internet, and format it together into an easy-to-read RSS feed (as well as JSON and KML — but that’s another blog post for another day). Come on — all the information on the Internet? You bet! Using Yahoo Pipes, you can import any already accessible content on the Internet, including RSS and other XML-based feeds, as well as any information that appears on a Web page.

How can a non-profit use Pipes?

(more…)