Micro-Blogging

It’s Ten Fourty Eight on a Monday and i have barely touched social media. I have barely touched social media for two reasons. People don’t see it as socialising anymore. They take a utilitarian approach to social media, which makes it absurd. The second reason is that we see how ignorant the world is about current affairs.

In the past when we used social media we were looking to have conversations, share ideas and do more. Now people want to promote books, and fill gaps in time between when they are with family, friends or colleagues, without considering that social networks, for decades, were about connecting people who lived alone, or were too introverted to be the life and soul of “physical world” parties.

Jaiku is a Finnish software that makes conversing with people easy. It’s an advanced form of chatroom and I love it. It works on the same principle as twitter with the added bonus of having feed reading and integration as a bonus. If I’m going out for the day but I want people to know where I am at any given point in time I can send messages to twitter because it’s the price of a local phone call rather than international, as with Jaiku where the message is sent to Finland. I added my blog therefore a summary of blog posts will automatically be added to my jaiku feed. I could add flickr, my video feeds and other feeds if I so desire and it should work. On Jaiku I love how conversations can take place based around posts about what someone is doing. One person talked about only having 5 gigs left on their hard drive and a short conversation followed on from that post. Leo Laporte commented on his twitter identity being ussurped recently and this encouraged a flurry of activity. It’s like many of the Web forums I’ve visited. People join a community and select their friends so that they get updates whenever someone posts. The difference is that there is a migration away from the desktop and laptop to the mobile phone. It’s becoming an integral part of people’s lives. Of course at the moment it’s for early adopters rather than anyone but over time when it becomes more socialy acceptable we should find a progression whereby information workers are no longer tied to their desks.