There are those people with whom this is an easy, natural place to reach. It's that friend that you haven't seen or heard from in six months, and the 12 seconds it takes for both of you to get back into a familiar place where the six months vanish. It's the easy now.

Then there are those people who are more work. They require a protocol of context setting, translation, and cautious check-ins. Hi, I said this, is this what you heard? Ok, good. This set of abilities, of communication skills, is more work and is a skill you refine over the years. It is a requirement of seasoned managers who are constantly thrown into meetings with strangers where they need to move quickly and efficiently past the "getting to know you" phase and into the "we've got work to do" portion of the meeting.

My guess is the majority of our relationships fall into the either the natural or slightly-more-work buckets. The majority of the folks you surround yourself with both inside and outside of work are manageable. Not all are natural, so they are work, but you can live with them and are willing to do the work to maintain the relationships.

Then, there are those you can't handle. These are the folks who, for reasons you may never understand, behave in a way that you'll never grasp, can't define, nor will ever like.

These people are toxic.

Big Fat Toxic Assumptions

This article is going to end with someone getting fired and it makes two large, uncomfortable assumptions.

First, as I explain the serious issues with toxic co-workers, I need to remind you that when it comes to disconnects between two people that there are always two vastly different stories regarding perceived toxicity. If I were to say that Veronica had a toxic personality, you would do well to spend some time with Veronica and see what her perception was of me. While I might have done as much due diligence as possible to examine every possible personality angle regarding Veronica, there would still be essential data to be gathered directly from her.

A declaration of toxicity is a judgement. Sometimes defined by a group, sometimes spearheaded by an influential individual who simply cannot find a healthy way to relate to this person, but regardless, never trust a toxicity label without doing your own research.

Second, this article isn't about fixing the problem; this article assumes you're done. You're done trying to bridge the gap between you and this toxic person. If you're a manager, this is hopefully the end result of months of careful negotiating, delicate compromise, and hardcore communication.

There are entire parts of your organization dedicated to providing ideas and skills about how to interact better with anyone on your team and this article assumes you've employed all of them.

I'm not going to walk you through strategies for dealing with toxic people because you're past that. This person is infecting the team with their toxicity and you're vastly underestimating the daily damage this person is doing to the group.

This article is here to convince you it's time to make a change.

Go Team!

A toxic person kills, and by kills I mean totally destroys teamwork.

Teamwork is one of those painful managementese buzzwords that is blindly used at inopportune times as a means of motivation. We need better teamwork to improve efficiency and productivity. Ew. I just threw up in my mouth. Fact is, teamwork -- teams of people actually working together -- is kind'a magical.

Listen, it takes all I can muster to get along with my brother who I've known my entire life, so the fact that a group of people sitting in close proximity to each other can build a product without killing each other is a fucking miracle.

It's not actually a miracle. It's years of practice, starting in elementary school where you learned the basics: raise your hand when you want to speak, say 'please' and 'thank you', and don't eat the glue. In school, you learn just as much about how to deal with different types of personalities as you do about the world, so when it comes time to jump into the workforce, you already have years of experience in social interactions with a variety of personalities.

However, all of these hand-raising, glue-free pleasantries barely prepare you for a toxic personality.

Let's go back to the personality buckets I described above: natural, work, and toxic. Let's say the cost of natural relationships is 1x. It's the base unit. It's no work, it's simple. Let's say that the work relationships are 2x. It requires twice as much effort on your part to bridge the communication and social gap. It's not difficult. It's just work. You reduce this cost as you gather more experience and as you get to know people a bit, but these relationships will never be totally natural. Fact of life.

A toxic relationship cannot be measured in terms of these work units because, at its core, it does not work. You never get to a state of comfortable communication in these relationships. They are never predictable, nor very productive, because you are in a constant state of social corrosion. There are brief moments of clarity where you have a lightning strike of insight: She's this way because I said that and this is how she always reacts to that... so I won't do that. Brilliant!

These moments of respite are short-lived. For reasons you may never understand, you are incapable of reverse engineering this personality, or your patterns of reaction to it, and it's only a matter of time before you rediscover this basic disconnect and move back to thrashing around, trying to figure out the unknowable.

Yes, this is a worst case scenario.

Groups of people get along because they all subscribe to a similar culture. Yes, these people are all unique, but they get along because they have a similar belief system and buy into the same goals. This similarity of beliefs has a lot of benefit, but the biggest win is that it reduces organizational friction. There are heated arguments, but they are arguments based on similar beliefs and the presence of these beliefs means these arguments have a chance of resolution.

Now, think about your base interaction with this toxic person. You sit down in the conference room across from them and the topic at hand is easy, really cultural easy. "We're discussing a small change to the architecture, and since you own a big part of it, I wanted to get your opinion."

Reasonable. Professional. Respectful.

THIS ISN'T A SMALL CHANGE. YOU HAVEN'T THOUGHT THIS THROUGH. WHY WASN'T I CONSULTED EARLIER? HOW COULD WE CONSIDER THIS GIVEN WHAT I SAID 14 MONTHS AGO ON THIS VERY TOPIC WHEN I WAS IGNORED...

It's a flood of incomprehensible toxicity. Now, inside of the flood is a bunch of historic fuck-ups on everyone's part, but go back and read that previous paragraph. Are you seeing any of the content or are you seeing the toxicity?

Do the math. This is one meeting, and while you might pull off a meeting win when everyone's calmed down, you're spending the first 30 minutes of the meeting in ALL CAPS, and here's the bad news: a majority of the team is having similar experiences. Most of the folks interacting with this person are spending their time trying to figure out how to keep this person from going ALL CAPS rather than actually getting work done.

After a time, this results in even more damage. People stop scheduling meetings with this person. They stop traveling to their part of the building and, again, I'm not talking about one or two people here, I'm talking about the majority of the team.

My definition of toxicity isn't based on the idea that you are incapable of getting to a professional place with this person; it's based on the idea that the culture of your group, your company, is literally rejecting this person. Everyone is avoiding this corrosive person and this avoidance is affecting productivity and morale across the board. It's a daily emotional tax of frustration and demoralization.

A culture rarely changes for one person and in the case of a toxic person a culture will protect itself through rejection.

A Toxic Paradox

Rands, he's just not getting along with the right people.

No.

This is not high school. I'm not talking about cliques here, I'm talking about culture. Cliques are inevitable micro-collections of people who like the look and sound of each other. Culture is the foundational broad strokes of beliefs, values, and goals in a group of people, and a healthy culture is inclusive. It seeks out new members who evolve the culture into something new and better. It's constantly growing in interesting ways because of the people it's built on.

A rejection by the culture, while not pleasant for anyone involved, is not a rejection based on individual taste, it's not because someone doesn't like someone else. It's a rejection because of a lack of shared core beliefs. Vastly different personalities get along famously when they share a common goal.

Yes. People get petty and people dislike each other for seemingly inane, reasons, and yes, it's a manager's job, along with HR, to figure out how to build a constructive working relationship among these people, but this is not the situation I'm describing. I'm talking about trying to shove a toxic square peg in a cultural round hole. It doesn't work. Keep pushing all you want, but... it's not happening.

It's hard to remember this when a toxic person is yelling at you, but they're not actually yelling at you. They're yelling at the culture. They're pissed because their belief structure isn't a fit with just about everyone else's and they know it. They know that they're not winning this argument... ever. They know that in order to win this argument, they'd need to restart the culture of the company and such an endeavor makes a re-org look like a walk in the park.

And, here's the worst part, they might be right.

The history of the Silicon Valley is full of stories of toxic people who were, well, right. These people were physically removed from their respective companies, but their agenda, their ideas, however unpalatable to the existing cultural regime, were actually the right thing to do for that particular company.

The paradox is we often need these toxic people. We need these self-centered assholes to totally ignore cultural conventions and to mix things up beyond recognition. They don't need social grace and they don't need charisma. Both help, but their value lies in their intense belief in their own culture.

We need these folks, but it can't be at the cost of the existing culture. Yes, this toxic person might have a core cultural contradictory belief that is key to the future of the business, but assess the risk. What if the cost of integrating that idea is half the team quitting because they can't work with the idea's toxic architect? Is that a viable solution?

No? Maybe?

The deportation of a toxic asset is a judgement call and it's based on the fundamental idea that fitting in is easy, but real change is hard.

During these times, I've done great work. I've taken teams from "We're fucked" to "We made it". Yeah, we had to cancel Christmas that one time and there was that other time I didn't leave the building for three days straight, but it was worth it because there's no more exhilarating place to hang than the edge of chaos. We're wired to escape danger.

There's a reputation you get after successfully performing the diving saves. You're "The Fixer". You're the one they call when hope is lost and while that's a great merit badge to have, it's a cover story. It's spin. See, someone upstream from you fucked up badly. When the sky falls, it means someone somewhere underestimated the project, didn't make a decision, or let a small miss turn into a colossal disaster, and while fixing a disaster feels great, you're not actually fixing anything.

Management by crisis is exhilarating, but it values velocity over completeness; it sacrifices creativity for the illusion of progress.

Still, right now, the sky is falling and rather than let it fall, immediate action is necessary and my first bit of advice is that everyone takes a deep breath.

Sigh

When you see an impending crisis, your body has a distinct natural reaction. In your consideration of the crisis, you take a long, deep breath. You often don't notice this, but if I was sitting next to you, I would hear sigh.

A sigh is associated with despair. We're screwed. Sigh. My interpretation is different; this long, deep breath is one of preparation. Let's break it down: Breathe in. Gathering your strength. Oh shit, how am I going to deal with this? Hold it. Hold it. Ok, breathe out. Ok, not sure what the plan is, but let's roll.

The interesting part of the deep breath is when you hold it. Try it right now: deep breath and hold it. What are you doing when you're holding your breath? Well, first off, you're slowly asphyxiating, but in that moment of life-threatening tension you're doing interesting work. It's a subtle transformation from building tension to calm release. It can also be a deliberate moment of consideration.

