Shortly after the before the last edition of MacMerc.TV got uploaded, my work with Greg Grunberg and August Trometer on Yowza!! Mobile Coupons really started to ramp up. Things have been going absolutely crazy since then.

My plans for MacMerc.com and MacMerc.TV remain uncertain as time goes on. I’m hoping that with the success of Yowza!! will eventually bring some “me” time and maybe even some “me” money and I’ll be able to do both the site and the show full time.

That’s the hope. That’s the plan.

2007 was pretty good too; that year I started appearing on TV as a regular guest on The Lab with Leo Laporte on G4 TechTV Canada and the How Network in Australia. This was huge for me. I had no business being on TV, but I have a passion for helping people with technology and a need to encourage people creatively to embrace the freedom it can afford. This allowed me to get past my fears and actually do pretty well on camera.

In 2008, the Lab was cancelled and I lost that outlet. But, through the wonderful friendships I’d made while guesting on the show, I was encouraged to go it on my own and create a video podcast component for MacMerc.com…MacMerc.TV. The show is about ready to launch and I attribute much of the success I’ve had in even creating it and achieving it as a goal to two things: poisoned popcorn and following strangers on Twitter.

To explain this, we’ll go back to 2007 again. It was Remembrance Day weekend up here in Canada (November 11th) and my good friend Maria and I were going to head down to “The States” for a bit of shopping. Unknown to me at the time, the melted butter I had sprinkled liberally on my popcorn the night before had gone bad just enough that it made me violently ill, but not so much that it tasted in any way “funny”…so I polished off a whole bowl.

The next morning, yes, violently ill. There’s no need to give you details but, suffice it to say my abs got a workout that morning. I moaned and groaned and slept through most of the day.

Later that night, after the storm had passed, I checked Twitter for some happy news and found that someone I didn’t know (a follower of a follower of someone I did know) had invited the world to watch him as he tried to compose music in his studio. This stranger was Geoff Smith and that night turned out to be the very first of his many and awesome UStream concerts.

Note: if you happen to follow me on Twitter, first off, thank you and, secondly, if I every go off on a “come check out @geoffsmith ’s UStream concert” jag, understand that I do it because I honestly, deeply believe the experience is so worthwhile that you need to come take part.

He’s got a Christmas show coming up on December 15th, by the way…

From being in that first concert, I have “met” so many cool people and, through them, so many more. Each contact has been an encouragement to me at some time over the last year; the names Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell spring to mind, but their friends quickly became my friends too. Awesomeness.

So, the lesson?

Poison Popcorn: every so often an unexpected turn of events can be an chance to find other opportunities. Find value in failure.

Follow strangers: often breaking out of your established group yields a new group with its own benefits and strengths. If you’re on Twitter, look and see who the people you follow follow…watch to whom the people you follow send @replies… they see something in these people—find out what! It could be very valuable to you.

Does that make me an expert? Hell no. It does give me a bit of perspective. I won’t even say it gives me a unique perspective, but I think it gives me enough seniority to prance around thinking I can talk about a few things that work and a few things that don’t. And so I’m going to take the examples of two people I follow on Twitter and show you how one way works, and another way doesn’t work as much (although there has been some improvement).

A little over a year ago, I bought the Heroes – Season One
DVDs at Costco and finally found out what everyone had been raving about. It rocks. Anyone who knows me, knows I hate TV. I keep it on in the background while I do other things, but I do not schedule my life around when certain shows are on…or at least I didn’t. I make a special exception for Heroes. And that’s it.

So imagine my excitement when I heard that one of the actors who plays one of the new characters form the third season is on Twitter. Yatta!!

Brea Grant, who plays Daphne "The Speedster" Millbrook on the show, but in the real world, she Twitters, she blogs, she UStreams and makes pickles. What’s more, she get’s it. She’s really on Twitter, really tweeting the answer to "what are you doing?" She works the Twitter. She follows a bunch of people; maybe they are her personal friends, maybe a few cool fans, who knows. And she interacts; frequently @replying to people both on and off her follow list. She is definitely following Gary Vaynerchuk beyond the scope of subscribing to his tweets—she’s building her brand on the interwebs.

(Click that link. Click it!!)

Not long after I found out that Brea was Twittering, I heard that Greg Grunberg was on as well. Greg "Grunny" Grunberg plays the part of Matt "The Mind Reader" Parkman on Heroes and was no doubt hipped to Twitter by Ms. Grant who plays his foe/friend/wife on the show (depending on what version of the present or future you happen to reside in).

