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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?

When MoveOn launched their “Bush in thirty seconds” user generated video contest, they received more than a little flak. Most of this was a function of a media that didn’t quite yet understand that an organization shouldn’t be held accountable for everything their supporters say. Since then, more organizations have opened up to user-generated content, though there are still a few goofy stories of using online supporters against an organization, by and large, the press has come to accept that there’s a difference between an organization hosting content and endorsing it.

That might be one of the reasons that MoveOn’s new user-generated video contest, “Obama in thirty seconds” has been more popular than its predecessor. As of last Tuesday, MoveOn brought in more than 1100 submissions for the contest (that’s almost 8 hours of total video!), and had more than 2 million votes in less than 24 hours (compared to 2.9 million total in 2004). Since then, votes continued to cascade in - when voting closed, more than 4.7 million votes were cast for the first round.

Why was this contest so much more popular than its predecessor? And what can non-profits learn from MoveOn’s success in this arena? The answers to these, and other questions, plus my favorite videos, below the fold…

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National Parks Conservation Association just launched an innovative campaign to expand America’s parklands called “FOR SALE: America’s Heritage.” The focus for the campaign is the recent report by NPCA - “America’s Heritage for Sale” - which identifies substantial tracks of land within national park boundaries that could fall prey to real estate developers if the governments does not approve the funds to purchase the land.

The Beaconfire team’s created a Google mashup using data from NPCA on park boundaries and the land within those boundaries that is vulnerable to development. The map lets constituents visualize the land at risk which heightens the understanding of the dangers to our parks. You can zoom around the map to see the parks across the country, zoom in on a park and area of the land threatened. If you’re not into panning and zooming, just pick a park from the drop down to go directly to it.

If you click on a pin or region, you can learn about the affected area and how cheap it would be for the government to buy the land — to buy the land in the top 10 parks is a mere $50 million.

After checking out the map to see some parks in peril, you can sign the petition to tell Congress to approve the cash the National Park service needs. The Google Map displays in a native Convio advocacy campaign page. You can tell your friends about the map or become an NPCA member, since the more members they have, the more Congress will listen. You can also Digg the map and petition (http://digg.com/environment/McMansions_in_National_Parks or share it with your friends on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://ga1.org/campaign/lwcf).

Congrats to the NPCA team for their great work on their report and to the Beaconfire team for an innovative representation of what’s at stake in America’s parks!

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.

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. We like to think of ourselves as ahead of the curve, so rather than focusing on Web 2.0 or Web 3.0, we’re already planning for Web 6.0. So this week, we asked the Beaconfire staff: What advances will be considered part of Web 6.0?

Lynn, Principal Consultant: With Web 6.0, my kitchen appliances will monitor my whereabouts (probably by cell phone) and know when I’m heading home. I’ll walk in the door to find dinner ready and waiting.  No more planning ahead!

Joanna, Production Specialist: Web 6.0 will see a simplification of the internet, eliminating extraneous, distracting features and focusing back on its original purpose: a global electronic forum for creating, sharing, and viewing pictures of cute kittens.

Milo, Marketing Consultant: Web 6.0 will usher in the era of the apolitical Web.  ePundits will be banished from the blogosphere, which will turn into a bucolic Arcadia with pan flute-playing satyrs.

Michael, Principal Consultant: I’m most excited about Web 6.0 Extramind communites. The groundbreaking occular implants with direct integration to your cognitive accelerator will for the first time truly allow you to see the world through someone’s elses eyes. Add the PediPlant 6.0 extenders to walk in their shoes. Extramind communities will foster a rich shared experience bringing the human race closer to empathatic understanding than ever before.

John Brian, Marketing Consultant: Forget video and audio - if a site doesn’t have a telepathic projection interface, it’s out of date! Not just for accessibility reasons, but by the time we get to Web 6.0, attention spans will be so short that we’ll have to beam content directly into supporters’ brains.

Jennifer, Project Manager: The nonprofit sector will stand out as an innovative leader in organizational effectiveness as practitioners of chaos theory demonstrate that data disintegration increases constituents’ pervasiveness and as a result the organization’s revenue and ROI on each fundraising dollar will multiply.

Ali, Marketing Consultant: The next wave of the Internet is going to bring the olfactory system into the web browsing experience. Computer screens will be equipped with scratch and sniff devices giving marketers one more thing to think about. "Should we use spring rain or campfire scent for the protect the forest campaign?"

Kate, Administrative Assistant: Because of the advancements in one-way time travel, most of Web 6.0 usage will entail writing in the sand with a stick.

Update: Tim, Functional Consultant: With the advent of Web 6.0 I look forward to the full (finally!) adoption of Habitrails 2.0. That we’ve been able to fully leverage the advances in reliability and speed gained over Habitrails Public Beta 2 (which seemed to be in beta status for years!) through the release of Habitrails 1.0 early last quarter, has been an absolute godsend for those of us who have truly come to rely on the features previously unavailable to us. But enough is enough! It’s time to accept that Habitrails 2.0 is the wave of the future and quit supporting the creaky old legacy builds that we’ve been trying to patch together with gum and tape for so long. I, for one, welcome our new hamster overlords.

Happy April Fools day from all of us at Beaconfire!

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…)

Since the advent of YouTube, we’ve been advising people that the average user attention span is about 4 minutes, and that making anything longer just means that people will click away.

But this political season has been challenging that assumption, when some of the most viewed videos have been extended speechs of thirty minutes or more.

Are we reaching the turning point for web video where users are willing to watch longer content? Are people willing to reach the Illiad in addition to a haiku? And how do you test the proposition of a long form piece of content versus a shorter one.

I explore these questions below the fold…

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I reneged on my promise to deliver my NTC presentation while juggling chainsaws and swallowing flaming swords. But I did have a PowerPoint! And here it is: The User Generators: What Makes Them Tick.

Thanks for the great questions.

Voting ends tomorrow for NetSquared’s Mashup Challange, a competition to find great mashups for social change. You can sign up and vote for your favorite here and be sure to check out the voter guide (pdf) for more info on the entries.

The twenty projects that win this round will move on to the conference for the final vote; it will be interesting to see which win funding, as well as how many of those that don’t win will be funded independently.

I haven’t had a chance to go through all the entries in detail, but there seem to be a lot of promising choices. Good luck to all who entered!

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.”