Jelly Helps Make New Friends & Connections

Imagine working in a place where everyone around you was enthusiastic, excited and totally jazzed. Now imagine that all of the people around you bring a unique blend of experience, entrepreneurship and incredible passion for the various projects that they are working on. Their unique energy, skills and specialized knowledge and experience is there and available for you to call upon at a moments notice. Sounds pretty cool right?

Brian Massey, my friend and self-proclaimed Conversion Scientist, first told me about just such an environment where people gather in a casual coworking environment called Jelly. He and I were scheduled to meet for a catch up coffee and he suggested that we meet at the weekly Jelly being held in North Austin. What I found that day and since is an incredible network of interesting people, working on interesting stuff and having a good time doing it....together.

Jelly groups are popping up all over the country and attracting all sorts of people -not just hardcore programmers and web developers. In fact more people are utilizing Jelly as a way to demo their wares, test new ideas, discover collaborative partners and complementary projects and stimulate a whole new way of working.

Coworking offers a unique blend of collaboration, innovation and yes, connection. The people you will meet at Jelly are likely people you would never discover on the happy hour circuit or at your local chamber luncheon. These people are edgy. They people are serious. These people are going places.

I find the people that I have encountered so far to be both motivating and inspirational - helping me breathe new life and drive into my own professional ambitions. The enthusiasm and creativity at work when you go to Jelly is truly something magical and it can only help stimulate your own creative juices and forward momentum. Plus the ability to share a cup of coffee and a quick conversation about a new project, a difficult problem or simply a common interest has the potential to create Ripples beyond imagination. Jelly makes it easy to find and make new connections and as you all know, I'm all for that!

Check out Jelly's main website and their wiki to see if there's a Jelly in your city. If there's not, there's instructions on how to get your own Jelly started. I'm also including a video about the whole Jelly experience too.

Hope to Ripple with you are a Jelly soon!!!


What is Jelly? from Amit Gupta on Vimeo.

Twitter Can Kill

I have found the service Twitter to be quite entertaining both as a way to keep up with friends and casual acquaintances and as a way to gage the real time pulse and reaction to news events, product happenings and even the most recent Democratic and Republican convention coverage. The veracity with which some people comment surprises even me.

Last night I was having a side chat with a contact that I have made out on in the valley. We were enjoying direct messaging one another about the various comments that were being posted and carrying on our own internal commentary about Rudy Guiliani and Sarah Palin's speeches. As we both watched comment after comment get posted on Twitter, many of which were my veiled attempt to add some humor to the mix, one particular person began to stand out for the viciousness of their stance. This person was incredibly over the top about the speakers and very opinionated about those who might support them. In fact at one point, this person even began calling the people who support the Republican Party names that I refuse to reprint here.

Now to be fair, Twitter has no rules or regulations about making such comments, or Twits as I like to call them. People get fired up....especially when they talk politics. One of the things I enjoy about this entire Web 2.0 era is the ability to get real time points of view and impassioned impressions of things that are happening out there in the world. With instant broadcasting capability there are going to be points of view I agree with and others I won't - I get that.

What I don't get is the people that jeopardize their own reputation and standing by throwing big rocks in a society that is truly full of glass windows. With instant everything comes one's instant ability to forever damage themselves and in many cases the companies they either work for or run. That to me is a problem.

Case and point. My friend from the valley had made this incredible connection with a designer over Twitter. After weeks of discussion about a project he is needing help on he decided to greenlight big dollars and somewhat open ended creative license for this designer to develop this idea as they saw fit. He was stoked. They were stoked. Web 2.0 had officially created the bridge of connection for these two bright people to work together on what appears to be a fairly substantial and lucrative financial project.

That all came to an apparent crashing and fiery halt last night.

The designer, whom my friend follows on Twitter, became incredibly offended by the hatred and vile nature of this person's posts. As each new Twit was entered it felt like you were watching a trainwreck happening right before your very eyes. My friend's comments to me were both sad and angry. A relationship that had taken weeks to develop was suddenly gone in a matter of minutes. All because this person decided to make some outlandish comments that revealed a disturbing glimpse into their character, values and ultimately who they are as a person.

Though I am quite certain that many of the comments were aimed at impressing this person's friends, I doubt seriously they thought about the consequences of their actions and the impact it might make to the clients and potential clients they may also have out there watching. In a Web 2.0 world those are risks that you simply can't afford to take. Discretion is the better part of valour and boy was it never more apparent to me than last night.

I have no idea if my friend will tell this person exactly why they are pulling the project. If he reads this I hope he will seriously consider doing it - we all need to know when we screw up. It's how we learn and grow as people. Regardless of whether he does or not, he did teach me something last night. He reinforced a lesson that I have espoused right here in this BLOG many times.....

In this world, you are always on stage and impressions are everywhere. Tread carefully!!!


Ripple On!!!

Ripple Connection Question Of The Week

Ripple Connection Questions are a unique way to engage people in conversation. Whether with a complete stranger or someone you already know, but want to know better, using Ripple Connection Questions (RCQ) accelerate the dialogue and deepen the connection. The questions are by design, fun to ask and fun to answer, and can take your connection to an entirely new level. Come on, break out of that shell of yours and start Rippling.

So I would imagine that most of you, like me, had an enjoyable Labor Day Weekend. Mine was spent watching lots and lots of college football, U.S. Open Tennis, NASCAR and even made it out to watch my beloved Albuquerque Isotopes come to town to beat our local Round Rock Express AAA baseball team. It was a great weekend filled with lots of downtime with the family and some much needed relaxation.

Labor Day marks the official end of the summer (sad) and it's the last big holiday before Thanksgiving so hopefully none of us wasted it. So that got me thinking about this week's Ripple Connection Question.

What was the funnest thing you
did this Labor Day Weekend?

This question will undoubtedly give you insight into the people you want to connect with. People love talking about their adventures so why not use this week as an opportunity to stir your conversation in a completely different direction and see what turns up. You may just discover that person you are connecting with has similar hobbies and interests to yours. How cool would that be?

Ripple On My Friends!!!