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To see how well it works

After the 28th of May I will have an Ipad. I have decided to get an Ipad for a number of reasons. The first of these reasons is activity within the social part of the world wide web. I use it as a conversational and informational tool. I share my location when I’m out, I express my opinions and in general I am at ease with online social activities. I also like being social face to face whilst being online. By that I mean that the age of the desktop and the laptop are coming to a fork. I would say end but laptops and desktops have a way to go. Photography and video editing are just two reasons for bigger machines. At the same time look at how mobile phones have become more competent tools for most of what some of us do in the social media. We share images, we share pictures, videos and even our location on a 24hr basis. For the latter you need to earn the sharer’s trust. Netbooks were an interesting proposition. They’re small, batteries last a long time and they’re practical. The problem is that the software they run is not optimised for a small screen. When you get an error message window where you cannot click ok you have a problem. When you attempt to play flash videos and the system hangs you’ve got another problem. When you visit the twitter site and the netbook struggles you’re just going to be frustrated. That’s where the Ipad comes in. The operating system and applications are all optimised for a smaller screen, for a mono tasking machine. Blogging applications amongst others will be practical on such devices. Any time you’re out of the home you fit it into the bag, pull it out and start writing. You’re online anyway so things are instantly synced with the cloud. No need to worry about being tired after a day at a conference or as a traveller when you prefer not to leave your gadgets unattended. I look forward to having an iPad, that glorified photo frame that can play video and communicate with the world.

Glocals is a local website to find out what events are going on where for the international community in Geneva. It regroups events in a number of cities making easier to meet like minded people. The reason for which I mention this social network is the low input high yield results from the site. In brief you see an event, you turn up, you meet some strangers and through conversation they become acquaintances. This is contrary to the way I have approached social interactions on the web. I have spent years now building trust, building relations with people in a virtual environment. As a result of this it requires constant attention, constant interest. I am thinking of twitter when speaking about this topic. 70,000 tweets have given me very little return on the time I have invested. In effect twitter is not only a waste of time but just the wrong social network for Switzerland. There are a wealth of people to be met through the Glocals site, some work in the UN system, others for global companies and yet more for other settings. People who have been in Geneva for just a few hours or days meet up with people who have been here for years. There’s also the gender balance. Going to many twitter events you’re surrounded by men, by workaholics, by self proclaimed entrepreneurs. They are focused on work, and profit rather than friendship. In contrast Glocals is a nice mix of men and woman, physically active people who go canyoning, sailing, running and more. It’s a well travelled international crowd. The most interesting aspet of my experiences over the past two weeks is that just because a site is talked about extensively does not mean that this is the site you should give most of your time to. There is a good chance that there is a tiny site with only a few thousand users that will reward you by turning up to events. No need for all that virtual conversing. Turn up, chat face to face and you will have gained new opportunities. The result is a more satisfied end of weekend. I will continue particpating in these face to face meetups and twitter will be a secondary network.

Remember the video version of seesmic, the one that spawned.the francofous? Things changed for two reasons. Bandwidth issues and ressources. Flash would suck down the laptop battery within a few minutes. It meant that you could.only Seesmic from a fixed position. With html5 that problem will dissapear. What I look forward to is an HTML 5 optimized version. It could result in a greater number of users on less powerful machines. I hope we see a growth in users and a more international set of users. I hope they also add more features at the same time. Let us see whether Seesmic take advantage of this opportunity.

There are many Geo location websites in the web. They have something in common. Using them openly in front of others will not result in positive opinions. As a result of this you want them to work flawlessly. Spending three minutes logging in is too long. That’s why foursquare has been deleted grim my phone. I am not ready to use that type of service when the site goes down for four hours. I feel this way after twitter. Popular site with a lot if downtime. Relations between people degraded as communication became more hit and miss. Now friendships and the core of interesting users is gone. Why invest in social networks where indifference is prevalent. Tara for now foursquare. See you in a year.

