Month: January 2012

Why I Deleted Facebook and Twitter from my iPhone

In early January I was in LA and my parents invited me to go a whale watching cruise for a few hours.  I’d never been whale watching and decided it sounded like a great way to spend an afternoon with my family.  About an hour into the voyage, the captain said that they’d spotted killer whales and that we’d try to go find them.  He was really excited.  He told us he’d been doing these tours for 10 years and only seen killer whales one other time.  I started to get excited too.

Thirty minutes later, someone spotted them.  It was a pod consisting of a large male, a mom, a baby and a few other smaller males.  I rushed to get my iPhone to snap some pictures, but they were so fast!  It was hard to catch them!  I got some decent shots but nothing turned out that great.  If you didn’t know what they were, you mighta thought they were something on one of those lake monster specials on the history channel*. I was a little disappointed.  After sharing the killer whales on Facebook and Twitter, my pocked buzzed a few times as friends liked, commented, tweeted, and retweeted.

Cruising back, I should have been really happy.  I’d gotten lucky enough to see something amazing that most people don’t get to see, but instead I felt a little disappointed my pictures didn’t come out well.  I realized that I spent the entire time trying to snap a picture of the killer whales so I could show my friends what I’d seen.  I ended up watching the whales through a little electronic screen, focusing on getting a picture, rather than simply enjoying their majestic beauty of what could be a once and a life time experience.  I really didn’t like those implications.

About the same time, I realized I’d been slowly increasing how many times per day I looked at and updated Facebook and Twitter compared to three months ago.  When I was in a car, a taxi, the subway, waiting for a meeting, riding the bus, or just sitting around, I was checking Twitter and Facebook.  Sometimes I found myself looking at my phone at meals or with friends, something I HATED when others did to me.  I was taking more pictures and sharing the daily minutiae of my life.  I found myself going through the day hoping to find interesting things not just because they are interesting, but because I wanted to share them.  As a reluctant convert to smartphones, I feared something like this would happen at some point.

On the plus side, I found out about important news really quickly.  I kept closer track of what my friends were up to.  I found funny stories and was up to date on sports, memes, technology and politics.  But, I spent way too much time with my head down, looking at my iPhone and getting carried away in the minutiae that is social media, seeing what people ate for breakfast, what celeb was in rehab and what random thought crossed their minds.  And some of my friends felt slighted when I didn’t like their status, retweet their tweets or tweet at them.

Facebook and Twitter have a value, but I didn’t like that I was almost obsesively checking Twitter and Facebook whenever I had downtime.  I was consuming unimportant content and over sharing meaningless parts of my life. I realized something had to change.  Social media wasn’t adding to my enjoyment of life, it was taking away from it.  So about three weeks ago I decided to experiment.  I deleted Facebook and Twitter from my iPhone and replaced them with the Kindle app.

I replaced my iPhone Twittering/Facebooking with reading books or keeping my phone in my pocket.  In the last three weeks, I’ve read two books and stopped checking social media as much and my life is so much happier.  I still get emails when people interact with me on Twitter and Facebook, but it’s much more passive.  And if I really NEED to use Facebook or Twitter, I can use the browser to get what I need done, but its slow and cumbersome so I don’t check as much.

Since I’ve deleted the apps, I can count the number of times I’ve been to the mobile sites on one hand.  It’s been a big change.  Freeing me up from oversharing and overconsuming has pushed me to read interesting books during my downtime.  Or just observe the world and interact with everyone around me.  And now that I’m mostly off Twitter and Facebook during most of the day, my friends can’t complain I’m not paying attention to their updates.  Because I’m not paying attention to anyone’s.  For me, life is so much better without the constant pull of social media!

Yes, I’ll miss out on knowing things really quickly, but a quick perusal of Twitter and Facebook after work so far has done the trick.  For example, I found out Prince Fielder signed for a $200m contract 10 hours after it happened.  But so what? I’m only sharing the most important things and cutting out the rest.  My Klout score is going down and I’m adding followers at a slower rate, but my life is more calm, free and easy.  I’ve been living more in the real world instead of living through a little 4.5 x 2.25 inch screen.

So think about it.  Are you walking through life with your head down, getting validation from social media instead of whats happening in front of you?  Are you tweeting and facebooking to show off and make your friends think “wow, what a cool life?”  Are you oversharing? Are you missing the killer whales live, so you can show your friends a picture of them later?  If you are, and I think lots of people are, think about taking a step back, deleting Facebook and Twitter and see if your life improves.  I know mine did.

In reality, nobody cares about the minutiae, its all about your impact on the world.  So stop oversharing, overconsuming and go out and live life!

*Thanks Polsky!

Capital Entrepreneurs 2011 Review

In 2011, Capital Entrepreneurs companies created 121 full time jobs, 66 part time jobs, and raised $23.7 million in funding, all in a time when Wisconsin’s economy is struggling to grow.  CE now is made up of 150 entrepreneurs who now employ over 200 full time and 100 part time workers.  When I started CE in May 2009, I never thought our initial group of 10 entrepreneurs would ever grow to 150 members.

Since I first started traveling more in November 2010, Forrest Woolworth has taken over leadership of CE.  He’s done an outstanding job finding sponsors, adding entrepreneurs, standardizing the membership process and adding additional events like Build Madison and CE Pitch Days.  CE members have also been behind the Forward Technology Conference.  Besides for Forrest, credit should also go to Justin Beck, Chris Meyer, Scott Resnick and the rest of the original CE members for making our founders group what its turned into today.  I’m so proud to see Madison’s entrepreneurship ecosystem continue to grow and hope 2012 is even better than 2011!

