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The twitter colour wars and sheep mentality

Byrichard

As if zombie slaying, vampire biting and sheep throwing weren’t enough the facebook lunacy has reached Twitter via Zefrank and the stupid colour wars. As if the conversation was not interesting and fulfilling enough for twitter users there is now a movement to create a colour war encouraging people to split into groups.

I dislike this movement for a number of reasons. For a start it’s a complete waste of time because it does not require people to do anything in the physical world. Just change your avatar and you’ve participated. That’s similar to the zombie wars.

As a second point it’s encouraging people to break into smaller clusters and groups, which although fun in certain situations where groups are too big is pointless on twitter. In particular I saw that for one colour the point was not to tweet but rather be tweeted at. Now why would you ask for people to remain silent when the whole reason behind twitter is status updates, firstly and conversations as a side effect of the first.

When few people used hotmail it was clean and e-mails were worth reading but as chain letters arrived so the usability went down. When geocities became popular so pages became flooded with junk, same with myspace and later facebook. I really don’t want to see this junk making its way into the twitter stream. I spend too much time there to appreciate it.

That’s why I won’t participate.

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On the importance of observation in Social Media marketing.

Byrichard

However, many purported Social Media experts are merely engaging in cultural voyeurism at best. They look from afar and roam the perimeters of online societies without ever becoming a true member of any society. This means, they don’t truly understand what, where, or why they’re “participating,” only jumping in because they have something to say and have access to the tools that will carry it into play. This is unfortunately a representation of the greater landscape of Social Media Marketing and it’s time to take a step back and study the sociology of Social Media in order to keep communities intact and unaffected by outsiders.

Social Media is much more than user-generated content. It’s driven by people in the communities where they communicate and congregate. They create, share, and discover new content without our help right now. They’re creating online cultures across online networks and using the Social Tools that we learn about each and every day to stay connected. And the societies that host and facilitate these conversations cultivate a tight, unswerving and mostly unforgiving community and culture. As Shel Israel describes it, people are populating Global Neighborhoods.

Source: Cultural Voyeurism and social media

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A really good conversation from TWiM

Byrichard

This Week in Media 85 is an interesting conversation about media news for the past week with a technological slant. This week’s interesting is particularly interesting as it explored the future of television and how people consume media. From the PVR and the ability for people to discuss the content they enjoy to machines that talk to each other they cover many topics.

They also discussed computer literacy and whether the youth of today are as computer litterate as previous generations. That’s an interesting point. The idea is not whether someone can get a computer to do what they want but rather whether they know how to set it up. Think of Linux. Would you be able to setup a linux box.

It’s the type of discussion that’s good to follow to give you a number of points of view.

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Socialthing aggregating several websites at once.

Byrichard

I’m active on more social networks than I have time to go through in a day and that’s where Socialthing comes in. It allows me to follow news from facebook, twitter, pownce, tumblr, flickr, vimeo and livejournal. What I like about this site is how easy it is to see everything that goes on.

Whereas friendfeed is nothing more than a few lines of text this version of a social feed aggregator is the visual aspect. At a glance I can see which social network is giving the content and I can post accordingly. If I see a status update on facebook for example I can view the profile and add a comment. There’s that option with twitter too. I can see everyone’s tweet and I can reply to any friend’s post quickly and easily.

As a positive sidenote I can follow what’s going on on pownce without logging in. I’ve often felt that the limitations of that site is the lack of people outside of California using it. At least this way I may find my interest growing.

If I’m in a rush or there’s an important message to get out I can simply select to “post” a message to all these social networks at once. That saves a lot of time although as expected this should not be used too frequently as it adds a lot of “noise”. I’m looking forward to more services being included

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The youtube application on the N95

Byrichard

For those of you with good data packages an application that could be a lot of fun is youtube on the n95. I was out and about and decided to check the youtube site and I was given the option to download their beta. I managed to play vides but I had no sound.

What they offer are:

  • upload your videos from the phone

  • watch your friends’ videos

  • view relatd videos

  • view received videos

  • search for content.

