austinpreneur

Will the real "Joshua Baer" please stand up?

For all of my childhood, I was the only Joshua Baer.

Sometime in high school, my cousin sent me a picture of the sign in front of Joshua Baer & Co, an art dealer in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I realized that I was not the only Joshua Baer in the world. My innocence was shattered.

10 years later I set up a Google alert for "Joshua Baer". Except for the occasional message about the art dealer, I only received alerts about myself.

Then last year I joined Facebook and was surprised to see 26 other Joshua Baers! From their pictures and school info, they all seem to be much younger than me - most graduated after 2000. LinkedIn shows 5 other Joshua Baers. I can't figure out how to find Joshua Baers on MySpace.

Are my Google alerts doomed to be polluted with news about other Joshua Baers?

I have joshuabaer.com and joshbaer.com and @baer.name. I have joshuabaer on twitter and on MySpace and on Linkedin. But how long can I keep it up?

Will the real "Joshua Baer" please stand up?

Austin Social Media Club meeting - 60+ attendees!

Tonight we hosted the Austin Social Media Club meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices. More than 60 people showed up to hear Jon Lebkowsky and David Armistad discuss "The Headless Organization". It was an engaging discussion and I found it particularly relevant to the MailThink conference I'm organizing in September.

I'm hosting the Austin Social Media Club meeting at Datran Media on Thursday, May 15

On Thursday May 15 I'm hosting the Austin Social Media Club meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday third Thursday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown).

We'll have free pizza (thanks Datran!) at 6pm and things will officially start at 6:30pm and wrap up at 8pm.

Jon Lebkowsky and David Armistead from Social Web Strategies will be talking about The Headless Organization:

Throughout the history of the Internet, we’ve seen an explosion of new, relatively frictionless communication channels, broad access to the means of media production, and a blurring of the distinctions between professional and personal media. We’ve seen an ascendance of many-to-many communications resulting in “out of control” communications, flatter hierarchies, and the emergence of new, agile forms of social and political organization. The rise of networked communications and the appearance of robust platforms for social networking has been accompanied by an increasing tendency for groups to self-organize — and the proliferation of entities referred to as leaderless or “headless” organizations. In May’s SMC presentation, we’ll consider how these headless organizations have evolved, discuss some examples, and talk about challenges, limits, and potential future developments.

I'm looking to hire a product manager in the social media space for Datran Media as well as Facebook app developers for Datran Media and OtherInbox. If you know of anyone who might be a good fit, please encourage them to register for the meeting and introduce themselves to me.

Facebook is radio, not TV

Most of my friends have taken to Facebook like fish to water, but a few seem to have trouble getting started. They can see that lots of their friends are participating but don't really understand what all the fuss is about. A common complaint I hear is that they think it is a waste of time, as if it is something that requires your full attention like TV. I think of Facebook more like the radio that I listen to in the background.

I really enjoy Facebook and check it a few times a day. I find it interesting to see the "newsfeed" postings about where my friends are traveling to, pictures they have posted online, events they are attending and connections to friends I've lost touch with.

I have a few recommendations of how you can maximize your Facebook experience if you are just getting started or want to give it a second try.

1. Make Facebook the home page on your web browser. This way every time you open a web browser the Facebook newsfeed will flash in front of you for a few seconds. Even when you move on and keep doing what you were doing, you will notice interesting tidbits about your friends activity that is posted on the newsfeed. Every once in a while, something interesting will catch your eye and you will click on it for more information.
   
2. Spend an hour adding as many Facebook friends as you can. Facebook is a social network, and without friends you can't be social. Your newsfeed only shows things about your Facebook friends, and only friends who you approve can see things about you.
   
3. Update your status when you travel. If you're going on a trip, announce it a few days before in your Facebook status, ie. "Joshua is heading to San Francisco on Monday for Ad:Tech" and then "Joshua is in San Francisco for Ad:Tech" and finally "Joshua is back home in Austin".
   

Follow these three steps and then explore other parts of Facebook for yourself as they catch your eye. I have started using Facebook for sharing pictures because of its ability to "tag" messages with the names of the people in them.

Facebook is not about spending hours browsing through other people's pages (at least not for me). I interact with it very passively - mostly noticing things on the newsfeed and updating my status once a day. Occasionally I'll spend a few minutes browsing but it's more like listening to the radio than watching TV.

Facebook says we should be friends...

I think this will be one of the new pickup lines of 2008 - "Hey baby, Facebook says we should be friends."

A new feature of Facebook and LinkedIn shows the names of a few "People You May Know" - basically the friends of your friends. This turns out to be incredibly useful and I suspect is causing significant growth in the number of connections between users. For a week now, every time I log into Facebook I add a few new friends. My network on LinkedIn is much larger than on Facebook so I don't find new friends quite as often, but it is still frequent.

LinkedIn

Facebook

Last night at the Austin On Rails meeting someone came up to me and said, "Facebook keeps saying we should be friends so I thought I would introduce myself." We had never interacted online, but when he heard my name announced to the group he immediately recognized it. How interesting that Facebook could cause offline connections to be made without any online interaction!

Now what we need is a physical device you can carry around that would alert you when "someone you should know" is nearby. This is kind of like that bluetooth dating toys that were popular in Japan and in the headlines 10 years ago.

Hiring Developers - ROR / Java / .NET / Facebook / OpenSocial

My new startup, OtherInbox is looking for experienced Ruby On Rails developers. We're a small team working in an Agile environment on an innovative consumer service. Our development team is led by Steven Smith, founder of FiveRuns. If you know of someone to recommend, please email jobs@otherinbox.com - we'll pay you $1,000 if we hire your referral!

We also need help with web browser toolbar extensions for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. We'd love to find one person who can do all three but it seems more likely that we'll find a specialist for each browser. There will be a big project up front and then ongoing maintenance.

Datran Media is looking for developers who are excited about building social networking apps of all types. We need Java and .NET developers to work on our StormPost Social Connector platform as well as standalone Facebook applications. Email joshua.baer@datranmedia.com if you know someone!

Facebook In-Utero

Today I made a Facebook profile for Baby Baer, who is currently surfing the Internet in-utero through Mommy. Why did I do this? I had uploaded a sonogram picture to my Facebook account and wanted to "tag" the baby in the picture.

I'm sure my baby is not the first one to have a Facebook profile in-utero, but you never know... maybe at 11 weeks this is the youngest Facebook profile ever! I'll admit I had to lie about birthday... the most recent year they allow is 2006. Apparently a 2 year old can have a Facebook profile but not younger!

What else should be done for an Internet "baby starter package"? I'll admit I've looked up possible baby names to see if the domain name is available as well...

Facebook adds Instant Messaging

Stan Schroeder at Mashable questions the value of Facebook adding instant messaging capabilities. He questions if this is adding any value or just trying to steal users from other chat services such as Twitter or AIM.

What's powerful about instant messaging is not the ability to send messages - we could already do that with email. It's the buddy list and the "presence" information. It's your list of the people that are important to you and knowing when they are online or not to enable real-time interaction like actual IM messages - or audio chat - or video chat - or playing a game - or so you can walk over to their desk to talk to them.

The reason why Facebook IM is powerful/interesting is not that it gives you a new way to do IM. It's that now you don't need to maintain a separate list of your "buddies" in AIM, your buddy list is the same list you are already maintaining in Facebook.