What’s a twittering sports fan to do?
As most of you know, or at least anyone who knows me or has followed me on twitter, I’m a huge sports fan. In particular Oregon State football is my passion. I have season tickets, my outside of work wardrobe in the fall is predominantly orange and black, and I get passionate about the ins and outs of the Beavers season, as well as other happenings around the college football world.
While this is who I am, and it’s not something I’m ashamed of, it has made me wonder how I should be tweeting during the football season. You see, I follow a few different groups of people on twitter. The largest groups of people I follow on twitter are my friends, the Seattle (and general) tech community, and Oregon State football fans. From the months of January until August my tweets are generally a mix of tech, sports, Seattle happenings, general life happenings, etc. but come September through December the balance of my tweets gets very skewed with Beavers football this, random Thursday night football game this, fantasy football the other thing. However, I also am interacting with many college football fans through the same medium, which has been alot of fun.
I know twitter isn’t about numbers, but I do like the fact that it allows me to interact with people who I don’t know that well. It allows me to keep a pulse on what is happening in different social circles and all together different areas of life. I don’t know who all follows me, but I do know it’s alot of people who don’t care about Oregon State football. They might find my tweets interesting from January – August, but I’m guessing I annoy them during any Saturday in the fall where I’m spouting off tweets every 5 minutes about this play or that call. While the same people who I share sports tweets with, probably don’t find the happenings of the Seattle tech scene very interesting in the football off-season. Do they unfollow me because of this? Some of them do. Will they re-follow me in January? Probably not without a reason.
So what’s the solution to make sure that I maintain an interesting tweet stream, show who I am, yet not overwhelm people with subjects that they don’t care about? There are lists to break up who I want to see, but no lists to break up who I want to see my tweets. Should I start a second twitter account for sports obsessed @otis and keep my main twitter handle for the more reasonable, well rounded @otis? Have any of you experienced similar issues about one of your passions overtaking your online presence where you want people to still know you’re more well rounded than that? If so, any suggestions for maintaining a balance online lifestyle?
The iPhone 3G will make YOU money!
As has been pointed out by a commenter’s (“the vis”) on a previous video, the iPhone 3G will actually cost more over 2 years than the original iPhone’s. The math goes like this, $399 for the original 8GB iPhone +$20/mo for the data plan (on top of your voice plan)= $879. The new iPhone 3G (8GB version) will retail for $199 (half the price) but will cost $30/mo for the data plan= $919 (I won’t tell you that to get 500 text messages a month it will be an additional $5/month as that will go against my argument.. wait I just wrote that, whoops).
So we’re looking at the new iPhone 3G costing $40 more than the current iPhone and much more than a baseline cell phone. So the question posed by “the vis” was, is there a way the new iPhone can pay for itself over the two years of your contract? I don’t think you can have the iPhone “pay for itself over two years, but I do think that there will be some great ways of saving money over the two years you have your new iPhone 3G, and let’s just see how much money we could potentially save with the new iPhone.
Free GPS
I feel that I know the city of Seattle fairly well, and that at most I may need to go onto google maps to figure out where something is located in Seattle. However, if last Christmas proved anything, people love in car GPS units (along with digital picture frames, which I guess you could use your iPhone for as well). When you’re in an unfamiliar city, is there anything better than having someone guide you, turn by turn, through directions. Well the new iPhone should be able to do that with it’s GPS. The savings right there is apx $150 if you were to buy a new one on sale, and $10/day for each day you may rent a car on vacation. Let’s call this a savings of $200 over two years.
Location Based To-Do Lists
Omnidrive will be offering location based to-do lists on the new iPhone, and so as “the vis” suggested, this will dramitically cut down on the ammount of gas you use running your errands. One of the main ways people are suggesting saving money with today’s high gas prices is to make all your errands in one run. Rather than taking many short runs, making one big loop will save you much more time, mileage, and money. Omnidrive’s location based to-do list will help guide these errands, and make sure that you remember what to do, and also show you the closest place to take care of each task. Very cool and if you figure it can save you even 10 miles a week, that is 1000 miles over 2 years, at $4/gal. and to make it easy on the math let’s say you get 25mi./gal that adds up to $160 over two years.
