How to Find Interesting New Twitter-ers

I’ve been onboarding some of my offline friends to twitter lately. It’s funny how the best brands make you into an evangelist for their platform, isn’t it? Anyway, I’ve found that after they get past the initial idea, and decide to sign-up, their biggest point of friction is finding new interesting people to follow.

Here are the best twitter-er finding tools I’ve found so far.

- http://wefollow.com/ – A top-down directory of twitter-ers
- #FollowFriday – Every Friday, twitter-ers recommend people they think are worth following, and append the #followfriday hashtag. Search for this hashtag to find those recommendations.
- Twitter Search – Twitter Search (formerly summize) is the best way to find what people are saying about a topic, in real time.
- Twitter’s Official Recommended Users List – While I think that Twitter recommending users defeats the purpose of a distributed network, and unnecessarily shifts the power dynamic to the users it recommends, this list remains a good place to find new twitter-ers.

What music have you been listening to lately? Please share. #musicmonday

One of my favorite things about integrating twitter into my life, thus far, has been how powerful the platform is for giving & getting recommendations of new habits, products, or hobbies, from a trusted network of friends & colleagues.

And, there’s a part of me that loves music. discovering it. listening to it. digesting it. feeling it. dancing to it. and, sharing it.

I’m going to try an experiment combining these two hobbies, and I’m starting today, Monday 2/22/09.

Every monday, I’m going to tweet what new music I’m finding, and where it fits in my lifestyle. (aka if I listen to it on the subway, while working, while relaxing ?)

I’m going attach the hashtag #musicmonday to these tweets for easy tracking.

I want to hear what you’re listening to. And I want to share what I’m listening to. So I invite you do the same.

Check out my twitter page if you want to take part.

The amazing value of the Techstars network

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.