RandellFever - Feb 0, 2008
Hey Richard - I have been on a couple of times to test it out. I like the interface design. It looks like an interesting tool for a group of people who have a specific purpose for meeting, but for random conversation I greatly prefer Seesmic.
Yeah I agree with Randell, I gave it a test run last night at my cycling social network and I think that kind of specific use is where it will prove useful.
Yahoo live is an interesting live video conferencing tool still in it’s early days. It allows you to stream video live from your webcam and watch up to four other streams at the same time. There’s a chatroom and you can see all the participants at once and select which ones you want in vision and which you’d prefer out of vision. There are a few bugs at the moment. I haven’t found sound that easy to deal with, especially since there’s a five to ten second delay. Chatting with Msiou he told me that what he had done is use skype conference calls to keep the conversation going. Of course this is a makeshift solution and some better interaction should come. My Channel, My live profile
I went to the Social Media Coffee event this morning and met quite a few of the usual people including Deek, Sizemore, Londonfilmgeek and others. I got to know a few more twitter users a little better and that’s where I stayed for part of the morning. I’ve been networking a lot over the past few days and I think i need some time to think about all the new options. It’s good to get to these events and talk to people. Quite a few people are interested in twitter and because I’m edging so close to the 15,000 tweet mark they’re quite curious to know my thoughts on the topic. People are actually interested both in what twitter is and how twitter works. Over the months I have acquired a respectable amount of knowledge and people are starting to seek it which is great. That’s just one aspect of the Social Media cafe I saw today but there is one thing that’s going to change. If no one objects to it I will begin to record the conversations as they go on and edit a summary to make available both via the London Social Media Cafe website for people to consult and keep up to date. I am in discussion with Jeff Pulver of PulverTV to see about covering the London side of Social media so if you know of any events that may be of interest let me know so that I may organise coverage if it’s relevant.
Danacea - Jan 0, 2008
We all use twitter differently, but to me it’s a two-way deal. There are people I follow who don’t follow me back - but they’re senior and respected members of he community from whom I’ve learned a great deal. Otherwise, the conversation, the interaction IS the community and unless it’s two-way, then I do find it pointless… …feels like standing outside a room with your ear pressed to the door - uncomfortable and pointless!
Due to the quantity of people using twitter it’s purpose has changed. From being a place where you tell people what you’re up to it’s become a place where you discuss what you’re up to and what you’re thinking about. As a result of this following people without them following you back is pointless. I went through my twitter list this morning and it was at over 530 people being followed. I went through that list and started to remove people according to four factors. If they’re not following are they A) personalities, B) Amusing, C) active or d)responsive. If they met none of these criteria they were removed from my following list. Even those with attractive avatar pictures were removed. That’s because twitter is a noisy place. People are tweeting about their activities 24 hours a day 7 days a week 366 days a year (since this year is a leap year) and if we start to listen and respond to those that can’t hear us then there’s a huge amount of noise generated. It was a fast and easy process which too no more than half an hour to an hour and there is a big change. Now as I look through my timeline I find that I care about everyone in it. I know many of them well and there are quite a few I’ve met in person. Yesterday for example it meant a lot to me when Jamie told me she was happy to have met me. It’s nice to be shown that you’re not just another piece of text on a screen. It’s nice to use twitter as a multiplatform instant messenger to chat both with old friends and to make new ones. That’s why so many people like twitter. That’s why I like it. If you’re on twitter take the time to check who is following you and whether they react to your @ messages. If they don’t then it might be worth removing them from your follow list as they’re creating noise. Let’s keep the noise to a minimum and conversation to a maximum. Twitter’s purpose has changed and I wanted to reflect it.