For tree years I’ve been using twitter and for at least a year I believed that this was the great social connector, the website that would turn our passive, faceless web habit into something more personal. Of course I was wrong about this. Anonymity is still as great as ever but in a new sense of the word. That motivation to connect, to establish meaningful relationships with people is weak. You see this through every twitter tweet, through every interaction. You see this through the contemporary attitude towards online and electronic conversation. Have you ever listened to two non users speak about computer communications? “I don’t want to use it because I don’t want to lose my privacy”, and the second person “I won’t use it because I don’t want to be stalked, I don’t want someone calling me without me consenting to it. It’s the same line over and over. It’s the line we were given as children about accepting sweets from people we don’t know. The only difference is that these people are grown ups, and the bad stranger is a globalised system of conversation commonly referred to as twitter and another called facebook. Both have been around for a while now and it’s interesting to see how much greater the usage of facebook has grown compared to that of twitter. Facebook, however foreign, however bizarre, however shy in nature is a relatively well respected and appreciated addition to the student life, and to some lesser extent the professional life. That is because it was built around a very private and closed community. So private it was exclusive to one university, then one nation of universities, then the global university before finally becoming a public hangout where you say who your real life friends are, and where their names are visible, their picture is available, their affiliations too. In a sense Facebook is the greatest breach of privacy you could think of. Stalking, as some people worry about is so much easier. At the same time it’s relatively untouched because of the personal security settings that are a common part of every day life. Now take a look at twitter. It’s a hundred and fourty characters of text at a time. That’s not much information. It’s less than an SMS. It’s basically a chat on a global scale. There is no threading, or at least there wasn’t. There was no @ sign. There was no concept of reply. Everything that twitter has become is through a great enough number of users agreeing on a communication convention for it to become part of the site’s fabric. This has been demonstrated a number of times. What makes twitter so “versatile” is also what makes it so unappealing as a communication tool for the most interesting people you know. Anyone with a normal life does not feel the need to communicate virtually to strangers. They prefer person to person interactions in the real world. Twitter is a waste of time. Spend an hour looking at a timeline and you’ll see what strangers are doing all around the world. Now ask just one person to meet and you’ll have no one to meet in great swathes of landscape. That’s because it’s for wealthy people according to some research, 67 percent of college graduates, so educated too. I read in a read write web post that whilst eighty seven percent of people asked knew about twitter or facebook fourty seven percent use facebook and only seven percent use twitter. The article, in it’s analysis went on to say that twitter is far more complicated to start than facebook. I can’t help but think creating a username on twitter would be faster than on facebook. All you need on twitter is the username after all. I think it has a lot to do with today’s social values, the fabric of the society within which we live. People have no problem with e-mail communication. They have no problem with phone conversations. They have a serious problem with electronic social interaction. There are a number of factors for this being the case. One of these is our superficiality, why commit to a person whom we have never met, never smiled at? Why commit your thoughts and opinions on paper, in a place where google can index them so easily, and eventually to be called on them. Does that make twitter appealing? No, it doesn’t. What about the barrier to entry. How many people have a computer that boots up within ten seconds, a permanent internet connection and a machine performant enough to deal with twitter and other sites. You may scoff at this last suggestion but have you tried using social websites on older less powerful machines? I have and it’s a laggy unpleasant experience. Hardly appealing to your average user. Then there’s the matter of time. How many hundreds to thousands of tweets do you need to read before you come to an interesting person? How committed are they to the site? If they post five times a month no personal connection will be established. If they spend all of their time on twitter is this as a result of unemployment or are they on the move with any of a number of smartphones? Do your normal friends have the funds for a smartphone and data contracts so that they are online? Is there a need? The conclusion is a simple one. In a society where people see the computer as a geeky waste of time for nothing more than work, where face to face interaction is prized above all else then facebook is the clear winner. You add friends from every chapter of the life you have already written for yourself. On twitter you’re building on the future, behind a computer, only to find that the early adopter lifestyle means you have to travel to meet these individuals. In other words unless you’re an entrepreneur or freelancer then twitter is a complete and utter waste of time.

Paul W. Swansen - Apr 6, 2010

Interesting info. I just hope that as or if we begin to migrate more towards Google we don’t run into the issues that CC. Chapman and Chris Brogan have encountered this week.

I will have to read what they have to say. Moat information fir me though is in a number of places anyway.

Recently I bought a Nexus One because the Android operating system appeared to be an interesting one. It is open source, intuitive to use and has some interesting features. It’s part of the Google cloud. Checking e-mails, using Gtalk and the calendar are all accessible through the phone. All content is everywhere as a result. Modern approach: I know of quite a few people that lose their phones and as a result of this lose all their numbers. They create facebook groups to gather back all of this information. Of course with Android you don’t need to do that. All of the contacts are stored online. As a result whenever you’re writing e-mails on the computer you have no need to remember their actual address. It is a redundant system as long as you have a data connection of some type. Navigation is good too. Using mytracks and Google maps you have a precise overlay if the route taken. This post was written using the WordPress app on the nexus one in part.

Whilst everyone makes fun of Google Buzz and continues living their daily life between google buzz and facebook I have jumped into google buzz with a passion and found it to be nice. It’s a social aggregator of content from a number of google services where you can discuss the content with a close network of friends. The strength of this social network is that it is plugged right into google mail. As a result you are guaranteed to log into this site for the whole day. When you have some free time you can go through the threads of conversation and comment on those of interest. Once this is done you can go back to the mail client. As the day progresses so will the number of people commenting on posts. You will see these comments in gmail and answer straight from there.  It means you don’t have to wait for a notification, click on the link, scroll to the bottom of the page and finally comment. Here you just type the comment and then use the keyboard to progress onto the next thread with a comment. The J and K keys can be used to go backwards and forwards between e-mails in Gmail. They can also jog from one item to another in Google buzz. The result is a very quick, natural way of conversing with the least amount of resistance. The biggest drawback at the moment is the lack of users who find any use for such a site. It’s hard enough getting interactions from Facebook so you can wait a few months before Google Buzz reaches critical mass. I will be there in the meantime enjoying conversation with others, who like me are early adopters.

Google thinks it’s a bee. That’s why they have the new service google buzz. I spent some time looking at it and it makes me think of jaiku, friendfeed and other services all combined into one. It’s threaded conversations and status messages based on geo-tagged conversation triggers. It has a good interface with google reader and of course the question which I cannot answer yet is what does the full version have to offer that will enhance the user’s experience