Nice breakdown by BJ Fogg:

From "Persuasive Technologies", from 2002.  I'm really enjoying this book.  It's very helpful in understanding the human <==> computer interface of products.  The technology has changed but people stay the same.  

There are many ways to get answers online.  I am a huge fan of Google and use it every day to find information that is already published and indexed.  But today I had a great "Aha" moment when I found an answer through Twitter instead, because it connected me to the best person in the world to answer a very specific question.  Here's how it went down:

 How many physician bloggers are there in the United States?

I already know that Doctor V, who follows me, is a physician blogger - one of the best, in fact.  The point of this tweet was to alert our mutual followers that this question was worth reading, and that we would both be paying attention.  This tweet did not go out to all of Doctor V's 6,154 followers, because by starting the tweet with an @ mention, he limited it's distribution to our mutual followers.

Barbara's retweet is amazing, because it just alerted all 3,240 of her followers to my question.  At least the ones that happen to see this tweet.

Whoa! Twitter is apparently scanning every tweet, detecting questions, and suggesting users who would be well-suited to answer them.  DanielCass works at Kaiser Permanente, a very large healthcare provider organization here in California.  Well done, twitterbot. 

Responses #3-#6: 

Some responses trickle in.  Not exactly to the question I asked, but it's a start.  Everyone who is @mentioned in RayGoldberg's and MatthewBrowning's tweets is now alerted in a special way to my request - their "@mentions" inbox will include this tweet.  That's how Twitter lets conversations expand across follower streams.  The @mention is  just high-friction enough -- there is a cost to publishing it, of having your followers know who you are trying to reach out to -- that it is not abused by most users.  Twitter's interaction design is absolutely sensational. 

Grandrounds is an aggregator of medical blogs.  Getting warmer.

DrVes is a physician, professor, and expert in online presence of physicians.  He is an adviser to NEJM, and his website has a lot of useful resources for physicians.   And he gives a me a rough answer to my question.

The interaction between DrVes and scanman leads to several pieces of useful information.  Call it instant-peer review.  Did I mention DrVes is in Chicago, scanman is in India, and I'm in San Francisco?

I clarify my question, and reach out to Danielle based on Twitter Bot's suggestion.

Another link in the chain

And another link

mR is Manhattan Research, which specializes in health care market research.  Bingo.  

• 20 hours of asynchronous interactions
• eleven people involved, 10 of which I have never met before, from San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Washington DC, New Haven, and a city in India called Salem.
• one twitter bot   
• I get my answer 
• Twitter shows off how powerful a communication tool it can be

What happens if I google my query instead?  The first result is the exact same question on Quora, which I asked a few weeks ago, unfortunately still answered.  The advantage of Quora would be that the answer would become permanent and well-organized, instead of vanishing in the void of tweets past.  But right now the community I need is on Twitter. 

I wonder what the folks at PLoS will say about this on Friday's meetup.

photo: Underground tunnel at MIT

I recently visited MIT for the first time since finishing my graduate degree there last year.  It was surreal to be back to a place where I spent so many years.  The emotions I used to feel there daily, which are already fading, filled my mind in half-nostalgic, half-confusing tones.  Everyone who has moved away from their childhood home knows the feeling that comes from returning to it.  Coming back to grad school is different in that I was already a self-conscious adult when that experience was shaping me.  It was like speaking with the version of yourself from a year ago, whom you left behind, but whose voice is still clearly familiar.  What a weird conversation.

MIT is an intense place.  There is a palpable sense of intellectual excitement and vigor, the feeling of being in the center of the innovation universe.  There is also the weight of being in an ultra-competitive environment, where peers are all brilliant and so extremely hard-working that 100+ hour work weeks - often alone in windowless labs and in sustained social isolation - are seen as common and perhaps even expected.  Luckily the ideas that keep you company are invariably fascinating ones.  

Having the perspective of being away for a while makes it easier for me to summarize the lessons I learned there:

1. No Shortcuts: People at MIT lead the world in science and technology innovation because they are really smart and work incredibly hard.  There is no shortcut to success.  Every amazing project and finding, which can be summarized on Nature or Science or Wired or New York Times in a few paragraphs, has a long story of intense planning, passion, frustration, commitment, and perseverance behind it.  This story is not as exciting as the end result, so it is not told as often, but you can see it in the puffy, sleepless eyes of grad students grabbing a take-out lunch on the way back to lab, you can hear it in the techy conversations that echo in the hallways, and you can think it while listening to an MIT engineer speaking on the significance and challenges of their latest project.  People here aren’t trying to outsmart the system or to jump on the latest get-rich-quick bandwagon. The path to world-leading success is long and arduous, and people here tackle it head on.  
2. Focus: I had lunch with a former labmate and we discussed a new grad student in my former lab who we think has the potential to do big things.  This kid is brilliant and hardworking; a single undergrad degree wasn’t enough for him, so he simultaneously did three.  As impressive as that sounds, credentials can be misleading, and we were most impressed instead with his intense focus on getting things done.  Last Friday, as my friend was leaving lab around 8pm, he saw the kid starting an hours-long experiment.  My friend asked “aren’t you going to have some fun tonight?” and the kid deadpanned “of course I am, I have a date with my equipment!”.  No shortcuts means you are going in the right direction, focus means you’ll actually get there.
3. Community: Conversely, the most successful people here are not necessarily the smartest and hardest working.  They are the ones that are not only brilliant but humble enough to best leverage community resources: the minds and hands of professors, postdocs, grad students, and even undergrads, as well as the global science and technology community which is fortunately very accessible to anyone with an @mit.edu address.  I saw some of the very smartest people here struggle and not achieve their potential because they thought they didn’t need any help from others they considered less intelligent.  That line of thinking is a mistake.  Big challenges require multiple perspectives and skills to tackle, and it’s impossible for any one person to develop all of them faster than coherent teams can.

These lessons will probably sound familiar to anyone at the top of their field - be it academia, business, politics, music, or sports.  The real lesson might be that the path to world-leading success is similar wherever you are.  It’s up to you to take it!