You can let that breath out now.

It's a metaphoric stretch, but it's around the deep breath that I build my team's communication structure. I'll explain, but first a story.

The team at the start-up was in a design crisis. The 1.0 version of the product was out and doing well and everyone wanted to do, well, everything. Every feature was being considered. Unbridled ambition is a good problem to have for about a week. After a month, we had three different design directions in play with various levels of support. The creative rush of developing a new release was degrading to useless design meetings where different camps were building strategic fortifications rather than talking. Decisions were being made and not communicated. Confusion was replacing creativity.

In times of crisis, a few human behaviors can make everything worse:

1. In the absence of direction, people make shit up. Nature abhors a vacuum and in the absence of solid information, people generate their own information to fill that vacuum. They're not lying, they have no ill will, they're just trying to build a semblance of structure amongst the confusion. This is only exacerbated by the fact that...
2. Human beings provide mutual group therapy by endlessly talking about the crisis at hand. This isn't the creation of new content; it's just the regurgitation of the latest new. At the right time, this hallway cross-pollination is a great way to evolve an idea, but if all we're doing is talking about the crisis, all we're doing is scratching at the worry rather than dealing with it.
3. Lastly, everyone wants to know everything. Combine the communication vacuums and the group therapy creating a fire hose of additional questionable content and it's not surprising that everyone on the team wants to know everything. Before I proceed, I want total disclosure. I have something unique to add and I better get a chance to do so.

It was an information communication disaster. There were brilliant ideas wandering the hallways, there were stickies with great ideas hanging from monitors, but in the confusion that was our communication structure, everyone was running around panicking and no one was taking a deep breath.

Three Meetings

Starting on a Monday, I imposed a new meeting structure. Let me first describe the meetings and then we'll talk about the purpose. There were three types of meetings:

1:1s with my staff. Monday morning. First meeting of the week. 30 minutes for the folks who are cruising. One hour for those in crisis. The agenda is a simple deep breath:

1. What are you worried about?
2. Here's what I'm worried about.
3. And discuss...

Staff. With air from our 1:1s still in our lungs, I have my staff meeting. Two hours, right after the 1:1s are complete. It sounds like a long meeting, but when this meeting is run well and full of the right people, it's almost always over before you know it.

Staff is where we can continue to publicly worry, but Staff is where I want to turn the corner, where we turn inhale to exhale. Ok, we're worried about a lot, but what are we going to do about it?

The tone and content for this meeting vary wildly by where we're at in the development cycle. If we're early in the cycle, we're talking about the state of design. If it's late in the development cycle, we're looking at confidence in the quality.

There are three buckets of topics that I work through at my Staff and they're increasingly slippery. We start with Operations (Where are we?), move onto Tactics (What are we going to do about that?), and, finally, Strategy (No really, what are we going to do about it?) I'll explain each.

Operations -- Where are we?

Operations topics are hard non-debatable measures. How many bugs we do we have? Where are we at with hiring? When are we moving? Any hard piece of data that we collectively need to know. No debate, no discussion, just alignment.

Tactics -- What are we going to do about that?

Now we're working. Tactics are changes, tasks, events, things we're going to do as a team over the next week to address the worry we found in our 1:1s. Like operational topics, tactics are measurable, consumable things, but these are not topics we're reporting on, this is where we're taking action. We are going to scrub every bug in the next product milestone to make sure it belongs there. Jason is going to provide the new design by Thursday. By defining these tactics, you're defining the agenda for the last meeting on my list, but we first need to talk strategy.

Strategy -- No really, what are we going to do about it?

All of these well-defined tactics are great. They are real work, which, hopefully by the end of the week is going to define measurable progress. Go you. There are some organization, product, and people problems that you won't be able to tackle in a week... or a month. Strategy involves deep changes to policy or culture. Our quality isn't great, so we're going to institute a code review culture. Our design is all over the place, so we're going to define a style guide. Strategic topics during Staff are my absolute favorite because they represent the biggest opportunity for substantive change in the group. They're also the hardest to define as well as the hardest to measure.

Worse, strategic changes are also tricky to implement during sky-is-falling situations because everyone is working to prevent the sky from actually falling - they're intensely and correctly tactical. This doesn't mean strategic discussions aren't important during Staff. You might not discover a strategic change, but just having the discussion around the idea of change will give a glimmer of future hope to those who are hyperventilating.

When my Staff meeting is done, I've not only taken a deep breath, I've also begun the process of calmly exhaling... I now know what we need to do this week... This is generally where people screw up. They confuse the relief associated with the exhale with having a plan, with actual progress. You haven't done anything yet except sit through three hours of meetings and we need one more.

Look What We Built Meeting. 4pm on Friday. This meeting exists for one reason - to measure the tactics we defined at Staff. Did we do what said we were going to do? From an agenda perspective, this meeting is a no-brainer. The list of topics and measurements were hopefully well-defined on Monday. Again, the content varies as a function of where we're at in the development cycle, but some version of this meeting always occurs on Friday. Let's review the design. Let's look at the bug charts. Let's confirm that we've made that big decision.

The "Look What We Built" meeting is the time to demonstrate progress, to show that even when the sky is falling, we know how to kick ass.

Invest in the Boring

It's not just during a crisis that this calm, repetitive meeting pattern pays off. It's always. I know you've been working with your favorite designer for three years. I know you believe you're totally in each other's heads, but this psychic confidence doesn't mean you should ever skip your 1:1 with her even when the sky isn't falling.

Communication in a group of people is an endless exercise in alignment. No matter how well you know your team, you can never predict where the internal dialogue of your team is going to wander. What this meeting structure does is set organization expectations:

• Everyone knows when they're going to get their moment to speak in private.
• Everyone, whether they're in the meetings or not, knows the system by which a lot of information moves around the building.
• Everyone knows, whether the sky is falling or not, how we're measuring success on a weekly basis.

Equally important to these meetings' existence is that they occur with obsessive robotic regularity. Years from now, when your team has been disbanded, I want you to look at your clock at 10:15am on Monday and think I've got my 1:1 with my boss in 15 minutes. This regularity is not a threat, it's not a stick, it's the basis for building trust in a team. I know I have a say.

And I haven't even told you the best part yet.

All of this structure, all of this boring meeting repetition, exists to make room for something else. Whether you're designing as an individual or a team, when you're being creative, you need two things: an environment that encourages the random and time to live there. An obsessive meeting schedule is an investment in the boring, but by defining a specific place for the boring to exist, you're allowing every other moment to have creative potential. You're encouraging the random and random is how you're going to win. Random is how you're going to discover a path through a problem that no one else has found and that starts with breathing deeply.

• Talking about a product we loved
• In great shape from a feature, quality, and schedule standpoint
• A group that historically did not kick ass
• A group that was kicking ass.

The slides looked great and the dry-run was flawless, so why hadn't I slept in two nights?

I couldn't sleep because I couldn't see the Screw-Me.

You Might Be Lying

There's an article to be written about the different kinds of meetings you're going to be exposed to, but for now I want to talk about the executive cross-pollination communication clusterfuck. The point of this meeting is alignment. Big alignment. You've likely got several different groups who don't normally spend a lot of time together being forced to sit in the same room so the execs can compare stories, measure reality, and figure out who is lying.

Before I explain how to get your head around this meeting, I want to talk about intent. Intent starts with a question: "Why does this meeting exist?" If you're responsible for the presentation in this meeting, it exists because someone hates you.

It's not personal hate. It's professional hate and it's exacerbated by a simple fact of organization: different groups speak different languages. Marketing speaks marketing, Legal speaks legal, and Engineering speaks engineering. There's a fundamental communication breakdown somewhere in the building and someone is feeling wronged. They're feeling bullied and since they don't speak your dialect, they're complaining up rather than across.

Normally, we deal with these Tower of Babel situations with the direct application of middle management, program managers, and other folks we pay big bucks to sit in meetings and translate between organizations. However, translation has not worked in this case. Someone high up on the org chart is hearing two very different stories and wondering which is true. Story reconciliation is certainly on the top of your list of items to resolve in this meeting, but job #1 is to figure out who hates you.

A Rubber Stamp Affair

For these critical meetings, your goal is to make them a rubber stamp affair. In the week before the meeting, you will have personally vetted your slides with each of the meeting invitees. You will have heard their concerns and made the appropriate adjustments to your deck. When the cross-pollination meeting arrives, your goal is an utter lack of drama and the finishing pronouncement of, "Yeah, we should do that and you know how."

It never happens like this.

We're "busy" and we have "things to do", but mostly we're "looking forward to blindsiding you with a Screw-Me at the least convenient moment in front of your executive team."

It's a disappointing trait of human nature that folks who feel wronged like to exact their revenge by flaunting their knowledge and dishing out the Screw-Me at the worst possible time, but, roll with it, you’re already a step ahead just expecting to be screwed. Besides, your enemy is working more with emotion than content and that will turn into their own personal Screw-Me Scenario at a later date.

Right now, your job is data.

No Guilt, No Doubts, No Fear

Ideas get better with eyeballs and before this meeting goes down, your job is to get as many eyeballs on your presentation as possible. You're not going to get everyone in the meeting, but that's not the point. The task is cross-pollination. Casting the information net as wide as possible and incessantly asking:

• Does this make sense?
• What is missing?
• How am I going to get screwed?

I've got the Russian Lit Major for vetting my strategy; who do you have? I'm not talking about your boss or your co-worker, I'm talking about the person who can objectively look at your presentation and start poking holes. These people are rare because it's another disappointing trait of human nature that we often think we're doing each other a favor by listening well, but then tell each other what we want to hear.

You lose yourself in any significant project. You’ve long forgotten your strategic initial assumptions, but, more importantly, you’ve forgotten what other people need because you’re furiously worrying about the daily tactical fire drills. A fresh perspective is a chance to test your entire idea and find the Screw-Me. You need someone to poke holes. You need to find and fill the gaps, and as each gap is filled, you're going to build confidence around your pitch because, well, that's one less potential Screw-Me entry point.

