Don’t Be a YASMINE

I’ve got a fair few followers on my Twitter, not that I’m counting mind you but I have to say that within the Twitterverse there are alot of so called Social Media Experts.  It seems alot of the people that have hunted me down and followed me yet not engaged with me in any conversation do so in the anticipation that I would auto-follow them back.  Hey, we use technology how we want so all is fair.  So what qualifies one as a Social Media Expert?  Well I’m sure it’s different for other people.  Ok I just did a quick Twitter search for ‘Social Media Expert’, looks like I’m not the only person tolerating this.  They call this SMEP (Social Media Expert Phobia).  That’s a good name for the victims but I’d like to publicly announce today that I release the term for the plague known as YASMINE (Yet Another Social Media INdustry Expert).  If you follow me, please don’t be a YASMINE, but if you do, you better engage me with some meaningful info or conversation or you’re getting blocked.  Those cheap marketing tactics won’t work on me buddy!

The Dark Knight Scowls

So I’m really trying to do this blogging thing right off the cuff in an effort to make regular posts and have consistent activity – here goes.  Most people I assume have heard of the recent “gossip” of Christian Bale’s outburst on the set of the new Terminator 4 movie.  Alot of the feedback that I’ve heard from friends is that they are disgusted by his conduct and lost respect for him, a few have even taken the step of tweeting and setting their Facebook status to “Batman/Christian Bale is a <insert expletive>”.

I have to say in some ways I’m not surprised by the public reaction.  Listening to the actor’s tirade at the unfortunate man, on it’s own, sounds like a moment of anger, which is exactly that – a moment.

Christian Bale has been known to be quite a private person.  The thing that bothers me is how people have been quick to judge him on a moment, that when put in perspective, could be explained rationally, though not necessarily excusable.  In all truth, I’m sure once in their life everybody has had an uncontrolled outburst when the stress got too much, when their passion and focus was distracted or had to unleash their stress and anger at something or somebody and rant.  It’s just at this time, somebody in the public light has had this moment recorded and exposed to the public.  Who knows?  Maybe if Christian Bale was a more public personality and had a more public friendly image that most of the feedback from the press and public would be of sympathy for his work.  At the end of the day, it’s a moment in his many minutes of work and it should be taken as that, a moment.  This was certainly not the first time in the history of film that an actor/actress had broken out in a rant at one of staff whilst on set.  For me, such sensationalism is not worthy of news and almost not worthy of my time blogging. 

Golden Globes 2009

It’s been almost 3 weeks since the winners of the Globes was annouced yet I still remember strongly how I felt as the night progressed.  Being British I was overcome with a deep sense of pride and patriotism hearing the list of nominees for the various categories and watching the winners make their acceptance speeches.

I hadn’t actually checked out the nominees list in detail prior to the night but there was a great representation of actors/actresses, directors and productions from the fair isles called Britain.  I’ve long spoken to my friends in the US of the many hit tv shows that have a British or Irish actor/actress cast in the headline role.  I’ve also harbo(u)red intentions to get into some acting workshops ever since my string of performances as a budding actor in small primary school productions (yes I was once Merlin in King Arthur).  The greatest thing about films, movies and tv for me is how it can inspire the audience.  Through a story, performance, direction and/or photography it can touch and provoke an audience.

It’s great to see these people recognized for their work.  However, it also reminds me of the talented people in the industry that don’t get the recognition and respect they deserve.  Anyway, afer this recent bout of inspiration and suggestion from my lady, we’ve decided to sign up for acting classes or a workshop.  Hollywood here I come(!)

How does one use Twitter?

As a follow up to my previous post on the hype of Twitter, I’m going to discuss the various ways (but by no means an exhaustive list) of using Twitter that I’ve discovered over my experimentation with the tool in the past couple of weeks.

Using Twitter for Personal Broadcasting

This was how I used the service for the first few months subscribed to Twitter.  Broadcasting sporadic updates to the handful of 20 or so friends that were following me.  Furthermore, over half of the followers I had barely and still to this day, not more than 10 updates in the past 6 months.  Twitter used as a service like this, offers not much more extra than what the Facebook status update feature does (or even less when one considers most people have an already established community on Facebook).  The only difference I saw was that if one’s updates were public, they would be accessible by the general public to read. Now why would one want their updates public?  (A question that I will come to answer later in this post). Though I did not protect my updates, any messages I did not deem as public were sent as direct messages to friends.  Nothing that IM or Facebook couldn’t handle; and so continued my ignorance on the dynamics of Twitter.

Using Twitter as an Alternative to SMS

One of the early uses I discovered was using Twitter (TwitterFon as the iPhone specific app) as a free SMS alternative service on my iPhone 3G.  It was free to use the data connection as served by my 3G service to send tweets (great for a cheapskate like me!).  Unfortunately this was limited by the fact that not many of my friends check their Twitterstream often let alone use the service.  One applicable instance though was when I had left my power supply for my Macbook at home and an ex-colleague saw my tweet and managed to snag one for me at his work place so I could borrow it!

