Quick'n'Dirty Episode 52: We Love Your Tweets

It's hard to know where to begin on the recap of this episode of the Quick'n'Dirty podcast. While the end result ended up being pretty good, the getting there part was a little nerve-wracking...

Having spent a day and a half out in Napa at the Wine Industry Technology Syposium, I knew that wedging in the Quick'n'Dirty with co-host, Jennifer Leggio, was going to be a little tricky. But with a 2:05 PM flight and a start time for the show of 12:00 PT, I figured that I would have enough time to get from Napa to Sacramento (about an hours drive) in time to get settled at a local Starbucks before doing the show. That was right up until the point where my iPhone decided to crash on me (apparently the outcome of updating all of my apps without having upgrade to the new 4.0 operating system).

Well with this post as my witness you can probably deduce that I did make it to Sacramento in time to co-host the show. The only hitch being that I had to do so from a rest area about 4 miles away from the Sacramento airport... in my rental car. For any of you wondering where I was in the chat room or on Twitter, that's where I was. So now that you know the back story, on to the recap!

Jennifer and I kicked today's show off with our social app of the week. Our choice was none other than Taxi Magic, a service that allows one to order and pay for a cab, all from the comfort of your iPhone, Droid, Blackberry or Palm app. The coolest part is that it uses your GPS to track you down so you never actually have to call the cab. Self-admittedly, this app isn't that social but it's very useful and I think may adopt more social features like integration with location-based services, etc. in the future. As I mentioned on air, a big old hat tip goes out to my friend, Chris Heuer for pointing this service out to me.

Next up was our guest of the week, the lovely and talented, Adele McAlear. If her name sounds familiar, it might be because she was our featured Twitterer back on episode 28. This go around, Adele was kind enough to share some information on her latest project called Death and Digital Legacy. While that may sound a little morbid, it's actually a growing issue and addresses some of the messiness involved with a person's digital assets (e-mail accounts, social networks, blogs, etc.) in the event that they die. According to Adele, some of the e-mail providers like Google have created a process to obtain the "contents" of a loved one's e-mail account but there are a number of validations and documents that must be produced first making the process a difficult one. One the other hand, most of the social networks really have done very little to allow for the transfer of ownership of onc's digital assets post mortem.

Our featured Twitterer of the week (and the reason for the title of this week's post) was AJ in Nashville. Jennifer discovered AJ through his regular commenting on her ZDNet Blog and liked that AJ started calling her "Scrapster" (a nod to her feistiness). Regular listeners will then a know that Jennifer has a phrase that she likes to use as we wrap up the Twitterer of the Week segment ie "we love your tweets." This week, Jennifer was a little "we love your tweet happy" and started saying it after our social app of the week. Bot being one to let an opportunity to poke a little fun slip by, I insisted on using the phrase a dozen more times during the show including in the title of the wrap up.

Last up was our point counterpoint. And for once, it was a topic that Jennifer and I did disagree on. Inspired by a recent article on Yahoo that talked about 10 brands that would likely disappear in 2011, I teed up the question of, "will brands that don't embrace social go away?" My answer was yes based on my own observations and validation from authorities like Charlene Li and Professor Jerry Wind. Jennifer disagreed and pointed to a number of B2B examples (her company included) that should do fine as long as they made good products.

Want to listen to past episodes of the Quick'n'Dirty podcast? You can find them all here on BlogTalkRadio or on iTunes by searching for Quick'n'Dirty. You can also read recaps of past shows on Jennifer's, my and now Rich Harris' blogs. So until next week, remember, "we love your tweets!"