Thanks for Carrying Me Via Follow Fridays

Follow Friday is one of Twitter's best traditions. It's a very real way that one's twitter friends can carry them in times where they get sidetracked and don't have the time to twitter as much as they should.

One of my twitter mentors recently shared with me the very real fear that twitter is like talking to people with ADHD. You know exactly what is being referred to. If one disappears from twitter for too long, one simply ceases to exist. Everyone's stream marches on quite quickly. Someone who hasn't tweeted in the last couple of days will simply have no tweets show up in one's stream. If you have some busy lists like I do, that time frame reduces to hours. Maybe one tries to make up some lists of particular friends to hold on to their tweets a bit longer in the stream, but that is only a stopgap measure.

The one place one can hold on a bit longer is one's mention (@ message) column. Okay, for the true top tweeters who get tons of mentions even that doesn't work. However, that's a different problem. For an average person, even one who tries to be active on twitter, one generally can keep track of one's mentions.

That really helps when Follow Friday comes along. Even if you've had a bad week and you haven't had nearly the time to tweet things like you wanted, if you go to your mentions column after a Friday, you can see those who remembered you despite your absence. Those are some of your truest twitter friends. The time you take to thank them or RT them will be well rewarded.

In fact, this works particularly true for those who Follow Friday a list of names, at least for those who use a list of names to group people who are similar. Those people are like the core of one's friends group. They are the people who keep the group together.

Thus, if you find yourself on one of those Follow Friday lists, here is something simple you can do. Use an old-style retweet to forward the list, starting it with thanks (THX or TY) if there is space. Make sure you include the original senders name, and remove your own name. If you do that, you are remembering the person who started the trend to all of their friends for your retweet will show up in all their mentions column too.

Now, clearly this can get carried away. In fact many of the twitter elite got away from Follow Friday lists because they were getting out of hand.

Here are some rules of thumb to keep from turning Follow Friday into a problem.

1. Don't forwards lists from tweeps you don't know, especially not when the lists contains entirely tweeps you don't know. Spammers have been known to use that technique to build up followers.


2. Don't generate overly long Follow Friday lists yourself, especially not every week. If we all keep our lists down to those we truly respect and our friends with, they won't get carried away. If we try to use Follow Friday lists as a way of growing our own followers it won't work well.


3. Do consider following people on the lists you receive, especially if you already follow most of the people on the list and the list is from someone you respect. These are your potential new friends and the whole reason for Follow Friday in the first place.


4. Be particularly aware of the people who send the same (or roughly the same) list each week. These are the people who have identified you as part of a specific group. You can take that as a stronger recommendation of the other people on the list.


5. If you are preparing your own Follow Friday tweets, mix them up a little, especially if you do more than one. Put different tweeters together on different weeks. Add a new friend you've found to the list. That will help your friends see the larger circle they are within and keep their circles gorwing.

To close, I'd like to mention some tweeps who've done a particularly good job of keeping the Follow Friday spirit alive. These friends have helped me through many a rough week and introduced me to other tweeters I would not have met otherwise.
@CyberSafeFamily
@FortaliceLLC
@MaryKayHoal
@MomsMaterial
@RonaldTi
@rootnl2k
@SaferDates
@SpectrumPestInc
@Strykerdlh
@SueScheff
@TalkToanIT
@techranter
@TheTeenDoc
@2morrowknight
@TrimuphCISO

Some of My Twitter Mentors

Even without having twittered long enough to be an accomplished tweeter, it is still worth paying homage to those who've brought me this far. These are the people who taught me how to tweet. In particular, these are people that I specifically chose to emulate or learn something about tweeting from. There are, of course, lots of others, I respect on twitter, but these, in particular, had a specific impact on how and what I tweet about.

My initial thanks go to @ShebaJo for bringing this idea to my attention. If you want someone to pick you up with a laugh or a great song, she is a go-to woman. In fact, if she hadn't cajoled me into blipping, I wouldn't have done that either, would have just happily listened to others music. She also knows more about photography that I want to imagine it is possible to know.

