Twittangle - Great client to manage your tweets

Since a lot of people ask me why I'm on twitter so much and why I tweet so much, I thought I'd start by giving an intro to my twitter usage. I'm a big fan of social networking so when I heard about twitter, I at least wanted to give it a shot.

I started using twitter May of this month even though my account was created a few months before that. At first, I wasn't sure what to use it for. I didn't see the point of using another tool just to give updates on your life, I already use facebook for that. Also, I prefer facebook status updates because they only go to my friends, not the entire world and all interweb crawling tools (And hopefully facebook keeps it that way).

First thing I discovered while messing around with twitter was the news tweets. CNN, Globe And Mail, Reuters, BusinessWeek, et al, the media outlets I most frequent for my news were all there. And I instantly saw the opportunity to improve my personal productivity. Instead of having to go their individual websites and browse for interesting news, they would just tweet it real-time and I'd get to read news right away. It helped me stay on top of news. I was a happy man.

Desktop clients like tweetdeck and seesmic served my needs then well. I had one column for friends, on column for news, one for sports.

I then begun to explore further and saw an opportunity to stay on top of articles/blogs in areas I was interested in, not just the generic CNN, Globe And Mail news, but my specific personal interests such as Technology, Software, Clean Technology, Solar Energy, Canadian news, Entrepreneurship, Investing, and most recently, Smart Grid. I started following people who tweeted about those topics. Wefollow.com is a great way to find some of the top people in each area. I also began retweeting articles I found interesting, and in turn networked with people interested in the same areas I was. To me, this was a way to be the "first to know" about anything new in my areas of interest.

Two to three months later, my followers list and friends list grew beyond my ability to stay on top of tweets like I was able to earlier. And there are people with 1000 times the number of followers and friends I have. My tweetdeck and seesmic desktop clients would keep hitting 700MB in memory usage and eventually crash. This sucked because I'd miss on all the tweets since the last crash. For a while I actually went to just using www.twitter.com. Another pain point was managing my group list across multiple clients and multiple machines (home pc, work laptop, work pc).

This led me to the following realization:

1. I needed to clean up my friend's and follower's list. Having a targeted, closely-knit network would serve me better, in terms of the tweets I would be seeing on my feed.

2. The twitter client I use must be online so my I only need to work on grouping my friends once and I can access my twitter from any machine.

3. I needed a good view of all my different twitter friends groups. I could only create 10 groups using desktop clients such as tweetdeck and seesmic and the online version of seesmic didn't have a good user experience for multiple clients.

4. I wanted to be able to search my list quickly and find people. E.g. I have a question on Solar Panels, I want to be able to quickly find all my twitter friends who have expertise there.

5. I wanted to be able to differentiate how valuable certain twitter friends are to me from others. E.g. within a group of all my twitter friends who tweet about Clean Technology, some have better tweets and/or are more influential in the industry. Also, this is useful for doing #FollowFridays

I then spent 2 weeks just focusing on the above 5 points. I didn't tweet at all for 2 weeks. I tried countless twitter clients. I read many articles. I'm now at a point where I feel like I am done with all the above five and want to share my findings.

1. Cleaning up friend's and follower's list

Quantity isn't as important as quality when it comes to your twitter follower/friends list, especially when it becomes so hard to manage getting tweets from 500+ people. (And there are people following millions of people!). I went to my followers and friends list one by one and decided who I should follow and who I should block.

Also, I'm not a fan of auto following, auto replying, auto DM. In fact, I block people who do. I now spend 1-2 mins deciding whether I want to follow someone who is following me and do not shy from blocking worthless twitter accounts (like obvious internet marketing, or the fake accounts with photos of attractive women)

And for the remaining points I want to share how Twittangle meets my needs

2. Twitter client must be online

This is fairly obvious. Twittangle is online only. http://www.twittangle.com

3. Good view of my twitter friends groups.

It took me quite some time to figure how to group all my twitter contacts. In the end, I came up with this grouping. And as far as I can tell, twittangle has no restrictions; I can view them all at the same time

Also, the UI to scroll horizontally is really snippy. I like it a lot.

4. Searching my friends list

Since all my friends are divided into groups, it's easy for me to say, find all the contacts who tweet about or are from Toronto

5. Differentiating how valuable certain friends are

Twittangle allows you to specify how much you 'like' a twitter friend.

I’m not clear on how to use this though. I asked @twittangle but have not heard back. I’m guessing it’s a future feature.

Twittangle is still in beta but I've had no problems using it. I've filed three bugs on things I've noticed, and here's the feature list I would recommend:

1. Being able to do group conversations with your twitter friends. Kind of like facebook's wall to wall. That would allow you to remember all the tweets you have exchanged with a certain friend

2. Being able to search for friends in multiple groups. Currently I can see all my friends in a certain friends group. I want to be able to do a query which says "Find all my friends in group B and group C that have tweeted about wind energy"

3. Being able to search for key terms within my feed. Example, I want to search for all the tweets containing #mkt from people I am following. Often times you want to find an old tweet because it contained something you want to refer to.

