@amnichols

WHAT IS #FF
Two weeks ago, I mentioned the need to use the #ff hashtag on Twitter more effectively. My experimental change to this end has begun.
#ff is a Friday meme on Twitter that is connoted by the #ff hashtag and is used as a way to promote Tweeters you follow and find interesting.
It might look like this this, that just happens to be the people I #ff-ed today, individually:

#ff @mimiavocado @amnichols @Cecilyk @ABattheBurrow

A tweeted list of names, @ signs with a person’s twitter handle after it, without context, does little to inspire other than the most devoted of Twitter followers to check out the list of your followers that you recommend. I have seen the hashtag #ff used as a reward given for new followers, as a shout out to buds met in the physical world may not have a large footprint in the social media world.  So, I’m approaching this hash tag a bit differently from now on through the end of the year, at least, to see if it makes a difference for the people I recommend, to my interaction with them, to my overall stats, or if it just gives me a platform from which to examine Twitter activity, and Pinterest activity, from a more informed vantage.
It will take me a while to play catch up with all the folks I should have already #ff-ed. Within a couple of weeks I will be caught up, though. Well, on second thought, give me through the end of the year on that too.  It all starts with Pinterest, but I will get to that in a minute.
TWITTER, PINTEREST & INFO THEORY
I’ve been thinking about this whole “social media thing” for years now.  I decided long, long ago that I wasn’t as into quantity as quality.  That’s the whole “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion,” thing.
Figuring out what constitutes quality in the new world of Twitter and Pinterest is an anything but a concrete or well bounded endeavor.  Life has never been simple, and that is infinitely more true now that we are but data bits churning within the swelling mass of everything that resides just before the event horizon of the Technological or Informational Singularity, put forward by Kurzweil.  I’ve wanted to reference this fantastically titled article, The Information Singularity Arrives Next Tuesday, Around Lunchtime, for years.  I’m sure it at first glance my mixing of the physics of the Cosmos with an explanation of why I think the link-up of Pinterest and Twitter is a good idea will baffle most of my college friends from Purdue who went off to work in Washington, Oregon, and what came to be known as Silicon Valley, in the late 1970s.
An informational change in kind is, and in fact probably already has, transmogrified all we know, and how we know it, and will continue doing so.  My friends, “Welcome to the future fair.”  As a comedy troop once said, “We’re all Bozos on this bus.”
This following You Tube video clip has nothing to do with Twitter or Pinterest.  I recommend just listening to it sometime because… just because.

 
There is no way you can catch up.  Just keep swimming, walking, writing, or thinking.  Keep doing what you do.  But knowledge, and the data connections that drive it, are so vast, and interacting and changing and creating new relationships at a such a near instantaneous pace (because that is what information does) that the very nature of information has
All of this is what has been bothering me about Twitter’s #ff.    The information system has a life of its own.  It may not be sentient yet, but it exists and is changing and adapting to what users think it is before anyone can figure out what it is.  As amazing cultural and social media influencers, bloggy divas, and women of a certain age, my women friends and I drive the engines of the information economy who are incorporating women’s culture and knowledge into this new cosmic intellectual stew.   My compadres and I are significant use innovators and the information we incorporate about women’s culture is essential to driving this new system to an equilibrium level that is more egalitarian, and more equitable, than anything that has previously existed.
PINNING MY #FFs
So, figuring out ways to efficiently maximize social media information and connections is something that we may or may not do “naturally” but it is something that we and new social media seem to be doing well.   I love the linkages that develop between new systems.  Tweeting my pins is something that seems like a no-brainer now that I am looking at both platforms.  What I have decided to do is:

• Figure out which social media dudes and divas I want to feature on any given Friday
• Get the links to the most complete listing of those folks social presence – probably a blog
• Pin those links to my #ff board on Pinterest and choose the image you want associated with the blog among the options presented to you
• In the pinning process SKIP OVER adding the checkmark to the box that says, Twitter

 
 
 
 
 

• You will add the #ff before the text of your tweet on the next screen – and though I didn’t do it this week (duh! I forgot the at sign with twitterhandle) the text of the tweet should probably read something like “#ff, @twitterhandle, brief intriguing comment about the person, pinterest-generated url to the pin

Doing it this way, I think, has these advantages:

• highlights the individual
• links blogs with twitter handles
• crosses platforms and thus kills two birds with one stone… Hehehe twitter and birds, get it?
• is more permanent than a simple tweet that gets lost in the Dickensian world of the Tweets of Twitter Past
• allows the visual to accentuate text without detracting from either

So, what do you think?  Is this a great idea or what?