Next, I think I should honor the people who got me started. First, Jessica Lortli, who appears not be on twitter any longer. In any event, she ran the brown-bag event that introduced the idea of having twittering and blogging for Intel as something one didn't not need to be a PR or marketing person to do. Having been a Usenet news poster, long before people thought is was Google groups, I happily jumped at the chance.

The next mentor has to be @dmadey, who was the Voce person assigned to teach me the ropes. I cannot give him enough credit for getting me going in the right direction. I still have some lessons from him on blogging that I'm trying to incorporate.

I also want to mention my fellow "Embassadors" @geek8ive, @intel_jim, @intel_rhonda, and @intel_stewart who've always been a great source of mutual support. Many of the other people on this list, I met by raiding my fellow embassadors following list.

@geekgirls was my next mentor with her blog entry on tweeps as real friends. I've used this as my guide for how I want to deal with my fellow tweeps. Really inspiring for me was how @dracona1031 stepped up and demonstrated what being a friend on twitter was about in the next week. Nothing like an excellent example to drive a point home.

The next four twitter mentors I met at approximately the same time. I'm not really certain who I met first. They were all instrumental in my development.

@mistygirlph was my next mentor and she lead me to the entire @bitrebels team and blog. The personal touch they use is an absolute inspiration. @adamsconsulting could easily have been my intro to this wonderful team, but I met Mindy first.

@terrinakamura became one of my mentors about the same time. She is my gold standard for what it means to be a twitter all-star. The fact that she also introduced me to more than a few of my other favorite twitterers, such as @lindacriddle, @krystynchong, and @nonglin does not hurt either.

@lanny_S is another mentor I met at the same time. She was influential in my learning that one could truly mix different styles of tweets successfully. Her tweets cover a variety of topics, including ones on security that I would otherwise miss. On top of that, she displays true class.

@nurul54 was instantly recognizable to me as someone I wanted as a mentor. She certainly came through. In particular, when I reached a point of frustration about not being able to keep up with all the people I was following, she since gave me the insight that it was okay. I depend on her for deep and abiding insights. She regularly delivers. Everyone should have a mentor that enriches their soul.

@rickasaurus is my mentor on tweeting about programming topics. He is always on top of interesting articles and comments.

@nigelfenwick is great example of someone who does an important job but does not let it go to his head. He has a great sense of humor and doesn't talk down to people.

@fortaliceLLC is representative of the whole online-safety community I associate with. She is a most capable choice to select though, displaying dedication and tenacity. She has certain inspired me to stick-with-it and keep trying to help keep people vigilant about the topic. As I mentioned in the post about the community, they have impacted not only how I tweet, but who I am.

As I mentioned at the outset, these are tweeps who have specifically influenced what and how I tweet.

There is a whole list of other people who I respect on twitter and like what they tweet. You can tell that by looking at the lists I keep. Each list represents a column in tweetdeck. And, while I RT mostly the people in my security-all and security-2 lists because that's my area of work, I could easily fill my stream by RTing just things I like from any one of my lists.

You can easily see that by watching the people who I RT regularly with the sad part being that I can't keep up with the number of great things to tweet that come in and so there are more than is visible. As they say, you can see only the tip-of-the-iceberg.

I love the #140char community, exemplified by @teksquisite, @technobozo, @mikerigsby, and @strikerdlh.

I also love the people who work regularly on security either as researchers or vendors, such as @vikphtak and @FSecure.

Also the journalists that translate our complex field into something more accessible, like @HelpNetSecurity, @RWW, and @DarkReading.

The law is another source of tweeps I enjoy like @clarinette02, @rcalo, and @econwriter5.

As a programmer, I also have specific technical people who I find interesting like @redzor and @tehlike.

Finally, there are just people who I admire and respect personally such as @modelsupplies and @mllyssa. I'd love to tweet more of their material, but I just can't keep up. :-(

I just want to go on listing people who I really enjoy following, but at some point one must stop.

