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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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There Are Two Parts To The World Wide Web

Byrichard

the future of the web

the search engine was the king, now it’s social networking.

People had their own home page, now it’s grown to their own website. The blog was grown and grown, replacing webrings

to be developed

For several years the search engine was king. This was the place where everyone went to find content because all the information was so disorganised. Recently though this has changed. The way people use the world wide web has evolved. Whereas people in the past would create just one webpage with a little content people are now creating entire websites.

These websites are not websites  in the sense that they were back in the late nineties, rather they are profiles. It used to be that you’d create a static HTML page that would need to be updated manually through the hot metal code. With CGI-bin and later technologies, the nature of the homepage has changed.

Remember Geocities? It’s been replaced by myspace. Remember the discussion about web portals and yahoo and google were trying to corner the market to get the highest audience. That has changed. Look at Digg, Facebook, Bebo, twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. All of these websites are about one thing. Community. They are only interesting as long as your friends are members; no friends means no way of using it. I was a member of myspace for months before anyone I knew joined and by the time had joined I re-created a profile having forgotten the other profile.

It’s the same with Facebook. I joined it a few months before anyone from my environment started using it but recently everyone has started using Facebook to communicate. Not just this, they’re also uploading their lives to the web. So am I. There are two issues that are interesting to look at. For anyone wanting to do a dissertation why not look at the changing nature of privacy with the rise of the social networking website. When I was studying for my HND privacy was key and release forms were essential. Now it’s as though everyone is a publisher and the nature of privacy has changed. It goes along the lines of “Don’t upload anything too compromising or embarrassing”. Your network of friends can see everything. Friends from your high school days can see all your university friends and vice versa.

This promotes the expansion of social circles. Whereas in the past networks of friends were mutually exclusive due to location they are joined online. Take some videos of when you’re at a party in Switzerland and those in England can see it, and so can their friends if you so choose. It’s a shame you can’t select for only one network to see videos rather than others, for example, only London friends can see the London videos and Switzerland friends can see those. It would make uploading certain videos possible.

Anyway, the web has become personal. Within the last 6 months or so I’ve seen the web go from being about avatars and nicknames to being about real names and real networks. It’s about bringing the offline world online and vice versa. This is where I believe for there to have been a shift in perception of what the web is for. Almost everyone I know and see regularly is now on Facebook. It’s amusing to see how it’s become mainstream.

It’s as though Facebook has become a portal although not in the 1998 sense of the word. There is a new part of the internet. If you imagine the web to be like drupal then imagine that Yahoo and Geocities are the old gateways to the World Wide Web whilst various social networking websites are a new ad important portal with one major difference. These portals aggregate and distribute your content to your friends around the world. You’re no longer going online for research. You’re going online because you’re socialising. It’s replaced, at least partially, socialising in the real world whilst nonetheless providing a great way of sharing content. Both “user-generated” and “interactive” have become keywords in describing what the web is today.

In summary, whereas two or three years ago the Web was somewhere people came to find information for future use the web has evolved into an interactive user-generated medium. As a result of this, I think the world wide web has added another node to what purposes it serves.

Web 1.0: static and hard to interact anonymously vs web 2.0: highly interactive user-generated content where real names are now used, especially in places like Facebook.

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People From The Past

Byrichard

Since I started using the world wide web one thing has become clear over the past year. The web has become personal. We have seen a migration from a worldwide web of strangers where everyone is hiding behind an avatar to a worldwide web where no one is hiding behind an avatar, where everyone wants to be seen.

In the early days of the world wide web when no one was sure what the world wide web was about many people created websites and web rings and such were formed. Webrings were an early form of tagging whereby a list of websites on a particular subject would be put together to help promotion between websites. Over time this disintegrated.

Another difference is the mentality of webmastering. Whereas before a website was designed to provide text-based information within the smallest amount of data (due to network limitations) it has gone the other way. From HTML pages to Flash-based video players. The Web has become a far more important tool now that broadband is so popular.

At the same time, broadband and “always-on” connections have meant that whenever you turn on the computer you’re online. In the early days, I had a friendship with a Swedish girl, via e-mail. The friendship was an interesting one because it was one thousand word e-mails one to two times a day for an entire month before it ceased completely. That’s a lot of communication between two countries at a time when social networking was in its infancy, at least online.

Remember the Geocities chatrooms, those that were text-based were a popular question was A/S/L… Those days were more interesting. In those days you’d chat with someone and try to keep them interested and establish a friendship which would result in getting an e-mail address to stay in contact. Profiles and logins became more advanced and chatrooms are now designed so that everything about you is clearly visible (that you choose to make public) therefore some of the more basic questions are no longer needed.

I have been a member of many online forums and I have seen how they have changed from being fairly simple places for people to share ideas a post at a time to massively complex social networking websites such as myspace, Facebook and others. This brings me to the idea of portals.

I remember when companies like yahoo attempted to give you as much information as possible on their main page and the most activities to enjoy were numerous so that you would stay there. A few years later and one of the top social networking websites is Facebook where not only do you have all your friends as members of the network but additionally they may choose how much they share with others. It’s become a central node for the web-based user experience.

In this time those networks have demonstrated one thing, the ability to re-establish links. On Facebook it’s getting back in contact with school friends I haven’t seen for more than a decade whilst in other situations, it’s about people we met during vacations in another country. It’s a way for friendships to be created and to remain alive thanks to the virtual communities that have formed.

I wonder how long it’ll be before my friends use Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce or other SMS enabled social networking communities online. In America, with Facebook, this is already a reality. For other countries with patience, it will be a reality as well and we will be truly connected.

I’m already experimenting with that idea via twitter.

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Too much listening to podcasts.

Byrichard

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts over the past few days. i had to catch up with all those I haden’t taken the time to listen to over the last few months.

It’s amusing. in “96 I began working on my website, in 2007 I uploaded it and since then I’ve been following everything that’s happened. I’ve seen as some new things became old and old things became new again with time.

How many people remember Geocities, Angelfire and other projects? I remember them. I remember when I started trying to get people to contribute to my website because I didn’t have time to produce the content. It didn’t work. That was web 2.0 several years before the time.

I remember 6 degrees.com, a website that attempted to do something which is becoming more standard as new social networking websites come of age. Look at myspace, look at youtube and Flickr. Each one concentrates on your interest, whether music, video, or video. Everything the youth enjoy. Rupert Murdoch is attempting to join the fun.

It bothers me that people are putting so much content on myspace without attempting to put that content onto their own domain names and websites. Why should I create content only to have a billionaire make a little extra money when the content is mine.

The challenge for me is to find how to create content, host it myself, and then make money through other people showing interest. Over time it should improve.

A site I like at the moment is Facebook because of how much information is available. The user interface is good, the add ons are interesting. If I create a post in a blog on my own website it’ll automatically be synchronized with Facebook for people to come to and read.

It’s also where people I haven’t seen for over a decade re-appear and I can see how things have evolved since last time. We’ve grown up.