Twitter Archive

Impromptu Coworking in Des Moines

This is practically from the vault! Mr. Lacy and I shot this video with Des Moines' first co-working space Impromptu Studios during the Mid-West swing of our User Generated Book Tour, but never got around to editing it until now. It's still timely though, since Impromptu Studios just had its open house last week.

I'm fascinated by the coworking trend, because I'm firmly convinced the social web has given anyone hardworking and talented in the services sector of the economy a new opportunity to work for themselves.

If you don't know about coworking, watch this video. If you are trying to start a coworking spot, hopefully it will inspire you. A group in Des Moines had been talking about co-working via an email group, but it wasn't until the conversation moved to Twitter that things started to actually happen. Eventually software developer Daniel Shipton-- encouraged by his wife Abbie-- had to "man up" and put their names on a lease and hope others followed. They charge people about $350/month for a permanent desk, with a small discount for a several month commitment. It's just enough to break even.

If you already have a rad coworking space and we're coming to your city on the tour, please let us know!! We'd love to come check it out!

CO-WORKING IN DES MOINES from sarah lacy on Vimeo.

Hold the Phone...AMC Isn't Dumb Afterall

I'm stunned to see a big media company do such an about face. AMC is now allowing fans to Twitter their favorite Mad Men alter ego. We're quite certain this post had a lot to do with it. (Kidding, calm down, everyone.) As my new BFF Daniel Terdiman writes, AMC realized they were throwing away free grassroots marketing that didn't in any way compromise the content, the way, say, illegal YouTube videos would.  I agree with Daniel that this will lead to a whole slew of Twitter spam of every character now having an account, and agree fan-concocted ones are WAY more interesting. As a Twitter community, we need to develop a short hand for knowing the difference.

But in the mean time, congrats AMC! You've now become my textbook example for a company that GOT the social web. ;)

AMC Continues to Ruin a Good Thing

So I hate to say this because I know everyone is annoyed by the whole "I-only-liked-it-before-it-was-popular" thing, but I'm really disappointed with AMC's "support" of Mad Men this season. It was one of my favorite shows last year and at first, I was excited it was getting so much buzz. Until AMC's PR machine went into overdrive and I suddenly saw Don Draper in EVERY SINGLE MAGAZINE-- from Spin to W to the most obscure daily. It was just too much saturation. To make matters way worse, the show has been pretty boring so far this season. They over promised and under delivered.

Still, a lot of people (me included) feel that a meh episode of Mad Men is better than a lot of other TV so we watch. And some of us, take the obsession into Twitter. And then AMC having annoyed people like me by PAYING millions of dollars for forced word of mouth, stupidly threatens legal action to squash actual word of mouth, ordering Twitter to kill these unauthorized profiles. This will likely become a go-to example of a big company that does not get how to leverage the social Web in any post, column and talk I give on the subject, so thanks for the material AMC. (Nice write up on it here too.)

It reminds me of the FX show "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia"-- loved it the first season, then the network felt they had to add Danny DeVito to generate more viewers and respectability. It's not that he was bad, I just didn't care much about his character as it was written. (Although I loved his performance on the View...see tribute below) As Geoff said, it was wasted time that he'd rather spend watching the other characters. But at least FX leveraged MySpace to promote the show. Shame on you AMC!

Stop Whining UK; Twitter Is Building a Business

In case you don't start your day with a way-too-early alarm, way-too-strong coffee, way-too-much on-camera makeup, interspersed with a quick doses of TechMeme, let me fill you in that the talk of the tech blogosphere today is that people in the UK can no longer send receive Twitters over mobile phones using SMS. After reading Biz Stone's post, I was going to write a quick one myself about how Twitter -- the much loved company that can't always communicate things well-- really nailed its messaging this time. It was out front with the bad news, not hiding it. It was apologetic, but also practical: We've been paying for this, it would cost us at a minimum $1,000 a user to continue, no UK carrier will do a deal with us, so we're working on it. Sounds rational to me.

Yet, somehow there are torches and pitchforks. HUH?

In Case You Haven't Seen...

brilliant.

UGBT: "I (Steak) Omaha!" Also, "Des Moines HELL YEAH!"

I saw both of those slogans on T-shirts during my recent swing through the Midwest. I asked Jeff Slobotski to mail me the first one, as the store was closed, and plan to order the second one on this rad site.