In other words you can do everything you’d want to from the n95 that you’d do from a computer. It does look like an interesting application although unless you’ve got wifi this is a very expensive gimmick. It’s nice to try nonetheless. Let me know if you try it and tell me what you think of it.

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Sports tracker on the N95

Byrichard

It’s fun to walk fast and far, especially in the countryside where there are fewer people to avoid. I often walk for fourty minutes to an hour at the end of the day to think about the day and process all that’s happened. Recently though I realised one of the shorter walks is almost 3000 steps thanks to the N95 pedometer.

That’s because with the N95 you have a built in GPS and the ability to download applications. One of these is the sports tracker that allows you to track a number of variables across four to six screens. There’s the map view, map view with relevant details, co-ordinate view, speed view, pedometer and then three or four graphs, some for time in relation to speed, distance over time and height in relation to speed.

You can zoom in and out of the graphs as you’re walking. If you do this more than once it creates a series of tracks that you can easily translate to KML and importe to Google Earth so the world can see your walks. Of course keeping your privacy from some people may be desirable.

It’s a fun little addition to the n95 although the biggest drawback is you need to have it out in front of you to keep track of the satellites.

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Two mobile content mentalities.

Byrichard

When’s the last time you visited a wap site? Have you thought of how content displays on mobile phones other than the Iphone? I hadn’t until quite recently. Recently I moved back to Switzerland and have started to work for Allthecontent / Toutlecontenu.com and they provide multiplatform content for devices ranging from televisions to mobile phones and more.

As a result of reading too much American press I lost interest in what Nokia were doing until it was mentioned that the iphone is not true mobile web use. At first that statement didn’t make much sense but since then I’ve bought a Nokia N95 8 gig model and I’ve been playing with vodafone live, seeing how content is presented. It’s very simple, quick and to the point. Images are small and sparse but text is heavy.

Naviguate from one menu to another and you eventually get to content that’s paying. That’s where it becomes interesting. There are quite a few topics, from sports to entertainment to adult content. Some of this content is in video form, some in MMS form and yet some more comes as text. As a result content is easily accessible from most media handsets.

Then there’s the question of data packages. Look at Swisscom. For 18 swiss Francs you receive a hundred megabytes of data transfer. That’s not much when considering the 3 gigs a day of transfers via my laptop. Mobile is different. I read that not more than fifty megabytes a month are downloaded over the air.

Take a look at Iphone optimised pages in contrast. They’re graphic intensive, slow to load and designed for one specific screen resolution. As a result of this that content is not accessible on most data plans or mobile devices. Iphones have a good part of the market but they’re excluding many users. You can’t download content on the iphone. You’re losing revenue right there.

What I think will be interesting over the coming months is to see how the European Vs. US mentality of mobile delivered content will affect telephone operators in these markets.

Eight things you didn’t know about me – Tagged by Nik and Neil

Byrichard

Both Nik and Neil have tagged me to talk about eight random things about myself and since I have some time tonight I’ll work on this.

1) I reached competition level as a skier in France after progressing through all the levels but have never bothered to compete. I love the sport and the sensations rather than comparing myself to others. It’s a year after I reached competition level that I moved on to learning snowboarding.

2) I studied film theory, montage theory and created shot lists long before I ever had access to an edit suite. As a result I had a very good theoretical background to editing and shooting before I did any work.For two to three years I would film every theatre production at school as a way to perfect my shooting style. It’s demanding when every minute you shoot must be of the highest qualities.

3) In 2003 when I applied to go back to University I was accepted for every course and university I applied to in England. That meant I had a real choice. It’s a great feeling. I knew where I wanted to go anyway.

4) In one year I went to Germany, Italy (twice) Poland, England and Switzerland both for pleasure and studies. I love to travel and have been to over 20 countries on three continents by now. It’s not much compared to some but it’s fun nonetheless.

