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Bernie Goldbach - Feb 5, 2009

I like Friendfeed because it helps me thread Twitter, just like Jaiku natively threaded posts.

I really like Friendfeed and what it’s becoming. What I love is how easy it is to follow many people and converse with them about everything they share. It’s the future of web sharing but it may take several months for people to move towards it. There are a number of things I love. First of all it aggregates your live stream in one place, so anyone who has an interest in you can share what they like about your work and you can follow this conversation. The second aspect that makes it so strong is that you can do the same for them. You can select those you think are thought leaders and follow everything they do and say. It’s mature, it’s like a web forum but grown up in that it branches out to blogs, twitter, plurk, youtube and flickr to name but a few networks. That’s just a small part of what makes it so interesting. Something else that makes this website and service interesting is the level and depth that conversations can take. If you get a few people talking together you get a debate and a dialogue, or conversation going. This contributes to the continuation of the discussion. What’s more is that it’s less name based. You can see what FOAF (Friends of a friend) are discussing and joining in. That’s not where it stops though. The rooms, albeit a little geeky for now will be a great place for people to come and discuss new topics, from political elections to festive events where they live and more. It’s specially designed for this. Look at the Davos room for example. RSS feeds from a variety of sources are aggregated into one place for easy digestion, especially when using the realtime feed option. The biggest weakness of the site at the moment is user numbers. With just a few hundred passionate users the discussion means the creation of a strong community bond that has long since dissapeared (or at least changed) for Twitter. Add Feedly to this and you’ve got one of the most interesting services yet to come out. Feedly makes it easy to share your content to many social networking websites, of which friendfeed and Google Reader are part. Read your google reader items in feedly, share them, add notes and more. It’s all synced from one place and it’s not website specific. You don’t need to be on the feedly website to use it. Just add the plugin and it works. I look forward to welcoming you there.

Yesterday I installed twitter remote on this blog. It’s a quick and fun way to see which of you twitter friends have been to my site recently. This is particularly interesting now that more and more people have their own twitter account.

Here’s a quick preview of what it looks like.

When you first arrive on twitter it’s lots of strangers sending messages speaking about what they’re doing and it quickly becomes overwhelming, especially with the vast number of people. For the first few months many people send no more than a hundred posts a day as they get used to the twitter stream. Eventually with time they get into the swing of things and they begin to interact with the other users and this creates a sense of friendships. Those friendships grow and they flourish, from the occasional exchange initially until several weeks later they are full grown conversations. That’s when character begins to show, when we see who we would love to spend more time and who we would get to meet in person. That’s when the tweetup is about meeting old friends for the first time in person. For most of you this is a foreign concept. For you the web is a place to keep in touch with friends who have moved out of the town where you are living. That’s why facebook is popular with over one hundred and fifty million people worldwide. That’s why so many of you are friends of mine on facebook but not on twitter. There is another trend, which is stronger and stronger, online friendships becoming physical world friendships. I call them this way because as good as the conversation is online you can’t give the person a hug or share a meal with them. The tweetup was an occasion when you had the pleasure of meeting these people for the first time. i still remember meeting sizemore for the first time, Loudmouthman and a few others. I remember meeting Documentally too. What made these meetings so interesting is that we knew each other from weeks of tweeting in most cases, although in others it was spontaneous. There was no breaking the ice. You just go straight into the conversation an that’s what makes it such a great networking tool. That’s part of the reason I was invited by Seesmic to LeWeb. I really value these opportunities. Recently though there’s another trend. You meet people in person and learn they twitter, you chat to them in person for a day, two days or more and you feel you have a good connection. A few days later you’re online, using twitter and you’re interested in staying in touch with them, seeing what they’re doing and sharing that passion, whatever the project. There is that drift away though, you give them your time but they don’t reciprocate. Instead you get a deluge of self promotion and ignored comments to what they’re doing. That friendship which had seemed interesting is broken. People don’t have time for twitter. Thousands of people are joining twitter every day and thousands of people are finding new followers but none, or hardly any of them are working at what made twitter so great, the community aspect. The community feel has disappeared. It may have something to do with traveling away from London but I think it’s deeper than that. I feel that as twitter has grown in value and as it has become part of their daily lives they are less willing to devote as much time to communication online. Of course this may be a sign of how ubiquitous Twitter has become. If it’s a tool where everyone is spread around the world then everyone wants to be online to talk because that’s their only choice. Now though opportunities have blossomed and twitter has become a local affair, and the bigger the local population the more isolated you will feel if you’re living in the provinces. That’s what I feel now. I’m not saying it’s a negative thing. I really disliked the only twestival event I went to but I think that’s because I saw that twitter has finally become something local. The fact that the event is in over 100 cities proves this. Twitter has become local, and so the focus is on those that live within easy meeting distance of where you live. That’s why London twitter users ignore users in other cities. That’s why there’s a new form of community. I’m looking forward to when twitter becomes more popular in Switzerland, when I get more local friends to use the site. In the meantime though I have to accept that more traditional approaches to friendships may serve me better. I did leave forget my phone at home tonight, when I went to meet some friends and I didn’t turn back to get it. I went out. I was disconnected from the world and it didn’t matter. I was finally living locally once more. I’ve learned a lot from this twitter separation. I will be back to the service but if you don’t give me the time of day when I send you a message then you can forget about me following those hyperlinks to the work you’re so busy promoting. I want to feel I have a personal connection with those I follow, not that I’m part of an audience. I want you to be in my seminar group.

