Sometime the simplest thing can bring a smile.

I was at the airport waiting for my friend Jen who was flying in from Denver. While waiting at baggage claim I saw an elderly couple. They were there waiting for someone also.

What I didn’t know was they were waiting for their daughter and her husband. While I was standing there waiting all of a sudden I hear a lady yell OH MY GOD IS THAT THE BABY. With that I turned my head to see a grandmother seeing her grandchild unexpectedly for the first time.

The smile that was on her face totally made my day if not my week. The grandfather was next and it appeared that the young couple didn’t tell the grandparents they were bringing the baby.

The grandfather yelled at the son in law because he didn’t bring a car seat to get the baby back home. Luckily the stroller they had was also a car seat.

Sometimes life gives you these moments, you need to take the time to appreciate happiness even if it is not your own.

Vinny’s Rules For Twitter

The other day I was on a well known social media experts blog and he had a set of rules for using Twitter. I was amazed at some of them to say the least. Instead of leaving a comment on his blog I decided to write a post instead. Why give him the traffic he already has enough anyway.

I am not claiming to be a “Twitter Expert” and these rules should be taken with a grain of salt. They are just some things that I have learned and some rules are not set in stone. It is just some of the rules I try to follow.

1 – Be yourself – Trying to be something or someone that you are not will not help you or your followers. Upload a nice picture of yourself. No one I know does business with an avatar.

2 – Be Helpful – People need help so do your best to help them if you can. It will come back to help you in the long run. Spreading good stuff builds good karma.

3 – Be Engagable – If you are following too many people that you can’t answer a tweet because you didn’t see it then I feel you are missing the whole point of this. Sure you can use list and such to help but if your twitterstream is too crowded you could be missing important tweets from some good people. The so called expert that inspired this post follows the population of Billings Montana which is over 100,000. I read 99% of the tweets of the people I follow, and respond to them.

4 – Don’t be spammy – Pretty easy one, if you have to ask yourself if the tweet is spammy in any way before you send it it probably is. This includes those sponsored ones. Putting #ad doesn’t make it acceptable it just tells me its spam. You can promote your own services as long as it is helpful to others.

5 – Limit your retweets – Not everyone has the same interest as you. Pretty hard to believe huh. I limit myself to one or two retweets a day. I usually retweet something useful or a cell phone tip since I am hooked on my Droid. Sometimes I retweet something because I know it aggravates Shawn Collins when I do it to all my followers. If you can use the manual method @rt your followers will appreciate it.

6 – Be Respectable – It is OK to tweet out a link about your latest blog post just don’t drop the link 50 times during the course of the day. This will get you on to my never follow list very quickly.

7 – Never Retweet a Guru – Everytime I see this on my twitterstream the first thing that pops in my mind is that the person can’t think on their own, they have nothing knowledgeable to share. They don’t realize the so called gurus only reason for placing the tweet was knowing some people will retweet it. If you need to follow all the so called Gurus odds are I don’t need to follow you.

8 – Don’t Be Perfect – No one I know is perfect and guess what neither are you. Admit when you do something that is stupid or not really with the times. It makes you believable and someone I want to follow. I don’t care if you are attending your 100th Poison concert, we all have bad taste in something we do. I would rather hear about a C.C. Seville solo then hearing about how great you are all the time. If 90% of your tweets start with “I” you are doing it wrong.

9 – Help Your Friends – If someone is doing something good for someone or doing something for charity help them out by tweeting about it or doing a retweet. There are many less fortunate people and animals on this planet. Retweeting about a charity never hurt no one.

10 – Be Entertaining – No one likes boring. Have some fun, it shows people that you are real. Be the life of the party as long as the theme of the party isn’t about how great you are.

11 – Don’t Automate Your Location – Most people don’t care where you are every hour of the day. I know I don’t care if you are on a highway or stuck in traffic somewhere in the swamps of Jersey. I have been there and done that. It wasn’t fun then and it certainly isn’t fun reliving that moment again. Every once in a while is OK just don’t do it all day long.

Well I guess that is enough for now. Would love to hear some of your rules concerning Twitter.

There has certainly been a buzz about Foursquare and I don’t know why. I see Foursquare as annoying and will never use it anymore. (I have an account and I yes I know how it works.) As you probably know I use Twitter a lot and when I get an update of someones location from Foursquare I will usually stop following that person.

