Unfortunately, this new ability also brings new challenges: misinformation and disinformation, which are very hard to detect with current technologies. In response, certification of content trustworthiness, detection and reply to errors, lies and negative opinions, albeit very people-intensive,are very much needed by organizations large and small.

At a personal level, Twitter allows to establish personal relationships with thousands or even millions of others. By opening to others truthfully and contributing to the communities we join, we stand to gain support, get quick answers to our questions and make unplanned, fortunate discoveries. The flows of tweets offer many perspectives instantaneously that we can explore to better understand our current situation. For that, we need to adapt our mindset and raise our awareness of the present.

The dangers: we need to watch what we write and re-transmit to avoid damage to our personal brand; we also need to deal with criticism.

How should you tweet? Listen more than you tweet, tweet emotional headlines, use humor.

What could the future of Twitter look like? Twitter use is likely to become more private and Facebook more public, social graphs should open up. The tools of the Twitter-verse need to evolve significantly, become more transparent and easier to use (Loic Le Meur’s complete prediction list here).

Many other interesting points were made, but “better timely than perfect” as one of the speakers said. I count on you, readers and fellow participants, to improve this draft with your comments…

Note: many of the points above were expressed by several presenters, so the list of references is a large subset of the 140 presenters list… Post a comment if you want me to give you a specific reference.

Anything you would like to add?

Very special thanks to Stephanie Schwab, Jacqueline Mason and Mike … for our long, passionate and deep discussions at BlogWorld last week. Your input and advice about Web iWays was simply incredible.

Watching the flow of tweets suggest as many paths of exploration, I feel the limits of my own personal filters and an urge to widen them: I don’t understand that tweet, what am I missing?

Some of the tweets are annoying (why should I care if XYZ joined such or such group? Or please don’t sell my your stuff so directly…), but fairly easy to recognize and skip. Some of the messages repeat themselves from time to time and it’s OK, it makes me feel like I’ve been around for a while.

I feel I’m monitoring the world of social media in real time and it’s pretty cool. Tweets lead to blogs, blogs lead to sites, and sites lead to books. The whole domain opens itself very easily.

Please keep what you saw to yourselves. It’s not public yet and it needs time to mature. If you think I should talk to someone you know about it, please let me know.

Send me an email at input@webiways.com with the URL of your blog and a few dates and times that would work for you.  Or better yet, let’s meet at BlogWorld in Las Vegas next week if you’re there.

Typical sessions consist of:
- Showing you an introductory video of the tool
- Getting your reactions in real time

Talk to you soon!

J-G

In the process, I found new ways of looking at the problem.

So I ended up with two very different paper prototypes, on the two extremes: one very visual relying on 3D, and one minimalist.

At that point, I showed the prototypes to many of my friends and got a lot of useful feedback. Thank you all!

The reaction to the 3D approach was black or white and directly related to the viewer’s way of thinking: architects and visual artists loved it, and other people felt uncomfortable with it.

But everybody understood the minimalist approach in a flash and could relate to it.

Concerned about my limited resources and the human interaction complexity of a new kind of 3D workspace, I chose to start with the minimalist approach.

After a while, I reached the end of the definition (on paper) of a feature set that I thought was powerful and pretty.

Then, I immersed myself in the incredible resources of the University of Berkeley library system (freely accessible to the community) to see what the scientific community had to say about the topic. Well, it is a huge topic with lots of interesting research, but I didn’t see anything providing the features and benefits of what I had come up with.

I looked at all the creativity tools I could find and did not see anything close there either. So I made a list of all the things I thought I should patent and came up with a few.

I read David Pressman’s “Patent It Yourself” book and sent two preliminary patent applications to the US patent office. David’s book was very clear and complete, but the process took several months and lots of work!

So we spent our first few months doing major house repairs and home improvement projects. Luckily, the weather cooperated nicely.

In parallel, I started putting on paper and developing various ideas about a visual tool to help people think, based on my use of creativity tools, systems modeling, object oriented programming, and a 3D computer environment I had been involved with at Intel:

The Miramar workspace environment

• Nurturing start-up environment
• Great public schools and university system for the kids
• Proximity of a university for continued education

We preselected Boston, the Washington DC area and the Bay area. We spent 3 to 5 days in each location. The choice was difficult, each place having its advantages.

My wife fell in love with a Victorian house full of character in Newton, Mas. Washington had the best public schools, but I felt much more comfortable starting a computer business in the Bay area. I had 5 times more LinkedIn contacts in the Bay area than in DC or Boston. Also (and surprisingly!) we were able to find housing we could afford and great public schools near the university of Berkeley.

Consequently, we relocated to the charming town of Albany, next to Berkeley, CA.