About a year ago, I was given an once-in-a-decade career opportunity: Join Adam Sachs & Dan Osit to help start Ignighter.com, an online group dating website, at Techstars, the startup incubator program based in Boulder, CO. Techstars typically takes a small equity stake in your company in exchange for a small amount of seed money, a summer of office space, mentorship, and connections.

While others have written extensively about the value of the Techstars program, from the perspective of their companies, I was in the somewhat different situation of evaluating my decision to leave my corporate job and join Ignighter at Techstars.

I made a weighted pro/con table of the options. Staying in Pennsylvania would be safe & conservative. I would continue to wallow in bureaucracy, process, suits, & ties. I would have little or no say in my workday or the work I was doing. Going to Colorado would be an adventure. There would be a complete vacuum of process, bureaucracy, and it would be completely up to my team & I to define how Ignighter.com worked.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was a no brainer to make the switch. At the time, it was a tough decision to pack up my life and move it across the country. In the end, the value came down to one last thing: If I joined Ignighter, I would like what I was doing for a living.

I’m a strong believer that when you truly & passionately enjoy what you do, money & success can and do follow. I work 40% more hours than I did before. But, that’s okay, because I relish it. I’m learning new technologies & APIs, meeting new interesting people, and defining a new niche, every hour of every day. I now feel a true sense of ownership for my work, myself, and a real sense that I control the destiny of my career.

So, if you’ve heard that Techstars applications are open, and you just gave them a passing glance, thinking it was too much of a long short, take another look. Applications are open now.

First, I just want to say that my heart goes out to the people on this plane. Let us all pray that no one got hurt.

That being said, I have just have a few observations on how the crash was broken to the world.

- News of the crash broke on Twitter, several minutes before it was on CNN or MSNBC.

- The guy who posted the first twitpic of this event, @jkrums, at http://twitpic.com/135xa has gone from 220 followers at 3:30pm EST on Thursday to 400 (at time of writing) in just over 30 minutes.

- That one twitpic of the crash , http://twitpic.com/135xa crashed the twitpic servers.

Whatever this crash says about the technologies of aviation, the reporting of it is a reflection of the way news is distributed today: Twitter is the present & the future

1. Thou shalt not tweet several times per minute. Goes without saying. It’s just annoying. Spread them out. Use tweetlater. Whatever you need to do so you don’t hijack half my feed.

2. Thou shalt not frequently tweet mundane information. Classic examples include “Eating dinner”, and “Driving to the dentist”. Do your followers a favor and don’t tweet it unless you have something more interesting to say about what you’re doing. If you must tweet about ‘being at the dentist’s office, come up with something quippy or though provoking, like “Just got a tooth out, I wonder what my dentist does with all these extra teeth he’s got?!”

3. Thou shalt not commonly tweet inappropriate or political tweets. Classic examples include fart jokes, excessive coverage of Israel / Gaza conflict, or your views on the election.

4. Thou shalt not just tweet your own products. No matter who you are, too much self promotion = Twitter FAIL.

5. Thou shalt not live out your dream as a television sportscaster in my twfeed. “Broncos Touchdown!”, “Donovan McNav is the man!”, “Eli Manning just threw the most beautiful pass!”. Hey @jockitch, you just earned yourself an unfollow!

What twitter rules do you have in place for your feed? Why do you unfollow users?