Do Twitter need to #fixreplies?

For those still not in the know, Twitter is a micro blogging site where people can post 140 characters about anything. You can follow people, or be followed (provided you make your tweets public) by anyone. You can follow me here.

I’m sorry to anyone who loved being able to see every single @reply from everyone they followed, but I am one of the ones who hated it, so please, #dontfixreplies!

Twitter can be noisy at times, when friends are tweeting live about sporting events, when celebrities are getting chatty, when several people you follow start a conversation, and so on, these are comments posted by people you follow, and your choice of viewer can easily get filled with a hundred tweets in between views.

There used to be an option to follow all @replies, this meant you could look at replies from people you were following, to other people who you weren’t following. Then there was the “only people I follow” option, which was my preferred, and the default choice, then there was an option not to see any @replies, you had to choose to click on the @replies on the Twitter page.

I don’t know how people could cope following all @replies, the one sided comments quickly get out of hand, and unless you are a serial follower, nothing is in context, so you generally miss the point. I can only see this being of use to people who are trying to build their network by following people who chat to people you  already follow. Surely #followfriday is all about building your network though?

Anyway, I was one of the people who was affected by a bug in Twitter, it meant I could see all @replies from everyone I followed, and I had to stop following several people and considered leaving Twitter because of it. It became a flood of useless information for me. I was not alone, and they received enough complaints about it to remove the setting.

One would hope that this was done with a little analysis, and they checked which setting the majority of people used, before making any changes, so that the most popular solution was implemented. I also assume they are working on a way to fix this option, but either way, I am happy. The tweets I read are not fractured conversations, they are either open statements, or directed at me, just how I like it.

Ahhh, peace at last.

New netbook

Well, new to me...

I have owned the Asus Eee PC 701, and the Acer Aspire One previously, and I have a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 for work, but I was missing the portability of a little device I could sling around and not worry too much about. My laptop is only a 12" widescreen format Samsung Q210, but it's also 3 times he price of a cheap laptop, so I don't want to put undue wear and tear on it if I can help it.

Anyway, yesterday lunchtime, a colleague and I went netbook shopping, just to have a look around. While I dearly loved the Samsung model, I couldn't possibly justify £300, so we went to look in another store. They had an "open box" HP Mini 2133 for £179. While I have always hated these because they are larger, and much more expensive than the two I owned previously, I simply could not ignore that price tag.

The CPU is slower than the Acer, but with a proper HDD, it's not as laggy on performance compared to the Acer's very slow SSD.

Anyway, I have installed Windows 7 on it with all the apps I need for day to day tasks, and designed a graphic for the lid which I had made today.

I really can't thank Asif from Fletchers Auto Parts in Birmingham enough!

Has Twitter replaced IM?

I just went to look at Windows Live Messenger, and Google Talk, seeing who was about, and I have hardly anyone showing online.

Maybe I’m just Billy No Mates, but I am actively commenting on Twitter, and getting replies, and also sending emails.

Now corporations are just starting to roll out IM and presence on their networks, are they already obsolete?

It seems as though the status generation has abandoned IM, why talk to 1 person when you can put a comment out there for all of your network to reply to, and if you do need to message an individual, you can still direct message, sms, email, and so on.

Thinking about my usage nowadays, I would say there are only a handful of people I bother to chat with on IM now, and even then, the preferred method is VOIP, IM is if they are AFK or can’t talk, but showing online.

I have cleared out my online contacts many times over the past year or so, removing people who I never seem to chat to anymore, or have started chatting to on other mediums, how long before my list only includes those closest to me?

Strange times indeed folks.

How do you convince a business it needs Web 2.0 when you don’t believe in Web 2.0?

I hate the phrase Web 2.0, I have never made a secret of that. Even the people I work with know I think it's simply a media buzzword that has no real meaning. Well now I will be leading a team of people to officially investigate what Web 2.0 can do for us, both internally, and externally.

Am I the right person to be doing this? Am I in the right part of the business? Possibly, and traditionally speaking, no. But isn’t that part of the equation here? All the things available to us now mean there’s no single right place for this to sit in an organisation, unless you have only just built a team recently.