You're not going to find them all. That's ok, because in the process of constantly refining your pitch, you're mentally refining yourself. You're preparing yourself by seeing each of the different perspectives in your deck,. That improves the chances that you'll know what to do when someone starts dishing out the hate.

Game On

The meeting's on. You're walking in with a head full of data and my hope is that through your constant cross-pollination you are legitimately the most informed person on this particular topic in the room. There's still work to do.

Size the room. Who is here? What groups do they represent? What do they want? Any unexpected visitors? Really? Why would they randomly show up? Who brought them? What possible Screw-Mes could they represent? Ok, let's get started.

Carry the room. Start your deck. You've got it memorized, right? They can tell this is the 32nd time you've done it, right? Good. It's smooth. You've already diffused two Screw-Mes by slide 12. Really well done there. Amanda, you have a question?

Manage the room. Questions aren't Screw-mes. You can clarify and stay on track. You know that Amanda is going to ask about hard data, right? Don't let her take over the conversation. Say, "I've got your data in the appendix, but let me get through this first, ok?" Yeah, you just shut down a Senior VP. Nicely done. No way you can do that without serious confidence in your preparation. Yes, Tim?

Tim's got the Screw-Me and you didn't see it coming. Total left field. Completely valid strategic observation and you don't have a clue how to answer. Shit.

You will recognize the Screw-Me by the complete silence that fills both the room and your head. That's the realization everyone is having that you're Screwed. First, let's not make it worse...

The Unforgivable Spin

Tim: "Rands, what about THIS?"

I'm a poker player and an experienced meeting surfer, so the room will not immediately know from the look on my face that This has Screwed me, but what I choose to do next will define my ongoing relationship with the room.

There are two options when you are cornered by This. Your animal brain, when cornered, will try to find a way out. You can taste this approach even before you begin. I am going to spin. I am going to talk quickly and confidently about This and I am going to hope that in my furious verbal scurrying they are going to believe I've got This handled.

That's not what they're seeing or hearing.

This is not your staff meeting where a little verbal soft shoe is going to entertain and delight. These are the execs and no matter how many meetings you’ve surfed, they see straight through spin, they know this dance, and the longer you sit there spinning, the longer you give your boss an opportunity to step in, try to make the diving save, and make you look like a blithering fool.

It takes a little practice to make the correct move when you feel the spin coming. You are going to do three things:

1. Acknowledge the Screw-Me.
2. Admit “I don’t know.”
3. Concretely explain the steps you’re going to take to find out and give yourself a deadline.

You have completely defused Tim. See, Tim was pissed which is why he waited until precisely the wrong moment to throw down the Screw-Me. He wanted to see you spin and make a fool of yourself in front of your management team and what you did with the instant acknowledgement was crush emotion with structured sanity.

You can get lucky with spin sometimes. There are times when you spin so hard that you actually talk yourself into a Screw-Me solution that actually makes sense. But this is rare and unreliable and in my experience this frenetic verbal journey erodes confidence and wastes time.

The only question on everyone's mind during the cross-pollination clusterfuck is, "Do you know what you're talking about?" It's lame that Tim doesn't speak engineer and waited until precisely the wrong moment to Screw you, but my hope is that through your incessant vetting of your slides that you can deliver the "I don't know" with confidence. Tim just knows what he’s pissed about and you, through your preparation, can see the entire picture.

A Screw-Me Detection Policy

An aggressive Screw-Me detection policy is, I believe, essential to navigating groups of people. It's not just constantly knowing the potential worst case scenario in any situation, it's that you are instinctively always looking for it. When I am looking at any situation, I'm always trying to figure out what sequence of events could occur that will screw me.

This strategy sounds a lot like paranoia and yes, an unchecked Screw-Me detection policy can result in a conspiracy theory lifestyle where THEY are out to GET YOU.

Yes, only the paranoid survive, but paranoia is a lot of work. You can burn a lot of calories worrying about all possibilities, but this is not an approach I recommend. What I'm asking is that you look at specific key events strategically. Step back and look at the whole board. Ask "What sequence of moves is going to benefit me? Can I see what is coming? And how could I get screwed?" because teams which kick ass aren’t just ones that deliver, it’s that they deliver when they’re screwed.

Not everyone is just sitting there. Some are wondering, “What’s next?”

Birdhouse (Adam Lisagor and Cameron Hunt)

The best explanation (and compliment) I can give Birdhouse is that it's just like Twitter -- the more I attempt to explain what it is, the less you'll understand. You're not really going to get it until you use it, but here goes...

Before I begin, a quick reminder. My opinion regarding tweets can be summarized thusly: "I don't give a fuck what you had for lunch unless you give me reason." This colorful opinion has already been well documented in The Art of the Tweet.

Described by its creators as "A Notepad for Twitter", Birdhouse is precisely the application you should be using if you want to bring some art to your tweets.

Let's say that art is one part consideration and one part timing. Birdhouse supports both parts by providing a temporary safe haven for your partially formed thoughts.

I've got an approximate tweet rate of six tweets per day. That's my thing. The rate at which I discover tweets varies as a function of time and caffeination, but almost always exceeds the publishing rate, which means I've often got a tweet pile-up somewhere. Birdhouse is a perfect place to park a thought or link.

While Birdhouse has a clean, usable interface, it's the act of parking an idea that’s where the innovation lies. Birdhouse separates the act of creation from the act of publication. It replaces the unnecessary rush between "I just thought of this" and "I need to publish this" with calm consideration. This replacement, in my opinion, is essential to developing tweet content of value.

Try it. I know your quip tastes mentally delicious when it shows up, but is now the precise time to share it? Maybe it needs the larger Monday morning audience? Maybe you’ve already unleashed enough of the funny for that day? Your Twitter-schtick is your deal, but my belief is an idea gets better both by letting it ferment as well choosing the right time to open it.

Tweetie (Atebits)

When I first heard of Tweetie for iPhone, I sighed. The problem with explaining Twitter to the uninitiated is, well, you have to say Twitter. A lot. Then you end up saying “tweet” or “twittersphere” or “twoot” and then you flash back to the embarrassing conversation with your Mom when you tried to explain what a blog was.

"No no no Mom... it's an important thing."

"What is?"

Sigh. "A blog."

Tweetie takes dorky, uncomfortable names to the next level. And it does so with stunning visuals and clean interaction design that will change how you use Twitter on your desktop. I mean it.

My measure for compelling visual design is, after installation, whether or not, in the first five minutes, I fire up xScope to see the pixel-by-pixel construction of a particular piece of UI. Exactly 12 seconds after I fired up Tweetie, I was applying the microscope to the breadcrumb bar in Tweetie because I wanted to know "How'd he build that?"

Build products that speak for themselves. It's simple. The teaser video for Tweetie had no feature lists, it had no spin; it was a simple, kickin' video with nouns and verbs where using the product was the best pitch. Take a look at the application window below and tell me how many words you can find that describe the functionality. I count one. How many do you count here?

The rest of the real estate is an elegant distillation of the four most important Twitter features:

• Updates -- who said what?
• Mention -- did they say it about me? to me?
• Direct Messages -- only me?
• Search -- if they're not talking about me, what they hell are they talking about?

Twitter has been tidying up the layout of the site to focus on these features, but I don't want to visit the website -- that's why I installed a rich client. After two weeks of regular usage, Tweetie has eliminated my daily visits to the website by providing simple access to all of the features I need and it does so by borrowing from the future.

Tweetie is a desktop version of an application of the same name for the iPhone which, in my limited experience, is the first time an application has migrated from the phone to the desktop. As a friend mentioned, "Platform merge in progress!" and he's right.

The navigation in the desktop version of Tweetie feels... like the iPhone. Jumping from Updates to Mentions (via the essential and deliciously obvious keyboard shortcuts) feels like a flick of your index finger. Drilling down on an avatar accesses the user information with a clean horizontal scroll, again, inspired by iPhone navigation.

It's delightful to navigate Tweetie. The application seamlessly integrates Twitter users, their information, and their conversations into a mesh of information that feels like more than the sum of their parts. And I believe Tweetie, like Twitter, is just getting started. Quick, look at the Tweetie interface and tell me exactly where a future Groups feature lands.

When I use Tweetie, I’m reminded that a maniacal attention to detail not only makes you want to reach out and touch the digitally untouchable, it describes the familiar as the new, and, most importantly, it speaks of an aspirational future.

However, you've also hit it out of the park. The unexpected standing ovation. That seven-slide deck that turned into an hour of ad-libbed brilliance. The moment you know you've deeply connected with your audience.

Admit it, you've got some presentation-fu.

The original Keynote Kung-fu article describes how to set up and use Keynote for the first time, but once you've done a couple of presentations, you're going to want more. How To Not Throw Up and Out Loud walk you through the basics of constructing and practicing your presentation, but there's more to say about Keynote because, as with any well-designed tool, the more you use it, the better you get and the more layers of awesomeness you will find.

Pre-Game

Advanced Keynote Kung-fu starts in pre-game. Before you've written a single slide, you need to pick a theme. This process has been simplified in the latest Keynote with the new, ginormous theme picker chock full of interesting templates, but I almost always start with standard black.

I don't want to worry about anything except the ideas and basic flow. Black is pleasantly generic. The rule is: if you're starting a presentation by endlessly fussing with your presentation design, you probably don't have anything to say.

With theme in hand, I follow all of the workspace setup advice I gave in the prior article, including the addition that turns on Master Slides via View | Master Slides. This puts the different types of base slides available in the black template at the top of the slide navigator. Rather than building a custom layout for each new slide, I stick to using this default layout as much as possible for early drafts. There's a great reason why which I'll explain shortly.

And then I create slides. Lots of them. More than I'll ever need. It's a slide explosion.

I'm an outlining zealot, so I'm going to repeat another piece of advice from the original Fu article. In Keynote's slide navigator, hitting tab will indent the current slide and create a collapsible group under the prior slide. This simple, convenient feature breaks the linearity of my endless list of slides and is the first indication that I'm headed down an organized path to a well-constructed presentation.