5) Working at Geneva airport was a really fun job for two reasons. Firstly because it’s physically and secondly because it taught me about real teamwork. When you’re kneeling in an aircraft hold lifting 20 kilo suitcases 50-70 times within 25 minutes you soon develop physical strength. If someone appears lazy they will be made to work twice as hard. Occasionally those with experience would tell me to work at a slower pace.

I’m glad it’s not my career but I’m happy I had the experience

6) I dived the English channel in November when the air temperature was hovering around 11°C. For the first dive I felt like an idiot and was scared. The visibility was no more than 30 seconds and the water was freezing. I shivered for  at least three hours after the dives. A few months later I dived the same waters and I used a third of a tank in the time it took others to use two thirds 🙂

7) I have had content online since late 1996-97. I started by writing about the Romans and putting the content on iprolink, then geocities before finally putting it on main-vision.com. My extended essay was about information technology in a global society back pre 2000. I have always been among the early adopters because I enjoy new technology so much.

8) I hate when people use the word mate because of all the Natural history documentaries I’ve watched. When you hear about animals mating for a decade or more and people start calling you mate it just feels wrong, especially when it’s guys ;-). 8 years in England doesn’t make me feel any more comfortable with the term.

Now that I’ve done this I’m tagging the following 8 people:

Phil Campbell

Maggie

Amanda Gravel

Kosso

Shanzan

Marlooz

Foulbastard

Dacort 

Now I can get on with something else.

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The Nokia N95 and some fun to be had.

Byrichard

Seesmic’ favourite phone at the moment appears to be the Nokia N95 and after months of thinking about whether to get the Iphone or the Nokia I turned to the Nokia because of everything it allows you to do. It’s a GPS, web streaming camera, time lapse camera, e-mail and web browser among other things. It’s also easy to use with services like Jaiku.

Streaming

Video stremaing from computers is becoming commonplace and as a result we’re growing tired of that piece to camera straight from people’s desk. That’s where Bambuser, Qik and seesmic come into play.

Bambuser is still in alpha and has an intuitive easy to use streaming interface giving you an easy selection between the main camera and the front camera. It’s very simple to use and I’ve played quite a bit with it but there are lag issues where the stream doesn’t keep up.

The settings can be adjusted quite specifically by the user allowing for quite a bit of experimentation.

A second service is Qik. This one has a nice user interface and has in built buffering. This means that as you stream the application buffers and indicates the delay between what you are seeing on the phone and what is being seen.

This service has too main options. Optimised for quality or optimised for creating a reliable stream.

Seesmic has already been discussed but it’s a good video sharing website. It allows for conversations to take via video similarly to instant messaging. The Seesmic application still needs some work but if you’re using shozu you can record your seesmic posts and FTP the files to the site for others to enjoy. I’ve done a few posts from the car once I’ve arrived at work and the results are good, except for a loss of synchronisation… but that’s in camera rather than seesmic.

 Jaiku

Jaiku was developed by people who worked for Nokia and it’s similar to twitter but with a better front end mobile wise. The application automatically displays where you are, whether you’re free or busy to answer calls and you can follow conversations.

Photo Camera 

One interestig feature of the camera that I haven’t used is the ability to take a picture every ten seconds. In other words to create time lapses that last as long as you would like. I haven’t tried the option but the idea is interesting.

GPS 

I haven’t played with the GPS so far but so far it looks nice enough, I’ll write more once I know more.

So far I’m happy with the N95 because of all it can do and I’m looking forward to using it extensively in the near future. As I learn more about the phone and what it can do I’ll write most posts.

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Did I mention I’m up to twenty thousand tweets

Byrichard

Did I mention that I got all the way up to twenty thousand tweets last night? I’m officially a very heavy user of twitter and many people celebrated the event with me in true twitter style. They @ed me. It’s not everyday you get to that number. I also seesmiced a few thoughts about twitter which someone can find and link to in the near future. I’m feeling a little lazy in that regard.

Also today was my first proper full day of work and it went well. I’m tired as a result and tomorrow should be more fun. See you then.