I’m not trying to be mean here, but Grunny doesn’t grok Twitter. He’s getting better, but he has a way to go. I had originally written the meat of this post as a private page especially for him to read, but he misread my @reply or didn’t know what I meant when I asked him to "follow me" so that I could direct message him the link to the page and the username and password to access it. (You can only privately message people who follow you on Twitter) I was just trying to help a guy out. I like Grunny. He seems like good people to me, and he has a lot to gain from Twitter and social media.

Greg Grunberg is a founding member of a musical group called Band from TV. It’s aptly named since the members of the band consist of actors from popular TV shows. They currently have a DVD available on Amazon.com and the proceeds of the sale of the disc go towards many worthy charities; Grunny’s being The Epilepsy Foundation in honor of his boy. The opportunity is ripe for Grunny to work social media and sell DVDs for this great cause in November: Epilepsy Awareness Month.

I want Grunberg to succeed at this. So, screw it, all the advice I was going to give to him privately, I’m posting here. I’m sure it applies to a lot of people, so maybe this will be useful information to others as well.

Here are the "Secrets of Twitter Success"…as I see them.

1. Don’t talk about wanting to boost your Twitter numbers or hold informal competitions with friends to see how many followers who can get in what amount of time. No one wants to be a number. Here’s the reason (at least publicly) that you want to get the numbers up: Band From TV (for everyone else, ask yourself what you have to offer the community).
2. Follow people. This might be one of the few times where it’s almost more important to receive than to give. It has been said that people don’t care what you know until they know that you care. Care about some people—follow them. Don’t follow everybody and don’t follow just anybody. Your "follow" is seen as a gift by your fans—it’s an honor. Any Heroes fan you follow is going to be very, very proud of that. There are a lot of influential people in the geek community you might want to follow too.
3. Twitter isn’t chat, but it is a conversation. Proper and judicious "@replying" is key. You don’t have to @reply to everyone who @replies you, but it will be a very big thing to the fan you do @reply to. If you are speaking to a specific person, preface the tweet with an @reply. @reply to people you follow also—start the conversation. Don’t go crazy with it though—you want each @reply to be worth something and @replying to everything devalues it.

   Ask us questions? Again, it’s flattering to a fan to have their “hero” care about their opinion.

4. Twitter about behind the scenes stuff. No spoilers obviously, but if you can convey the kind of feeling Adrian got with his YouTube stuff that will give fans a sense that they’re getting let behind the curtain a bit. Post pictures via TwitPic if you can. (He’s already started doing that. Yay!!)
5. Mundane isn’t always mundane. Let your followers know what you’re doing today…even if it’s boring. (Note: I have pretty much proven through my own Twittering that this rule only applies to people with a decent amount of fame. My mundane stuff really is boring to people.)
6. Work away from work. Tell us about your side projects. Let your followers know how the Band from TV album is doing.

I think if Greg Grunberg, or anyone else who has the "I’m a famous guy on TV" edge applies this kind of strategy to Twitter, big things can happen. Being famous is going to get you followers regardless, but being famous and working Twitter, can be huge. Fans will be able to see that it’s really you, they will know that there is a chance that you might follow them and even reply to them. That’s magic.

I have avoided much comment on iPhone and iPod touch news on MacMerc up until now since I had neither and didn’t feel like I could speak intelligently about them having only very limited experience with them. This had now been remedied to some degree.

So, if your an iPhone/iPod touch developer or make hardware devices for the iPod touch and would like them reviewed on MacMerc.com or even featured on MacMerc.TV, email me at rick@macmerc.com and let’s talk.

Created by OnePlusYou

The survey doesn’t take into account my ability to put a boogy man style scare into a swarm of five-year-olds. Most of them would run off crying.

…and then it got cancelled.

Yeah. Sucks.

I’m determined not to let my momentum die down though. I want to continue producing segment-like ideas but, instead of doing them for The Lab, I’ll be doing them for MacMerc. I’m going to to start by reproducing some of the segments that got a bit rushed when I tried to present them on The Lab and do them here in the Secret Underground Lair.

I’m probably going to use ScreenFlow but, to be honest, I just can’t afford to buy it right now.

But, rest assured, I’m not going into hiding—I’ve gotten a taste for the the attention visual media brings and I like it.

