Adam-Jackson

I’ve been lacking on a few things lately. One of those is parties. I haven’t attended tech events as much as I was. I’m not tired of parties. In fact, I totally love parties, tech events, happy hours and mixers. I miss everyone but I’ve been pretty busy. The other thing is that I wanted to blog every day but that hasn’t happened much easier but quality of quantity is a good excuse for that. I like writing things out as to what I’m currently working on so I figured I would write out what I’m currently working on for you all see.

• Yoono: helping them with the community, evangelizing their product and lately I’ve been helping them plan events such as Twiistup and SXSW.
• Twitter Book: Dom and I have multiple publishers lined up and we’re taking things 1 chapter at a time while also trying to develop an iPhone app.
• Social Media Consulting: I have 1 client and 3 more prospects. I’m hoping I can do some short term work for these companies in the near future.
• AdamsBlock: I’m helping the new owner with AdamsBlock. I’m not officially involved on a pay basis but I’m helping this guy out part time.
• Teens in Tech: I’m “technically” the President of Teens in Tech right now in place for Daniel Brusilovsky while he focuses on school.
• Agent: I just signed on with a talent agent to help me secure more speaking engagements and assist in the Twitter book things.
• Project Homeless Connect: Working with my friend Katrina on some homeless outreach activities and trying to get some social media coverage for the work we’re doing in order to get more volunteers.
• Super Secret Stuff: This is the stuff that I’m publicly involved in but there’s 3 more secret things that I’m working on.

I wanted to apologize to everyone involved with the things that I listed above. You’ve all seen 15% of Adam for the past 2 months. I want to give you all 100% but I’m doing a few things at once. This explains my 3 days a week of not sleeping and working 18 hour days. I’m in love with everything that I do and you wouldn’t believe that only 1 of these things actually pays at the moment. I’m cultivating a lot of fun projects that might make money one day. I’m working on tax returns tonight and coming to the realization that I made almost no money last year. Let’s hope 2009 is a better year and some of these projects come to a reality.

My hometown isn’t small but isn’t big either. My county has about 100K people living in a 60 square mile area whereas my current town, San Francisco with a 7 square mile land size, has nearly 1 million people. My hometown was small but we had a Wal*Mart, McDonalds and a few mechanics. It had everything that you would need in a “small town”.

I graduated high school in 2004 from Pedro Menendez and I was lucky because 400 of us were the first class of students who had attended the school for 4 years. The school opened in the year 2000 and that’s when I started my freshmen year. There’s a site that has been setup for high school alumni and there was a poll that asked, ” Which of the following is most important to you?” I was very surprised at the results.

Naturally, I answered “career” because as a 22 year old who has moved across country to pursue a life in social media, speaking and writing, that’s my primary focus and I feel that by 22, most kids are out of college and should be focused on their career because that’s just how it should be at least that’s how I think about things.

Instead the findings totally surprised me. It turns out in the town of Saint Augustine, Florida, nearly 60% of my pupils are now thinking about marriage, others are thinking about friends and then there’s a tie between school and career followed shortly by sleep.

Seriously? I’m not surprised because nearly all of my high school friends are still using Myspace and every one of their profile photos are pictures of babies and pickup trucks and a large number of them are just getting out of college or still have a fast food restaurant listed as their employer. Sometimes I get a little down or frustrated when I realize that I haven’t “made it” yet but I need to remember that I’m only 22 and compared to many of my peers from high school, my lifestyle is the exception and not the rule.

I’ll be on a news spot next week and they’re filming it today here in San Francisco. I was curious because they needed a social media expert in Facebook and Twitter. So what kind of questions do they ask an “expert”?

