Cut back on Social?
30 ways to shock yourself by bre pettis (cc: by-NC)
I'm quite tired of Social Media. I'm rather amused by how much we tend to think it does and how little it ends up delivering.
I've had enough of watching the promise go in vain. I've seen too many examples of agencies and companies tuning Social Media into television. What do I mean? They have made novel (sort of) media into the same old waste. We've failed on the promise (premise?) of transparency, we've turned too much of it into mere entertainment.
This has pushed me to look elsewhere lately. I'm desperately looking for the next unstained piece of technology that I can help colonize before the evil greedy arrogants unavoidably take over.
Cloud computing? Too dull, too backend. Interesting, but overly niche.
Semantic Web? Well... I like it, yes, but, once again, something only nerds would find interesting.
Mobile? Not my game. By far.
So I default to what I know. And I become a critic. Maybe I will not colonize a new theoretical space but put up a good fight instead. Try to raise the values of authenticity and conversation close to the heart.
Thus I shall denounce every crappy campaign, every false premise, every piece of painted cardboard I come across.
Because Social Media might have been bastardized to near-death, but it ain't over till its over.
The Challenge shall become darker, more sarcastic and more acid than ever before.
I'm back for good.
On Real Time Web
There has been a lot of buzz around the real time web lately. And the main responsible for that buzz has been, without a doubt, twitter. Some have gone to the extent of saying that Google is afraid of twitter.
Well, hum, I don’t think so, clearly the mountain-view gang is worried about other stuff, not twitter. Twitter does not overlap with what google does. Yet it does open the door to something somewhat novel.
One of the main differences of twitter with “chat” as we knew it is that the content is stored, indexed, and publicly available in the form of webpages. IRC, for instance (or Messenger, or Yahoo! IM) uses its own protocol to transfer, store and access information which, in most cases is not publicly available either.
The so-called “real time web” then is actually “almost real time web”. This makes a small difference to the human interactions (things happen as fast as we can assimilate them) but has huge implications from a technological and indexing point of view.
This is where google comes into play, why they shouldn’t worry and why this rumor about big G’s plans to launch microblogging search makes perfect sense.
Let me explain.
Twitter is endogamy. It is a self-contained universe. Fair enough, its API allows all sorts of interactions with the outside world and extensibility through other services and programs, but it all orbits around the same. Google, on the other hand has always been an outside-looking company and set of services.
Google’s basic premise is to crawl what others generate in order to allow people to find that content. That premise does not have to change with the so-called real-time web. That is what makes companies such as google so interesting, the fundamentals are so simple that they can adapt to changes without having to change them. As a matter of fact what google needs is other real time content-generation sites and services to proliferate.
How so? since most people use Twitter it makes perfect sense to use Twitter’s native search when looking for the latest. But what would happen if there were another big player in the scene? You’d end up using a search engine that indexes them both. That is if such two things existed. It does not make sense for google to buy Twitter, but it makes perfect sense for google to foster and help new players to enter that market.
A lot has been said about how important(sic) Twitter is in news-spreading. I remain skeptic.
I plan to blog about the Iran-Twitter affair soon (and I know most people won’t like that post), but a quick lesson learnt from the entire thing is that Twitter is neither a good nor reliable news source. It is a good alert system, granted, but if you need in-depth information, background or analysis you better seek some place else.
In what seems to be the trend with every new wave of web technologies (scrape the term technologies, this is not technology, call it “usage”) the signal to noise radio decreases. If you watch the entire river of tweets you’ll only spot a very tiny percentage that are meaningful in any way. Yet, I think enough has been said about the amount of rubbish going on in twitter all of the time.
Bottom line is: Would I buy Twitter stock? Probably not for the long run. Do I think Real time web is here to stay? yes it is, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.
Troublemaker
For as long as I can remember I've been regarded as a troublemaker. In High school I often found myself the subject of my teacher's punishments. I was even "expelled" from one School. (Long story short: they wanted to get rid of me, but couldn't find a good argument to do so. The principal approached me and said "we're going to make your life miserable". I had to leave -besides I was just 14-. Funny enough that has happened to me twice ever since under different circumstances, the difference is I never quit again).
That "tag" stick to me all through out my life, even in my professional life.
Question is: am I really a troublemaker? Yes and No.
I have 2 curses:
- I always speak out what is on my mind, and I don't care if it is "good for my career" or anything of that sort
- I have a very critic point of view on most stuff that I come upon.
Do the math, I don't like most of what I see and I'm vocal about it no matter what. This has headed me in the way of trouble more times than I dare to disclose publicly in this blog.
That being said I must admit I am quite proud of being tagged as a troublemaker. "Why would you?" you might ask. There are several reasons.
For starters it means I wont settle with what is instated or accepted as a practice. At least not if I see defects or possible improvements. This is bound to create all sorts of trouble with those who find themselves comfortable with the status quo. People who are comfortable with how things stand are, quite usually, quite boring.
Usually I not only rant about stuff I dislike but engage in the task of trying to change it. Now that is the single thing that gets me into trouble more often. A huge percentage of the people that I encounter are too comfortable living in mediocrity. I hate that. I'd rather fail a thousand times than walk down the beaten path.
I also have a bit of a problem with authority. I don't believe in authority. at least not as Authority is usually understood. Just because someone makes more money than I do or has higher position than I do, does not mean they have any sort of authority over me. If you want me to regard you as an authority you'd better prove you are smarter, more experienced, better connected and with a broader view than me.
Bottom line is: being a troublemaker is an advantage for anyone who wants to hire me, fail to see that and you are probably not worth of my services.
Comments gone (intense debate sucks)
I tried IntenseDebate for a couple of months. It Sucks. Badly. I've seen comments vanish, disappear, make all sorts of odd things.
I've seen comments going to ID but not to the blog and viceversa.
As a result I decided to deactivate the doomed thing today. And I lost a lot of comments thanks to that dreaded 2 decisions.
I'm really pissed. But, what can you do. I'll look at ways of recovering those comments.