Social Media

The Francofous are part of the seesmic community and can be differentiated by their ability to speak french and their avatars. Originally formed around Seesmic and twitter they are now migrating to both plurk and phreadz, two services I have talked about in the past. What is nice about this community is that it’s a core of 20-30 early adopters who move and try new communities as a group rather than individuals. What this means is that whereas in previous years we would jump from one community to another, start without knowing anyone and over weeks and months get to know people here we have a core of people moving with the times. Of course I speak about the Francofous this way but they’re not the only ones. Many of my English and international social media friends are doing the same thing, moving from one fesh community to another to see what the strengths and weaknesses are. They’re also testing out the sites, seeing what works and what doesn’t. They’re illustrating how many of you will use these sites once the barriers to entry have come down. There’s another factor that’s important to take into consideration. Those who are early adopters are used to using twenty to thirty sites several times a day from google reader to plurk, to seesmic, to phreadz to gmail to flickr, youtube, dailymotion, vimeo and many more. At the same time most of my university friends are happy with facebook and gmail. They’re lucky, everything they want can be found in one place ;-). How far are these communities from the mass of mid to late adopters? Quite a few months to a year ahead of the pack.

richard - Sep 5, 2008

i always wake up early after a good night out. Enjoying the fresh air today :-). What time did you end up leaving last night?

It was lovely last night, I’m surprised your up and logging so early today though…you had quite a bit to drink ;-) Maybe Trafalgar Square has that effect on you!

The first tweetup I went to saw a crowd of no more than sixty people. The twestival had many more. Enough to fill the Doon club. So many new faces but not many new people to follow. It’s fun to see how big the London twitter community has become. The usual people were there, sizemore, loudmouthman, documentally, danacea weaverluke and a few new faces like digitalmaverick, amandita, Poppyd and a few more people. Some video was shot of the event but I’m not sure by when they’ll go up. There was no wifi so no opportunity to do some live streaming. At the same time I’m thinking it’s time for a plurk up of the same scale, since for the moment there are so few people. Now it’s time for Tuttle.

A good video looking at the evolution towards the fourth screen

Today I met, Gael Métroz, a guy who decided to travel along the trail of Nicholas Bouvier shortly after his studies. It was an opportunity to try the seesmic style of interview at the City Club in Lausanne. The idea is simple. Those doing the interview have a laptop with a webcam and a good internet connection. They go to film an interview with the laptop and the audience themselves ask questions from the person appearing. It was the first time that the people I was with tried this style of interview and it was a good experience. Nomad’s land - Gael Métroz What was also a nice experience was getting to talk with Gael, getting a more personal view than if we had watched the interview on television. It’s a more relaxed, and in this case, less rushed interview, more personal less formal. I hope that we get to do more of these events.

Lifestreaming is not something the mainstream understand yet. they’re still getting to grips with the idea of lost anonimity on a place like facebook. This is visible through the creation of the facebook group to cry about the new facebook. I’m an early adopter and I love new ways of connecting with people and that’s why I’m sitting in an appartment in Paris after spending a fun night with 20 friends from seesmic (or so). They’re all friends I met through social media. In particular I met them through Seesmic. Imagine posting a video that anyone and everyone can see. I like to describe it as video instant messaging. Record a video of yourself talking about something and wait for your friends to answer in video form There area number of features on the new facebook that are similar to those of jaiku. These are rss integration, status updates (as in twitter) and commenting. They’re all things that I’ve been playing with for months now. It’s part of my daily life. I understand and embrace this change. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for those I met in the physical world to start tweeting and seesmicing or using jaiku. Will it be a year or two? They did take a year to finally get to facebook after all.

This weekend I’ll be in Paris for another seesmeetup, an opportunity for French speakers to meet in person after getting to know each other online. They’re good fun. Seesmeet’up a PARIS le samedi 6? See some of you there

Yestereday night when I should have been sleeping I downloaded a web server for the Nokia N95 8GB and so far it’s been a lot of fun (albeit a little slow). It has blogging, messaging, photo galleries and more and here’s a little run down of what the interesting features are. if you’re logged in then you see a number of features: Blogging: This feature allows you to write blog posts and post them. Commenting is possible. Camera: There are two options, the first one allows you to take pictures remotely. I can take pictures from my laptop when I want to. The second is photo requesting. this feature allows for those visiting your website to ask for a picture of something, for example “I want a picture of the restaurant”. Take the phone, take a picture of the restaurant and send it to the person that may be coming soon. The Gallery: The gallery has three options. The first of these options is that you select which pictures you want to share. The second option is to share all phone memory pictures whilst the third is to share all memory card pictures. Guestbook I haven’t played with this feature yet but it’s pretty self explanatory. Contact me. There are two ways by which for someone to contact you from the mobile site. the first is by short IM and the second is by SMS. Both of these work quite well even with slow connection speeds. Presence The presence Availability information consists of “Active profile - Silent”, in other words that the phone is silent. That would mean there’s little chance I’ll hear the phone if you call. “Calendar availability - Available lets you know that I’m available. “Call state - Call inactive” means that you can call me since I am not currently using the phone. Webchat allows those on the site to chat with the web server user. Calendar The calendar is a quick way to see what events are planned and for when Messaging: It’s a nice way of seeing the messages people have sent you and when, in other words you can see all the sms you’ve received on your phone remotely. It’s not something you’d share with the world. Unread messages appear in bold. Phone Log. Allows you to see all phone traffic on your phone with the usual three distinctions Contacts, allows you to see all your contacts. Conclusion With more ubiquitous wifi and more forgiving data plans we can expect more and more people to carry the webserver with them. If I take pictures of an event you can connect to my phone and look at the pictures I’ve taken. It’s also an easy way of sharing those embarrasing photos with friends. There’s no video support yet but that’s sure to come and there are other options ready already. Editing from the phone is fast so blogging from the phone makes more sense than via a laptop, in relation that part of your site. There is also an RSS feed which means that those following you can automatically download any content you generate for viewing when your phone is out of range of free wifi or you select not to use the data plan. The downside is that it uses battery and the connection drops fairly frequently. Data plans that are only a few megabytes large would soon end up costing you more than it’s worth. The connection speeds are slow so doing anything is laborious. For more information

[caption id=“attachment_674” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“my article on newsgator”][/caption] Today’s top recommended story on Newsgator, one of my posts.

richard - Mar 5, 2009

It’s coming to more and more phones over time. Now you can get it on quite a few phones, from Nokia to Blackberry to Sony Ericsson and iphone (to a lesser degree)