Online Safety List

Disclaimer: As always, remember that these lists are only my personal opinions as to people who seem to be tweeting about the topic mentioned and don't reflect Intel's endorsement in any way.

The online safety list is the clique primarily responsible for making me a better person on twitter. These are the people was are activists on twitter attempting to get people to understand the security and privacy risks of online behavior both for themselves and for their children.

If you follow these people you will get:

1. specific advice on various internet activities,
   
2. what risks they may expose you to,
3. things to do to mitigate those risks,
   
4. and support for doing the right thing.

Typical topics include:

1. phishing and spam attacks
2. cyberbullying
3. sexting
4. oversharing
   

Of course, not everyone on this list tweets about the above topics all the time, but many of them have it as their primary focus. Like many clique's we often "Follow Friday" each other. Since even just checking out the recommendations I receive on Fridays doesn't fit in that one day, I decided to make this list up of these friends. (It has only taken me two months to actually get this to the point that I'm ready to share it, despite being on the top of my to-do list each weekend in that time period.)

Note that this list is not a one-time thing. I will add to it as more people are recommended to me. This list also doesn't even include eveyone talking about online safety. In particular, there are some very good advice givers that aren't advocates in the traditional sense and who aren't included on the list. Some of the commercial anti-virus vendors have very good advice sections, but they aren't on this list at its inception. I'll take suggestions on whether that should change.

I also have two other related lists:

1. security-all is a list of the people who tweet about online security (more generally, not just advocates)
   
2. parenting is a list of the people who tweet about parenting issues
   

All of these lists are simply those that I have found and am following so far.

I always take recommendations, just tweet me @intel_chris.

Has Twitter Made You A Better Person?

That's a fairly simple question. Has twitter changed you? And, if so, how? Has it improved your life? But, most importantly, has it improved you?

While people on the outside may scoff, most people who have twittered for more than a few months have made friends on twitter. Many of them are the casual acquaintance type friends, but some are deeper. There is good reason for that. Twitter relationships are inherently based upon respect and admiration, which is a pretty healthy basis for friendship. More important this is the kind of friendship that encourages personal growth.

How does this happen and why? Well, if one looks at how one interacts on twitter it becomes clear. How does one start interacting with another twitter user? It usually begins with something one of the users tweets: an opinion, a news item, a quote, a joke. That strikes a chord, sometimes dissonant, and prompts a follow-up tweet by the other tweeter. If the two are in agreement, then the relationship tends to develop and they get in the habit of retweeting (RTg) each others tweets. And there you have it, you RT a person, because you like what they say and how they say it. That's a relationship built on respect and admiration.

There's another interesting side-effect to this. If you are developing friendships with people you respect, you are emphasizing those own qualities in your life. You are naturally causing yourself to grow to be more the kind of person you respect. Moreover, as you interact more with those you respect, they are even liable to bring out latent tendencies within you that respect your loftier ambitions.

To make this concrete, let me illustrate with a way that my new found friends on twitter have brought positive changes in my own character.

When starting on twitter under a year ago, my anticipation was that I would find links to interesting computer ideas and facts with references to projects in compilers and security that might contain interesting ideas, just as surfing Google and comp.compilers had done for years before. My expectation was that I would also find lots of neophytes who needed help to aid with my experience.

And while I found some of that, what was really on twitter was something different. Yes, there are people on twitter discussing technical matters and using twitter as a tool for learning has not been difficult. However, much of the conversation on twitter has been at a different level, a more human level, a more compassionate and caring level. The surprising thing on twitter was the level of advocacy.

The change in behavior was gradual. At first my tweets were about where to find vulnerability databases and similar dry matters. However, that led to tweeting about potential threats, which led to tweeting about how to protect oneself. And suddenly, et viola, I had started to become an advocate, advising people to take caution, to watch for phishing threats, to change their passwords regularly, and to protect their children. It wasn't a big jump from there to be discussing online privacy, sexting, cyberbullying, and other things which were security related but not within my narrow technical scope.