jonmaim - Feb 6, 2009

Come back warzabidul, we are geeks and proud to be so :))

I’m still active on Jaiku, plurk and friendfeed but I need a break from twitter. I played my best game of pool yesterday, possibly thanks to not thinking of twitter.

I’ll be back on that network on the 14th of February but there is a good chance that I will no longer follow quite a few twitter users, especially those that do nothing but tweet how great what they’re working on.

I have fun with technology which means that I spend a lot of time online as a result of which I enjoy creating online friendships. The advantage of that is that wherever I am in the world I have people to chat with, or so I thought. I am taking a break from one social network in particular because I am no longer gaining from that social network. It was never about more than developing interesting friendships with interesting people and this was fine when I lived in a city where everyone used the site. The problem is when you move to a place where there are fewer geeks. The social media require one very important character trait for success. That the user is not stigmatized as being geeky. This comment comes after reading facebook statususes. One person said they were online at six am, second person replied “dweeb”. Of course this is playful but below the surface that attitude is very strong within contemporary culture. Spending too much time socialising in social media labels you as a geek. Social media will never be social whilst people still think of conversing with people online as geeky. Social networks will never be strong until people drop the stigma of being geeky and embrace a new way of doing things. Mobile technology is evolving the right way with so many social media networks developing their services for people to carry with them at all times. For the moment business professionals have blackberries and geeks like me have a diversity of smart phones. In two to three years when smart phones become more affordable then the stigma of being social online will weaken. It’s at that point that social media will hep improve your social life, rather than run along side it.

Jub - Feb 6, 2009

I think the most important point is the one you make in article 7.

I am happy for anyone to use twitter and any other micro-blogging service for self-promoting. Frankly, that’s their choice, and I can choose to not follow back.

But then, they have totally missed the point of it, and will have a hard time maintaining a good level of followers unless the content they share is of a superior quality.

Article 1. I shall take interest in the projects of others before my own. In this capacity, I will pay attention to what others are doing and see how I may help them bring those projects to fruition

Article 2. I shall Participate as actively as possible in as many discussions as possible. That is to say that I will make sure to get to know the audience that is listening to me. This may include answering any and all tweets, commenting on blog posts and more

One Hundred Million is the number of photographs geotagged on flickr. That’s an impressive number. There’s an article about the news here but I want to explore the fun side of things. Whenever I take photographs with my mobile phone they’re geo tagged so where ever I am in the world I can pinpoint within five to twenty meters where it’s been taken. As a result if I go for a walk every day for a year I can take pictures of the different seasons and how the landscape changes, from snow to spring to summer and more. It also means that when you’re going on holiday to some of the top tourist destinations you can find all the images taken around there and see the area before you arrive, scouting out where you would particularly like to go. It’s also a way of keeping your own record. We’ve all heard that sentence, “hey that’s a great picture, where did you take it” but the photographer never remembers. Now there’s no worry. You’ve automatically kept track. Listening to a recent “This Week in Tech I heard mention of GPS units that are smaller than a nail, meaning that they could be put into all devices by default. Whether you share that information is entirely up to you, as is clear in flickr. I’m looking forward to more geo-cached images of the area around which I live, then when you’re tracking me with latitude and I upload images to flickr they are automatically placed on the map in real time.

warzabidul - Feb 4, 2009

What makes the first meetups so great is that you spend weeks and months talking to people, you develop a relationship with those people so that when you finally meet them you’re really happy. That feeling is made even nicer when you realise you have similar interests to people you had not met yet.

Now the tweetups and other meetings often feel like a formality, nothing fun, nothing innovative. That is not to say that I don’t like tuttle. In fact I do like tuttle because there you still have that young entrepreunerial spirit, those innovators and thinkers. There’s a lot to be gained from the tuttle meetups. That’s a concept that works really well in my eyes.