The Obama Team Takes to Twitter

So how important is the debt ceiling crisis?  So important it has gotten the Obama team to actually use Twitter.  I’m only sort of kidding. 

It is understood that the 2008 Obama campaign was the most successful digital campaign ever.   Given how well run it was, it always seemed strange to me that they never really did much on Twitter.  They built a massive following to be sure (over 9 million followers at last count), but the updates have typically been fluffy.  Lots of stuff about President Obama’s travel schedule, what he was eating and the game he was watching at a given moment. 

The last few months things seem to have changed, at least to me.  Team Obama has started playing offense on Twitter.  President Obama did a Twitter-centric town hall back in early July.  The Office of the Vice President joined Twitter.  And most importantly, Team Obama has started using the account to promote his agenda, aggressively.  As you’ll see below, throughout the day today  President Obama has been using Twitter to mobilize followers to pressure specific legislators in key states in support ofa  debt ceiling compromise.  Below is a sample. 

Will it help?  Who knows.  But I think the aggressiveness being shown is a clear sign of how important the debt ceiling negotiation is to President Obama (and the country).  They are attempting to mobilize support using any means necessary. 

Update: Mashable has an article with more details about this.  The Obama campaign ended up sending more than 100 tweets targeting Republicans in all 50 states.  According to Mashable they lost 14,000 followers in the process.  I think it would have been more effective if they had been a bit more targeted.  Sending that many tweets in that short of a timeframe is annoying to followers and comes off as a tad desperate.

Perspectives on the Internet and Human Memory

Humans and machines have been intertwined for as long as anyone currently reading these words can remember. Recently though, the discussion has turned to whether this relationship affects our mutual memories. In essence, do we remember things? Or do we, as a collective human race, simply remember to google them?

The study publicized this week by the New York Times comes was spearheaded by Dr. Lindsey Sparrow and the Psychology Department of Columbia University. They tested people on 40 different bits of trivia, entered by the subjects into computers. The catch? Half of those tested typed the questions believe they would be able to call those bits of information back from the computer. The other half were told the information entered into the computer would be deleted. The study found “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read”. Your mind knows now, in these trying times, when to focus and remember, and when to not pass “go” and head directly to Google.

The other major example of this memory erosion shows a lapse in so-called “transactive memory”, which the Times defines as “the notion that we rely on our family, friends and co-workers as well as reference material to store information for us.” We count on landmarks, images, scents, smells and people to remind us basic facts and logical connections. Thanks to the internet, the study finds, we no l longer place memory information with these familiar tools in our brain; instead, we simply remember to use the technology at hand to retrieve the information. The take-away at the end of the article? Dr. Sparrow’s bombshell: “Human memory is adapting to new communications technology.”

This is not news. Take for example the demographic of people who accessed this article via tweet, blog post, or even the online edition of the paper. They wouldn’t even have read those words if their brain hadn’t adapted, at some point, to each one of these information transmission systems. Acclaimed author and journalist Jonah Lehrer writes at Wired: “for most of human history, the only other reliable source of information were other people. What these experiments reveal is that we treat the search engine like a particularly clever friend.” Our buddy Google has always got our collective back. Lehrer, the author of “Proust Was A Neuroscientist” explains that this is easier to understand if you think of the human mind as a computer. “Although we like to think of our cortical hard drive as infinite in capacity, it’s actually pretty constrained” he writes, “which is why we’re always looking for ways to not remember stuff”.

To put the limits of our mind in context, it’s important to remember how much information is thrown at us daily. Google recently announced that the new Google + network transmits 1 billion items of information per day. Facebook? They say 4 billion items of information. Twitter countered with their own staggering statistic: 350 billion pieces of information (if you could call most tweets actual information) per day. Divided by the number of “real” Twitter users as determined by Business Insider, 56 million, that means each twitter user absorbs 6, 250 pieces of information daily.
Is it really that hard to believe that we can’t remember anything?

5 Things To Teach Yourself In Drupal

We build websites in Drupal every day at the Bivings Group. And every day, we answer questions for clients that are simple, easy things for us to change. Sites built in Drupal are inherently very easy to change and are often malleable to a degree. The problem is that many people see the full-blown Content Management System as an unknowable hurdle-they think that if the larger problems, handled by developers and programmers, can’t be managed by a non-computer scientist than many other things in the site must also be nigh-impossible. This is simply not true.

Here are five public-facing edits that can be made easily by anyone with the most basic of computer skills. These tips will not only help you manage your site, but will allow you a better perception of websites and online programs as manageable constructs that aren’t built and maintained by aliens or magic-wielding online warlocks.

  1. Changing the Navigation of Your Website

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The Genius of Google+ Circles

Like many, I’ve spent the past few weeks playing around with the new social network Google+.  The most interesting aspect of Google+ is Circles, the tool for organizing contacts (social graph) on the network.  Here’s a quick video overview:

So why does Circles matter?  It differentiates Google+ from Twitter and Facebook.

On Facebook, to have a relationship with someone you both have to opt in.  You have to become “friends”.  Due to this restriction, most interactions on Facebook are private.

On Twitter, you follow people and people follow you.  While there are ways to figure out if someone reciprocates your follow, it isn’t critical to the use of the service.  The primary point of Twitter is to find interesting people to follow.  The service is primarily public.

With Circles, Google+ has sort of split the difference between Facebook (private) and Twitter (public).  They have left it to users to decide how they want to use the service.

When you decide to add a contact on Google+, you are automatically asked to put the contact in a circle.  By default, Google has a a few predefined circles.  Some of the predefined circles imply intimacy (Family, Friends), while others imply only loose connections (Following, Acquaintance).  You can also create custom circles.

When posting an update, you decide which of your circles to share information with.   And that’s it.

This is a really elegant solution for a number of reasons:

• Adding someone to a circle is less of a commitment than adding someone as a friend on Facebook. Circles just doesn’t have the drama associated with Facebook “friendships”.  At the same time, the inclusion by default of circles such as Family and Friends makes it possible for adding someone to to be more of a commitment than simply following someone on Twitter.
• Circles lets you define your relationship with someone in private. While you are notified when you are added to a circle by another user, you have no idea which particularly circle you are included in.  So someone that has added me to a circle called “BFF” will never know if I’ve only added them to a general circle called ‘Following”.  While this sort of grouping is possible to do in Facebook, it is not nearly as fundamental to the experience as it is with Google+.
• Circles forces you to categorize contacts. To add a contact, you have to put them into a circle.  You have to make a choice. This requirement forces you to think through how you want to categorize your contacts, which ultimately makes you think through how you want to use the service.

As a result of all of this, Circles allows people to use the service publicly, privately or through some hybrid model determined by the user.  Scoble can use the service to amass 40,000+ followers in a week while at the same time my college buddy can use it to post photos from his wedding only viewable to three people.

The sharing flexibility of Google+ allows the service to fill a nice little void between Twitter (public) and Facebook (private). If Google+ succeeds, I think it will largely be because of the elegance and flexibility of Circles.

What do you think?

Partnering with the Innovation Works Conference

For the latest edition of SLURP140 – we partnered with the National Journal's Innovation Works Conference on Thursday July 13th. For this event, our talented designers created a custom skin for the SLURP140 tool and integrated NJ's logo. We'll be tracking both #njinnovation and #njliveevents – and will update this blog post with usage statistics after the conference. Follow along at http://www.slurp140.com/nationaljournal/

From the conference website:

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