GPS traffic maps
Google offers traffic maps for their mobile maps, and although you can access these maps on other phones, the iPhone will make these maps much more accessible and much more widely distributed (at least I hope that they will). As Minneapolis has shown us, idling your car for even three minutes will kill the earth, and also cost you money. Something like half a gallon of gas per hour. With these mobile traffic maps you’ll be able to see what roads are backed up with traffic and avoid many hours of being stuck in traffic. So, if you’re able to avoid even 11 minutes of traffic a week, you’re looking at saving 1200 minutes over two years, which would be another $40 in savings.
Scanned Membership Cards
Lifehacker layed out a great idea for how to carry many store membership and reward cards with you by scanning them, saving them as a picture on your iPhone, and then presenting them to get your savings at your local store. Rather than having to worry about holding onto all of these cards, and packing them all in your wallet for every trip out of the house, just take your iPhone and present your scanned card. I recently went on a trip to California, and was able to signup for a Ralph’s card to save $15 in a single shopping trip. I have no idea where this card is, and won’t use it again, unless I were to signup for yet another card to save $10 or more on my next trip to California. If you didn’t want to take the time to signup for the card more than once, you’d be able to save say $50 a year on club cards that you don’t normally carry with you per year. Over two years that’s another $100 in savings.
Coupons and Special offers from Location Based ads
Through Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, as I talked about in a recent video, I expect that we will start recieiving special offers for restaurants and stores that will be of more interest to us. Based on our location and our friends recommendations and behavior we will get much more targeted offers that will bring more value than today’s google adwords ads. If you get an offer for a free appetizer or drink and use the offer every other week, that could be $ every other week, would be about $400 in savings over two years!
Having the same phone for 2 years
Most people get a new cell phone every 18 months. Since the iPhone is so revolutionary, it will be a much easier phone to hold onto for the extra 6 months than your run of the mil Motorola phone. Yes , there will be a new iPhone out before the two year contract is up, but it still won’t be a necessity to buy as, the 3rd generation iPhone will probably only add a better camera, video conferencing, and maybe some new colors. Holding onto a phone for 6 months will save you the equivalent of $20 in that amount of time.
Add up all of those costs and you have saved $920 over two years! Actually giving you an extra $1 over the course of two years! Yes, the iPhone will pay for itself through the amount of money it saves you. It’s just like Steve Jobs is paying you $1 to use the iPhone!
Yes, I know these are stretches, but it was a fun list to put together and it does show that the iPhone will actually be able to help you save money over the life of it’s contract, even if it’s not THIS much.
So everyone, does this math make you want to get to your nearest Apple Store or ATT store come July 11th? I’ll see you all there.
Blogging, getting easier and easier…
I’m not saying that I will be updating more and more, but there are becoming more tools to make the process easier to complete. I’ve read many stories about how long blog posts take for the more professional sites, such as TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, etc. Now I don’t spend as long as they do on writing each post, but each post does take a little while to complete. Through adding pictures, finding links, deciding what to write, and making sure it’s all setup right, it takes longer than I first though.
Well today I just started using Zemanta and it seems to be speeding up the process quite a bit. It reads my post as I write it, and automatically finds links, pictures, suggests tags, and other stories for me to look into. This is only the second post I’ve written with Zemanta, but it seems to be very useful so far (unfortunately there are no good picture recommendations for this post), and hopefully it will make it easier for me to continue to write more blog posts down the road. With the addition of video, I am focusing more on that and less on the writing, but I hope to continue to post thought provoking, informative pieces here.