1. Why do people use Facebook?
2. What should people use Facebook for?
3. What shouldn’t people use Facebook for?
4. What kinds of things should you post on your page?
5. What kinds of things shouldn’t you post on your page?
6. What is the etiquette in contacting people you don’t know through someone’s page that you do know. For example: I’m friends with Jack who is friends with Tom, but I don’t know Tom, however, I have access to him through Jack’s page, can I contact Tom?
7. Also in the above example what is the etiquette in asking Tom out on a date?
8. How revealing should you be about yourself, again I may not necessarily know if Tom is married for example.
9. There are privacy blocks on Facebook, should you use them and in what way?
10. What are the biggest things people should keep in mind with social networking sites?
11. What are the biggest no-no’s on sites like this? (whether it’s posting things or replying to things, etc..)
12. What kinds of things do people NOT really need to know about you? (like oh i just used the bathroom.. or something like that)
13. Should you have separate pages for personal and work?
14. Anything else you would like to add?

I’ve been reading how Apple is now asking users of iWork ’09 to save their documents as ’08 versions because if you don’t, someone who is using ’06 or ’08 versions of Pages, Keynote or Numbers won’t be able to open those files. AppleInsider calls it a bug and others say it’s not an issue. Some people state this:

What’s the problem? I see this as a non-issue. Why is it news worthy that a previous version of some software can’t open files from the new version? Now, if you saved in `08 format from within `09 and `08 couldn’t open the files, that’d be interesting. But this is a complete non-story.

Well they are missing the point. Apple has chosen to create incompatibilities between their software in a suite that is only it its 3rd revision. I understand Keynote has been out since 2003 but Pages and Numbers are both from 2005-2007 era and are very new software versions. iWork itself wasn’t a package until 2006 and Apple had so little faith in the suite that AppleWorks continued to sit on shelves at Apple Stores until 2007. Now that we’re all up to date on history, I’d like to say that most people bought iWork in its second revision which was in 2007-2008. Now Apple is asking those users to upgrade it iWork ’09 for $79. That’s a steal compared to Microsoft Office but they’re saying that you must down save your files for compatibility for anyone not using iWork ’09 which is a real issue when you’re collaborating with people over email. Another thing that Apple is missing is that how do I know if they even have a version of Pages on their computer or if it’s even a Macintosh to begin with?

Let me get this straight; I type out a document in Pages ’09, then save it, down save a copy in Pages ’08 and export a version in Microsoft Word format as well. I zip all of that up and send it to my colleague. You have got to be kidding me. I would rather spend $149 for Microsoft Office 2008, rest assured that they won’t be updating their suite for at least 3 years, have full compatibility with Mac and PC users with a simple save command and have twice as much functionality in the software. Sure the ease of use in iWork ’09 is tremendous and there’s that whole iWork.com feature (which will cost you money once it’s out of beta) but Microsoft has spent 20 years perfecting Office and they have 60-80% more market share.

Apple, you fucked up. You lost me on the iWork suite. Your latest version is easy to use but saving in Word, PDF, ’08 and ’09 versions is ridiculous. Incompatibilities, forcing me to upgrade every single year and charging me (a MobileMe) customer to put things on iWork.com is another stupid idea.

Some people may state that Microsoft in its latest version of Office just implemented totally new file types for all of their apps and you need a converter to open those files in the previous versions! That’s true but Microsoft has been using .doc, .xls and .ppt for at least the past 12 years. Microsoft also has preferences in each application that allow you to make the default file type the new or old format. If I’m the only Office ’08 user in an office of Office 2000-2004 users (Mac or Windows), it’s in my best interest to simply set my default to .doc so now I don’t have to worry about compatibility with any other user but Apple doesn’t allow you to setup iWork ’08 as your default file save option. Microsoft made the transition very easy and they didn’t change until they were the leading suite of office applications and they even made the file extension different. Apple still uses .pages for all of their extensions so I won’t know if it’s a Pages ’08 or ’09 until I’m greeted with a comforting, “your version of Pages is incompatible.”