I have a guy that I was following on Twitter that checked into Foursquare every morning from a Starbucks. The first thing that popped into my head is the guy should make coffee at home and send the $5 he would save everyday to a charity or something. Odds are if I had known he likes to waste money like that I don’t want to be following him anyway. While he thinks it’s cool to be at a Starbucks everyday I am totally thinking otherwise.

I have another buddy that checks in almost every half hour from the same locations everyday, once again I don’t care where you are or where you are going. Since this guy is up in Canada and I have no plans on going there it is nothing but annoying when I got these updates. It makes me wonder if this guy really thinks we care where he is.

Someone else I was following on Twitter used Foursquare to give updates whenever they stopped to eat. Everyday his morning update was from Dunkin Donuts. His lunch was from another fast food place and dinner was from KFC. When I see this person all he talks about is how his diets never work and he doesn’t know why. He may be the mayor of his local Mcdonalds but to me he something else.

I don’t get why anyone would let anybody know their location using the gps on their cellphone. You have no idea how they are going to use this information or if they are going to sell it. What if Foursquare was sold tomorrow to an advertising company? Now someone you had no relationship with knows your popular locations and what time you are usually there. To me this is the scariest part of Foursquare.

What happens if a crime is commited in or near your location, you could end up being dragged into something you know nothing about. I know that is far fetched but it could happen, all because you had the need to tell strangers where you are.

Last week I was reading about how big brands were giving money towards Foursquare. Little do they know there are many people like me that find Foursquare as annoying. Whenever I see the companies that are using this I stop buying their products forever. Never again will I buy a product from a certain soda company that gave Foursquare 10k a few weeks back. Guess they are doing me a favor since I drank alot of soda over the years.

I am all for Social media but this service is totally spammy to me. There is no circumstance where I would keep following a person that likes to post their location updates to Twitter. If you want to use Foursquare be my guest but please turn off your updates on Twitter.

This morning when I got off the subway in Bed-Stuy I see the homeless guy with a coffee cup and he is singing songs trying to get a few bucks for his morning coffee. This guy is there every morning and I am sure he makes a few bucks as he is very entertaining. He sings songs that are not the normal songs, one day its nursery ryhmes and the next day it could be Nirvana. He makes everyone smile as they walk by with these crazy songs.

I go into the coffee shop like I do every morning to get my breakfast and talk with the old timers like I usually do. The homeless guy comes in and starts singing “Harper Valley PTA”. The whole place is in laughter as they want to know why out of all the songs in the world this guy choses this song to sing.

Two of the old timers start a discussion across the room from me about who sang the song originally, the guys are starting to work up quite a discussuion and its getting heated. These guys are usually disagreeing with each other, they are like an old married TV couple. One of the guys is insisting that the song was sung by a guy and the other was saying it was a woman. I know of course that the song was sung by a female but the name escapes me as it was a one hit wonder.

Now I was cuurious so I take out my Droid and do a quick Google search for “Harper Valley PTA” and I see it was sung by Jeannie C. Riley so I let the guys know and of course the guy that said it was a male singer disagrees with me.

He didn’t realize I had looked it up online, actually he probably doesn’t even know what a computer is as he is still stuck in the 1960’s. I went into my pocket again and pulled out my Droid again and searched for “Harper Valley PTA video” and sure enough the video of her singing was on YouTube.

I start the video and show him the lady singing Harper Valley PTA and I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I didn’t realize that the two guys had a wager for breakfast on it. It seems that the guy already owed the other guy a breakfast and he was betting double or nothing. Well he lost and everyone in the place knew it and was rubbing it in. Apparently this guy is one of those that boast when he wins so it was a change of pace that everyone liked to see.

You should have seen the reaction from everyone as the video was playing. Some guys were asking me why do I keep a jukebox in my pocket, all of a sudden I am standing among 7 or 8 people showing off the features of the Droid. People were amazed that it was a phone, I got tired of this as my breakfast was ready and starting to get cold but people were so intrigued I couldn’t just walk away. I spent about 10 minutes showing off the phone. It was quite a site to see.

All because of a guy singing a one hit wonder from the 1970’s. Can’t wait until tomorrow to see what he sings, maybe I can get a free breakfast out of the deal