Why? Well, Omaha does have good steaks. And both Omaha and Des Moines have a genuine, not obnoxious  self-promotional culture that I've seen in few places. Cities like New York, San Francisco, and LA don't really have to promote themselves. They're like the cool guy at the party who's like, "Yeah, I know you're into me..." Atlanta, Phoenix and Nashville are almost the cool guy at the party who got to ride with him and wants to MAKE SURE YOU KNOW IT! (That guy is annoying.) Meanwhile cities like Memphis and Detroit have inferiority complexes, so they're frequently self-deprecating even when they have something to brag about.

Omaha and Des Moines aren't pushy about it-- but they love their cities and want you to know why. It must be a Midwestern thing because the same thing struck me about Chicago. I flew there several years back when BusinessWeek was trying to get me to move there and everyone from the cab driver at the airport to the desk clerk at the hotel told me how  much they loved Chicago and how much I would to. There's something undeniably endearing about it.

Beyond that, there were some other (hopefully more salient) impressions about the Midwest I wanted to share.

Oprah Wishes She Had This Feel-Good Moment!

Every time I say I'll never mention SXSW on my blog again...

So last night TechnoSailor had the testicular fortitude to be the only person after Robert Scoble to actually come up and apologize for the SXSW heckling event. Apparently while I was sweating around NYC all day semi-off the grid everyone discussed and called it the apology of the century! I don't know about all that. But I thought it was an incredibly gracious and classy thing to do.

It seems T.S. didn't know if I took his apology so I wanted to do a quick post to say YES. Life is too short for grudges. Besides the whole incident sold way more books and got me way more speaking gigs. Not that I want such things to happen all the time. But just saying.

Here's are photos to mark (haha!) the occasion. First, "ehh...I'm not letting you off the hook..."

then, "Well, ok."

Awwww

ValleyWag wrote something nice about me and helped promote my User Generated Book Tour! Owen Thomas is like that puppy that eats your shoes, but then brings you the paper so you like him again.

By the way, I'm not ignoring everyone who has commented or written to me about the UGBT, I'm carefully going through everything. I've nailed down about six of the cities for sure and will do a post on this soon. Just waiting a bit because responses are still pouring in. VERY excited about this project!

Also, Geoff spotted this today. Thanks for the nice review! It all helps on the dreaded Wednesday: The day I get weekly book sales numbers. Wish me luck.

Hope to see any ladies at this event tonight. If you're coming enter here to win a free iPod courtesy of FiveEdge Media. That's John's company! Another fruitful business relationship thanks to Twitter!

Twitter Props (Or: Yay! No Whales!)

I know I'm not the first to say it, but I wanted to give public props to Twitter for staying up during the Apple madness today. (For most of us.) It's not fair to just write about it when they're down, although with any luck the uptime will cease to become newsworthy soon! Considering the greater complexity of keeping Twitter up and running (as explained beautifully by TechCrunch here...although no clue if that's really accurate. Comments?) and how many other blogs and sites crashed today amid the 3G iPhone unveiling, I think we can say they've made a lot of improvements very fast. They've certainly improved their communications. And am I alone in smiling at that adorable whale even when he's delivering bad news?

With any luck, I may be able to add my Twitter badge back to my blog soon.

Meanwhile, in bizarro land: a post by Rafe Needleman here. Odd since on most people's browsers Twitter was up throughout the keynote, and Summize was down. Twitter deserves harsh press for its scalability problems, but I'm sick of everyone touting other competing services as up all the time. Plurk has had a small fraction of Twitter's traffic and crashed all ready, Summize barely made it through today, and Twirl and Twitterific seem to have constant problems. Can we just accept that maybe this is a hard engineering feat? Twitter has only recently started having systemic problems. At some point, aren't we all like that morbidly obese guy who's at a baseball game shoveling nachos while he berates a hitter because he can't hit a home run?

Portland Twitter Meet-Up Resounding Success!

OK, it'd be generous to call it a "handful" of people who showed up with just 30 minutes notice. But we still had a great time, with great conversation about the Web and entrepreneurship and where it's all going. It convinced me to absolutely do this in every city I go to from now on, so watch out Twitter because your city could be next! Speaking of, I'm loving all the responses from the Sarah Lacy User Generated Book Tour idea. DC seems to be getting the most love to date...

Here's a photo of me and Portlander John Weiss at the meetup last night. He got a signed book and a free drink! Your chance in your city coming soon...