Joshua Guffey

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I just finished watching Bedtime Stories (amazon link).  It left me with the feeling of “your life is now…live it dammit!”  It really got me thinking.  You’ve heard it before… “do the things you want when you’re young”, we all have.   But what I’d like to do is to ask you to take a moment–invest it really–and ask yourself “what is it in my own life that I am struggling with that I don’t want to die knowing I haven’t overcome?”

It’s a simple question really, albeit a scary one. What, if you change nothing about how you’re living, will you die having to come to terms with?

For me right now it’s my health.   Sure, I’m young (29 if you care) but I’m finding that things aren’t quite how they used to be.  Okay I’m being vague…I’ve got a belly.  And I’m not feeling energetic and agile like I used to.   Hmmm, still weak.   Okay…I was walking recently and felt my belly jiggle, how about that!?

Sure, I’m not a ‘heavy’ guy, but it’s not fun feeling a truly negative change in my body when all my life I’ve been very thin, agile and energetic.  I’m not even 30 and I’m so much less energetic than I was just 5 years ago.  Something’s GOT to change.  And now!

I believe that most things in the universe actually work in more of an exponential or ‘compound’ fashion (in contrast to our tendency to view things as if they have a linear progression), that said I’m sure that if I don’t make a change now, one day I will look back and ask myself “where did I go wrong?”

Now really the point of this post is really about you and what YOU want to get out our life.   Not me.  But you see where I’m going… HONESTY

We’ve got to be ‘brutally honest’ with ourselves because there’s some part of our make up (most of us anyway) that likes to hide from the facts.   It’s why we dress up our dead.  –  Respects to anyone grappling with loss right now.

My point is to cut the proverbial shit.  Quit kidding yourself.   There are things that are important to you that you aren’t making happen.   It may not be your waist.  Or your pocketbook. Or your car.  Maybe it’s riding a motorcycle.   Or taking your kid camping camping every month.   It doesn’t have to be what we see on TV or at the movies.

Hell, if it’s collecting every damn version of every Derek Jeter baseball card ever made–and that’s what really matters to you–than do it goddamn it.   Enjoy it.  When you’re laying in your hospital bed at the end of your life… you’re gonna damn well wish you had.

And now you’re gonna make me eat my words.   And I’m glad of it.

What’s your takeaway?

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PS.  Love your family.  Love ‘em like people might think you’re a little wacky.  Really, it’s okay.  :)

Oh… PSS.  Shout out to my buddy Juan Hernandez who seeded this whole train of thought by sharing this video of his amazing high-speed motorcycle ride yesterday (a thrill to watch) http://youtu.be/Ofxhrw1rDE8

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photo credit: thenoizz

Further big changes are coming to Twitter, we can be sure of this. Especially since Facebook’s PR stain, more users may gravitate more towards Twitter without actually closing their Facebook accounts.

End in the end, it will all just be an interesting chapter in web history — but, for now, when big Twitter changes come…what will it bring? — Okay, enough setup…here’s the meat of it.

Twitter is changing. We may not like it but it’s happening. So what will it mean? Well it’s very possible that a flatening may be occuring.

What I mean is this…
Much of what has made Twitter so significant has be that it’s been a democratic platform. Anyone can post. Anyone can read. Anyone can follow… You get the idea.

It’s also been less then impressively profitable for the founders given it’s global (and relationally…instantaneous) proliferation and impact. Only Facebook has seen faster numbers of adoption.

It’s been interesting to watch as Facebook makes moderate to serious changes to their platform on practically a seasonal basis, while Twitter has remained, largely unchanged in comparison.

Facebook has managed to piss off millions upon millions of people simultaneously. — Simultaneously! And on many occassions. Twitter’s community, on the other hand, is significantly smaller, but in many ways more loyal to the brand.

Facebook has become the social network of convenience. While Twitter is largely untapped. Which is why I think it might be wise for the powers that be at Twitter to continue to make changes slowly. We’ve seen what happens when you change something emotionally charged for millions of people. Massive trust is lost.

Now is an opportunity for Twitter, but if they go about changing too much too fast, I’m afraid they may leave some of their audience behind as well. Or at least their trust and loyalty.

The great things we do in life usually take some time. Rarely do they happen overnight.