A prior version of Keynote introduced a Light Table view to allow you see just thumbnails of your slides, but this view confuses me. In my head, my deck is linear, with a beginning, middle, and end. While looking at your complete deck is visually stimulating, the wrapping of slides destroys the shape of my deck that I have I my head. The Light Table view is useful only after my deck is done when I’m looking to poach bright ideas for other decks. See?

Organize and Design

The point when organization rather than creation becomes the primary activity is when I start to worry about design and layout. This presentation is far from done, but a design exercise is a great mental break from working on the message. If you haven't already, take a look at the original Keynote article regarding preparing your workspace. In addition to the preferences tweaks and enabling the color and font inspectors, I enable the following:

• Rulers: you're going to start worrying about spacing at some point.
• Presenter Notes: as you go through this first part of organization, you won't be able to ignore the content, and rather than getting stuck endlessly rewriting your deck, use the presenter notes to capture your random inspiration so that you can focus on the organizational task at hand.
• Multiple inspectors: Keynote added an additional mini-toolbar, which includes many of the common inspector options, and I use it a ton, but I still need the inspector window. Actually, I need a couple. Option-Clicking on any of the inspector tabs creates additional windows and I usually have the Slide, Build, and Graphic inspectors open.

With your workspace prepared, let's begin the deck design transformation. If you've stuck with the basic black or any of the base slides for any template, you're about to discover that you've already saved yourself a tremendous amount of time.

Which Master slide did you use the most? I tend to riff on Title & Bullets quite a bit, but the Gill Sans has just gotta go. I also despise the spacing on the bullets, so how do I go back and change the 19 slides that use Title & Bullets? Just change the Master. Typography, artwork, animations, transitions -- it can be all be changed at the Master Slide level.

If you ignored my Master Slide advice, you can slap the palm of your hand firmly against your forehead. Like CSS, Keynote slides inherit styles from the Master Slides, and while this is hardly revolutionary, it's a presentation development must-do to avoid repetitive design tasks. By working with a base set of slides, you give yourself the flexibility to change your mind as much as you want.

Even better, once you've developed your personal base set of slides, you can save those slides as a Theme which then shows as up as one of the options in the Theme chooser.

Designing for Failure

At the end of this process, the slides should have a shape and a cadence. Go glance through all your slides. How does it sound in your head? Is it tap tap tap or taptaptappitylet'smovetap? What should it sound like? I don't know; it's your deck.

In order to effectively present you need to have a love affair with your clicks. You need to know them intimately not only so you can cleanly step through the slides, but for when something goes wrong. And something will go wrong.

Try walking through your deck backwards and forwards. In your practicing, you're going to know the regular flow of your deck, but what about when you screw up? I love that multi-stage build-out you've got on slide 12 -- it's 32 seconds of transition goodness -- but what happens when you accidentally hit Back after it's done? That's another painful 32 seconds that you're going to need to improvise.

Your presentation is not a movie. Each presentation, while structured, is you standing up there waiting for disaster to strike, and when it does, where I want your head at is: “Disaster… failure… is only going to make this presentation better.”

Practicing for the unpredictable, improvising, is covered in How to Not Throw Up, but Keynote also provides a variety of disaster recovery tools.

URL Jump. Available via the inspectors, this feature allows you link any object on a slide to jump forwards, backwards, or to any other slide. My move is to hide these jumps in the navigation of the deck for unexpected moment when I need them.

Presentation Mode. Once you’ve fired up presentation mode, you have a slew of features to help you navigate disaster. All of these features are available by hitting the ? in this mode and here are are few of my favorites:

• Slide Switcher Overlay. You’ve probably already triggered this without knowing because clicking on a number will fire up this handy feature. Just type any number and the overlay will appear.
• Jump to Slide. When you accidentally back up over an animation-rich slide, you can simply jump over the slide rather than stepping through each build using the bracket keys.
• White Out / Black Out. There are moments when you want them to pay attention to you. Keynote provides two features which achieve this effect: white-out (via W) and black-out (via B) do exactly what they describe. Blank the screen with your favorite color so that the spotlight moves completely to you.
• Swap Displays. In presentation mode, X toggles the display and presenter screens while in presentation mode. Handy for those tense first few seconds where it's not clear which display is showing up where.

Even with adept usage of these tools you’re going to screw-up. I like when a presenter stumbles. I like to see how they react to the unpredictable because non-catastrophic failure humanizes a presentation. I’m there to hear what you think, but when you stumble over that slide and attempt to recover, I get a glimpse of how you think.

A Slice of You

In the past year, I've seen two amazing presentations where there was a total absence of slides. One was, essentially, an author reading his essay. Another was two of my favorite people talking about finding your obsession and following it. Both parties, I'm sure, spent a tremendous amount of time constructing their talks, and the results of that work were a scathing critique of Web 2.0 and an intelligent, clever romp into why you should simply focus on building things you love.

You don't need slides to say something big.

I'm not there yet. Yes, over the past few years I'm finding fewer and fewer actual words on my deck, and I can see a day where I can riff on a single slide for an hour, but I'm not there yet. Not sure if I want to be.

It's you up there on stage. They paid to see you. If they simply wanted to know what you think, they could have read your weblog or bought your book, but they paid to see you. A presentation is not just the careful construction of your thoughts; it’s a means by which your audience has access to you -- pacing, waving your arms, and cleverly recovering from that disaster on slide #32.

Mastery of Keynote can give your deck significant fu, but the slides are a prop. You're the presentation.

I cringe. It's Ian and Ian is a senior engineer. He's a rock. He gets it done. I never have to ask him twice and, after six years, Ian has every right to ask to work remote. But I'm still freaked because my first thought when anyone asks to work remote is, "This fine person is a year away from either quitting or being fired." Why? Because they're asking to leave the Pond.

The Pond

When I think of communication in a large group of people, I imagine a pond. Small, round, slightly green water. You can see the edges of this pond and there's a willow tree over there looking both informed and sad. Metaphorically, all the people in the organization are standing somewhere on this pond. Our positions are based on whom we know and where we are in the organization chart. When something happens in the company, when something noteworthy is said, a drop falls in the pond and creates a ripple.

The ripple is the piece of information traveling from one person to the others. Big drop, big ripple... travels further.

With me so far?

There is a constant flow of information in your company. That means there are constant drips in the Pond, creating various-sized ripples traveling every which way, bumping into each other, and transforming each other into slightly mutated ripples. These mutated ripples are the rumor mill, gossip, and all those small pieces of slightly bizarre information that cross your path during the course of the day.

If you're in the Pond, you're gathering data, whether it's intended for you or not. It's inevitable. It's what we do as curious humans; we receive information, digest it, alter it, and then send it on its way tweaked to our own personal wavelengths.

A remote employee is not in the Pond. Yes, he’s on the mailing lists and he aggressively updates the wiki, but the subtle, unintentional, tweaked, quiet information that is transferred throughout the Pond doesn't leave the Pond. There are those whose jobs it is to look at the Pond and attempt to relay the interesting ripples, but while these program and project managers are well intentioned, they relay poorly because they're just single observers of ripples. Real information is never conveyed by the individual; we understand by listening as a group.

The group forms a collective picture of the state of the Pond – it’s a distributed picture understood by everyone, but never completely known by one. It is the unspoken royal “we” and this intricate, immeasurable thing is absolutely essential to how a group gets things done well.

Do you mean it?

Remote has to work. It's not just Ian. There are bright people in your building right now who are going to want to return home to Colorado, and you're going to let them because losing them is not an option. Also, there's a planet full of talented people who will always be at a distance, but who represent huge, untapped productivity for your team. Your challenge is how to augment the remote employee’s absence from the Pond.

This article is about how to decrease the risk that you will have to fire your favorite employee who decides to become remote. I'd like to give advice from the other side, on how to work remotely, but I've never done it. I don't have the personality. My professional satisfaction comes from being able to look those I depend on in the eye and ask, "Do you mean it?" There is essential content to be discovered in that stare that will never be fully conveyed in an email, IM, or tweet.

My belief is that without deliberate attention, the remote employee slowly becomes irrelevant to the organization. Through no fault of their own, they can be gradually pushed to the edge of what's important. And when you're at the edge, you're an organizational shudder from falling over it. Failure happens at the edges.

Avoiding failure involves asking four questions before they leave:

1. Do they have the personality?
2. Do they have the right job?
3. Does the culture support it?
4. Do you have a remote friction detection and resolution policy?

The Personality

Whether the employee has the right personality to be a productive remote worker is a tricky call because most of your data about this person is based on working with them. What’s going to happen when you can’t see them? How are they going to react when you forget to include them in the staff call? How are they going to feel when the product launches and they aren’t there to celebrate?

This is what I consider.

Are they eloquent in email? Every bit of communication is more expensive with remote folks, so they’d better be good at it – no matter the medium. Can this person construct and convey a complex argument in a single email? Can this person make an important point... via iChat? Written communication is bereft of much of the intangible value of the Pond. It lacks the nuance of face-to-face communication, which means the author needs to be painfully explicit about the details. Can this person do that?

Are they self-directed? How do they deal with ambiguity? If you've given them crap direction, do they bump around for a bit before admitting defeat, or do they immediately ask for clarification? Many of the subtle ways you check in and error correct co-workers leave when they leave. If they're in the weeds, are they going to ask for help? How long until they ask for help?

How detail-oriented are they? If self-direction indicates how they start a thing, their detail orientation is how well they finish. Is this a person who needs help across the finish line? Do they get lost in nonessential details? When you ask for a thing, are you getting the end result you expect?

How well do they know the Pond? We'll talk about their job in a moment, but whatever that job is, it will have dependencies on people they are leaving behind. Does this person know how the organization communicates? Do they know both the organizational structure as well as the social structure? Are they asking you who to follow up with or are you asking them? Are they instinctively aware of whom they might piss off and proactively account for this in the first mail rather than after the flame-o-gram?

