From One Screen to the Next and the Next
A good video looking at the evolution towards the fourth screen
MG had noted that, after a week, Twitter seemed to realize that it was a problem that the replies still weren’t working, and was pointing people to Summize for a workaround. I said “I hate having to rely on the web version of Twitter, first of all, then having the reply tab bork, and THEN having to go to summize, and hit reply there and pray that twitter works. It’s why I only check Twitter once or twice a day now.â€
So you see I’m not the only one that’s complaining about the lack of service from twitter. More and more people are getting tired. Remember when hotmail was unreliable, soon after it became part of microsoft. That’s the phase twitter seems to be in although it’s funding rather than being bought. The early adopters are “leaving” because they’re tired of the site being down but that doesn’t matter.
Awareness of twitter is going up and if within a week or two they iron out the bugs then there’s a good chance that the middle to late adopters will come and enjoy twitter. We’ve seen that in shows like TWIT the later adopters are there now. More and more people arrive and because they’re not part of the “echo chamber” that we, as the early adopters inhabit to them it’s a new service that they’re learning about.
Whilst I was not twittering I did watch the different conversations about the fail whale and how crap twitter had become and we see the negativity. Look at the timeline though and see what new arrivals are saying. What’s the point of twitter? How do I use it? Those questions mean one thing. It doesn’t matter that twitter is broken when they join for the simple reason that they don’t know what it was like before.
Now it’s up to twitter who have purged the geek community through inefficiency to take advantage of that to get many more real life conversations going rather than all this web 2.0 and marketing chatter. If twitter does make an effort I look forward to when it’s properly fixed.
As an addition taking a few days off from twitter did help me feel more relaxed about the bugs.
I have been using sports tracker for years. I first used it on the Nokia N95 8GB several years ago. This was an excellent app that allowed you to track your moves using the mobile phone as a GPS. The limitation of such an app was battery life on mobile phones. The battery usually did not last more than an hour at first and eventually progressed to two hours or more.
The first Suunto Device I used was for diving. I used the Suunto D9 dive computer for many months before upgrading. As I satisfied with this device I bought the Suunto Ambit 2 and eventually the Suunto Ambit 3. The reason for buying these watches is battery life. As normal watches they can last for 100 days, losing about one percent a day. If you use them as fitness watches then they easily last for a day or more.
When you’re doing via Ferrata, hiking, cycling or doing other sports you want the device you use to track your fitness efforts for as long as you’re going. That’s where Sports trackers and other mobile phones had their weakness. Mobile phone apps sometimes crash. If you’re pushing yourself hard during a workout you do not want to reach the end of a workout with no data.
Another frustration I often encountered was with Movescount, Suunto’s social sports app. At the end of quite a few workouts, I was unable to sync my workout data and analyse my progress. At the time,
I wanted to see Suunto and Sports tracker combined. They’re both Finnish companies and they both excel at specific tasks. Suunto for the hardware and Sports tracker for the analytics. By combining the two we have the best of both worlds.
Communications between Movescount and Sports tracker has been available for several weeks at this point and it works flawlessly. I have hiked, cycled, walked, sailed and climbed and each activity has synced without problems.
Yesterday when looking at YouTube over lunch I noticed that they now show six videos at a time, compared to the 20-30 videos they used to show, back in the good old days. This means that you have six videos to choose from. The algorithm is cutting down our choice constantly from 30 videos down to 20. and now 6.
If we watch one channel’s content then that content will be shown exclusively until we grow tired of it, and then we will have to choose from a dozen or less content creators. Sometimes videos will appear in three or four categories. It’s hard to browse when there is so little choice.
In the days of renting DVDs for a night or two we would go into the shop and there would be a few recommendations but then we could go into the library and search for a while, trying to find content by genre, mood or more. Today that browsing experience is getting worse.
When I look for something to watch on YouTube or Netflix and Prime I want to have a real choice. I want to see a breadth of choice within a single screen. I don’t want to be forced to watch what algorithms force people to watch. If you recommend content because it’s popular, but it’s popular because it has been pushed on people, then it is not popular. It is spoon fed. The algorithms are cheating us and content creators. We’re being cheated because we have no choice, and content creators are cheated because they are invisible.