All of this process was encouraged by those I met on twitter. At first the people were ones who lead me out of simply technical matters to the general threat landscape. However, from there I encountered real advocates. Ones not arguing just for better technical solutions, but for people to actually change their behaviors. To be more cautious, more aware, more responsible, more involved in their children's lives. This widening circle of friends has taken me out of my narrow comfort zone and given me more perspective. (There is a famous quote in German about viewpoints, saying that some people take a circle of radius zero and call it their horizon. My friends on twitter have forced me to widen that radius to encompass more.)

Now, obviously in this process, I hope I haven't gone too far. Intel has prohibitions about us ambassadors (yes, that's what they call us) tweeting about controversial politics and religion. Those generally sit fine with me as I am not comfortable discussing such topics openly anyway. Plus, I would rather not have to decide what is controversial and so general avoidance of politics and religion is a simpler rule. Not that I avoid all references. I certainly won't avoid a quote by a religious or political figure if I like the message.

Still, in general, you will find my tweets to be mostly about things you (as an individual) can do. ways you can make positive changes, rather than changes in the legal or social system. I will pass on information from people who do want to make such changes, but that is for your awareness, to enable you to decide whether you want to support the change or not.

So, how has twitter made me a better person? It has brought out a latent side for encouraging people to "do the right thing". Hopefully, without making me a partisan, taking only a one-sided view. A certain level of advocacy feels good. It does make me feel like a better person. And, I owe this to the friends I have met on twitter. This happened thanks to them. Thanks to you.

Sincerity, FFs, RTs, and Cliques

Disclaimer: Intel prefers that I am upfront about the fact that I tweet and blog at their leisure, but do not do so on their behalf. These opinions are purely my own.

Recently a new friend of mine was bothered by the lack of authenticity of twitter, exemplified by self-promotion, boasting, and behaving disingenuously. It seems fair to include insincerity in that list.

Now for the relevant quote:

(George Burns) Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

To a certain extent one has to agree, there are certain things on twitter that magnify our human tendencies to be not completely candid and to exaggerate our successes (or even fake them). This is particularly true when one is involved in "social media" and is attempting to establish a reputation.

One of the things that increases that tendency is a modern proclivity to attach metrics and measure everything. You certainly have seen some of the sites:
klout, twiteralyzer, twitter analyzer, retweet rank, and tunk rank. Those are just a few of the places we can indulge our obsession to be measured, graded, and ranked. They are ubiquitous.

They all measure valid things and generally provide useful information. However, every one of these metrics can be manipulated. That can be intentional or unintentional. Some of that actually brings about positive change in people's behavior. Other times, it encourages them to "game" the system.

Let's look at a couple of my favorite activities on twitter and see how this measurement affects them. The two things to look at are RTs and FFs.

As most of you know, RTs (or retweets) are times when one twitter reads another and sees that a tweet is worth repeating (or sometimes requires correcting or responding to). The reader then copies the tweet into their stream and adds RT and the copied from twitter's name. If the information is particularly valuable or interesting, another twitter may RT the already RTd tweet. Sometimes, there can be chains of 4 or 5 RTers attached to a tweet.

This has become a major source of information sharing on twitter and the reason twitter is so interesting for those involved in "social media". It combines the legitimacy of word-of-mouth with global reach. The much RTd saying is "On Twitter, Love is spelled RT." To be perfectly candid, if there were no RT, I would not be on twitter. The use of RT as an information sharing tool is what justifies my time on twitter.

FF (or Follow Friday) is another important twitter tradition, as most of you are also aware. This is twitter's way of giving shout-outs to the people who inspire you. It's also a good way of introducing your twitter followers to other people you think they might like to read. It can also be a way of expressing thanks. If someone does something nice for you on twitter (for example RTs you), you can easily thank them back by putting them on your FF list.