When lessons learned make sense

A few weeks back I wrote a blog titled "Breadth vs. Depth" talking about the importance of having depth and how it helps you accomplish more.

I've been reading a book called "Predictably Irrational" By Dan Ariely talking about how we make irrational decisions. There's a couple of things he talked about which I could relate to, and other concepts were new to me.

I am normally not an impulsive buyer. I used to be but I came up with a 3 day rule. Basically, if I feel like buying anything over $50, I wait 3 days and if I still feel like buying it, I go ahead and get it. This helps me filter out 99% of impulsive decisions. Interestingly, Dan Ariely talked about a similar concept, called the "ice-glass method". The idea is to put your credit card in a glass of water and put that in the freezer. And whenever you impulsively decide to make a purchase, you must wait for the card to thaw and by then your compulsion to make the purchase dies away.

Secondly, he talked about an experiment with MIT students who were asked to play with a program that had three doors, one red, one blue, and one green. The participants could enter any of the rooms by clicking on the door and when in the room, each subsequent click would earn them a certain amount of money. However, moving from one room to another required a click and there were a total of 100 clicks. Furthermore, one of the doors would permanently close if not used for 12 clicks. In the end, Dan observed that most students tried to keep each door open, even though they were better of staying in one room and clicking as fast as they could. The parallel of this to life is how we like to keep our options open instead of just picking one option, staying with it, and accomplishing something. It was a good reconfirmation for me after having written my "Breadth vs. Depth" blog.

It also got me thinking about theory vs. practice. There are some things you learn from experience and they tend to stick with you for longer. Even though a lot of times you realize it took you months to learn something so simple like "Don’t make assumptions", the general sayings foolhardies repeat without really knowing what it means.


I want to get an MBA eventually. When I think about it, I begin to appreciate why it's recommended to wait a few years, get some solid life experiences and then do your MBA. Just like reading Dan Ariely's book made more sense after I had already had already learned some of the lessons in the book, and the remaining concepts that were new to me made much more sense, an MBA is similar. Also, if the book has 10 lessons and I am able to relate to 2 of them, the remaining 8 lessons will make much more sense. Similarly, an MBA will make more sense when I have accumulated enough interesting life experiences.

Breadth vs. Depth

I’ve been a breadth person for most of my life because my philosophy has always been to keep my options open. I am now learning to be a depth person.

In University I switched from Computer Engineering to Electrical Engineering just because I wanted my options open. Electrical Engineering would have allowed me to do either as I already had many programming courses and projects, even though I liked computer engineering more and that's where I ended up after school.

I started working at Microsoft 3 years ago when I was 21 and I have jumped technology areas 3 times in 3 years, not counting the smaller projects I’ve taken up on the side. During my first 2 years, I wanted to get into consulting. I’d get bored too quickly. 6-8 months of doing the same thing and I’d be itching to try something new, and I thought consulting was the answer. I’ve now realized it generally takes doing the same thing for much longer to accomplish something meaningful.

Observing and talking with many professionals at various stages in their careers, from Vice Presidents to entry level professionals, I’ve recently started to realize the importance of having depth. The importance of just picking a technology, industry, business, whatever, and just beating the shit out of it. Going at it for years and years and becoming the best in the world at it. Even successful serial entrepreneurs spend years in each of their businesses before cashing in and trying something else.

One of the areas I’ve put this into practice in the past year is in activities outside work. 2-3 years ago I was all over the place. I remember there would be weeks in which I’d work 70 hours, go to acting class once a week, boxing class 3 times a week, guitar lessons once a week, going out with friends 2-4 nights a week and golfing (I’m not used to sleeping much, thanks to the University of Toronto. And I mean that in a good way). Such a lifestyle meant I didn’t accomplish much in each of the areas. I never acted in small theatre, I never had an amateur boxing match, I never played at golf tournaments.

A year ago, I decided to cut my plethora of activities and just focus on guitar. I began to realize how much more passionate I was about guitar compared to everything else I was doing. And that decision paid off. I started playing guitar 10-20 hours a week. Sometimes I start at 10pm after I am done with work and keep playing till 3-4AM (I have headphones connected to my amplifier which is why I still have neighbours). My guitar skill level began to improve exponentially. In May, I performed live in a band at the Experience Music Project museum for a small audience of about 50 people. Within guitar-playing, I am passionate about lead guitar work. I was only doing simple lead guitar work for a couple of songs at EMP. Since then, my skill level has gone up even further. In November, I will be playing at a bar in Woodinville WA (Details still to be confirmed), and I will be the lead guitarist in all the songs and will be doing some Metallica solos.

