When Mike wrote about James Karl Buck’s use of Twitter this week to alert his friends when he was arrested in Egypt for photographing a demonstration, I wondered if my little hometown paper would pick up the story.  Today, they did, with a good article by Mike Musgrove.  It’s another example of the benefit of being able to make your friends aware of what’s going on in your life right now whenever you want or need to. 

Then again, it also hints to some concerns about documenting your day to day life.  Does your company have a list of keywords it searches for in a Twitter feed before it makes a hiring decision?  If so, do they take things out of context or really try to understand the situation?

Darren recently posted about the SethGodin account on Twitter, which is run by someone who simply tweets every time Seth writes a blog post.  This morning, Seth (the real one) posted to explain why he’s not really using Twitter, even though “he” has almost 1,500 followers.

“In 1993, we installed a primitive form of chat on our network at work. I think it was called SnapMail. I discovered pretty quickly that I was spending three or four hours a day using it. I was really good at it. And I also didn’t get as much done as I needed to. So we ripped it out. Just because it was stimulating doesn’t meant it helped with our goal.”

Does Seth think that Twitter is just idol stimulation?  A meaningless distraction?  A worthless time-suck?  I don’t think he does.  He also says:

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I spent some time this morning talking with my three year-old daughter about Martin Luther King Jr.  I did my best to put into simple terms why he was great man, and his contributions to making the world a better place.  I wanted her to experience his speeches directly, so we watched a couple of shows on the History Channel and some videos on YouTube.

Being able to see the footage of his inspiring speeches and the protests that took place during the civil rights movement reminded me of one of my engineering courses at Virginia.  In it, we discussed how the television coverage of these protests — which often showed police officers attacking defenseless, peaceful people with water cannons, batons, and dogs – influenced Americans across the country in much more profound ways than photographs and news reports had previously.  In many respects, television was the technical catalyst that propelled the horrible realities of racism into American living rooms everywhere, to the point where the issue could no longer be ignored.

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Misery loves company.  It’s true in life, and it’s true on Twitter.  When you don’t feel well or are going through a difficult time, most people feel better when they share their experience with others.  It’s human nature.  To some extent, other people appreciate engaging with people going through a challenge, either indirectly (watching a drama unfold from afar) or directly (being able to support a friend in need). 

These long-standing realities of human interaction are taking place on Twitter, highlighted by two recent high-profile examples:

1. Jason went through a travel nightmare.  His tweets along the way provided dramatic entertainment for his 5,000+ followers, including Fred.
2. On a much more serious note, the recent passing of Marc Orchant inspired dozens of blog posts.  As news of his heart attack unfolded, however, it spread quickly on Twitter, with those who cared about were Marc compelled to share their concern and support.

A less public and more personal example occurred this past week.

Over Thanksgiving, I set my mom up with Twitter (and Snitter).  I set her to follow my brother and me, and honestly didn’t expect her to tweet.  She lives alone about an hour away from us, and her work has her online a lot, so I figured she’d just enjoy seeing tweets about what her kids (and grandkids) are up to all day. 

Much to my surprise, she was tweeting immediately, mostly about things happening around the house.  Occasionally she’d tweet about her old dog Lucy, who hadn’t been doing well for the past several months.  About a week ago, with the support of her vet, she made the very difficult decision to have Lucy put to sleep.  She emailed the family, and we talked about it in person (you know, old school human-style) during a recent visit. 

In the days following her decision, mom’s tweets were telling.  “Wishing Lucy was a lot younger” and “Feeling sad about my dog…” and “I don’t want to say goodbye to my dog.” and ultimately just “Two more hours.”  Mom is too strong and independent to ask more of us to be there with her (my oldest brother, who lives nearby, was), but it was clear that being able to share her feelings passively with more people along the way was comforting for her.  We emailed her and called her, but group support via Twitter somehow seemed best — a way for us to deal as a family.

For me, it was another example of technology being both wonderful — it allowed a degree to connectivity with my mom during a tough time that never would have happened otherwise — and completely insignificant.  Human nature shows through, no matter what tools we happen to be using at the moment.

2 inspirations in a row from Scoble.  This game and this video are just amazing.

I also like the tagline “Coming to PC when it’s done.”  Classic.

