To celebrate the launch of I So Wish, Dubber and I decided to grant a random wish that someone had made. Ben was nearby and had made a wish that we could grant, so we did - check out the video of his reaction!
If you could wish for one thing in 2009, what would it be?
About six months ago Dubber and I came up with an idea that we called “I so wish” - a site where you could make wishes and share them with your friends. It was quite cute, and showed what we could do in only a few days of web development time. The trouble was, that once you’d made your wish what happened next? Not much.
Last month, after watching the ITV show that I was on, a nice guy called Dan got in touch and suggested solving the problem. What would happen if we turned the site into a community of people that could respond to eachother’s wishes and actually make them happen.
Dubber and I thought that was a pretty smart idea, so for the past couple of weeks we’ve been busy building a new version of I So Wish and we’re launching it for Christmas (and we announced it at Birmingham’s Social Media Cafe today) with one simple question:
A cute new service for new Twitter soon-to-be dads: Goingtobeadad.com
I was astounded to see how many people were announcing to the world that they are going to be dads every day.
So I thought - wouldn’t it be nice to have a page on the web somewhere that welcomes all of those people?
So this is a simple one page site that shows you all of the tweets by soon-to-be-dads who tweet “going to be a dad” with a big “Congratulations!” message from the big blue Odadeo dad.
You can get an RSS feed of all of the tweets and I’m also planning on retweeting some of the tweets as “@username is @goingtobeadad!” but I’ve just got to figure out how to filter out ones that aren’t quite relevant, like “my brother is going to be a dad” and so on.
I’m a big fan of making and doing with my two year old daughter and we’ve been encouraging her to scribble, paint, stick and make things whenever possible. I like joining in, and it’s very therapeutic to stop the hard work and do something simple like making some animals or sharing a drawing, even if she’s only scribbling at the moment.
In fact, here’s a pledge I made on Odadeo about it:
This morning though, I was sitting with my laptop over breakfast (I know - bad geek dad behaviour - minus 10 points on Odadeo), and she started taking an interest in some of the pictures on the screen. So I asked “Would you like to draw an animal?” She said “Yeah”… “Which animal?”. “Bear!” was her reply…
The results after some creative direction along the lines of “Ear! Ear! Body! Nose! Rabbit! Robot! Pink! Yellow!” are pretty good I’d say - maybe I should make a series?
But seriously - my advice is to use whatever skills you have, and just drop the ‘I’m being a serious adult’ thing for five minutes from time to time and see what happens.
You may surprise yourself and delight your kids in the process.
Twitter has really taken off in Birmingham (UK) this year. Here’s a list of some of the people who are using it and I think you should be connecting with you if you haven’t already!
Twitter is a micro-blogging service that answers the question “what are you doing now?”, but it’s also becoming a substitute for blogging as well as being a great way of chatting about interesting things in a public way.
There wasn’t much activity in the city until around the South By Southwest conference in Texas about nine months ago. Now, though, it’s there’s a vibrant community forming.
I think more people should be using it, but it can feel a bit confusing at first unless you have friends who are using the service.
A ‘getting started on Twitter’ list for people you should connect to (In no particular order):
I’m sure I’ve missed lots of people, but as a starting point for people new to Twitter in Birmingham, follow a bunch of these people and you will suddenly find yourself in the middle of a conversation that actually makes sense!
followers
My Shared Reading