I must be doing something right on Twitter
Michael Arrington on Twitter
Michael Arrington gave me this plug earlier today. Not bad to have a rave review like that for the internet resume. Everyone listen to Arrington, he knows what is going on in the tech and startup world. His comment gave me 20 new followers within about 5 minutes, kinda fun. Now I need to make sure I’m updating my blog and twittering the most amazing 140 character messages there are.
You know where you can find me on twitter if you’re on there already.
Gary Vaynerchuk; great marketer, good guy.
Gary Veynerchuk just created a “day.” I guess that is what you would call it. No he didn’t creat April 3rd, 2008, but he did create “Good People Day ’08.” What does that mean? Well I don’t really know, but what I do know is that it’s a great idea, and a great marketing tool.
Yesterday Gary asked his fanbase on twitter, facebook, wherever to help spread the word on his newest video. The idea presented in the video was that he was thankful for the good people out there. That the good people will be who succeed in this new tech world and that the good people need to be pointed out and thanked. He urged people to blog about the good people in there life, in the tech world, and just spread the word on who should be rewarded for being a good person.
Well I think that it’s a good idea to spread the love and for Gary V. it’s a great marketing tool. He has been spreading his name, growing his brand, and most of all just being a genuine guy. I’ve never met him, but he just comes across as a guy who takes time for others, through his twitter, through his IM convos, etc. He’s not above the commenters on his blog, or the people that send him twitter messages. I mean, I’ve gotten two IM’s and a twitter reply from him, not bad for a guy who said that yesterday he recieved 500 IM’s in 5 seconds! So if you think about it, all Gary Vaynershuck is doing is sharing his ideas and his insight with others. Why is he doing it? Well I think it’s just who he is, but as a bonus it’s helping him get to know new people and also grow his personal brand.
So today, on Good People Day ’08, lets just think about those that have helped us out. Those who have helped us become who we are today and that have been genuine people. Be it friends, family, co-workers, mentors, whatever. The good people in our lives are the ones who make the biggest impact on us and help us to grow into who we are. So to all the “good people” out there, thanks for the impact you have made in my life.
Facebook needs to speed up.
- 30 minutes- Time it takes Google to notice that I have a new blog post and index it.
- 30 seconds- Time it takes for a typical email to be sent to someone I know.
- 2 seconds- Time it takes for Twitter to update my tweets and send them out.
- 1 second- Time it takes to send an IM
- 1 WEEK!- Time it takes for facebook to tell me that someone wrote on my wall.
This is ridiculous and it seems like it should be a major concern for facebook and the people who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars. As others have notices, the instantanious connection that twitter provides should really make facebook consider how they are doing things on their site. Yes, they provide a much larger news feed of what your friends are doing, but if the news is on pace with a weekly magazine, how relevant is it in the world we live in today?
It sounds like facebook will be launching an on site IM service on Monday which will allow people to chat with other people who are online. This will be a nice service, but I am surprised that it is so far up on the priority list for Mark Zuckerberg and Co. With so many people already on AIM, MSN, GChat, and the many other services that work with eachother and can be used without being logged onto a specific site I don’t see facebook’s service taking off that quickly. Yes, it will work. Yes, I’ll probably use it a few times. But no, it won’t make me stay logged into facebook all day long.
What facebook should be doing is working on speeding up their news feed as well as how quickly they notify you of new messages and wall posts. I don’t live on facebook because there isn’t enough of a stream of new information being sent through my news feed. When someone writes on my wall, if I don’t find out about it for a week then the chances of that message being relevant in todays world of connectivity are very very slim.
Facebook needs to stay on top of the game if they wanto ever cash in on their $15B valuation.
About Otis
I live in Seattle, Washington. I am passionate about working with and interacting with others. My work experience includes marketing, account management, and sales.
I am a huge sports fan who on top of cheering for my favorite teams (Go Beavs!) also appreciates coaching strategy, as well as the marketing behind teams, players, and events.
Personally, I enjoys exploring new cities and areas (particularly small towns) and getting outside and playing.