Do they need the Pond? Knowledge of the Pond is great, but does this person thrive because of the Pond? How much of their day are they spending talking with co-workers? Is this conversation essential to what they do or purely social? Which part of them are you going to socially amputate when they’re no longer in the building?

Are they reliable? I imply at the beginning of this article that it's a senior employee who has a better chance at being successful remotely, but that's not true. The ability to work remotely is not entirely a function of seniority; it's also genetic. There are those who do it better solo. Their standard operating procedure is to simply get it done. Seniority can improve personal efficiency and the quality of the finished product, but I've discovered innate reliability at all levels of experience. There are people who simply do what they say they're going to do.

The Right Job

Typical corporate logic dictates that a remote employee should work on a project that is separable from the rest of the team’s. The reasoning here is flawed. The belief is that the inconvenience of communication and decision-making latency around their distance means they should be separated and placed on non-dependent work.

Every part of that reasoning is wrong. Every part is another reason that remote fails.

My most successful remote employee was a perfect anomaly. He wrote standards -- protocols. The heart of his job was to define a structured means of communication where the primary goal was the removal of ambiguity. He was a phenomenal communicator. He went out of his way to completely and promptly answer every email. 24 hours a day. When he visited, he took the time to do a complete circumnavigation of the Pond, vetting all the ripples he could find. He instinctively knew that the skill in defining a protocol is creating a structure that is going to meet the needs of right now, but also the unimagined needs of five years from now. And he applied that not only to what he wrote, but also to how he worked. He was a wonderful anomaly and he taught me that a remote job must be perceived, in all ways, as equal to a local one.

There should be absolutely no consideration of a person's location on the planet Earth when considering the work you need of them. Each time the concern "Well, they're remote" comes up, you need to turn the concern around and ask, "What about my company, my people, or the work makes remote an issue?" because that is what needs to be considered locally.

The Culture

How are those back in the Pond viewing the remote employee? The means by which Pond-based employees discriminate varies from the discreet to the direct, from the passive to the aggressive. The reason for this discrimination always boils down a single, fundamental tension: remote creates productivity friction.

The friction sounds something like this:

• "I don't know what the hell this remote person is doing, so I'm going to assume he's stumbling around the house in his underwear.”
• "This remote person is messing with my deadline or deliverable."
• "He doesn't answer his email."

How long does it take to build a thing of quality? There's a cost and the question is how is the remote worker affects this cost. Anything higher than the cost of a local employee creates friction. What was a 27-second walk down the hallway to yell at Bob about his crap code is a now 30-minutes constructing an email. Staff meetings start with a wasted 10 minutes trying to get the videoconferencing to connect. Every single communication with a remote worker costs more and generates more ripples in the Pond, and both their job and yours is to either make this cost go away or justify it.

Respect comes from knowledge and the question is: does your culture support a constant and consistent flow of knowledge to and from the remote worker?

Let’s find out:

• Have you created or implemented specific communication media for the team? Wikis? IRC? Are they used? Do different teams need different media? Are there too many and, if so, how are you going to anoint the one true medium?
• Other than the job, how are you encouraging other random interactions between local and remote folks?
• How often are you seeing these remote folks face-to-face? My vote is at least monthly.

Friction Detection

Remote friction is going to crop up. Just like interpersonal tensions randomly appear in the building, so does friction around remote employees. What are you doing not only to detect these, but also fix them? An example.

I hate meetings, but the brilliant thing about a meeting is that it's full of people, and in a room full of people you never quite know what the hell is going to happen. The knee jerk reaction to bridging this meeting gap when there are remote workers is always, "We need good video conferencing software."

After 10 years of hearing this argument, I'm calling fail. Video conferencing works when you need to talk to your kids during that trip to Chicago. It fills that visual gap, but all of the video conferencing solutions I've been a part of relative to a meeting create friction rather than remove it.

Yes, I can see Anne on the screen, but she's flat. She's also got this 1/10th of a second lag on the conversation, which doesn't sound like a lot until you're in the middle of that strategic rant about design and Anne chimes in, mid-sentence, with a bright thought that completely disturbs the creative cadence of your rant. That 1/10th of a second. Her inability to inject her essential thought at precisely the right moment. These micro-disturbances of the Force are a constant reminder that Anne's not there. She's being projected on the conference room wall like a well-intentioned screen saver. This isn’t just hurting the tempo of the meeting, it’s eroding her credibility.

In this case, surprisingly, less technology, rather than more, is better. Skype’s proximity to my computer and the usual lack of lag is far superior to video conferencing for 1:1s, and spending a little money on a quality Polycom is a fine solution for the staff meeting, but technology is a tool and never the answer.

Friction detection is paying attention to all the ways a remote employee interacts with the group and constantly asking, “Is this working?”

Another Pond

You, as the manager of people, are responsible for making the remote call regarding a person, putting them in the right job, and making sure the culture supports remote people. But the responsibility of delivering while remote is squarely on the remote employee. Yes, a remote employee answers to himself. At four in the afternoon when they run into an impossible problem, it’s almost entirely up to them to develop their plan of attack.

Working remotely isn't a privilege; it's work. And it's the same work we're all doing back at the mothership... fully clothed... in the Pond.

In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It’s not these facts, but the stories surrounding the facts that inspire me when I take a good, long stare at a suspension bridge. But first…

Stunning.

In a good bridge, I see the defiant end result of how some of my favorite engineering stories begin:

• "I'm sure you can arrange an impressive line of people who say it's impossible. I take personal joy in ignoring those who say no."
• "Yes, halfway through this project we'll discover the impossible, but we know how to build through the impossible. Impossible is when we do our best work."
• "Trust me when I say that I can close my eyes and see the end result, and when you can see it, too, you will be amazed."

Ignore the No. When Brooklyn and New York's population was booming at the end of the 19th century, the best way to get to and from Brooklyn was via ferries. As solutions were considered, I'm sure there were those who simply thought, "More boats!" These ardent defenders of the status quo were not engineers -- they were the business. Their goal was not to build something great, but to make a profit.

It was an engineer named John Roebling who proposed a suspension bridge. We take bridges for granted now, but back in the 1800s, bridges were in beta. They fell. One out of every four bridges... fell. He convinced them by designing a bridge half again as big as any before it that was six times stronger than he estimated it need to be. Roebling designed the complete specification for the bridge in a mere three months and then died of tetanus from an injury he received surveying the bridge site.

Discover the impossible. Both of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are in the water of the East River. Ever wonder how you dig a big hole in the bottom of a river bed? In the late 1800s? It's called a caisson, which is a huge, watertight wooden box half the size of a city block. This monstrosity was constructed on the river, sealed with pine tar, and carefully floated to a specific location on the river. It was then slowly sunk to the riverbed by placing stone on top that would eventually become the foundation.

Done, right?

Wrong. With the caisson on the riverbed, it's time to push it another 45 feet into the riverbed in search of bedrock. Workers did this through the continued application of stone to the top while workers in the caisson dug out the riverbed with shovels, buckets, and, when necessary, dynamite. There was nothing resembling an electrical grid, so there was nothing resembling modern lighting in this watertight pine-tarred box, which was slowly descending through the floor of the East River. There were no jack hammers, so when they hit rock, they used small amounts of dynamite to crack these rocks. In a pine-tarred box, at the bottom of a river, mostly in a very wet dark.

And when the caisson finally hit bedrock 45 feet underground, they had to do it all over again for the New York tower. 30 feet deeper.

You will be amazed. With his father killed via an accident early in the surveying process, it was Washington Roebling, John's son, who was chief engineer. He did the balance of this work bedridden in Brooklyn Heights, suffering from caisson disease, which he acquired working in the caisson as it descended into the New York-side of the East River. It's not technically a disease; it's decompression sickness or the bends, and it forced him to monitor all of the work from a window in his bedroom. He relayed detailed instructions via his wife, Emily, who effectively managed a cadre of politicians, competing engineers, and anyone else working on the bridge for over a decade.

As the New York caisson descended further than its Brooklyn counterpart, the incidents of the bends increased, killing two men. With no bedrock in sight, Roebling used his knowledge of geology and mineralogy to make an amazing decision: stop digging. It wasn't bedrock, but it was compacted sand.

The New York tower. 78 feet deep into the riverbed. Resting on sand. It hasn't moved.

We Are Defined By What We Build

The Brooklyn Bridge was built from 1870 until 1883. A quick history refresher: five years after we finished shooting each other in the American Civil War, we started building this:

Three years after that, work started on another:

And before the Williamsburg Bridge was even done, work started on the Manhattan Bridge:

These are the words and the stories I hear in the Brooklyn Bridge: enthusiasm, audacity, impossibility, and amazement. More importantly, I see a work of bare utility with a palpable sense of confidence, an equilibrium with nature, and a beauty that only grows with time.

We are defined by what we build. It's not just the engineering ambition that designed these structures, nor the 20 people who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. It's that we believe we can and decide to act. I'm happy to report our new President agrees when he says,

"In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom."

Someone, sometime soon is going to start describing the climb out of this impressive hole we've dug for ourselves, and they're going to call it "America 2.0". Clever, yes. We need a new version of ourselves and that's going to involve bright, unexpected ideas from those we least expect them from, and they’re going to strike you as impossible. All you need to do to understand these terrifyingly ambitious ideas is to look back at what we’ve already done to understand what we can do.

And then, in a moment, it's done. It looks nothing like the final product, I still have hours of writing and editing to do, but I know that I'm done because I can see the arc and the shape of the piece. I have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but, most importantly, I have the new ability to remove. I can delete. A line here, a paragraph there -- I can let go of things of former importance.

It's one of the biggest writing lessons I've learned in the past few years -- the art of less -- and the appearance of Twitter has only reinforced this lesson's importance.

Two Tweets, Three Guidelines

There are two kinds of tweets:

Original material. This is you talking to everyone.