In short, Microsoft wins on pricing, functionality, widespread use, common file extensions and the transition to a new file format. Apple asks us to pay $79 each year, changes compatibility without warning or extension change, charges us to put things on the cloud and with their small iWork market share, they’re really pissing people off very early on in the game. Oh and one more thing, Apple add a freaking set of key commands so I can export to Word, PDF or RTF with one keystroke. I’m tired of going to the “share” menu and then “export” and then “Word Document” Make it freaking easy already to save Word Documents and PDFs!

UPDATE: The Apple Blog posted a great update to how Apple is handling iWork ’09 files. Of course, I support the change they made I still feel that the transition could have been a bit more seamless for users by providing an update to iWork ’08 or a conversion tool instead of leaving ’08 users out in the cold.

I’ve been holding off from posting this for a while. It’s actually going to be a section in my book that is nearing completion but I think it’s time to say something because I’m coming off as a complete ass. I can understand how some people are bothered by me not following them especially when I reply to every reply as a direct message. For those who don’t know, you can’t send a direct message (DM) to anyone unless they are following you. I like it that way because it really eliminates spam. I’m sure I would be getting a crap load of spam if anyone could DM me and people would start gaming the system with auto-DMs so let’s keep it the way it is for now.

So what’s the big deal with me not following people? Well, I have nearly 2,400 followers now. It’s not many compared to others but I only follow about 550 people. Those are 550 people that are influencers in my industry, companies that I love or people that I’ve met in person and have real friendships with. 500 seems like a whole lot of people but it’s not really. Would you believe that I’m not following Zappos, Robert Scoble or Gary Vaynerchuk. Those are 3 guys that everyone follows, right? Well they send way too many replies and it clogs up my stream.

To be honest, I unfollow about 50 people a week and block about 2 people a day. I’m very serious about who I’m following and not following. If I see a hint that someone is being a complete ass to someone else or is supporting things that I don’t agree with I’ll block them. If someone is sending replies any more than 1 out of 4 of their tweets then I unfollow. I should be able to look at the twitter stream of my friends and see real information, something informative, educational, inspiring and real. Replies, chat rooms, spamming and angry messages I don’t have time for. If I’m not growing and learning from you, you’re unfollowed.

So now that you know how I do things on Twitter, I’d like to explain why I didn’t follow the two guys who asked me today “why aren’t you following me?” Well I looked at your page, and you both reply to too many people. I’m sure you’re great, smart and inspirational guys but your Twitter stream is equivalent of a 7th grade social butterfly and that’s why I didn’t follow you.

So why the hell do I DM everyone? Because I love showing people that I absolutely read every single mention of @adamjackson or “adam jackson”. I see all of them and even if you’re talking about me, to me or retweeting what I say, I quickly send a DM to you saying, “hey thanks for the retweet” or I’ll reply to a quesetion that you have. What I won’t do is start following you unless I see a value in following you based on my personal made up Twitter algorithm for people worth following. Does that piss people off? Sure it does and it forces them to publicly @reply to me in response to my DM but that’s the best way to use the system at this time.

A plan that I have is to create an account @adamDM that auto-follows everyone that mentions @adamjackson or “adam jackson” and that way I can DM those people from that account and they are able to DM me back but that account doesn’t ever tweet or do anything else and is simply a way to communicate with people over DM without any limtations. Ideally, I would like it if Twitter was smart enough where when I DM someone, it gives them a 5 minute – 1 hour grace period where they can DM me back without my following them. Until that happens, this is the system I must work with.

Apologies all around for not following every single one of you. For the record, I receive nearly 100 replies a day and 80% of those are from people I’m not following. It’s unfortunate but that’s how I must do things and I apologize. It’s nothing personal.

Last week, I was invited along with a few other bloggers for a national AMC theatres promotion where they show all five films that are nominated for The Oscars’ 2009 Best Picture award. I’m excited to be joining bloggers from all over the US to take part in this. With the help of AMC, I’ll be blogging throughout the day, sending photos to Flickr, blog posts to this blog and posts to Facebook and Twitter.

