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On moving from the Social media capital of Europe to Geneva

Byrichard

As a student it was not unusual for me to spend no more than six hours a day at home. The rest of the time I was out socialising, whether helping post grads with their work or with those from my studies. As a result of this I started to pay attention to many of the social networks. It had shifted from Facebook where all my real life friends could be found to more abstract social networks such as twitter, jaiku and others.

Through these networks I saw what everyone was up to and I could take the opportunity to go out and meet them occasionally at first and then more and more frequently as time passed. By the time I left England I had the opportunity to meet with one group every Friday morning and quite a few others on a number of different occasions. As a result my social life was built around what I saw via twitter and seesmic.

In geneva that social scene is pretty small at the moment. Some people are in Geneva, some are in Lausanne and others in Zurich. The problem is they’re not centralised therefore participating is not practical. That’s one of the weaknesses of social networking that I’ve encountered over the years. I do miss that aspect of life in England and I should attempt to recreate it here.

I’m not the only one facing this problem. Corvida of Read Write Web wrote about this topic recently and it’s an interesting challenge for Gen Y and early adopters. The majority of the users of mobile social networks congregate in one specific city and rarely move outside of it. As a student facebook was great to find out about events that were going on within that circle, then twitter became great once I graduated.

Now the challenge is to find what social network will be of interest in a city like Geneva. Would it be facebook used by most people in my age group. paying services that guarantee no results or simply going out into the physical world hoping to meet people that way.

Each method requires time and I’m not sure which is the most adapted to the lake Geneva region. It’s something I’m going to explore over the coming weeks. I want to rebuild a good physical world social network once more and see which tools remain relevant now.

May-21st for a twit-out, boycott of twitter

Byrichard

I’m not the only person that’s annoyed with the vast amount of downtime suffered by twitter and there is a call for an international boycott of twitter on may 21st. During that day we’ll be using other more reliable services to show that twitter is nothing without the community that makes it what it is.

Twitter has been having some serious issues over the last few weeks. It seems that the service is down almost as much as it’s active. Exaggeration or not, it’s a problem, and it seems to be worsening rather than improving. As a result, a bunch of us Twitter power users were using FriendFeed to discuss a way to hit Twitter where it hurts in order to send a message to the powers that be.

Sourc

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Twitter and Breaking news

Byrichard

Once more twitter has shown it’s value. An earthquake occured earlier this morning and people started to twitter about it within half an hour. people like Robert Scoble started linking to the story. It took at least an hour for most of the major networks to start speaking about this news.

There’s a lag of course, as journalists have to do some research, get some reports and distribute them. I did a search on the twitter search engine flaptor and here is a little taste of the content of those tweets.

Here is another source of tweets.

Say something in 140 characters or less

Byrichard

For those of you who know me as Warzabidul you’re probably used to my incessant tweeting, when not at work.. Two days ago twitterfone came out, a service that allows me to call a number and tweet by voice.

The system is still in very early stages but works great. The idea is that you register on the site and provide your country and phone number, associate your twitter account as well and wait till your number is registered. Once the number is registered you call and speak your message.

Once all of this is done any time you can talk and want to tweet you call the number, talk and the message appears in two places. It appears on twitterfone as text and an audio file and as a tweet and URL on twitter’s website.

It’s great for when you’re driving, with hands free of course (;-)) because it avoids you touch typing messages on your phone when your attention should be on the person in front slowing down to let pedestrians cross.

So far I’ve been pretty happy with the way it works. It recognises words effectively and is quite a good alternative for those who are not touch typists.

Direct message purging the lazy way.

Byrichard

Damon Aka. Dacort on twitter has come out with a new toy which meant that Meg Fowler deleted all her direct messages. Twitter is both public and private. Tweets are the public portion and DM are the private. Dacort came out with a Firefox tool that allows you to quickly delete tweets from everyone or individuals.

I tried it earlier but I can’t bring myself to deleting everyone’s DMs at this moment in time. Maybe later.

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Mobile web apps and data transfer; Jaiku and twitter

Byrichard

So I disagree that The Mobile Web is dead. For many of us it is just coming alive. Given the speed at which these devices are evolving and price dropping, I don’t think it’s worth people’s time to build sofware that optimizes the experience. Rather, they should use their expertise to build exciting new applications that will run directly on these new platforms.

The mobile Web was born only yesterday

That’s the difference between twitter and Jaiku. Twitter is an old fashioned website and application that requires data heavy websites to provide you with content whilst jaiku offers a mobile phone that requires minimum data transfer from server to phone

Another big difference is the api. With jaiku you can download all messages without needing an api’s permission. That means you can get all messages. With twitter you need to be patient. Tha api only allows sixty requests per hour… That’s one a minute. With something instant that’s stifling the conversation

Over a month of using twitter on the mobile phone I would count 300 kilobytes or more per refresh whilst with Jaiku I require just 15 megabytes of data transfer over a month to follow the conversation. As a result I much prefer the forward looking attitude that Jaiku have taken. There’s just one drawback, the community is smaller.