The coolest thing about what’s going on with the Web right now is that game-changing innovation is sparked by small teams of smart, motivated people who just do stuff.  They try things.  They hack on their ideas and put it out there.  Some take off, some don’t.  The difference between now and 8-10 years ago is that the audience is really there, so the really cool ideas can really take off.  And thanks to open source software and open platforms, part of that “take off” is others contributing to the ideas to make them better.

This model has been limited to software, but BugLabs is taking it to hardware.  The BUG is a collection of open-source hardware modules that you can snap together to make your own custom device.  If they can successfully connect these gadgets so that the collaboration and community building can happen as seamlessly as it does online, there’s no telling what people will come up with.  Check out the video with founder/CEO Peter Semmelhack and marketing guy Jeremy Toeman:

It’s cool to see this “rough” product display, brought to us via a cell phone video interview, generating buzz and getting the word out.  No need for fancy marketing speak and flashy demos.  I’ll take an unedited chat with a founder/CEO showing off his/her product any day.  In this case, my favorite quote from Peter is:

“I’m building it because I really want it.”

That’s how the best stuff comes to be.  Kudos to Scoble for the interview.  My second favorite quote is Peter calling his company “Bell Labs” — a mistake I’ve never made at Viget Labs.

My dad, who was hacking on hardware and software as far back as I can remember, would have loved this thing.

Last month I mentioned Rails Rumble, the app dev contest that went down last weekend.  The apps are done — 92 of them, in fact — and now anyone can go play with them and vote for their favorite.  Two Viget-associated teams participated:

Clinton assembled a tiny all-star team with Julia Kulla-Mader and Jackson Fox dubbed “Snack Nut Item” and built Clubhouse:

Clubhouse is a network for clubs or teams or any organizations, providing them with loose and fun event scheduling. Anyone can create and join clubs, create events, and plan the future! It is more filling than a good breakfast. It is like Meetup.com, but free, and what the people want. Also, iCalendar! Yeah!

Ben, who couldn’t play the whole weekend due to “social obligations” (otherwise he’d have been in VL South along side Clinton), formed a solo team called “Texasbenonian People’s Front” and built Irksome:

Irksome is a web-based client for IRC, providing all the normal features of IRC through a much friendlier UI – and with searchable transcripts!

Nice work, guys.  As DC’s Startup Weekend draws closer, I can already tell that the insights from the Rumble will be valuable.

Update: check out Clinton’s post about Rails Rumble on the Viget blog.  He makes some great points …

Last week Fred asked for something, Dave built something, Fred thanked Dave, and that’s great.  This week Mike bashed Yappd, techcrunchies suggested Tweetr and Radar, and that’s all fine.  But I still have to take the picture.  Here’s what I really want:

1. A really … uh … “cool” holster for my Treo 700 that holds it about in the center of my chest with the camera facing out.  Or maybe a way to strap it to my forehead.
2. A photo taken every [1|5|30|60] minute(s), which is then automatically uploaded to … the next version of Twitter which displays images instead of links to them (in web view, anyway) and sends MMS in addition to SMS (maybe the other services do this already, but come on … I already have 13 followers on Twitter).
3. A blog post auto-generated that shows all of the days photos in rows, or perhaps a rapid-fire animation of the entire sequence.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit much.

But there has to be a video thing happening here.  When I go to answer that ever probing question”what are you doing?” 9 times out of 10 my instinct is to say “why, let me show you!” and then point my camera phone and shoot a 10 second video clip.  Photos help, but let’s just skip to video already.

I think I’ll make it a habit to rhyme in my post titles as much as possible.

There was talk today around the Lab about fielding a team for Rails Rumble, a web app competition happening the weekend of September 8 & 9 with rules that are similar to Startup Weekend.  While Rails Rumble is new, it spawned from Railsday which has been around since ‘05.

After visiting the first Startup Weekend in Boulder, I blogged about how the technology challenges are often the toughest to overcome when building a web business.  Rails Rumble avoids the major problem Startup Weekend faced – debating what technology to use throughout.  The four-person-per-team limit avoids the other major challenge: too many cooks in the kitchen.

We’re helping to organize Startup Weekend DC on October 26, 27, & 28 and while the team-size challenge is still TBD, the tech decision has already been made: Rails it is!