For just over a year now I have been tasked with looking at technologies out in the big bad world, and how we could make use of them. There have been a few hardware solutions I have put forwards, a few applications which could help save money, but by far the most common proposals involved web technologies.

Many of these technologies aren’t new anymore. Some have only just become popular. Some are still wearing the beta tag. But this is my point. Web 2.0 is not new, it’s just highlighting that there’s loads of new things for the masses who haven’t been paying attention for the last 5 years. And even now, things are still progressing, moving forwards, and always looking to innovate.

My head of service made a very good point though “you have to call it Web 2.0, because people don’t have time to devote to incremental updates”. In a way this is true, and having lived with my head in the clouds of technology for so many years now, I forget that to the majority of people need help in understanding why they should take these new things seriously.

So now I will be banging the drum of Web 2.0 and cringing every time I utter the phrase, just so that people pay attention. Even if they go away thinking this is a new product from PC World that will save our web based efforts, surely that’s better than nobody being interested. My salvation will be that people have taken notice, agreed with proposals for change, and let us do what is right.

Come on people, Web 2.0 is the way! Ewwwww I feel dirty.

It's Star Trek Jim, but not as we know it!

OK, so I am a bit of a fanboy, I went to see the new Star Trek last night.

I'm not a trekkie, I just love scifi in nearly all its guises.

That out of the way, what did I think? It was the best Trek ever! Seriously. I don't see how they could make it any better. It had the epic cinematography from the original films, the planet busting, Federation destroying threats that made the earlier ones so good, and you guessed it, the Enterprise and her crew were all that stood in the way.

Something was lost in the more recent films, they just came across as very long episodes of The Next Generation, and the last few of the original franchise were laughable, but JJ Abrams has not only managed to capture the spirit of the original series, and feel of the earlier films, he's managed to improve upon it. Sure, some of that is bound to be in the special effects available now, but even the interaction between the cast members had everyone in the audience, myself included, getting all nostalgic when you heard certain phrases, and saw mannerisms. The cast complimented this perfectly, and obviously a lot of hard work went into their parts.

The film obeyed the unwritten Star Trek rules too, with dilithium crystals, red ones die, McCoy being asked to do non docterly things, and so on. They even observed a few things that true nerds and geeks usually criticise in other films, like in space, you can't hear anything! I must be a real geek because when that happened, I immediately thought wow, realism!

Anyway, I could prattle on about this for ages, but I would likely give away too many spoilers, so for now, I suggest you go and watch this, even if you only have a mild attraction to scifi films. You don't have to have seen any of the other films, as this restarts the lot, and opens the door to a whole new franchise with this new, yet very familiar ship and crew.

Tagging meatspace

Putting my twitter name on my laptop in meatspace has had me thinking about QR Codes and Microsoft Tags.

Things like this are very common in Japan, probably many other places, but I don't see them around the UK very often.

QR Codes will probably win, there are already more users, reader applications, and people who recognise them, but we'll see.

I think that it would be easier for someone to tag my twiter ID via a code with a mobile phone running a reader, than hoping they would see a text version, jot it down, and remember to look me up when they check twitter next.

If you're at an event, there's a chance your tags could be read from photos too. I think this is where the Microsoft tag is better, it seems to be a little simpler, and from a few experiments, can be read from more angles in lower resolution images.

The next experiment is to see the best way to make the labels, as my preferred cut vinyl graphics would not be suitable for either.

Here's my twitter address in the two competing formats:

Microsoft



QR Code

twitter branding

I have seen many sites with customised links to twitter profiles, and so on, and a few people even put it on business cards, but on Friday I thought about having a logo made for my laptop.

The result is this...

From Blogger Pictures

I hate boring laptops, we customise so many things in our lives, why stop at wallpaper on your laptop?

The people who have seen it so far seem to like it, let's see how the unwashed masses take it, and if they even understand what it is. I think the people that matter will get it, if people still don't know about twitter, then it doesn't matter if they don't understand does it?