Facebook is a smart company. Possibly one of the smartest companies we’ve ever seen, or will ever see in our lifetime. It’s for one simple reason–they want to be important, and they’re good at it.

Facebook thrives on being important. And now that they’re the largest social network in the world, they can proudly proclaim themselves “the most important.” Without a doubt.

But in the past year a new social media ecosystem has sprouted up–location-based services, e.g. Foursquare, Gowalla, and the like. And tweeting back and forth with my good friend @bigguyd just now, I realized that Facebook’s strategy is much larger than either of theirs. They don’t want to put them out of business, or buy them out, or pound them into obscurity. They want these other services to thrive, but only if they play by Facebook’s rules.

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I, @alexpriest, tweet a lot. Some of you might consider that an understatement. But I also listen a lot. That’s why I follow over 3,000 people on Twitter–because it’s not just a microphone, it’s also a speaker.

Today’s Twifficiency fiasco (don’t you dare click that link, much less authorize the service) is all the proof you need that there are simply too many talkers and not enough listeners on Twitter. Despite it’s creator’s supposed brilliance, it’s spammy and worthless. Still, even among the people I follow–all of whom I consider remarkably intelligent people–almost every other tweet I saw tonight was about “Twifficiency”. Everyone was just so excited to have found the next big tool for measuring “Twitter influence” (an idea in and of itself that’s completely abstract and pretty much bogus, if you ask me) that they were thrilled to try it out, regardless of the consequences.

That in and of itself isn’t that big of a problem. Even I clicked on it at first. But on Twitter time is fleeting and everything moves extraordinarily quickly–I clicked on the link early this morning, before it had blown up the way it did. Immediately after realizing what it did, I closed it, deleted the auto-tweet, and posted a warning to all my Twitter followers. Rather than these warnings spreading (mine, and others), instead the link itself spread like wildfire, as Twitter users found themselves overwhelmed by the desire to talk and not to listen.

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Here it comes.

It’s that time of year again, when my life goes from being just abnormally busy and ridiculous to absolutely-mind-esplodingly busy and ridiculous. Yup, school starts back in just under one week.

I’ll admit, I’m already feeling the pressure a little–which is odd, given that I haven’t stepped foot back in a classroom yet. It’s mostly mental, and it’s not necessarily bad, but that extra responsibility for my six (6!) classes is going to be a kick in the butt for the next few months. Thankfully my work schedule will calm down soon (cutting my hours almost in half), and with a little luck the weather will get nicer, leaving me a little less exhausted at the end of the day than I have been in this heat.

In fact, I’m kind of excited for my classes this fall (and yes, I know I say this every semester, and by the end I’m about ready to bang my head against the wall). I’m done with general education requirements, and really, based on course descriptions and syllabi alone, I’m not expecting this to be that difficult of a semester. And well hey, I slogged through six semesters and a summer course already, surely I can manage two more, right?

The biggest thing hanging over my head is the amount of ongoing projects I still have on my plate. I’m designing not one, but two websites (both of which will likely extend throughout the semester) and I have a fair amount of blogging responsibilities. Bad thing? Not really–in fact, blogging and designing are kind of nice, relaxing escapes from the textbooks and assignments I’ll be facing over the coming months. But they’re still more to do, which means I’m going to have to put a little more hustle in my step to get it all done.

Probably my biggest ongoing project–and I’m really regretting not getting this all done and out of the way in June–is my spring capstone project. While the content is finished, the website is not. And I’m contemplating turning it into an e-book, at the prodding of @amandamogul and @riethja.

But it’ll all get done. A little positive thinking and perhaps a teensy bit less sleep, and I know I’ll make it through just fine. Will it be a little stressful? Sure. But then again, I seem to kind of thrive on this stuff. And if all else fails, I know I’ve got an amazing community of friends–online and off–to turn to for a little extra moral support.

This morning I had the privilege of co-hosting a workshop with Amanda Miller Littlejohn (@amandamogul and @mopwaterpr). The subject? What else–Twitter!

Amanda let off the workshop with a quick overview of the power of Twitter and building a brand on the social network. I then concluded with a presentation of nine tips (and a bonus!) for being more efficient and effective when using Twitter and various Twitter tools. The presentation is embedded below, check below the cut for links to the tools I mention and an archive of the tweets from the workshop this morning (hashtag #dcpowertwitter). Thanks so much to Amanda for inviting me to present, @chinatowncoffee and @sprint for sponsoring coffee and Wi-Fi, and to everyone else who attended!

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This is super-basic for anyone who’s been using WordPress for a while, but I thought I’d just throw out a quick addendum to this Mashable post on how to integrate the new official Tweet button (see at the bottom of this post) with your CMS.

For people running WordPress.org installations, it’s super easy to install–you just drop the line of code in where you want it to go. For me, for example, it goes in a tiny footer at the bottom of each of my posts.

The only minor hiccup I had when installing it was getting it to tweet the correct entry title and URL when someone clicked on the button from my homepage. Because you’re technically on my homepage, the button’s default settings led users to tweet nothing but my homepage and the URL for alexpriest.com. Thankfully, it’s a super, super quick fix.

The line of Twitter code is simple:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/share” class=”twitter-share-button” data-count=”horizontal” data-via=”alexpriest”>Tweet</a>

This, by itself, will do nothing but create a Tweet button sharing the current page. In order to get it to tweet the correct post (even from the homepage), you need to add these two bits of code to the link HTML in the Twitter button:

data-text=”<?php the_title(); ?>” data-url=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”

This makes it so that the text of the tweet is the title of your entry (<?php the_title(); ?>) and the link is the permalink to that post (<?php the_permalink() ?>). In the end, my final code looks like:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/share” class=”twitter-share-button” data-text=”<?php the_title(); ?>” data-url=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” data-count=”horizontal” data-via=”alexpriest”>Tweet</a>