Clarke’s Third Law
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

According to Wikipedia:

Clarke’s Third Law codifies perhaps the most significant of Clarke’s unique contributions to speculative fiction. A model to other writers of hard science fiction, Clarke postulates advanced technologies without resorting to flawed engineering concepts (as Jules Verne sometimes did) or explanations grounded in incorrect science or engineering (a hallmark of “bad” science fiction), or taking clues from trends in research and engineering (which dates some of Larry Niven’s novels).

The way I’ve always viewed it was in the context of someone from “modern civilization” taking a digital camera or radio to a primitive tribe somewhere. But on that drive home I imagined that, as a law, it applies to all people everywhere. The trouble is the “sufficiently advanced technology” part.

Imagine that you are riding an airplane on a trip and a passenger a few seats up from you is working on what appears to be a tablet PC with a touch screen showing what seems to be live video of a person. The person in the video appears to even be conversing with the passenger. You’ve never seen the device before and, taking a wild stab t the type of person who would read my blog, you are pretty up on the latest technology. You can’t see a logo on the device, but it doesn’t look like anything else currently on the market. What is your reaction?

Do you assume that you are not quite as up on technology as you thought and that this device, as amazing as it appears to be, must have slipped past your RADAR?

or

Do you assume, correctly, that this passenger is a traveller from the future sent here to bring resources that we frittered away to a future that desperately needs them?

and/or

Do you rat him out to the flight crew for using a wireless device when passengers were expressly told not to.

This is what I mean, how “sufficiently advanced” does a technological device have to be before you believe in magic?

I’m not saying Clarke’s Third Law is in any way flawed. It’s not. We, in the modern world, are just way too difficult to impress.

I don’t say this to puff myself up, I’m just saying it because of the perspective I have from being with Twitter earlier on than most. I don’t think I fully understand everything that’s going on with this service and I doubt that anyone really could. I hope I’ve got this right, but who knows. Back in those days…hold on let me get comfortable in my rocker and readjust my afghan to better warm my weary old legs…yes, in them days, Twitter wasn’t the way it is today. It’s changed.

More accurately, I think, it’s changing; constantly changing.

Originally, Twitter was used as kind of “iChat status without the iChat.” You saw the question, “What are you doing?” and you answered it. That’s it. You got people saying “Making dinner” or “Blogging” or “Looking at something that says ‘What are you doing?’”

Once more people got on board, people quickly got more creative and expressive. And once people get expressive, they impact others. And when people are impacted, they want to impact back. You could send Direct Messages to others on Twitter through the website, but for some reason the community devised a protocol of adding @ to the beginning of a person’s username to address them more publicly and interact with them. This protocol has been adopted by Twitter itself as a reply. It is also supported by Twitter clients.

This community driven evolution (I think that’s how it happened) change Twitter from just a status report or “micro-blogging” platform, to a really clumsy IRC-like chat service. (Honestly, for chat, it’s crappy. If anyone had sold this as chat from the outset 1) people would have said “why do I need another chat platform?” and 2) they would have laughed at how this one works) This change has also split the Twitterverse into at least two factions.

The first faction—the traditionalists, the micro-bloggers—they probably don’t “tweet” that often and what they do tend to post is pretty concise, clever, thoughtful, composed and intended to be interesting to all. They also seem to only check the posts of the people they are following a few times throughout a day and get used to claiming “Twitter bankruptcy” upon each visit after reading a few of the most recent posts.

The second faction—the communities, the chatters—they post constantly. The tell you when they stand up, sit down, take a drink, inhale, exhale. They link, they reply and they reply to your replies. They often follow everyone who follows them and their most interesting tweets are questions thrown out to the Twitter community at large to gnaw on and discuss.

For the most part the two factions get along. The only problems I have witnessed are when someone from the first faction follows someone from the second. The first faction twitterer may grow weary of seeing the entire Twitter client screen filled with posts from a single second faction member. At this point, the first faction member usually stops following the second factioner.

You would think this would lead to the demise of the second faction. That the drop in numbers of followers would eventually defeat them under their own words leaving them with so much to say and no one to listen, but it doesn’t. The site Tweeterboard tracks Twitter users and ranks them based on frequency of posts, links sent, and numbers of replies sent and received and does so by checking activity throughout the day. It is all about the second faction. Compare its Top 100 to that of Twitterholic. Twitterholic lists its Top 100 based solely on who has the most followers, most friends or most updates. You will notice that several names are shared by each list.

So I deduce that Twitter is indeed changing, it’s changing by the will of the community and, probably because of that, it is just as popular as ever.

Twitter is an amorphous community and it’s hard to categorize it. I’m sure I have over simplified things here, but take from it what you will.