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There are two communities on Seesmic, those that are English speakers and those that are French speakers. The French speaking seesmicers can be recognized by two things. The first one is the Racoon avatar, the second is that they refer to each other as the Francofous, the crazy french. Last night Seesmic went down due to an upgrade gone wrong and as a result many seesmicers didn’t know what to do with their time. One seesmicer decided to create a skype conference call where over ten seesmicers were chatting for quite a few hours. I only found out about it via the discussion between Fred2baro and Sizemore and added Fred2baro. Quite a few of the French seesmicers were there and we discussed many topics and it lasted for at least three hours before it was cut short. What made this conversation so interesting is how people came in and left at various points and how at one point Eric Rice and Purplecar joined the conversation. A few more people joined in including Loic Lemeur although his presence was short due to children in the background playing on a PSP. I think that this is what the future of web interactions is about. It’s about a global community of people, at the moment early adopters, who have strong ties with friends and family in various parts of the world and no particular illustrated that such as the one of Kosso and Ifiz. They like to advertise that they met “in 140 characters or less”. That was a nice story and it shows the point of the new age of social interactions. I won’t give all the details here as you can easily ask them in person at a later date.

This week should see me dropping by the Frontline Club in London for the first time in weeks. I want to see Blog Wars which could be quite interesting. “Blog Wars provides a sharp and funny look at the explosion of political blogs, which have become the loudspeakers for a new generation of activists speaking out and picking fights across the political spectrum” I’m looking forward to yet another Seesmic meetup and I’ve heard that some interesting people should be present although I haven’t seen this written on paper yet. The usual London suspects should be there so that should be a really good evening. That will be on the 17th and more details are to follow. I’m not sure whether there’s another Social Media Cafe but if there is then there’s a very good chance I’ll be present. I’ll keep you informed.

Mark Harrison - Jan 6, 2008

Richard, Can you blog about the next one a few days BEFORE it happens, please :-) I follow your blog more reliably than I follow your tweets :-)

As soon as I hear about the next event I’ll point to it here. Should be easier to follow.

Friday morning a few people from the Social Media scene met at the Breafast Club for the Social Media Cafe. A few of the usual people were there to discuss the direction the Social Media Cafe should take. There was talk about the need for more frequent of these events to take place as a way for people to get up to speed with what other people have been up to as well as to enable easier collaboration.

Rox - Jan 5, 2008

Update - comments as homage to twitter I’ve been using it for an hour and no crashes with the most recent update. Carry on.

I was so going to love twhirl, but it is crashing on me in Leopard. What platform are you running it on?

OTOH, I like to colors of the interface. :-)

For those of you familiar with twitter there are a number of ways of keeping up with information and my current favourite is Twhirl. What I love about using Twhirl is how well it works. At first it feels clunky. You’ve got to download adobe air, then you’ve got to download twhirl and once this is done you’ve got to get used to the user interface. I went from twitterific to here and the transition was relatively painless. I missed one or two of the keyboard shortcuts. Since then I’ve grown to enjoy using it for three key reasons. The first of these is that you don’t need to restart it as there are no caching issues. For someone who tweets as much as I do and follows as many a lot of time would be sent reseting twitterific. Not with Twhirl. It’s got over 5500 tweets right now and no sign of slowing down. The second feature i love is how you can choose whether to @, DM, Favourite or re-tweet. Anyone using twitter is familiar with the first three. The re-tweet feature is fun. It allows you to retweet verbatim quite easily. I don’t see it used often luckily but it’s a nice gimmik. The third feature that I enjoy are the shortcut keys specific to this program. R for replies, F for friends, D for direct messages and then there are two or three other such short cuts that could be of interest. As an aside you’ve got the filter option although having not used it I can’t comment. It’s a nice package and anyone using Aero should give it a try.

Critter - Jan 5, 2008

Nice one mate. The main thing I love about it (and, of course, I am biased) is definitely the speed, but also the ability to really be doing something else /while/ doing Seesmic. keep checking www.seesmicAIR.com for updates :)

SeesmicAIR developed by Critter looks like a really fun application for those already using Seesmic. It looks quite similar in appearance to twitter but rather than be based around text content this is based around video. You see the video timeline and as you see a video of interest you click on it to watch. There are two things I love about this. First it’s built in AIR and that’s a great platform. I’ve been using Twhirl a lot over the past two days and it’s working really well for me. There are no caching issues, even after almost 3800 tweets over the past two or three hours. The second reason I love it is how fast it looks. Of course it’s fast because it’s running off a machine that’s been used to trial it before and the connection might be better than the one I’m using. That’s really the type of app that would encourage me to use seesmic far more freely than I do currently. If as Christine suggested it could be brought offine for our viewing pleasure then that would be even better. I think being able to download at least the friend’s timeline would contribute greatly. Now I’m really enthusiastic both for seesmicAIR and Seesmic and how this would improve how people interact with the too

Lewis - Jan 5, 2008

Would love to see how filling your social life with London network events would go.

There are now two million people who consider themselves to be part of the London network. It is currently the biggest network Facebook has to the best of my knowledge. I know it was the largest before and there’s a good chance it has remained so. That’s a lot of people. There are 117 events occuring just for today. There are almost a quarter of a million post on the group wall and the top three posted items are Clarkson’s story about bank pranks, Israeli girls and a crash on the m40. Now what would encourage so many people to join this facebook network. Are they all immigrants or students, are they people who have friends in this city so they decided to become part of the network. What does it mean from a social point of view? As i’ve mentioned there are 117 events for today, 165 for tomorrow, 161 the day after and so on. Does this mean that as a person London living in London I could get everything I want and need socially via what the London network is telling me is going on? Would I be able to fill an entire day with activities via this network? It could be interesting to try it and see what happens. Are you part of the London network? 116 of my friends are listed as such. How about you and your friends?