David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

I’m not sure what it says about me. I’d like to think its that I’m a busy person, hopefully not that I’m a lazy one.

I have been slowly looking into more and more ways to oursource various things I do in life to other people. I’m not rich. My parents never really had anyone come do services asides from fixing the A/C unit or fixing the roof at home. We always mowed our own yard, did our own laundry, cleaned our own house, painted the house, etc.

Yet, I really like this outsourcing of various things that I’m finding lately. I have my laundry done for $0.90/pound at the corner. It’s about $50 every 3-weeks and they do a far better job than I could. I’ve been looking into getting cleaning services for my apartment (yes its tiny, but I wish it was always clean too!) as I am never at home to clean it; and when I am at home that is simply not what I want to be doing.

And now I’m looking into getting a Virtual Assistant for some various tasks online, such as research and things that simply take too long for me to do. The first task will be helping me fix my Twitter followers.

Where is too far? What is too much outsourcing. I don’t have money to waste, but I have things to do that I feel could make me more money. I have no time for cleaning, laundry or clicking on the same thing 500 times. Have you outsourced any portion of your life?

Tags: 4hww, laundry, outsourcing, twitter, va, virtual assistant

In the ultimate act of irony, @biz posted to the Twitter blog a plug/link for the TwitterCounter site, which allows you to track the (general growth) of your twitter following. Hours later of course, people aren’t tracking growth but tracking loss due to Moby Dick, the biggest of all fail whales, eating many people’s followers. Twitter’s response is a Douglas Adams like, “Don’t Panic” button saying:

One thing to note: Even after this recovery is complete, your counts may appear lower than previously. In almost all cases, this is not due to missing data. The counts we display on your profile page are not always up-to-date. For example, when we remove spammers from the system (which we’ve been doing a lot lately), the follower counts are not updated in real-time.

Everyone breathed easy for a moment and assumed this to be the case. Those extra 200 or 2,000 followers you had weren’t really followers but just spammers (I didn’t actually know that Twitter was activity pursuing them, which is good to know). If everyone simply lost the “Spam-follower” inflation, whatever. That’s fine. Readjust and move on. Stop claiming that you have 15,000 followers when they are all spammers.

So what everyone did then was check a follower or two of theirs. There was a fast realization that the guy in the office next to you, who certainly wasn’t a spammer with his paltry one update a day, was no longer following you and vice versa. It wasn’t just spammers. It wasn’t just the “count being off”. Something was fucked.

Twitter hadn’t updated the status blog, but @EV (one of the founders of twitter) did tweet, “Okay, maybe it wasn’t just the *count*. But the important thing is: It’s being fixed right now. And we know what happened. Do not panic!”

I don’t know about you, but I’m still panicing. This isn’t good. This isn’t stable. This makes the Middle East look stable. My followers dropped by over 200, many of them people that I know well. What if Facebook just stopped you from being friends with a huge portion of your friends? What if they removed the linking to your girlfriend and made you ’single’? (For some I know this could likely cause them to actually be single due to the silly politics around Facebook relationship status).

So check out the TwitterCounter. Mine shows buckets of fail. Checking some other friends shows oceanloads of fail. We all said EPIC FAILZ before, but now we know the true meaning of it.

Tags: epic fail, ev, fail whale, failz, inflation, istwitterdown, moby dick, teh, tweet, twitter, twittercounter

A friend and I were talking last night about careers and various goals. Some people want to run a large organization, others want to go as far from an organization as possible. There is a satisfaction that many take in working with a single company and focusing for many years on efforts there, and others want to work in a very lightweight roll away from a company and not have any specific day-to-day activities with any one company.

Regardless of all of these work goals and any career paths that you might have in mind there is one goal that everyone should work on but yet few do; your personal brand.

The concept might honestly sound funny to most people. It is easy to confuse personal branding with attention seeking and a shot at stardom or at least your 15 minutes of fame. But that is simply not it, although many famous individuals do have strong personal branding.

You know you have attained strong personal branding when you are irreplaceable with someone else who has similar talents or job description and this is largely recognized in your community.

Take Jeff Pulver for example; Jeff has excellent personal branding. When you want to meet with Jeff then you want to meet with Jeff. There isn’t a substitute. Sure there are other entrepreneurial people out there, but his unique talents, social network, and success make him a one of a kind. He is not famous. He is not a household name. Yet for those that know him there is no replacement. Many of the top people on twitter could also be thought of in this way. From Robert Scoble to Chris Brogan to iJustine, they have each created their own unmistakable personal brand that could not be substituted or replaced by another person with the same ‘job title’.