Used in moderation, both of these are very nice traditions and add to twitters sense of community. They also tend to cause the formation of cliques on twitter. There is a natural tendency to RT those who RT you back, or at least those who send you a thank you tweet or put you on a FF list. The same goes for FF list. If someone is "in your circle" you are likely to include them in your FF list and they include you in theirs. One simple way of doing this is to RT their Follow Friday list when they send it out. Both of these things tend to strengthen the bonds of people who tweet similar things to each other, that is to form them into a clique.

Strengthened bonds are generally a good thing. Forming a community is a good thing. Being in a clique is even a good thing, despite the negative connotations sometimes attached to it.

However, the key is moderation.

For example, I found a clique of users who RT everyone who RTs one of their members. That's generally nice behavior.

However, it is also a temptation to "game" the system. A common important measurement is how much one is RTd. To improve ones stature, getting RTd is important. But to the unscrupulous this clique gives an easy way of escalating that number, simply RT one of their members posts and you will be RTd.

Now from the perspective of the group, they have accomplished their goal, they have promoted their members--so for them it is not bad. Moreover, if you actually wanted to RT the content, the boost to your score is simply an added perk.

However, be certain you are participating in that clique for the right reasons--that you really want to be promoting their message and not just getting your RT count up. Remember that if you cheat the measurements, the measurements are simply a reflection of your cheating.

So, be sincere, because if you fake that, you may have it made, but what you will have made will be fake.

Some Smart Women in Tech I Knew In Real Life

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day I tweeted props to smart women in tech I had met via twitter. Because I limited the list to only people active in tech, and not science in general, and also not those who were tech savvy but did something else, I was surprised that the list was small. I was certain I had known far more in real life, and it was a bigger percentage of the people I knew in real life.

Thus, I have set out to give some props to the women who I knew in tech that I knew outside of twitter. Again, I am going to restrict myself to women who were directly involved in some sort of computer technology. I'm also going to restrict myself to ten that particularly impressed me.

The order will be roughly chronological in my meeting them.

Paula Hultgren was a software consultant before joining HP where she worked on non-stop (fault tolerant) computers.

Judy Bamberger helped develop and teach the capacity maturity model.

Julie Lancaster developed compiler optimizers at Softech.

Debra Minard developed the debugger at Pr1me Computer before moving on to being an early developer at Rational/Clearcase.

Barbara Zino developed compilers at Pr1me before she was the co-author of Yacc++.

Wendy E. Brown was an early networking developer at Compuserve.

Sue Yeghiayan led the Unix compiler group for Digital before being an early developer at SavaJe.

I-Yu Chen ran compiler groups for Pr1me and Intel.

Ada Gavriloskva does closely-coupled networking research at GA Tech.

Michela Becchi did research on regular expressions and network security at Intel.

Follow Friday Follow Up

It's late, so I'm hoping this comes out coherent....

I have 4 things I want to add to my Follow Friday list this week.

First of all, I want to welcome @dracona1031 back to twitter after too long an absence. When I was first getting used to twitter, I read an article on twitter friends by Kristen of @geekgirls network, who I've spoken of before. The article touched my heart with the thought that these ephemeral relationships on twitter could actually have the seeds of friendship. More importantly, within about a week @dracona1031 showed that it wasn't only possible, but demonstrated how it was done.

And, while I'm on the topic of people who inspire me to be a better person, I need to acknowledge the online safety advocates like @BethanTuttle, @BurgessCT, @CrisClapp, @CyberSafeFamily, @FortalliceLLC, @GoogleBombBook, @LindaCriddle, @marykayhoal, @pranheim, @safeworld4women, @stopsignblog, @SueSheff. (And my apologies to anyone who I should have remembered from that list--this is why I need a twitter sub-list of my different groups within the security world.) These are the ones who remind us that we need to protect our loved one on the internet.

While I'm on the topic of twitter lists, I want to thank @Eva_Smith who put me on her list for innovative developers, whose title thrills me every time I recall it.

And, the final thing I want to mention this Friday is I love the way @terrinakamura is doing her #FFs to music. That is simply inspired.

