I am 25,000 tweets old
Half the amount of tweets from a few months ago and far less than was my habit until now. This should be the normal twitter amount from now on. Don’t have as much free time for the social media anymore.
This weekend I went on a social media binge. A social media binge is the moment when you forfeit sleep and the rest of reality for a few hours as part of the social media.
For the purpose of this particular challenge I set myself two pass times. The first of these was to twitter and the second was to seesmic. If you read previous posts you’ll find out what twitter. As to seesmic that’s another story. It’s close to being instant messaging with videos.
Normal video chats are live. I talk and as I talk you can respond and interrupt me. In seesmic you talk, type a title and share the video. After that another person speaks, presses stop and posts. Over the period of a few hours many more posts appear and as they do so the conversation evolves exponentially. All of these videos is available to every over member so there is a great degree of overheard conversation. This overheard conversation is where the fun begins.
I’ve seen girls dancing, guys act like zombies, discussions about literature and social media. I’ve seen so many things that it feels like the social media equivalent of a music festival. Watch seesmix clips on youtube to get a better idea.
Remember the video version of seesmic, the one that spawned.the francofous?
Things changed for two reasons. Bandwidth issues and ressources. Flash would suck down the laptop battery within a few minutes. It meant that you could.only Seesmic from a fixed position.
With html5 that problem will dissapear. What I look forward to is an HTML 5 optimized version. It could result in a greater number of users on less powerful machines.
I hope we see a growth in users and a more international set of users. I hope they also add more features at the same time.
Let us see whether Seesmic take advantage of this opportunity.
Having used Friendfeed intensly for the last two days and through reading this post I believe that twitter is on it’s way out for early adopters for one fundamental reason. The re-tweet.
Twitter is over simplified for anything but IRC like conversation and as a result of this for passionate users such as myself we bounce from the walls of twitter without an opportunity to escape it. We see links but know nothing about them. We see retweets but don’t understand them. We get replies of which conversation they were part of and in general twitter is a two message medium.
The two message medium is the way I think best illustrates how people use twitter most of the time. Too many people worry about productivity and wasting time and because they feel guilty for having a conversation on twitter they cut it off after two messages on average. As a result the twitter user often feels that they have wasted time.
In Friendfeed however you write a message, link to an article and if people like it you see how many people, including you liked the article and you can see the comments. As an effect of seeing their comments you may exchange more messages with them. It doesn’t matter when you join the conversation because the flow is still there.
This saves so much time and technology that I am really thinking of moving away from twitter to Friendfeed because it has finally come of age and is more reflective of the way people disseminate and share information for at least a few more weeks.
Anyone else feel the same? Let me know.
Going out is great, especially to an empty night club when friends of yours are present. It immediately becomes less fun when one friend decides to enjoy the freedoms of nature on a fence whilst a police car is rolling past.
At the time I was sitting in a kitchen with my back to the window when I hear the siren go off. What’s the cause of this I wonder and lookout. I spot two people I know and immediately I understand what they were doing. Harmless engineering term, up to you to figure out which one.
A friend standing behind me decides to yell out of the room “stop them, they’re terrorists” which in itself would be a harmless joke except for bored policemen. They decided to give the guy they had interrupted when nature calls an £80 fine. That’s annoying for anyone who’s been fined. You know the feeling.
It became more interesting when those two people came up to see me and ask whether I had caused those problems. Having a clear conscience I answered that I had not been the one to land them in trouble. Ok, who did, was the next response.
This person
Ok, now the situation escalated. At this point, both people knew who was responsible for what and they were willing to fight. I used all of my body strength to come between both individuals because I did not want to see a fight take place when I was a key witness in the unfolding events.
No fight took place but the echauffement definitely did. I was asked to leave the flat although I had done my best to avoid a fight and everyone went their separate ways.
That’s definitely not what I want to have to deal with after spending so much time and effort on the dissertation. When I wake up I’ll spend some more time adding the finishing touches to my dissertation before handing it in.