The paths to getting here there are infinite. It is not a matter of only being the best at something, but being pretty good at something, a great communicator, well liked and overall respected. Getting good at something is a great start, but also doing something special is another strong starting point.

Think about getting past your job title. You are not a photographer, consultant, planner, actor, musician or business-person. You are you and the goal is for at least your larger social community to recognize that.

When you attain this you, in my opinion, have attained the best job of them all; being yourself.

Tags: career, goals, jobs, life, networking, personal branding, work

Sometimes the only way to express yourself is via a facepalm. This evening Twitter really fucked up hard, and rocked even the most hardcore Twitter users to the core.

Twitter works on a system of following people and being followed in lieu of ‘friends’. This is the way that your voice is heard, and the way you heard others. Without it, its pretty stupid and basically just a system to update your blog via SMS (like I said, stupid).

This evening some problem popped up that basically cut many people’s followers down by 20-80%. One of my friends went from 500+ followers, to just over 100.

Twitter acknowledged the problem and said they were fixing it. The problem seems to have occurred when they ‘fixed’ it however they made things worse for some. I wasn’t affected in the first round, having over 600 followers… and now I’m sitting in the 400s after many others seem to have their problems fixed.

This has many questioning whether Twitter is useful, or worth their time. Seemingly no amount of money that is thrown at the problem will fix it before the usebase outscales it. Everyone wants their site to go viral right? Well twitter went viral and the virus is killing it.

Twitter said that it is just in the ‘count’ and that it didn’t actually affect user followers. I disagree. I KNOW that I was following @samhouston for example. Yet when I looked at him this evening, I wasn’t. That’s simply not good. Its unfollowed people. Does Twitter keep backups? At all?

Where would people go? Pownce? Brightkite? A twitter clone written properly?  Can social media people still justify putting time into Twitter if its going to inject a bucket of fail whale nonstop? Moby Dick seems to have been let out of his cage.

This hurts my head and I’m ranting, but its late and this freaking sucks. No more fail whales please? kthxbai.

Tags: fail whale, followers, lost, missing, moby dick, twitter, whales, wtf

After arriving home I realized that I needed/wanted a USB keyboard for a computer that I had been given recently. I walked to Radioshack and Best Buy to find that everything was by far excessively overpriced. I will walk to Microcenter instead tomorrow to get one for $3.99. I will not type on it often.

However on walking home from this, I saw police cars and an ambulance racing down the street. Being the curious individual that I am, I started running. It was already dark and the skies where additionally grey from the rain clouds overhead that had yet to open again. As I got closer I knew something was very wrong.

At least five Boston police officers were standing around, seeming to not know what to do. Several other passerbyers and neighbors stood around. One man in particular seemed genuniely confused. There are several assisted living and other elderly housing nearby so my initial assumption was that someone elderly had collaspsed.

I stood for a few minutes, try to figure out what was happening and I think to talk away. I actually do walk probably 50 feet away thinking to distance myself from whatever is happening and not be in the way or a gawker. Yet I walk back and ask the man who seemed particularly troubled what happened. This many was in his mid 30th, and had taken off his shirt for whatever reason. He told me, “That’s fucked up, he just collapsed, I tried to help him, but that’s fucked up, he’s dead man, they’ve been pumping away on him for 10 minutes.” Each of us of course wanting for that to not be the truth, we stand. The police mill around, wishing they could help as the ambulance crew make their best efforts.

The man standing next to me tells me of the other man who I never see, “He wasn’t ugly or anything, he wasn’t old… probably 30. That’s fucked up man. I gotta live with that.” Apparently he had caught the man when he was falling, or had came to him right after he had apparently suffered a stroke or heart attack.

After a few minutes, I see they are still working on him but the police are packing up shop. I very slowly walk away, looking back and hoping for the best. I twitter a few times to perhaps gain words of encouragement for the man from afar. I doubt that they will do any good however and that the man is likely already gone. As if to signify something, the skies open up and the rain and thunder roll in.

My only hope is for him is once I am nearly home I see the same pack of ambuluances and police speed away from the scene and turn to the hospital. I think, and hope, that the would not likely do so if all they were carrying was a dead man.

Tags: death, man, random, street