Mark McGuinness - Jan 0, 2008
Hi Richard, good to meet you too. I think the site I meant was New Music Strategies, lots of food for thought about music, copyright and the online environment: http://newmusicstrategies.com/ You might also be interested in this page I put together about intellectual property: http://www.wishfulthinking.co.uk/blog/books-and-links-intellectual-property/
Two nights ago whilst having a conversation about technology with Fooz on twitter I got a message from Jamie about the Likemind coffee morning in Central London that she thought might be of interest to me. I decided that I would go and it was worth the effort. From what I gather it’s held once a month. It’s a meeting that started around 0830 and continued till 1030 where a few people from various backgrounds in the media came to talk about a variety of topics. It ranged from Facebook and those that influence discussions to Qik, twitter and seesmic. Of course other topics were also discussed. I talked to Mark of Wishful Thinking who wrote the e-book Time Management for Creative People. He has some interesting ideas and his blog can be found here. Whilst talking to him he touched on a number of interestin topics of which i would like to find out more. One was copyright and music for example, recommending a blog or two I should read and from the conversation I am interested in seeing what he’s been writing about. If I’m not mistaken (and I did meet quite a few people) I also talked with Lauralynne about the challenges of finding work but also about twitter, a subject I know well. Arriving at almost 400 tweets she has a very different to the whole twitter thing. When talking to people many of them are not sure what it’s about yet and that’s why talking to her about it was good. I talked to her about how society is changing. Previously when you met people you would meet them in person, be friends with them for a few weeks or months and one of the two would move to another country or another city and so the link would be lost, hence the utility for something like facebook. It then progressed onto a conversation about twitter. I explained my view that twitter is not just about saying what you’re doing. Another person who was listening in asked us to define twitter. I defined it as a multiplatform chatroom that you can take with you. I talked about the key difference between IM and twitter. With instant messaging you chat with someone and you’re telling them about things as if you’re talking and you expect an answer. With twitter it’s about the day to day life. Through following your stream they’re going to come through a lot of noise depending on how often you tweet. That noise is what makes conversations easy when you meet twitter friends. You’ve got three topics ready because you know about the good and bad things currently going on in their life. It means you’re friends offline. Live in a city like London and you meet these people and a physical world friendship can occur. The motivation behind this point was the notion that technologies are helping to seperate people and I wanted to refute that argument with the points made above. If you go through some of my previous posts you can follow the progression of these ideas further. I heard Mark Iddon talk about his blog about multiplatform content and it sounds interesting although I have not yet had the opportunity to visit the site. Another person I came across was Damiano whose blog Nitmesh sounds interesting. It is described as : “A comment on the imploding chaos of the convergence that hopefully entertains, enlightens, educate, reminds and shares ideas that might stand out and make a remarkable difference”. Overall the meeting was good, productive. I arrived feeling both inspired and shattered. Normal, I got to sleep at 4am and got up at 630 because I enjoyed the thought of being able to have more conversations in person rather than via twitter or seesmic.
Gia - Jan 5, 2008
Oi! I sat across the table from you for the whole end of the evening! We ‘interacted’… sheesh. ;)
LOL. You tell him! :) - nah great writeup richard. Sorry never got to talk Gia. Maybe at a future one? Thanks! Phil
There should be another event at the beginning of February so that Kosso can join. I’ve also heard from Fred2baro that the French may have one simultaneously in Paris. Could be interesting.
Last night I had the good fortune of attending the social media dinner at the Coach and horse in London. It was yet another opportunity to meet people like Lloyd, Sizemore, Phil Campbell, Deek, Rupert Howe, Jess and many other seesmic participants. It was also my opportunity to meet some new people. I met Vinvin and Johann from Seesmic for example. They’re part of the Seesmic team in San Francisco. Loic Lemeur arrived a little later so it was great to meet him to. It’s not everyday (well actually it’s almost everyday) that you meet CEOs of startups. It was also Phil Campbell’s birthday so that added a little something to the party. He presented a new method by which to use eesmic which looks interesting although at this moment in time it is more proof of concept and I’ll wait until it’s developed further before discussing it in depth. I was able to try out the Nokia N95 layout and user interface for seesmic on that night. Loic lent me his phone and I was able to record and post one seesmic post. So far I still think it’s a little slow so i prefer to use the web interface. I got to meet the charming Kittenfluff (unless it’s an imposter as is alleged in a seesmic video from the early hours of this morning;-)) and had a nice time chatting with her and playing around with two laptops, two seesmic accounts and a little seesmic camera ping-pong. I also got an exclusive interview about some mysterious january flies and why the London light is the paper of choice to use as a fly swatter There’s a great picture of me taken by Thayer 
Take note that There’s seesmicAIR and Seesmic being used in this shot. Two speeches were made, one by Loic Lemeur and the other by Gapingvoid (Pardon the poor sound quality.) There’s one of Sizemore’s videos too. Fooz, Giagia, Jason Jarrett and two or three others were present but I did not get to interact with them as personally for this event. This is a fun group of people are fun to interact with and I’m happy I went to the event. i hope to have many more to look forward to.
Last night at Four AM I got an alpha release of SeesmicAIR from Critter and I started to play with it. My initial response was good. It’s fast, intuitive and it doesn’t a browser. Today as I had lunch I went mobile with my laptop, relying on battery. Those who follow my blog know that I’m using a macbook pro and those that follow my tweets know that I was happy about something. Usually when i seesmic I go into the user interface and I get told that my battery will last about an hour and a half to an hour as I seesmic. Today though I had almost three hours of battery life whilst being able to keep an eye on seesmic. That’s because SeesmicAIR is running off Adobe and rather than use most of the CPU to work it’s running with far fewer resources. As a result I can lurk on seesmic without killing the battery or running a hot machine. I saw that both Loic Lemeur and Johann are on the Eurostar and I was able to comment on seesmic and keep an eye on reactions. Vinvin answered my question and it’s good. I love the fact that I don’t need to worry about battery life anymore. I’ve had time to prepare lunch, have lunch and then still have an hour and a half of battery life to write this post. I really enjoy having the ability to do this. It means that I can do something in the background. In brief SeesmicAIR is just as useful as I thought it would be. It’s still a little buggy but that’s normal when dealing with Alpha.