From Forrest’s Capital Entrepreneurs 2011 Year End Review:

Capital Entrepreneurs companies are curing cancer, preventing suicides, and organizing community groups. They are making mobile apps and games used by millions, revolutionizing the digital music industry, making sense of social media, shaping some of the world’s largest brands, and much more. Capital Entrepreneurs companies participated in prestigious startup incubator programs including Y Combinator, TechStars, Startup Chile, and 94labs.

Over the last year, Capital Entrepreneurs companies were featured in news outlets around the globe. These included The New York Times, NPR, Mashable, TechCrunch, CNN, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, MTV, Sports Illustrated, AdAge, and more. Locally, Capital Entrepreneurs companies were the topic of two Isthmus cover stories, and were featured in the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison Magazine, and InBusiness.

The Stop SOPA and PIPA Blackout

Tomorrow, many websites you depend on each day will go dark to protest the abomination that is SOPA and PIPA, two incredibly bad laws to restrict internet freedom currently proceeding through Congress.  7000 sites including Wikipedia, WordPress, Reddit and others will go completely dark.  Mozilla will go dark.  Google will post a large message explaining expressing their opposition to these horribly thought out laws.

SOPA and PIPA are two bills pretty much written by the movie and music industry lobby to ostensibly limit illegal downloading, but they are so broad and poorly written that they allow people to be jailed for up to 5 years for illegally downloading a single song.  They’d force companies like Twitter and Facebook to censor user posts.  And they’d force search engines like Google to not show “offending” websites or face big penalties.  For more info, read my full post on SOPA and PIPA from last month.

Kids, if you have homework due tomorrow and thursday, get it done in the next few hours because Wikipedia won’t be able to help you!

Santorum: The First Ungoogleable Presidental Candidate?

Rick Santorum finished a surprise 2nd place in the Iowa Caucus yesterday after gaining a ton of ground in the past two weeks with a huge grassroots campaign that took him to every county in Iowa.  Santorum finished a surprising 8 votes short of front runner and establishment candidate Mitt Romney and did it with lots of handshakes, personal events and groundwork, all the while spending almost no money.  He spent $20 per vote, compared to $480 for Rick Perry and $155 for Romney.  He also did it by eschewing the Internet, twitter and other new media.

Now, as the American electorate is being introduced to Santorum, their first reaction will be to run over to Google and type in “Santorum” or “Rick Santorum.”  Many will not like what they find, but not just for political reasons.  If they Google “Santorum,” the first 2 results and 6 of the 10 results on the first page will refer to the aftermath of a specific sexual activity (full definition of Santorum here, I warn you, its really gross).  If you Google “Rick Santorum” #3 refers to the same activity.

Santorum got its alternative meaning in 2003 after he made anti-gay comments, including comparing being gay to bestiality.  Sex advice columnist Dan Savage proposed renaming a sex act with Santorum’s last name to forever stain his name with his antigay comments.  I remember reading the original columns in The Onion and thinking it was pretty funny, but never thought that the campaign would actually catch on like it has.  Savage set up a website and it quickly went viral.  I cannot hear his name without thinking of the other meaning and now Google is introducing millions more to the alternative meaning.  Savage offered to take down any references to the other meaning if Santorum stopped his anti gay rhetoric and then donated $5m to marriage equality causes, but Santorum turned him down.

So what does this mean for Santorum the candidate?  And what does his story mean for the rest of us?  I think Santorum’s original comments in 2003 ruled him out from winning a Presidential election, so in the grand scheme of things, it won’t really change his chances of winning.  But it does make him answer uncomfortable questions.  And I think it’s the start of a trend.

Google and other social media have become such powerful tools, especially for people with influence.  It shows that if you piss off the wrong people on the Internet, you too can be synonymous with something equally disgusting.  Before, people were accountable for only what people could remember, or what they could find in librarian’s archives.  Now, anyone with a voice can share their opinion.  And their opinion is there forever.  Google and the Internet never forgets.

What happens when my generation decides to start to run for office?  We’ve had Facebook, Twitter, blogs and personal websites since our teens.  It’s going to be really easy for people digging up dirt to find photos of us wasted or doing stupid things (more likely both at the same time.)  What about old status updates and non-mainstream political ideas?  Bad jokes we made to friends that can be taken out of context?  We’ve all got it and if you don’t you’re either incredibly private or really boring!  People will either disqualify presidential candidate with these “problems” or they will realize taht everyone has similar posts and decide that it’s just part of life.  I sure hope it’s the former or we’ll have some really boring people in office!

The other issue that’ll affect all of us, not just politicians, is that the Internet never forgets.  Before the internet, we could reinvent ourselves, change our opinions, do dumb things when we were young and nobody besides the people involved would know your past.  We could start fresh.  It’s part of what made us human.  Now our past is all out in the open for anyone to find. From blogs to twitter to tumblr and now the Facebook Timeline, anyone with enough time or curiosity can find exactly what I thought in 2005 via my Facebook Timeline, my political views in 2007 via my blog and dumb things I tweeted to my friends in 2009.

In the past, we could change our opinions when presented with new facts.  In fact, that’s the most admirable trait that I think someone can have.  Now, if you change your opinion, you’re branded a “flip-flopper” or you “don’t have strong convictions.”  I think that’s bullshit.

Eliminating the ability to change and reinvent ourselves is going to be a really big change for humans.  There’s no way to put a wild past, a flirtation with a non-mainstream ideology or simple youthful exuberance behind you.  There’s always a record.  I’m not suggesting that it’s good that people can lie about their past, but I don’t think its healthy to be able to get as specific as the internet allows you to.  And Santorum is  one of the first public figures to experience our new reality.