Social Media

Twitter is not a social network, rather it’s a way of life. The more you use Twitter the further it gets into your way of life. It allows you to follow current affairs, geek out about social media and keep in touch with friends that uses the social network. What’s more it’s a network that does not require any specific device. At first it’s a confusing place. Look at the public timeline and it’s a torrent of junk and sifting through it will take hours a day. As you spend more time on twitter though you find people of interest to follow. In some cases it’s friends from the physical world, in other cases friends from other websites on the web and then more. In reality what makes twitter interesting, and part of what makes people use it is how efficient it is at getting a message across. You’ve got 140 characters to express yourself. In Paris I was told I speak in 140 characters or less. That’s not a bad thing. In fact it’s good. It’s about the continual flow of information. Imagine you’re swimming down a river but everytime you move to stay afloat you have to close your eyes. That’s what article and blog reading is. As you focus on one task so your ability to focus on anything else dissapears. That’s fine in the old media where pages are static and where airwaves are limited. In the modern world though it is necessary to absorb many sources of information at once. How many of you have your ipod, laptop and mobile phone with you at the time you’re reading this post? I’m sure most. How many of you have more podcasts than you can view or listen to? How many of you have more programs recorded on PVR than you can watch? That’s why twitter is a lifestyle. It’s about constantly looking for information and building an understanding of current affairs through constantly taking in little bits of information. Stop talking about the social media on twitter, rather start talking about the good old fashioned time efficient soundbyte. Want to be heard. Don’t take people’s time. Encourage interest instead. Many people are complaining about the decentralised conversation, the notion that blogs are no longer the center of attention, that twitter, friendfeed, facebook and others are killing the conversation. In fact quite the opposite is true. If you’re in New York you’ve got one set of people, if you’re in London you’ve got another. if you’re in Geneva you don’t have much… To have a decentralised conversation means that many ideas can be explored at once and as pillars of the online community meet at various events so the conversations can once more converge. Don’t worry about comments on a blog, think about the conversations and the people you’re having them with. That’s where the fun is to be had.

I found yet another toy to play with in the form of alerthingy and one question springs to mind. Will this one be able to cope with my stream of actions. It’s an adobe air interface that allows you to keep track of friendfeed. I’ve only started playing with it but it looks like a useful tool for when i’m at home after a day’s work.

A few days ago I was in Paris to meet the Francofous and in the process I passed by La Cantine where they were holding a Videocamp. It’s like a barcamp but rather than talking about radio and podcastng people talked about peer to peer video sharing, citizen journalism and other topics. I filmed a few people presenting what their seminars had been about and finally they’re available via my website. Please note that the videos are in French. [Video 1](http://www.main-vision.com/richard/video/paris0408/just got to work014.mp4) [Video 2](http://www.main-vision.com/richard/video/paris0408/just got to work015.mp4) And yes it is very lazy of me to distribute the videos like this but I don’t have time to edit the content at the moment. If anyone wants to offer a transcript of what’s said I’ll credit you for the work.

I’m back from Paris and what you can expect from me this week are a post with two or three short video clips of people exposing what they discussed at Podcamp uk as well as two or three amusing videos from the Paris Seesmic meetup.

Next Saturday I’ll be catching the TGV to Paris to meet with a few friends from the Seesmic community. I had planned to do this for over two months but never got the opportunity due to various events. It’s fun to go to meet people who you know via online social networks because of the friendships and the inspiration they may provide. In London whilst looking for work i took great advantage of all these events, trying to go to as many as possible. That’s how I got interested in twitter and so much has grown from that point. The people in Paris are not unknown to me. I have met Fred of Blugture in London and Virginie from two meetings in Lausanne. Now I’m going to Paris and I’ll see many more seesmicers in person. It’s good fun and you never know what interesting projects and events they may talk about. It’s just fun to meet people who we’ve spent the past few months conversing through a number of methods I’ve written about previously.

The month is almost over and I’ve got fourty megabytes of streaming left to play with so I’m going to take advantage of that with my mobile phone. Since cities around Switzerland are covered by 3g you may find that I’m using Qik, Bambuser and Flixwagon to stream what I’m doing. Today I actually got Flixwagon to stream live over wifi which is better than i got yesterday and I found that streaming via qik works well on 3g. In less than a hundred days you’ll have big crowds of people in the streets and that’s going to be for the European cup. If enough bars and squares have wifi then you could get the fans streaming their reactions live from the pub. It’s the Vertovian vision, the All Seeing eye, and it’s a reality, no longer just a 1920’s eutopian vision.

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](http://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/rich95.jpg “Richard and the Nokia N95”)Because three or four, I’ve lost track of how many, live streaming applications for the phone aren’t enough i’ve started to play with flixwagon as well. So far it’s taking some getting used to but I hope that by tomorrow I’ll have learned more. It’s still an alpha and only works with select phones. I could test it from here and now but it’s night time and there are more interesting places from which to play.

Quotably is a new service that allows you to easily follow people’s conversations by typing in their username. It displays the most recent conversations and shows the original post as well as the discussions that have occured as a result. It appears to work by taking the most recent @ reply from one person to another and displaying. Here are a few examples: Warzabidul Jeff Pulver Fred2baro These are examples where you can see a lot of conversation because these users are active in their responses with those following them. Take a look at certain people’s threads and you see that there’s an initial post but no response to the response. It’s quite funny to observe.

However, many purported Social Media experts are merely engaging in cultural voyeurism at best. They look from afar and roam the perimeters of online societies without ever becoming a true member of any society. This means, they don’t truly understand what, where, or why they’re “participating,” only jumping in because they have something to say and have access to the tools that will carry it into play. This is unfortunately a representation of the greater landscape of Social Media Marketing and it’s time to take a step back and study the sociology of Social Media in order to keep communities intact and unaffected by outsiders.

This Week in Media 85 is an interesting conversation about media news for the past week with a technological slant. This week’s interesting is particularly interesting as it explored the future of television and how people consume media. From the PVR and the ability for people to discuss the content they enjoy to machines that talk to each other they cover many topics. They also discussed computer literacy and whether the youth of today are as computer litterate as previous generations. That’s an interesting point. The idea is not whether someone can get a computer to do what they want but rather whether they know how to set it up. Think of Linux. Would you be able to setup a linux box. It’s the type of discussion that’s good to follow to give you a number of points of view.