They occur as we sleep. While our neurons are firing and our minds are set free. We dream. We explore. We find paths yet undiscovered. And ultimately we find our way.

It’s not always fun. It’s not always pretty. But is always ours. At the end of the day, when we are are weak and tired and our minds are unsettled. We seek vision. We grasp for our purpose. We seek to divine.

We are one. We are realeased. We give way — and merge.

We are returned to the abyss that is our birthplace. Our mother. Creativity. We are born. We live.

I was going to write some kind of introduction to this post and then realized… you’re here to find Twitter peeps… so get to it!

Here are a few ways I’ve discovered to find the peeps that you’d most like to follow.

For the newbies: (you can probably skip this part)

• Follow some of your Gmail contacts. If you didn’t do this when you started your Twitter account, you can do that here.
• See who they are following. You’ll usually find more friends in your circles this way; often people you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
• Tweet about topics that you want to connect with others on. People want to connect with others on similar topics and with people who share their same basic attitudes that they themselves possess.  So tweet!

Once the training wheels are off:

• Browse Listorious for who is listed in the topics that interest you. Follow whole lists or just people.
• Run some simple Twitter searches for the more obscure terms that interest you (perhaps kayaking San Diego)
• Explore who is on lists that were made by those who you already follow or who you find to be interesting or influential.
• Follow insightful, funny or interesting commenters on blogs that you read.
• Explore some influencial tweep’s favorited tweets (such as Scobleizer’s favorites) for interesting twitterers to follow.

Ninja skills:

• Twiangulate some of the peeps you already follow to see who they commonly follow.
• Use a free service called RSSFriends to watch who certain tweeps follow.  You can then decide if they are someone you’d also like to follow.
• Find tweeps using Tweepz, a site that allows you to search by bio, name and location — and to sort those results based on follower/following counts, language and more. You can even combine search metrics, like this search which uses both the bio search terms “twitter addict” and the location search term “san diego”.
• Run a specialized Google search to find people on Twitter by words used in their name/username or their bio (example “work at Google“).
• When you meet interesting people in real life, ask if they Twitter.  It really doesn’t have to be “weird”.
• Engage in interesting conversations and be useful to those who follow you.  Don’t be spammy.
  (I know that this isn’t really advanced, but you’ll know why it’s listed here)

For every technique I’ve listed here, I’m sure there are many more that I’ve missed. Why not add to the conversation by adding your peep-finding strategies in the comments?  Be sure to leave your Twitter handle for others to find you.

If you found this article useful, please consider sharing it below.  For more on using Twitter for business subscribe to this blog or follow on Twitter

If you don’t already know about Aardvark, you should.  It allows you to ask a question of those people in your networks and those of your friend’s networks.  And it does a damn good job most of the time.

Aardvark attempts to provide you with answers from people who actually know about the topic you’re inquiring about. And it’s actually quite useful. Apparently even Google thinks so since they acquired Aardvark back in February for $50 million.

Here I’d just like to mention something that relates back to my post about timing.  Aardvark (like any web social network) has users who are active at various times. This said, it makes sense to position your question at a time when it’s likely that your specific question will get answered.   This isn’t possible with Aardvark’s basic web interface or their iPhone app, however Aardvark also offers the ability to ask questions via Twitter, which has the side-effect of making it possible to schedule questions.

The usefulness for asking via Twitter is you can ask your Twitter followers at the same time.  You can also use a service like Hootsuite or SocialOomph to schedule your question for a time when more people are going to be active or for when users who’d be more likely to know will be available.

Tonight I’m just asking a general question about managing documents in the cloud so I made it for early morning (7:45am PST).  My rational is that at this time early risers will be available and also, that they may be a more organized faction of the Aardvark community.  Really the big deal here is that there will be a great deal many more users available at this time than when I thought of the question late at night.

A better example of this might be a question like “I’m planning a trip to NYC next week. Got any tips on great breakfast cafes on or around Main St?”  Something like this would probably do best scheduled around morning time in NYC, so take account of time zones too.

You can schedule a question on Aardvark by scheduling a tweet to be sent out at anytime you wish and including “@vark” in the tweet.  Have fun!

-@JoshuaGuffey