Retweets, quotes, and links. This is you forwarding a thing that you find interesting to everyone. For simplicity's sake, let's just call these retweets.

There’s another type of tweet that I want to talk about briefly and that’s the conversational tweet. What does this tweet tell you?

@commanda No clue

Not a thing. As you’ll see with the three following guidelines, my Twitter expectation is that each time I glance at my Twitterstream that I can something of value in any tweet. While conversational tweets are interesting for you and the recipient, they leave the rest of us in the dark.

Say More with Less

Tweet material just shows up. I'm sitting there in someone's office when they say something which is, well, twitterable. This identification process has become annoyingly front-of-mind over the past year to the point that I interrupt important meetings with the simple declaration, "That's twitterable".

With solid twitterable material on my hands, I ask, “Does it need an edit?” The editing of tweets started out as a practicality for me. I needed to know whether or not my rough tweets were more than 140 characters, so I'd fire up WriteRoom, which conveniently counts characters, words, and paragraphs. Yes, I know Twitteriffic counts characters and so does the Twitter web application, but writing happens in big, open places. I don't like typing in boxes; I want a canvas.

With the rough tweet dumped into WriteRoom, I start cutting. First to get it under the 140-character limit, but, more importantly, to reduce the idea to the basics. The Elements of Style has advice here. They suggest: "Avoid fancy words". Why utilize when you can use? My advice is similarly confusing: "Drop words to give them room to think".

In my head, I'm cutting words from my tweet to give you room to mentally add your own:

BEFORE: If it’s 4am, I know how stressed I am.
AFTER: Stress is how well I know 4am.

Nine to seven words. Slight reorganization, but which says more to you?

The act of editing a tweet seems contradictory to the impulsive nature of tweets, which means this is a good time to remind you that I’m a repeatedly stated firm believer that Twitter is what you make of it. I want my tweets with a bit of art. I want each word considered. You want to share the intimate details of your Battlestar Galactica watching habits. Whatever works for you, but how about…

Don't Say What You're Doing, Say Why You’re Doing It

The question Twitter asks is, "What are you doing?" I can't think of the last time that I followed that direction. Fact is 95% of my day would bore the shit out of you. Really. There's a chance you might derive some meager inspiration from the fact that, right now, I'm sitting in a coffee shop writing -- talking to no one -- but what is more interesting is why I'm here. Why I choose to do what I do. The tweet is, "Avoiding a meeting I hate".

It's just a mental step further from “What are you doing?” It's a moment of introspection to transform the boring details of your day into delicious group therapy. This is why I think you should...

Add a Bit of Yourself

Twitter is you. I'm a big fan of the retweet, but I have the same fundamental problem with it that I have with literal answers to "What are you doing?" My question about the zero-add retweet is, "So what?"

Yes, the point of the tweet is the link and, yes, I follow some people because they are experts at finding compelling content on the Web that I probably care about. I don't want just the content; I want to know what you think about it. Retweeting an article? Great, what's the one line you love? Think that lolcat is funny? Me too, but why?

BEFORE: NYTimes Graphic: Home Prices in Selected Cities: http://bit.ly/4CjL (@khoi)
AFTER: Ouch. Phoenix: http://bit.ly/4CjL (@khoi)

I've already got a bevy of sites that are scrubbing and prioritizing the web for me. I check them four times a day and they serve their purpose well. But these sites lack authenticity. I don't need another list of interesting links.

In Twitter, you follow people, not content.

140

My brief research into the English language revealed the average character count of a word is eight. Throw together a bunch of a smaller and bigger words, some single spaces and punctuation and you roughly end up with the average 140-character tweet being somewhere between 14 and 20 words. Let's call it 15.

15 words.

In my opinion, the art of a good tweet is not just how much you can convey using extreme brevity, it’s also how you can take an idea, shape it with a bit of yourself, and give it to someone else who, if you’ve given them reason, will do the same.

The nature of these decisions varies from project to project. They may be choices about look and feel, rules about architecture, or trade offs regarding feature set. Whatever these decisions are, they set a tone that defines the success of the project.

When I look at Twitter, I see three early essential decisions about how Twitter allows you to craft a community. I believe much of Twitter's continued success is due to definition and execution of these decisions.

Interestingly, some obvious candidates for the Top 3, like "Scales like crazy", "Will generate money", and "Needs to be searchable" weren't initially there.

The decisions were:

• Decision #1: A user chooses whom they follow.
• Decision #2: A user chooses whom they no longer follow.
• Decision #3: A user should be judged only by what they say.

These are simple decisions of empowerment. As Twitter's popularity grows exponentially, both veteran users and recent arrivals need to remember that these basic decisions mean Twitter is yours to build with however you choose.

Yeah, Britney's here now. Barack was here for a bit. I hear Shaq is figuring out Twitter as well. Yeah, these folks have an inordinate number of followers and are saying nothing particularly interesting, but they do not embody what makes Twitter great. Twitter is great because of choices made to allow you build whatever you want.

Decision #1: A user chooses whom they follow.

This might have been your first Twitter crisis: why am I here?

“Well, I hear so'n'so was on Twitter and I like them, so I followed them so I could figure out what the hell this Twitter thing was all about.”

You added folks. You looked at whom others you respected were following and you added more. Then, someone pissed you off. Someone said something that was not aligned with the vibe of your Twitterstream and you got cranky.

Every couple of weeks, a meme stressing about "an increase in Twitter spam" wanders the Internet. Each time I see this meme appear, I turn away from my keyboard and bang my head against my desk three times.

Twitter spam. Really? Are you even paying attention? I'll say it again, you choose who you follow. If you're following a newsbot, you're going to get news spam. If you follow a good friend who can't stop RTing, you're going to to get retweet spam, but complaining about it is like standing the middle of a freeway asking, "Why do these cars keep hitting me?"

"But Rands, I need to follow this person, but they won't shut up."

There's a legitimate complaint here. I'm certain there's a sensible feature request based on this complaint, like "Please don't show me tweets contain RT or @" or maybe a feature to put someone you follow on Twitter time-out during that weekend drinking binge where they won't shut up about their ex-girlfriend. Yes, these features could be added to the base platform, but why complicate a feature you already have? You unfollow. It's brutally simple and it solves the problem.

Decision #2: A user chooses whom they will no longer follow.

My theory regarding folks who complain about Twitter spam is that they, like me, have been traumatized by decades of email spam. You believe that Twitter spam is inevitable because, well, we lost the war against email spam, so we're going to loser the Twitter spam war, as well.

You can win this war.

Think if you had the following power over your email inbox. When a piece of spam showed up, you could press a single button and guarantee that you would never receive that type of mail again. Poof. We just eliminated the billion-dollar spam detection and prevention industry with this dream. That's exactly what Twitter made possible with Decision #2 and they did it with class.

If you choose, you receive a notification when someone starts following you, but have you noticed there is no similar notification when they leave? I find this omission telling. While I can't confirm the feature omission was deliberate, I hope it was. The simple choice to not broadcast a departing follower strikes me as saying, "We are choosing to focus Twitter's community conversations on what's being built, not what's being taken apart."

A service like Qwitter quickly appeared to fill the gap, but unless you're getting paid by your number of followers, getting lost in figuring out why someone is no longer following you is a waste of time. Their departure has nothing to do with you; it has to do with them and the experience they want out of Twitter.

Decision #3: A user should be judged only by what they say.

Take a look at the decisions Twitter made regarding your profile. It's a spartan, 160-character bio, your location, and a URL. None of which you actually need to fill out. This is decidedly not Facebook. There is no feature in Twitter which tells who in your graduating class has a Twitter account. If you don't know the person whose account you're checking out, you're forced to think. You make a choice to follow not based on where they live, where they went to school, what they do, or whom they know. What matters is what they say.

Yes, this rule says should because there’s no way my hippie utopian vision of a world where bright ideas connect bright people is going to last. Barack hasn't said much since the election, but still garners thousands of followers a week. Mr. Tweet robotically scrubs your follower list and offers automated helpful advice regarding followers of followers that you might be interested in, and I've found some "Well, duh, I should be following them" folks.

Twitter is mainstream and lots of time and energy is being spent analyzing and judging Twitter habits. "He's got 17,123 followers and only follows THREE PEOPLE. Jerk." Who cares? Yes, some folks have huge numbers of followers, whereas others have 12. This gives these massively followed people a larger stage for their 140 characters, but because someone has a pile of followers doesn't mean I ever want my search altered by someone else’s subjective calculation regarding “authority”. I define my own authority. I prioritize.

This is My House

Think of your Twitter account as your house. This is my house. Your house is different. You're trying to figure out how to use Twitter to monetize eyeballs. Good luck with all that. For me, Twitter remains a place for casual information. For me, a tweet is still a note I tie to a balloon, which I let go and think, "Who is going to read that one?" Sometimes I look and see where it ended up, sometimes I don't.

In my house, I want to create an illusion of a two-way conversation, which means I continue to prune followers so that content flows at a consumable rate. If I get the sense that I've lost control over my Twitterspace, I'll stop going -- the same way my fancy new mail rule files once important messages straight into the well-intentioned To Forget folder.

This is my house and I’m still deciding how I want it built and, thankfully, Twitter decided to be spartan and to stay out of the way. I think they knew the construction of your community is your deal. Bitching about it means you haven’t figured it out for yourself.

"Rands, you're doing a great job on tools development and I'd really like you to Lead the effort."

It sounded liked your standard professional compliment. Atta boy! Go run with it! Problem was, I didn't hear the capital L.

Lead is what my manager had said. Not lead, but Lead. He asked poorly and without definition and specifics, but he did ask. He was subsequently baffled two months later when I said, "I don't think I can finish this by next month, I need more time."

Him: "Why don't you hire another engineer?"

Me: "Wait, I can do that?"

I see three possible situations whereby you might become a manager:

1. You decide. "I believe I am going to be a better manager than engineer. I choose management."
2. You evolve. This is what happened to me. Essentially, a series of small decisions and actions where, at the end, you end up being a manager.
3. You have no choice. "You. Manage this team. Go."