In San Francisco, I’m joined by the following bloggers:

• Krystyl (@krystyl)
• Brittany (@brit)
• Giannii (@Giannii)
• Brock Kneeling (SFist)
• Dave Morin (@davemorin)

This day long showcase of the 5 Oscar nominees takes place in Los Angeles, Toronto, Denver, Atlanta, Toronto and St. Louis among other cities. The price for a ticket is only $30. Here’s the press release and schedule.

ALL OSCAR®, ALL DAY LONG:   AMC ENTERTAINMENT® PRESENTS A SINGLE-DAY SHOWING OF ALL FIVE “BEST  PICTURE”  FILMS
Tickets On Sale Jan. 30; New  Discount for AMC  MovieWatcher Members
Kansas City, Mo. (Jan. 30, 2009) – AMC Entertainment Inc.  (AMC),  one of the world’s largest and most innovative theatrical exhibition   companies, is proud to offer guests the rare opportunity to experience  all  five motion pictures nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture  Arts and  Sciences for “Best Picture,” on one special day.
On  Saturday, Feb. 21, the  AMC Best Picture ShowcaseSM will take  place at approximately 97 AMC  theatres in 42 North American markets*  (check local listings for availability  and show times). Guests can  purchase an exclusive AMC Best Picture Showcase  All-Day Pass for only  $30, or just $25 for AMC MovieWatcher® members.  Moviegoers will have  the chance to see all five Oscar®-nominated “Best  Picture” films and  will also receive a large popcorn with unlimited refills  for the  entire day. This offer is valued at more than $50 and marks the third   year of this exclusive event.
The Oscar® “Best Picture” nominees,  “Milk,”  “The Reader,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Slumdog  Millionaire” and  “Frost/Nixon,” will play in one dedicated auditorium  back-to-back throughout  the day. Upon arrival to the theatre, guests  will receive a souvenir lanyard,  which will feature artwork from the  five nominated films and give guests the  freedom to come and go  throughout the event as they please.
Guests can  locate a theatre  hosting AMC Best Picture Showcase in their area by visiting   www.amctheatres.com. Advance ticket sales will be available by noon  C.S.T. on  Friday, Jan. 30, on a first-come, first-served basis online  at  www.amctheatres.com <http://www.amctheatres.com/>    or by visiting the box office or Guest Services area at any  theatre  hosting the AMC Best Picture Showcase.
AMC Best  Picture Showcase  schedule (all times local; schedule is the  same  nationwide):

Schedule

Milk, 10:30am –12:50 pm
The Reader, 1:05 – 3:19 pm
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 3:45-6:43pm
Slumdog Millionaire, 7:15 – 9:27 pm
Frost/Nixon, 9:45 – 11:59 pm

Not bad for $30. I know it’s a long day but the pass means you can come and go all day if you want to skip out to grab lunch. I’ll be there all day because all of these films are amazing. If you want to join up with me and other bloggers in San Francisco or nationwide, CLICK HERE to buy your tickets. I’m super excited and hope you all will tune in the day of. Here are the places I’ll be doing live coverage.

• This Blog
• My Twitter
• My Flickr
• My FriendFeed
• AMCBPS Flickr Group
• #AMCBPS ON TWITTER

The official Hashtag for this event is #AMCBPS

I’m the worst when it comes to research, organizing information and putting it in quotes for you all to digest. That kind of work is what true jounalism and high paid bloggers are for. No I’m just going to be one guy talking out his ass about FaceBook’s news today. Retweetist shows today’s top retweeted URLs and FaceBook’s TOS news hogs it all. Even Twitter Trends are showing Facebook, TOS and other things at the top. It’s interesting because I didn’t even notice all of this was happening until receiving 5 DMs from friends saying, “I’m leaving FaceBook and you should consider doing the same.” Wow. Well, I was intrigued and began investigating. All of this was over FaceBook keeping your information forever. That’s it?