What I liked about YouTube is that it provided us with a breadth of content to choose from. We might have browsed for a few minutes and skimmed through thousands of videos but we had real choice to find ideal content. Now, with six videos being shown at a time we’re forced to pick out of six. This isn’t choice. This is scarcity. Thousands of hours of content are uploaded to youtube every minute and yet the algorithms get everyone to watch the same thing.
The problem is that I don’t know what I want to watch for half an hour to an hour so I don’t have key words that I want to look for. If I’m forced to see six videos, rather than browse, then I’m likely to give up rather than search. Usually we look at YouTube and similar sites to discover new content.
YouTube wants us to pay for prime but they take our ability to choose. They use algorithms that, because content is pushed on us, become worse and worse with recommendations. We can give feedback, but not proper feedback. I sign up for Prime, enjoy it for a few weeks, and then it becomes toxic and I take a break. The algorithms pigeon hole us, rather than learn about us.
I love the medium of video. I love well produced content. I love content of a certain type. Google’s algorithms looks at users and recommends the content that it would give to teenagers to 40 years olds, and vice versa. The recommendation engine knows our age, and our viewing habits over a decade and a half. If people are worried about privacy, just look at ads and YouTube recommendations and you will realise that algorithms know nothing about us. Algorithms, by now, should know that I hate sensationalism. I realise that hating sensationalism is sensationalist. The point is that if recommendations for content are bad, then we are likely to take a break.
Two weeks after twitter gave up on Europe here are a number of services you can try out.
TweetSMS
This service should be launching this weekend and some people are already testing the service
3jam
It’s up and running but requires for you to pay via paypal rather than Visa or other widely accepted cards
Twitmobile
So far not much information on the service but advertises 5p per message. Let’s see when they’re online
Hootsms
Hootsms are already up and running but as with other services you are required to pay via paypal. It allows a number of bulk buying SMS. You can buy up to a thousand sms for 50 GBP.
Zygotweet
Not much information so far.
Twittex
Appears already to be up and running.
If you’ve tried any of these services leave a comment below commenting on your experience with these services.
Twitter is one of those things that’s really hard to explain due to it’s sheer simplicity. It’s a website that allows you to answer the “what are you doing question”. That is the initial phase. When you’re new to twitter you’ll be confused because you know no one therefore the codes and conventions are blurred. You may tweet once or twice a day and that’s enough. Over time you will look at what other people are doing and that’s when you move to phase two of twitter use.
When I first started using twitter I had no idea how to use it. i thought that it was a storm of 140 character postings that are completely unrelated. Some refer to it as microblogging but it’s not a blog. instead it’s a great tool for entrepreneur for two key reasons. The first is brevity. Anything you say must be summarised to 140 characters. As a result you’re efficient. The second factor is the interaction between twitter users.
If you take a look at my profile and my twitter block then you’ll see the ten most recent tweets in my public feed and what everyone within my circle are talking about. As a result of this you’re entering a communal environment. Out of those I’m following on twitter I know from ten to twenty of them, occasionaly meeting a few of them two or more times. As a result I know what they’re doing and they know what I’m doing as well.
Each one of us is in charge of a number of projects we find of interest. I’m a recent graduate therefore I tweet about one set of things. Loudmouthman and Documentally both tweet about other things that are related to their activities. Links help to get all of this information and work distributed to the right people. Most of those on twitter have at least one website and quite a few profiles on a variety of other websites. We’re embracing what’s called web 2.0 by many people.
It seems to be the tool of choice for entrepreneur to keep up to date with what everyone else is doing at the time. Just take a look and you’ll see this for yourself.
Twitter is a great tool for it’s brevity and it brings together a great number of content creators who are having a conversation across borders and timezones. It’s boundless in that it can be viewed from the mobile phone to the Itouch to the computer. It’s versatile and quick and I’m going to continue using it for many months to come.
Whilst a friend was filming with a high speed camera i was streaming the event live from my phone via Qik. I noticed they improved a couple of important things. The first is that video files are now saved and readable without conversion. The second fact is that you now have an RSS feed, makes aggregation easier. I’ve added two or three of those feeds to itunes so the content can be accessed more easily.
And there are a few more on Qik which I’ll let you get to yourself.