(Tomorrow, I promise to make the things which should be links work. Now, I sleep.)

A New Years Follow Friday

Follow Friday is one of my favorite twitter concepts. However, when you are following more than 200 people, it begins to get unwieldy to track ones favorites, at 500 it gets hard to track even the new favorites. On my seemingly infinitely long to-do list, I have this plan to make up some public twitter lists that classifies the people I follow into groups so I can recommend them that way. I have started, and while I am not happy enough with the results. I am making a few of my lists public. In the meantime, I though I would write a posting about different people I admire on twitter, who tweet in ways I don't or can't. This isn't all my favorite tweeps, just some representative ones.

And, that gets to the next part of my introduction to this post, like many of you, I'm busy with things other than twitter a lot of the time. The time I take for twitter has to come from somewhere and I can't always find it. Especially, when, like now, I am behind at work.

The only good side of that is that I work for Intel on developing internet security products that can go into Intel's chips. As part of my job, I became an "ambassador" which is a program in Intel to let those of us who are interested write blogs and tweets and share our expertise. That's how I can justify writing this. And, as always, this is simply my opinions and not something blessed by Intel.

Intel is quite good about the program in that they don't tell us what to write about (although they do give us little prepackaged tweets that cover topics Intel wants people to hear about, but we can send them or not at our discretion and even change them to match our voice) and are more concerned about things we shouldn't write about (like giving out insider information that could impact the company or pre-announcing something before the normal marketing or legal folks are ready for it to be announced). For a person like me, who is in a narrow niche, and doesn't have a marketing role, that means I don't have a lot of pressure to write about specific things. Therein lies my first recommendation. If you want more and better Intel specific info, the @IntelEmbedded/intel-embedded-ambassador list has tweeps qualified in areas I know nothing about.

Thus, in 2009, I've been finding my twitter voice, and learning who am I am who I am not. That brings me back to the topic of this blog entry, a pointer to some people who I admire, but who tweet or blog in ways I cannot do.

When I first got onto twitter I figured I could use it to get headlines from my favorite news sources, like Scientific American, and The Register. Sure enough they are there. You will still find me RTing @ElReg and because it covers topics in my specific niche, things I figure people might not know about otherwise. I also found some new sources that I didn't know before like ReadWriteWeb (@RWW), @DarkReading, and @HelpNetSecurity.

Not on that list are some of the "big names" in twitter. I figure most people can find CNN, Mashable, and Guy Kawasaki on their own. Moreover, RTg them, except when its on a specifically interesting topic to me, is simply adding "noise".

That gets back to one of the things I am not. I don't tweet a lot of general interest info, not even a lot of "twitter" interest info. In fact, not even a lot of "scientific" or "computer" interest info. Mostly you will find me tweeting about online computer security. (Or if you happen to follow me and some of my friends, occassionally engaged in the luxury of a brief conversation.)

I do have some favorite sources outside of my narrow topics, such as the folks at Bit Rebels (@adamsconsulting, @mistygirlph, @clementyeung to name a few). I also follow @Lanny_S, @terrinakamura, @bkmacdaddy, and @flipbooks for high quality general interest links. I also find the women at Geek Girls Network site (like @GeekGirls and @ArkhamAsylumDoc) interesting to read. If you want to know who I read just for interest, you can look at the list @intel_chris/personal. These are the tweeps I read just because I like what they say (or how they say it). It also includes people who I'm curious as to whether I will like.

But mainly, as I said, I talk about computer security, privacy, and related topics like cyberbullying. From that I draw my main list @intel_chris/security-all. This list has almost everyone that has tweeted about security or privacy issues. It's also my "main" tweetdeck column, the first thing I scan when I want to know what I should be retweeting. I have started sub-dividing this list into smaller lists, but that project will take time, and this is the list I actually follow, so it is better in that regard.

The last list that corresponds to a tweetdeck column is my programming list, @intel_chris/programming. As you might guess, these are people who I discuss programming issues with.