Whether you get to choose or not, there are aspects of management that you need to understand.

Management is a total career restart. Now, if you're evolving into the career, this will be less obvious, but if management just landed in your lap, realize that while you're in the same game, it's a totally new game board, and you're at square #1. You will use the skills that made you a great engineer, but there's an entirely new set of skills you need to acquire and refine.

This sensation will appear at the end of the day when you ask, "What did I build today?" The answer will be a troubling, "Nothing". The days of fixing ten bugs before noon are gone. You're no longer going to spend the bus ride home working on code; you're going to be thinking hard about how to say something important to someone who doesn't want to hear it. There will be drama. And there be those precious seconds when there is no one in your office wanting... something.

You go to a lot of meetings. You already knew this, but Managers Go to Meetings. Meetings are the bane of my existence and I consider it my personal goal to kill as many possible, but I still go to a lot of meetings. As best I can tell, there are two useful types of meeting: alignment and creation. Briefly:

Alignment meetings sound like this: "It's red, are we all in agreement it's red? Ok, swell. Wait, Phil thinks it's blue. Phil, here are the 18 compelling reasons it's red. Convinced? Done now?"

Creation meetings sound like this: "We need more blue. How are we going to do that? Phil, you're our blue man. What should we do here?"

There are other meetings out there, but you will learn to avoid them. One being the therapy meeting. They sound like this: "Show of hands, who likes to talk about blue? Or red? I don't care. Let's explore our color feelings for the next 60 minutes."

In time you will learn which meetings to attend, but when you start you will go to all of them because...

You are a communication hub. One of your primary jobs as a manager is to be a communication hub not only for all of those working for you, but for everyone who needs something from you. This means you are going to spend an inordinate amount of time sitting in random conference rooms and listening. Hard. Who are they? What do they need? Do I understand what they are saying? Should I say no now or let this fester?

Confusingly, as a manager, you often get credit just by showing up, sitting there, and nodding. As a career management strategy, the "nodding fly-on-the-wall" approach isn't proactive or helpful. But there are critical times when all that is being asked of you is that you are the receiver of the rant. Simply by listening, by letting an idea be heard, you are helping.

However, you need to do more than listen. Whatever is being said in this meeting isn't just for you; parts of it are for your team, which means you need amazing skills of...

Abstraction and Filtering. During these endless demands for your time, you do need to communicate, but if you're relaying all the information that's being thrown at you during the day, all you'll do is relay. Your new job is one of abstraction, synthesis, and filtering. During that 30-minute status meeting, you need to develop the mental filter to listen for the three things you actually need to tell the team in your alignment meeting, but in a mere three minutes instead of 30.

Your thought is, "If there are only three things I need to know, why the hell are we spending 30 minutes in this meeting?" First, I relate to your frustration. Second, the three things you need to relay are different than the three things each of the other folks in this meeting needs to relay. Third, if you blow this, here's what's going to happen: more meetings.

See, your world has expanded, now...

You will be multi-lingual / translator. Each group in the company has a different language they speak and a different set of needs. As a manager, you need to be able to speak all the corporate dialects of those you depend on. Think of the healthy tension between Engineering and QA. Remember that flame war that went on between you and the QA guy for a week in the bug database? Engineering and QA actually speak the same language, but have different goals. As a manager, you will discover an entire company of languages and goals. For example:

• Sales cares about selling and doesn't much care how hard it is to build.
• Marketing is passionate about brand, content, and voice and will argue endlessly for details you find to be irrelevant.
• Tech supports talks to the customer ALL DAY, but still feels no one listens to what they say.
• Admins speak many of these languages and have more power than you think.

Everyone believes their job is essential, everyone believes everyone else's job is easy, and, confusingly, everyone is right.

These roles exist for a reason. The groups each bring something unique to the corporate organism. You can giggle and make fun of their bizarre acronyms as an individual, but as a manager you must speak their language, because once you do, you're going to better understand what they want.

Learning new languages is tricky, especially when you're just getting started. You're going to spend 90 days being totally confused, and it gets worse because there's...

Drama everywhere. Your manager calls you into her office first thing on a Monday morning. It's clearly urgent. She sits you down and starts, "I'm, uh, making a change in the organization. Amanda is really excelling in tools development so I've asked her to take over Jerry's management responsibilities. I think this will make everyone more successful."

Wondering what happen to Jerry? Feel like you're getting half the story? Wrong, you're getting 1/10th of the story. People are messy and a huge part of the management gig is managing this messiness. Who knows what personal or professional issue Jerry has that is forcing this management change. It's really none of your business. However, it is your manager's business because the people are her job.

As an individual, you're seeing 10% of the organizational drama your manager is seeing. I know it's intriguing to get the full story, but again, it's often none of your business, and it's not your job. As a manager, you get front row seats for all of the drama in all its messy glory. This is why you have a monthly 1:1 with Human Resources. Their job is to train you how to manage the drama. This is why you need to become a great...

Context Switcher. This is your morning. Six 30-minute 1:1s starting at 9am. This day is unique in that in your 4th 1:1, your architect resigns. The guy who has been designing the heart of your application for 18 months has been poached by a start-up and had piles of money thrown at him, and it sounds like there's no way of saving him. Sounds grim. What's harder is that when your sky-is-falling 1:1 is done, you've got your next one with your QA Director who has no clue your architect resigned, and she urgently wants to talk bug database, and that's exactly what you need to do. You need to quietly and confidently forget that you're fucked and give this team member your full attention.

There will be a steady stream of curveballs headed in your managerial direction, each with its own unique velocity. One of your jobs is to not only deftly handle the pitch, however bizarre, but also shake it off and calmly expect an even stranger one.

There's a reason you'll see an inordinate amount of bizarre organizational crap as a manager. See, the individuals can handle -- and should handle -- the regular stuff. You want a team of people who aren't bringing you every little thing, but if you successfully build this team, your reward is that what is ends up in your office is uniquely kooky.

As these freakish pitches whiz by, you will be judged in two very different ways. First, what did he do about the pitch? Are we going to see more of these? Second, how was his composure as that pitch whizzed by, missing his nose by an inch? Does it look like he handled it or is he freaked out and ready to bolt?

Leadership is not just about effectively getting stuff done, but demonstrating through your composure that you aren't rattled by the freakish. Fortunately, one of the new tools you have to control the proliferation of freakishness is the ability to...

Say No. This is your second most powerful tool. Whether you're a manager, considering management, or just here for the Rands, I want you to pick the hardest problem on your plate. The one that is waking you up at 4am. I want you to decide and to say out loud:

"No."

You're not going to do that thing. QA can't test it. Engineering won't finish it. If we attempt to do it, we will fail and we don't fail, so the answer is "No".

You had this tool as an individual. You could say no, but you usually did so by cornering your manager and explaining, "Here is why No is the right move here," and then he'd say no.

As a manager, you are caretaker of No for you group. When it is time to do the right thing by stopping, it's your job to bust out the No. You defend your team against organizational insanity with No.

No does not come without consequences. Saying No because you can rather than because it's right slowly transforms you into a power-hungry jerk, but again, this is your new tool to do with as you see fit. Also, it’s not all No, you can also…

Say Yes. Yes is how you begin building both people and things. It’s not just a positive word; it’s the word that provides the structure for moving forward. “Yes. Begin”, “Yes, I know he’s leaving. What are we going to do?” and “Why yes, we should tackle the audacious.”

There will be times when your Yes needs to be unencumbered by reality, where it needs to be the inspiration that demonstrates how you perceive the unknowable.

“Yes, I think you’d be a fine manager.”

Trust So You Can Scale

As a new manager, whenever the sky falls, you'll become an engineer again. You're going to fall back on the familiar because those are the tools you know and trust, but it's time to trust someone else: your team.

If I could give you one word, a single, brief piece of management advice, the word would be "scale". Your job as a manager is to scale the skills that got you the gig in the first place. You used to be the guy who did the impossible when it came to fixing bugs. Ok, now you're the guy whose entire team does the impossible bug fixing.

It's time to translate and to teach what you're good at to those who you work with, and that starts by trusting them to do that which you previously only asked of yourself.

The benefits of defining and maintain this trust create a satisfying productivity feedback loop. By trusting your team, you get to scale, and scaling means you hopefully get to do more of what you love. The more you do, the more you build, the more experience you gather, the more lessons you learn. The more lessons you learn, the more you understand, and that means when more shows up you’ll have even greater opportunity to scale.

We were a year into a two-year development process. Far enough along to have confidence that we could do it, but not far enough to be sure when we would get there.

Features were claimed to be done, but each build of the product was a study in broken and frustration.

So I'd ask Larry, "Why doesn't this feature work?"

Larry's lengthy answer demonstrated his deep knowledge of the product, his confidence in his team, and incontrovertible evidence that they were making progress and that the feature would work "real soon now." Larry would convey this confidence and I'd leave the conversation swimming in a pleasant sense of managed calm, but a day would pass, I'd install the next build, and shit was still broken.

I knew if I walked into Larry's office I'd get the same fire hose of comforting reasoning regarding why we weren't done. I also knew if I waited another 24 hours to see another pile of broken bits, I'd lose it, so I stopped, took a deep breath, and wrote myself a short list.

Seven bullets. Each representing a feature that needed to work. Not done, just working.

I took the list into Larry's office and handed it to him: "This is the Larry Test and you need to pass it."

Done

This is an article about choosing to be done.

Done has a lot of definitions, depending on where you're standing in the building. Marketing thinks you're done the first time they see a working demo. Program managers think you're done when the deadline arrives. QA thinks they decide when it's done because they've got fancy metrics to define doneness: "No high priority bugs found in the software for a week." Ok, fine metric, but for engineering, done happens long before all of these definitions.

The issue is that an engineer's definition of done is the perfect set of code, and left to his own devices, an engineer will endlessly improve the code on the mythic journey to done.

