2 posts tagged “social software”

Until now, online communication has lacked personality, being limited to text (IM, SMS, email). Seesmic changes that, bringing conversation alive through video

"At last, the Internet is really social: you can see and hear people express their ideas and thoughts, you can join in, and you can make new friends. With Seesmic, everyone can participate in live conversations rich with personality, bought to life through video," commented Ron Conway

Although I now realise I first saw Twitter a week ago (when the news that Dunstan Orchard had moved from Apple to Flickr broke), I only really properly noticed it when I got back from a largely blissful weekend away from computers. My first reaction was pretty much nailed by Phil Gyford in the introduction to the first of two insightful posts on the back of the service:

If you hate blogs because you think they’re full of people rambling about pointless details of their mundane lives you’ll hate Twitter, which makes it as easy as possible to post snippets to the web (and your friends’ phones and instant messengers) letting everyone know exactly what you’re doing RIGHT NOW.

Nonetheless, as is my wont, after a first burst of hating the idea, I thought I'd better try it, inspired mainly by Chris posting his design. I started with a very minimal list of users- unlike on Flickr, where I don't mind a stream of photos by people I don't know well but who's work I like- and it was OK, although I suspect it's meant to be used for things more profound than me saying how many cups of tea I manage a day.

The point- yes, I've finally reached it- that annoyed me this morning, though, was that, when looking at the friends of friends, I see lots of entries saying "I'm only giving updates to friends. Add me." Why do this? It smells of "I'm at a fab party but you can't come", an attitude that really annoys me. Why not just not show that user? Or, perhaps, collect a list at the bottom: "you also missed three updates by Matt Jones", or something.

The flipside of this is that other people have noticed me on my friends pages and now want to be added. Generally I'm allowing them, but what happens when someone I don't really know starts poking around? Oh, the social.

Another thing that I've noticed during the writing of this post is that the app seems to be suffering somewhat from its expansion. Perhaps a clue to this is given by the error message "Rails application failed to start properly". Oh.

I expect I'll keep poking at it for another few days, but I expect this to rapidly vanish from my life until (unless?) someone comes visiting London and finds it more convenient than IRC and SMS to arrange nights out.

* by the way, I disagree with Gruber's comment: "Hopefully Flickr will just hand him the keys to their design car — Orchard could give them a serious injection of awesomeness." Flickr is already awesome in a really nice, understated way; they're designed but they don't look it. The last thing they need is page furniture that detracts from the photography. That's not to say that there's not stuff to do, but more that there's no need for a vast revamp.