PTP Blog

Despite what you learned in typing class, stop using two spaces after a period. It’s nothing more than a habit – one worth breaking.

I had no idea. Now I do. And I still can’t stop the double spacing, can you?

Twitter’s had quite a bit of buzz lately. If you haven’t heard of it, maybe its because you’ve got better things to do with your time than subscribe to a service that enables you and other twitter users you know to update each other on the minutiae of your lives via the web, cell phone text message, or rss.

But wait, maybe, just maybe there’s something else here. Stay with me for a moment here:

Take twitter, not as potentially annoying social phenomena likened to the latest form of cat blogging, but instead as a communications platform that does a few things really well and really easily:

1. enables short text posting through a web form, from your cell phone, or through an instant messenger account
2. publishes that short message on the web
3. pushes that short message out to your network of subscribers via: web site, rss or cell phone text message

Do you see it yet? How about some scenarios:

• GOTV work? GOTV staff posts a “remember to vote” message on twitter 1 week, 3 days, 1 day, on the day, and then every hour for the last 5 hours of election day. Could this get annoying? Maybe, maybe not depending on constituency. Include a link or phone number to find out where to vote/get a ride/or for election protection info for extra points.
• do you do lobby days? spend a chunk of your state’s legislative session at the capitol? Twitter just became your best bet for super fast updates to supporters and to your website.

Those are just two examples. There are many many more, and I hope that you’re thinking about and planning to use some of them. Twitter’s not perfect - far from it. Currently, the site can be painfully slow as the number of users outweighs the resources of the server twitter.com is sitting on, but I’d be surprised if that didn’t change soon.

What is really cool about twitter is that it is totally permission based - you can’t just collect someone’s cell phone and and spam them with sms text messages - they have to register at twitter and ask to receive your updates. It may add a layer of complexity, but it means that folks that do subscribe to your updates probably really want to hear from you.

From an organizing perspective, it would be very cool if twitter supported groups, but given how many people are clamoring for this functionality, I hope to see it soon.

What are your thoughts about where and how twitter could be used in community organizing?

I was cruising along this morning, happy that my machine hadn’t fallen prey to any DST change issues when I suddenly noticed that I had been living in denial.

My clock was off. By an hour. It shouldn’t have been. I’d applied all the right patches, checked everything twice, but still it was off, by an hour.

My mistake? I had the computer thinking it was in Central America instead of Central Time. Central America is of course the option right above the one that I wanted.

Let that be a lesson to all of us to double check that our digital I’s are dotted and T’s crossed.

Mark got me thinking about this yesterday. We were talking about the potential for Google Apps to provide some real competition to Microsoft. He was of the opinion that unless Google can address the security and ownership concerns, their “Apps” won’t have much traction. I’m sure he’s right about that, but I think that if Google is smart we’ll soon see Google Apps appliances for sale by Google so that businesses can use Google Apps in an environment they control.

Following the announcements that the DOT is halting Microsoft upgrades, and the FAA is thinking about a move to Google Apps and maybe even Linux desktops, a Google Apps Appliance is almost a no-brainer.

Government agencies and really most businesses as well can’t or won’t use hosted services due to security concerns. If Google’s smart and doesn’t build in any phone-home stuff like Microsoft does, a Google Apps Appliance is exactly the product businesses need to get off the Microsoft bandwagon.

And if they do? I’m hoping there’s a non-profit version

I’ve had a number of people ask for RFP writing resources over the last few days, many wanting to see samples of “good” RFPs.

I’m not sure that I know what constitutes a “good” RFP other than one that helps the organization arrive at the desired technology destination. However, I did some research to see if the internet had more helpful information than I had close at hand, and it turns out the it did.

I started by tagging a couple of RFP resources over in my del.icio.us account with the ever creative “rfp” tag, but I’d love to know if any of you have RFP writing resources that you like to point people to when you field the “how do I write a good RFP” question.