How many times have you clicked “I Agree” when signing up for a new service. I agree to terms once a day since I joined the web in 1996. Forums, chat rooms, web services, banks and social networks all have terms of service and iTunes sometimes changes theirs and forces you to re-agree to new terms just to access their music store or play the music you legally purchased. These TOS agree buttons have forced us to not think twice about what we’re agreeing too and a few sites occasionally delve into the terms with a lawyer and discover some horrifying truths. Well, here’s the truth about The Internet as a whole.

Nothing you do at a computer, on a cell phone or on your television is private anymore. Someone in some remote location can find out everything you order on pay per view, every email you send to our girlfriend and every Myspace message you send to your ex-girlfriend. Every time you load Bittorrent or sync your iPhone, usage statistics, logs and kilobytes of information are stored in a remote server and someone has the password to see that info. Scared? I’m not.

I installed Little Snitch on my Apple laptop and was pretty astonished when every single Apple application from iLife to Calculator and TextEdit brought up a window that says, “This application is trying to connect to xxxx.apple.com” and I had the choice to allow or deny that connection. Why the hell would Calculator.app try to connect to Apple? I can only assume it’s usage statistics and maybe Apple is analyzing how often I use certain equations or what buttons I push the most. After a few weeks of receiving this notifications, I uninstalled Little Snitch and I’m just leaving it up to chance now. I don’t care what Apple knows about me because I have some logic that you should all get through your head.

If I custom built my own hardware and operating system. I mean actually custom built my own processors and expansion cards and built my own unique operating system and then bought some black fiber without using my own ISP (no Comcast or AT&T) and then put a computer on this end of the US and another computer on the other end of the US and installed a web server in between and then sent an email through that web server to my grandmother then I might have complete and utter privacy. Once you throw in Comcast Internet, Microsoft Windows, Outlook 2007, Gmail and fiber that you don’t own, everyone between you and grandma have full right to access that information and there’s not a god damn thing you can do about it.

So they the hell is FaceBook getting so much shit? Because they came out and said, “we own your information” and that upset people. The masses need to understand that each instant message, email, tweet, website, forum post, blog post and song you add or download from the web is logged, archived, saved and indexed on a server somewhere and at some point in your Internet travels, you agreed to terms of service without even thinking and this content is saved forever without you even knowing it. From now on, just know that nothing is private, behave yourself, don’t cheat on your girlfriend, don’t look at illegal porn and don’t steal music because it’s being logged and there’s no need bitching about it.

I assumed there was a prostitution problem in Oakland and San
Francisco, but I had no idea there was such a huge problem with sex
trafficking of CHILDREN. I’m watching an MSNBC story on Oakland sex
trafficking right now. Thousands of underage girls and boys are
exploited every year. Since the girl’s pimps keep SUCH a close eye on
their every move, sometimes the only way they get help is when they’re
arrested by undercover cops, pretending to pick them up. A lot of them
do not have homes, though, or they are so afraid of their pimps that
they don’t seek help. Vans called “rolling brothels” drive through
Oakland looking for new girls to kidnap. It’s such a HUGE problem in
Oakland. The youngest girl rescued was 10 years old; so young that she
hadn’t even started to develop and her childhood was already robbed
from her. It’s all so heartbreaking.

The story also hits on the fact that Craigslist has become a HUGE
resource for online sex trafficking in the Bay Area. The pimps create
Craigslist postings and use key words like “rosez” and “diamonds.”
myRedBook was also highlighted as being used for the same purpose and
on this site the men can write detailed, crude explanations regarding
their time spent with these girls. Craigslist has now agreed to donate
some of their profits to organizations that protect these women.

