Sol Young

On Twitter, the numbers for friends (people you follow) and followers (people who follow you) are being misreported. The most common tweet today is about one’s follower count dropping off. This is telling of your personality, and not in a good way.

If you’re complaining about your follower count dropping off without your realizing your friend count dropped too, you’ve probably only been paying attention to building numbers. You’re also describing to the world that you didn’t care about losing touch with your friends.

For the record, I first noticed my friend count dropped. Over the year or two on the service, I’ve built up a friend list of ~6200 extremely interesting people (~2100 follow me). When I saw my friend count dropped, I checked my followers to verify. My tweet was, “Wow - number of people I follow and who are following me just dropped by more than 1000 each. Not good!”

While they reboot the service and get your numbers back to normal, take a moment to consider what matters. If you’re that important, they’ll find you again.

Alvin Ashcraft (@alashcraft) put out the idea to create a Facebook group around the geek dinner concept; so I ran with it. The Facebook group is Philly Geek Dinner. Sign up there (or here, here, or just show up here).

A quick additional tidbit. Jason Hill from National Mechanics dropped me a DM and they’re looking forward to our being there. They’ve got a Twitter account for the restaurant itself. Pretty slick.

The kick-off Philly Geek Dinner will be at National Mechanics. I haven’t been there before, so looking forward to checking it out. Post on Upcoming or Eventful so we get a feel for the number of people.

National Mechanics - 22 South 3rd Street - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - www.nationalmechanics.com

Link to today’s run

I love running. I skip wearing headphones or listening to music because I love hearing the world race past me. Things that interfere with the actual experience of being there aren’t interesting to me.

Nike+ on an iPod (a music player first and foremost) thankfully has the option to do a workout without music (and without a headset). I’ve been using this since Christmas 2007 when my wife gave it to me. It’s great! Nike has training programs you can follow to get you the next level.

Recently discovered when I got an N82 is the Nokia Sportstracker app. It keeps track with GPS and gives an amazing amount of live metadata. Not only are you able to follow your speed, pace, average pace, distance, location, etc, in real time, you can pump the data live to the web.

There are a couple things lacking with both systems: Social interaction outside their gardens. Both offer links to back to your workout pages, but neither supports easy placement of the data elsewhere (read: No RSS feeds of the content).

An RSS feed of the workouts would be an ideal next step for either company. RSS being available would allow WordPress and TypePad widget development much more easily.

It would also be slick to have Twitter and Facebook integrations (Nike+ has some Facebook apps written by third parties - I haven’t been impressed with these since they’re all Flash).

Running profiles:

• Nike+: http://nikeplus.nike.com/nikeplus/?l=runners,runs,1089318170
• Nokia: http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/user/profile.do?u=solyoung

Video update about the Philadelphia Geek Dinner on August 5th, 8pm.

Having some fun with the iPod Nike+ and Nokia GPS at the same time while running down to the John Kelly statue along the Schuylkill. While stretching decided to shoot a quick video (didn’t Qik).

The results for the Nike+ are extremely accurate. Since the iPod measures pauses, I believe both devices were pretty much in sync.

Results:

• Nike+
• Nokia SportsTracker

I’ve been wanting to organize a meet-up in Philadelphia for a while. Combine that with having a list of 30+ restaurants stored as a note on my phone, wanting and waiting to try, and you get opportunity. An opportunity for the geek in us…

So I’m finally kicking this off in an official manner. The upcoming.org page is up. Eventful, too. I’ll have a venue picked out this week.

If this works out we’ll keep it going on the first Tuesday each month.

Cheers and looking forware to meeting you!