Twitter

Twitter desaturation

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!

Twitter desaturation

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.

Likemind Coffee morning in London

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.

The Seesmic Dinner

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.

The Seesmic Dinner

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 Warzabidul on Seesmic 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.

Twitter is broken and I want an alternative

Twitter is a great idea poorly executed as a result of which I wish there was an alternative. It’s a chatroom that can be used on multiple platform which is what makes it so interesting. The managment however have decided to cancel Api support, or at least throttle it. As a result of this conversation is floundering. As a result of this action twitter has become notoriously unreliable and people are no longer able to keep up to date with what people are doing quite as easily. This has resulted in many of my favourite tweeters being far more quiet. Others have felt the need to leave the service. I would love an alternative to help me keep a constant wave of consciousness of what friends are doing. The 140 character model is good. It’s a very efficient way of dealing with information. We’ve got many alternatives but none are conversational yet. I love the conversations and how you overhear so many things. I would pay for an alternative that has a far more stable track record. Give me that alternative. I’m disappointed not angry.  There’s a really good product there but it’s so badly implemented I’m losing interest in twitter.

The Francofous Seesmic Skype call

Kmeron - Jan 1, 2008

was there, left at like 4am… great thing not planned, and as u said richard, loads of different topics, nice community idea, nice moment :) and yes ledretch, ur a francofou don’t worry ;)

A lot of things in the air yesterday night, we were pretty close and not so anonym, just us, alone in the night, just voice to voice. Funny. Thank you Richard to report this.

The Francofous Seesmic Skype call

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.