Goodnight
Twitter has three options. You can tweet to the world without barriers and anyone can read and respond. This is great when you want to grow your network and have conversations. The second option is to send DMs to specific individuals or groups (if I remember correctly). The third option is to make your account private. The only people can read your tweets are the people who were following you when you made the account private.
The weakness of a private account is that twitter is a social medium and as such any time we @ or retweet someone they will be unable to see our answers. Any answer we write to those people will be unseen and so we will be tweeting in the wind.
My two reasons for keeping twitter private are:
A) More freedom. If we approve the people who can read what we write we can first warn them that we may be cheeky. We may something that we only think for long enough to write a tweet, and by the time it’s published we have already changed our mind.
B) The people we’re tweeting with are also private. If we answer a private tweet publicly then people may intuit what the conversation is about. We could use another IM platform but WhatsApp is part of Facebook and other IM networks have their own problems. People tend to be spread across platforms.
Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are three different types of social networks. LinkedIn is serious. I keep my profile up to date but not much more. Facebook is the network of former university friends. Due to this, I need to trust those I add. When twitter was a network of friends waiting to meet at tweetups everyone was accountable to the community so everyone had reason to behave a specific way. Now that trolls, hashtags and other issues are present keeping an account private keeps them away.
140+ characters is excellent to tell people how we feel but terrible for context. Blogging, forums and other long-form discussion websites are better suited to being public because you spend half an hour to an hour developing your idea, modifying it, and then sharing. That is long enough for an irrational tweet to become a rational post.
I’d rather have one to three blog posts by the end of a given day, than twenty-five to two hundred tweets. ;-). I haven’t tweeted like that in years for a reason.
Snowboarding is a fun and safe sport as long as you know what you’re doing. Occasionally of course we push the limits. A few years ago whilst snowboarding with someone around La Dole we decided that rather than go back down via St Cerque we would snowboard home by passing over the ridge and down the other side. For decades both us had hiked those slopes so we knew them well.
I took one step and felt myself falling. I was face down in the snow and I called to the person I was with to know whether he could see me. He could, so I knew there was no problem. We both strapped our snowboards on and from that point we snowboarded down the slope.
In Verbier a 29 year old Entrepreneur lost his life after falling from a cliff into a rive below, from a few articles I’ve read. The conditions are unclear at the moment. What is clear though is that the people did not have a proper contingency plan or experience of the mountains. If the conditions are adverse the last thing you want to do is go off piste, especially when you’re not with a local guide who knows the mountains.
The reason I’m speaking about this particular story is that these people had some of the latest technology at their disposal. GPS enabled iphones and twitter, as is written in this article. If you’re lost in the mountains with this type of device you can get a geo loc within twenty meters of where you are. You can see a satellite view of where you are and you can see which way would be the best to get home. You can also stay put and let rescuers find you rather than attempt to make it back down. If your GPS location is within 20 meters it’s not that complicated to find two people.
The other reason I’m speaking about this is that some of those who were part of the group were tweeting the adventure. One tweet speaks about the great time they were having and how they “finished the ski day due to complete whiteout”. The next is about the 2 people missing. Screen grabs of the tweets are here.
This demonstrates the weakness of the iphone and the GPS functionality. With my phone whenever I go outdoors the GPS tracks my exact location within 20-60 meters. What this means is that if I go missing within a minute you’ll see exactly where I am if you’ve added me on Google latitude. On that note I’ve invited a few more people to follow me on google latitude. If you have an S60 Symbian phone maybe you could do the same, just as a backup.
It’s a shame it had to happen to anyone, especially since that type of accident is easy to avoid. It’s even more of a shame that Hermioneway, whom I met at LeWeb in Paris is one of those that had to go through the experience. Switzerland is a beautiful country for all those that enjoy outdoors sports and beautiful landscapes so it’s a shame that it’s overshadowed by that event.
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