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Follow Friday is a common practice on Twitter where many people spend friday posting things like #FF @aplusk @guykawasaki …  This practice is distracting at best and fails to accomplish the single purpose it intends. Follow friday began as way to share lesser known twitter users with your community. A great idea that quickly grew out of control.

I propose a better implementation that will not only accomplish the original intent but will do so in a non-distrcting manner by leveraging twitter lists. I propose that any individual that wants to share their recent finds, favorite follows or other gems create a list called “recommends”. Keep a handful of people on this list. Cycle them out as often as you like. You can find mine at @spf13/recommends

According to a study commissioned by Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing company, 54 percent of U.S. companies say they’ve banned workers from using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace while at work. Source: 54% of Companies ban Facebook, Twitter…

We should be shocked that this number isn’t higher. Let’s look at this realistically. For many professions, networking is crucial to success, but in most professions, it is personal networking, not online that is beneficial. For instance, I don’t want my doctor on twitter. Can you imagine an surgeon breaking to tweet or check his feed. Seems not only ridiculous but dangerous. A lawyer tweeting about his current case would clearly be a breach of trust. Would it be appropriate for the delivery driver to be tweeting while on the job, no because his job requires him to concentrate on the road. Or what about a retail employee or server. Certainly they are not being paid to tweet, but rather take care of the customers. For many jobs social networking / social media provides a distraction from the task at hand.

Social media will be the next innovation in the most unlikely of places, search ( leveraging the community to scale infinitely ). It’s not that people will all together stop searching, but the approach that they take to finding information will become increasingly social (rather than algorithmic) in nature.

For the last decade, search always seems on the cusp of “intelligent” results. Each new engine promises to be able to overcome “search overload” as Microsoft puts is. Yet none have been able to actualize this goal. If you want to know the best place in NYC to get pizza, you don’t ask google. Why, because google will give you hundreds of results, without any acutal value attached to them. You will certainly find better responses by inquiring through social media.