So the point I am trying to make is that with the same amount of effort and energy, I’d get nowhere in 5 endeavors, or somewhere in one endeavor. And I’m now trying to figure how to apply this to my professional life.

However, for depth, you need passion. You need passion that will get you going late in the night on the most minute details, for YEARS. I’ve done that for months because I am a passionate person, but I find it hard to continue to work on the same technology for years. And I’ve realized I just haven’t found something I can work on for years and years without getting bored. I’m working to change that in the upcoming 6 months and hopefully will be blogging about it then.
Case in point, Bill Gates. He found that thing he could work on for years and years, at a very early age: operating systems. I also think the earlier you find that passion, the more likely you are to succeed. And by succeed, I mean financial and personal success.

Breadth on the other hand is good to have to augment your depth. Most successful executives and managers I see at Microsoft picked an area they were passionate about, beat the shit out of it by spending long hours for years and years which is what got them promoted to senior levels, and at the same time kept some level of breadth to know what’s going on in other areas. Anytime you talk to them about any industry, they will know at least something about it. An advice my former manager gave me was that anytime you read anything, think about how it affects what you are working on. So even if you are in technology, and reading about the stock market or business, (or even Us weekly :) ), think about how it affects you.

People with much more breadth than depth have very interesting experiences. For example, I’ve seen people who have done very unorthodox career switches. Some have been in the army for 10+ years before starting as entry level engineers at Microsoft. Such experiences mean they have so many stories to share, so many interesting life experiences to talk about. And they grow fast, but in most cases, a person who spends 20 years in industry will be at a level higher in his/her career than an identical person who spends 10 years in the army and 10 years in industry. At least in my observations.

In the end it comes down to what you want. An interesting life with many different experiences, finding and fulfilling smaller passions, or a much more accomplished life where you find your one big passion… and beat the shit out of it.

Blog Driven Reading

At the beginning of 2009, I set myself some goals for blogging and for reading, because I enjoy reading and writing. I've blown my reading target out of the water. My target for the year was 20 books and I completed that in 6 months. I feel like the sales executive that meets his annual quota in 6 months and then parties for the remainder of the year.

However, my blogging has been terrible. I'm logging on to my blog after a month. And looking at my blog makes me feel sick. My initial goal was to blog every 2 weeks. While browsing my blog folder on my computer, I saw many blogs that I started but couldn't complete doing the research needed to finish writing the blog. I've come to realize that blogging often requires more reading and research than I anticipated.

To solve this problem, I've come up with a new approach I am going to try starting next week. I've coined it "Blog Driving Reading". I'm going to let the blog topics I have in mind drive what I read versus going on amazon and ordering books I find interesting. This would allow all the time I spend reading to contribute to my blogging, and I'll get the best of both worlds.

It may already be working because I just blogged.

The basic elements of the Clean Tech Industry

The Clean Tech concept is not old. In fact, there were electric cars produced in the 1830s and the first wind mills are reported to have been built in the 9^th century. However, the combustion engine became the driver of innovation in the second industrial revolution due to convenience, efficiency, and price – oil was very cheap. In fact, many entrepreneurs have been trying to start clean tech companies for the past 40-50 years, but they did not get traction because oil seemed plentiful and cheap.

We based an entire revolution on those assumptions, and in the last 10 years, our assumptions have been challenged and, some would argue, broken. Oil is not cheap and abundant anymore. Here’s a graph from http://www.wtrg.com/prices.htm with historical oil prices.

The second factor is availability. When the second industrial revolution started, oil was abundant and easy to extract. Now we are seeing oil becoming more and more difficult to extract. Per square foot of land, oil provides more energy than solar or wind energy sources. I don’t think we’ll run out oil, we just won’t be able to extract it in a cost-effective way. There will be some ‘sustaining innovation’ in drilling technologies to help extract oil that is otherwise difficult and not feasible to extract. There are varying estimates, but the most widely accepted peak oil forecast is the year 2020.

The instability in the Middle East is another variable that affects this factor. I think much of the reason there’s so much investment in alternatives to oil is because of political reasons. Western countries want to remove their dependence on foreign oil because instability in the Middle East region makes it hard to plan and forecast oil prices and supply.

Conceptually, Clean Tech means using processes in nature to help us produce energy, without disrupting the earth’s natural processes. Since usage of oil emits CO2, nature is disrupted by more than natural emissions of CO2. Using solar or wind energy sources just use existing sources in nature to generate electricity.

We can break down the Clean Tech industry into the following areas

· Energy Generation: Using alternative sources to generate energy. This includes Solar, Wind, Tidal, Geothermal, etc...

· Energy Distribution: Enabling a new way to efficiently distribute energy in a network by upgrading existing power grids into smart grid

· Energy Storage: Innovating in new ways to store energy so houses

· Energy Services: Each industry has a ‘services’ industry which entails technical support, reselling, and distribution of the products in the clean tech industry

Next, I will blog about each area.