If there is an issue that you’re looking to donate to, this would be
by selection. There are local organizations aimed at helping exploited
girls escape and jailing their pimps. Here are some links.

http://www.acgov.org/icpc/ourkids/overview.htm

http://www.sagesf.org/
http://oaklandnorth.net/2008/10/28/bay-area-child-sex-trafficking-stings-lead-nationwide-effort/

Starting February 16th (Tomorrow), I’ll begin placing ads on my Twitter page for 2 weeks. If all goes well, that will be extended to 1 month. I’m excited to accept advertising on my page for a couple of reasons. The first is that it’s proof that my social media worth is finally allowing me to make money. It’s a really good feeling when money comes in just for doing a few tweets or blogging things that I’m passionate about. Of course, I’ve never made money from social networking and I’m not about to start. That’s why I’m giving all of the proceeds of this advertising to The American Cancer Society. I’ve been told that there are better cancer charities out there but I’m going to keep it mainstream for this one round of donations.

Social Media making money that goes to charity means I’m ecstatic! I’m not a rich guy but if my influence can help save lives, then sign me up! Who’s the awesome partner that’s making this possible? It’s a design company called SnobbySlice. They’ve been great partners through this planning process and I’m happy to have them involved with my first Twitter Advertising test.

Here are the terms:

• 2 Weeks – 1 Month of Advertising
• My Twitter Background is Changed to Snobby Slice
• Four Tweets per day linking to them prefaced by #advertisement

I hope everyone can get behind me on this one. If too many people complain, I’ll end the advertising at 2 weeks. I hope you can all help support this by Following SnobbySlice (link) on Twitter and checking out their site (link).

Ok. I’m going to talk out of my ass for a second because this is something I feel very strongly about but for the past 2 years, I’ve been doing the complete opposite as sort of a test. I think along the way, I became addicted and became something I was completely against. I’m against everything being online. I’m against the digital lifestyle and nearly everything it involves. For the past few weeks, the idea of robots taking over the world has become so very clear. With every new product that Google releases, I become more and more terrified of our future. As recent as 2 years ago, we were still browsing the web and kind of putting some data out there but it wasn’t a lot. In most cases, the data we were giving companies wasn’t really organized. Amazon didn’t have a recommendation tool based on your buying habits and services like Last.FM and StumbleUpon were in their infancy. There’s a growing trend among nearly every web service that is, “give us your data and we’ll make it look cool.”

Every time an email goes through Google’s Servers, I make a search, watch a YouTube video, update my location, send my Genius music results to Apple, “like” something on FriendFeed or Facebook, play an episode on Hulu, blog something I liked on Flickr or Dugg something……more of my passions, thoughts and interests are stored on a server somewhere. I’ve agreed to terms and conditions that say these companies can use that data for anything they want and I think Google’s agreement is that they can keep this info for over one hundred years. What? That email I sent to my sister saying I love Apples and has been deleted will stay with Google for 100 years and when I’m driving my Google car down the Interstate on my 60th birthday, an advertisement will pop up like in Minority Report that asks, “so do you still like Apples?” That’s scary as hell and I want no part of that.

What can we do about it? Nothing really. If 100 of us decide we’ve had enough, go to some spot in the rain forest and form our own society, the rest of the world will still be handing data over to Internet companies and 50 years from now a robotics company will acquire that data to help robots better understand how humans think. It’ll seem like a good idea that your robot knows that you like Apples, hate gin and likes to be left alone when you first wake up every morning but when the robot uprising happens, that same data will be used against you and it will make robot interrogations extremely easy because they know exactly what we hate. My tweet that says I don’t like Power Rangers will be used against me as Power Rangers episodes play over and over until I give in as a slave to the robot race.

You think I’m kidding? Nope. This will happen and it’s only a matter of time. I’m a part of the problem now. I’ve sent and received over 50 thousand emails through Google Mail servers, 35 thousand tweets through Twitter, rated thousands of YouTube videos and used services like Wakoopa, Last.FM, Pandora and others. That data is being collected and will be used against me in the future. I just don’t know when. I’m scared. You should be too.