It's never done. For any large project with many personalities in play, at best it's always good enough. Sorry.

This is not an argument for mediocrity. You can toot your horn about quality and only be good enough, but I guarantee -- I promise you -- that you will ship with significant piles of two types of bugs: the ones you know and the ones you don't. Engineers have an innate sense of where those bugs are, and if you don't tell them to stop, they will merrily continue towards their goal of total elimination of all bugs.

This is why, when the time is right, you indicate to your team you're done, and I use the Larry Test.

Are You Larry Worthy?

The art of the Larry Test is not in its writing, it’s when you choose to use it. When are you choosing to be done?

Paradoxically, it's the engineers who will never actually be done that I size up to figure out when to land the Larry Test. I'd like to say there was an obvious measure, a clear sign that indicated it was time to pull out the Larry Test, but it's a culmination of little signs.

• The senior engineer who worries the most saying something small but positive.
• A strange cessation of all meetings, indicating that we've stopped talking about how it should work.
• Hallway conversation about the bug database.

Each engineering team is different, so each set of subtle signs will be different. In a pinch, my advice is to sit each person down and ask, "Are we done?" Their answer will usually be no, but listen carefully to the size of the no. There's done in there.

Before You Land the Larry

Poor application of the Larry Test can exacerbate a fundamental tension between managers and employees. We all have a boss, right? Wherever you are on the organization chart, part of your manager's job is error checking. Been in this meeting? You know, the one where you bring in the project plan for the next year? It's taken six weeks of hard work by your team to build this comprehensive and compelling plan and what does your manager do when you begin? He starts poking holes in it. Nit picking.

Show of hands. Who likes to be told what they've done is flawed after six weeks of hard work? I thought so.

Different managers have different communication styles and there are those where delivery of criticism feels almost pleasant. But criticism, whether it's constructive or destructive, coming from the guy who signs the checks often triggers the knee-jerk negative "I did something wrong" vibe.

Reactions to this criticism vary: "He's just trying to show he has value by poking random holes in our hard work."

No, he's not.

What your boss has that you do not is, hopefully, more experience. What he should be able to do after looking at a situation you've been staring at for a month is say, "Yeah, I've seen this before and this is how this is going to play out."

It's annoying. "Why did he wait a month to say something us? We've been wasting our time!"

No again. Part of your job is to become your boss. What you are doing while stumbling to and fro is finding and building the experience your boss already has. The trick and the art is, how long did your boss let you stumble? I mean learn.

There's a fine line between managerial insight and incompetence. Your job, and your manager's, is to let your team wander long enough to find that experience.

In the case of the Larry Test, your job is to find the precise moment to tell the team it’s time to be done. Do it too early and you’re going to look out of touch. Do it too late and you’re going to be, well, late.

An Evolving Done

I wrote the original Larry Test on a yellow Post-it note. I wrote it at midnight on a Sunday night after the team had worked the entire weekend, but the bits were still all over the floor. The Larry Test was not comprehensive, nor was it even readable. It was me, in the middle of night, thinking, "What has to work?"

Your Larry Test will differ. Maybe it’s not features you need working, but performance. I don’t know what you do, so I can’t tell you what to measure, but the point is not entirely in defining the test. The point is: when are you going to stop the design and stop the development and communicate that it's time to be done?

No one really knew about my Larry Test for a week. It was just for Larry and I, but his team figured it out. After a week of Larry repeatedly hammering, "These are the 7 things that will demonstrate that we're serious about being done", there was a version of the sticky stuck to the corner of everyone's display,

This is my test and I need to pass it.

Strangely, the time of year it's the least fun to be outside is when I use the chainsaw the most. This is a result of holiday vacation, trees conveniently falling during winter storms, and short windows of time the county of Santa Cruz allows you to burn in your yard.

The job of the chainsaw is rarely one of actual building. It's destructive, constructive work where you're removing dead or live trees in order to make room for others to grow. After an afternoon in the forest, I'm covered in sawdust and sap. I'm bruised, I'm exhausted, and I can barely walk. It's great.

I've been doing the same type of work with the weblog. In preparation for a new design, I've been slowly tidying and pruning the site. I've also been reflecting on the past year's writing. Let's look back at some of my favorite articles from 2008:

Appropriately, 2008 was led off with a Twitter article. Twitter was a recurring theme for the year and it showed up again in May as I talked about what, in my opinion, made a good follower in We Travel in Tribes. The first tweet inspired article was The Quirkbook, which listed a plethora of quirks I gathered via Twitter after admitting a few of my own.

Out Loud was the second half of my reposings on presentations. This article tackled the art of giving a presentation versus writing one. Articles like this appear because of immediate practicality. I was in presentation hell last spring and needed to articulate through my fingers how to prepare for a presentation.

Pixel Rigs documented another visual fascination of mine, namely desktop arrangements. I'm happy to report the Flickr group I created continues to receive a trickle of new desktop set-ups. I've recently updated mine, as well.

The FriendDA was an idea that had been kicking around my head that I finally got around to writing and posting. I deliberately disassociated the FriendDA from Rands to see what it could do on its own. Checks of the Twitterstream demonstrate folks seem to find value.

The Coffee Mug Affair was my third obsessive analysis of tools I can't live without. The "This is seriously fucking black coffee" sits in front of me and is happily serving its purpose as I browse the archives and write this article. The cup also made an appearance on the first piece of Rands schwag, the t-shirt.

The year finished up with this Rands shirt with 100% of the profits go to First Book literacy charity. I'm done printing shirts, but I'll be leaving what has been printed up in the Buy Olympia store until we've sold out.

That's 23 articles on the year -- five less than the year before. Other than some small tweaks, I'm moving into year #4 of the current design -- which is unacceptable and currently being rectified.

The fact real work kicks in this week is tempered by the presence of MacWorld, which brings some of my favorite people to San Francisco. This collection of bright minds shows up at a perfect time of year. With the holidays behind us, with the celebration and the cleansing complete, it's time to ask, "What are we going to build next?"

Penny: "How old are you?"

William: "18."

Penny: "Me, too. How old are we really?"

William: "17."

Penny: "Me, too."

William: "Actually, I'm 16."

Penny: "Me, too. Isn't it funny? The truth just sounds different."

What does a lie sound like? How do we decide to trust? There's a reason why you can figure out in an instant whether a mail is spam or not. It's not a single, measurable thing, but a whole set of small, invisible variables with which you can instantly make a judgment -- I do not trust this mail.

You have a complex set of analytical mental muscles that help you make critical snap emotional judgments. Whether it's a mail, a website, or a person, your brain can instantly look at 12 imperceptible aspects of a thing to determine how you should feel.

Truth, love, or lies, human has a signature cadence.

I love Flickr

Really, I love it. My favorite part of designing a presentation is the three hours I get lost slice and dicing the deck and cruising Flickr looking for the perfect image. I always find a photo that changes the way I see my deck.

Flickr pulled my SLR out of my closet and onto my desk. Flickr gives me regular visual insights into friends that I’d never find in Twitter, instant messaging, or even over lunch. I feel as I've only begun to scratch the surface of what Flickr can offer and you know what? Until recently, I thought Flickr loved me back. Up until a few months ago, this was the Flickr logo:

As far as I could tell, just about every single Flickr page contained this highlighted message, and what I saw in this simple message was that I wasn't on a web site; I wasn't using software. I was somewhere else.

Flickr is not a web site. Flickr is a tremendously large group of people constantly throwing their photos at each other and when Flickr said it loved you, it was reminding you that you weren't at a website, you were part of a community.

You're Not a Clock

Some time shortly after Web 1.0 was over, an engineer was programming and making a choice regarding wording. He needed to tell the user how long it had been since something had happened -- elapsed time. There are well-formatted, structured ways to display this information, but most assume you're a clock:

3 days, 2 hours, 12 minutes, 3 seconds.

There are a bunch of problems with this format. First, you waste a lot of space saying very little, but the larger issue is that it doesn’t effectively describe the passage of time. You don’t measure time -- you feel it. This engineer understood that you're a human being. He decided that communicating elapsed time should sound like telling you the time over coffee, "When did Michael update his status?"

It’s small. You probably didn’t even see it. It's not precise, but tells you exactly what you need to know. Moreover, it sounds like someone rather than something is saying it.

It sounds authentic.

Stop for a second and reread any paragraph in this article, but this time, I want you to listen to the voice you've constructed in your head. It sounds like you. This is why, when we meet, you’re going to be confused because I don’t sound like you. You do.

You trust this voice and the more a website or an application is designed to imitate that voice, the sooner a user will engage because they’ll make an emotional connection faster.

It's a Little Thing

Do this. Take a moment to look on one of your favorite websites or weblogs and look for where they choose to sound like a friend you bumped into at the coffee shop. Once you start looking for it, it stands out. My favorite place to look is at the bottom of the page around the copyright:

It’s a little thing. In the huge pile of work building a website, the words chosen to deliver small messages might seem important, but these small words define a personality and both personality and reputation are built on decisions that feel too small to matter.

Here are three ways JetBlue starts the conversation at their kiosks:

Here's how Twitter used to tell you they saved your information:

And this is how Khoi reminds you to have a conversation, not a flame war:

This conversational tone has a purpose. By sounding like a human, these small wording decisions push the technology out of the way to reveal what we really care about: the people.

Yeah, they’re faking us out. Yeah, it's a script that is randomly saying "Hi" in every language possible, but look at the design intent. You are being benignly deceived into believe that you aren't interacting with a computer, you're staring through a window at other people.

And that's where your head should be. Not worrying about how it might work, but who you might find on the other side.

I Think Flickr Still Loves Me

I see a lot of guilt inside the term “Web 2.0”. It’s an overused catchall term used to describe a bevy of new technologies and trends, but what I hear is guilt. When someone uses the term, I hear, “Yeah, so we’re not going to fuck-up and flame-out like those Web 1.0 dweebs. We’re Web 2.0.”

My negative reaction is unfortunate because inside of this guilty morass are some brillian