Using Twitter for News Feeds & Aggregation

I get most of my news from the internet.  In fact make that all my news (sad but true but then isn’t that how the Internet is changing the real world?).  Due to my broad interest in a variety of subjects, visiting all the sites can be costly and an ineffective way to circumnavigate the large amount of information.  For a while I used RSS feed aggregators like Google Reader and Netvibes.  However the desire to read most of the articles quickly became overwhelming and one’s capacity to filter through the feeds quickly is largely determined by their own descretion.  With Twitter (or in my case TweetDeck), though it is not designed as a feed aggregator, it has proved effective in helping me navigate the sites I’m interested by subscribing to certain authors, sites or people whose interests are similar to mine and having them filter news to their followers that would be of interest to me.

Using Twitter as a Social Network

My initial method of befriending followers consisted of adding familiar names of the @replies in my Twitterstream and any that I knew from friends’ following and followers lists.  However, as my update activity grew I soon had strangers following my updates and learned that my mental approach towards Twitter had been the single barrier to my understanding of it’s potential.  Twitter isn’t simply a personal communication tool to broadcast updates to your friends but a Social Network.  Earlier in my post, I posed the question ‘Why would one want their updates public?’.  The answer lies in how one wants to use Twitter.  It is an exceptional tool to find and network with new people that have similar interests and the key is the publication of those updates in the general Twitterstream.  Tweets that can be searched by the various apps that have cropped up as the popularity of Twitter has increased.  For example, a search for say ‘Barack Obama’ would return recent tweets involving the new US President.  Exploring the twitterstream of such a subject would enable a user to befriend other Twitterers that enjoy discussing politics!

Using Twitter for Company PR, Branding & Marketing

In the previous section I discussed how one could search the public twitterstream for a certain subject.  Imagine the data one could find on one’s company, their service/product and the opinions amongst the gossip of the twitterstream.  It goes without saying that Twitter is a powerful social media tool with which to communicate with the community but with greater viral effect and immediacy.  Already a numerous companies have recognized the value of Twitter as a customer/community service tool to control their brand and image.  With the rapidly viral qualities, it has in many cases proved to be the quickest and cheapest way to get news or marketing content out to the crowd.  (Note that disseminating advertising especially for the purposes of monetizing one’s personal twitterstream is in my opinion and in most cases considered spamming and is not advocated.  It is also a sure fire way to get unfollowed.  Check my Twitterquette link below for more information!)

Conclusion

Twitter in concept is not dissimilar at all to the comments one makes on a friend’s status or posts on Facebook or the various blogs they surf.  In fact, with such a wealth of data to be found in people’s comments and opinions on one’s status, blogs or tweets, tools such as Twitter search can help bring value to such data.  One of which, is the ability to create meaningful relationships that are relevant.  Incidentally, last fall I was at a tech meet up and met one of the co-founders of Backtype. They’ve built a service that allows one to find and follow blog comments of specific individuals and/or posts.  A great idea and in many ways, a social network for comments and it’s commentators.  Another service that I recently signed up to is FriendFeed, winners of best new startup of 2008 at the Crunchies.  My initial impressions are that it’s a feed aggregator that collects data from multiple sources from social networks, social bookmarks to blogs and RSS feeds, amongst others.  It sounds very promising but warrants a fuller post pending further investigation.

The question these days with most startups is how will services such as Twitter and FriendFeed (sub: social content discovery network) be monetized so that they are self-sustaining (make that profitable)?

Which also begs the question, if Facebook offered users the option to publicize their status updates allowing them to be searchable by all Facebook users, would that deprecate Twitter?

My initial thought is not likely but a discussion on both questions will come in a later post.  I’m sure I’ve overworn the attention of most readers so far despite my vain attempt to write a short and digestable post.

By no means an expert in this subject, I’m hoping my insight and observations from my recent experimentation with Twitter are a helpful introduction to those that are new to it.  For further reading I suggest TwiTip and familiarizing oneself with Twitterquette.  Feel free to add any relevant sites in the comments area.

What’s the big fuss about Twitter?

So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing around with Twitter and following the various feeds of Twitter related articles on the tech interest sites I follow.  There’s been alot of buzz about the large growth in the use of Twitter by the web community in 2008 as well as the co-founders’ recent win at the Crunchies (the Oscars equivalent for technology held in Silicon Valley, CA).

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a social network that allows users to broadcast and subscribe to other users within their network their updates in the form of text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

I first came across Twitter back in 2007 and quickly dismissed it as a glorified status update feature already present in Facebook.  However in the summer of 2008 I had a couple of invites to use Twitter from friends and decided at last to register an account and see what the hype was about firsthand.

Now the interesting thing about Twitter when I first used it was that most of the people I followed were people I already knew on Facebook.  People who used Twitter as purely an extension or alternative to Facebook’s status update.  However, what I learned is that the usage of Twitter and it’s growth has increased and changed from it’s original inception, similar to how mobile operators first provided SMS services for mobile phone users and realized that it provided a channel of communication that the public deemed pertinent to their needs (cue SMS packages and price plans).

So I’m going to list some of the ways I’ve identified over my usage of the service the past couple of weeks of how one might use Twitter and why it works.

In an age where the abudance and dissemination of information is increasing, the human mind has always had a hunger for knowledge and learning, but it’s capacity to absorb and process that information is getting ever more difficult and people’s daily lives get busier.  So what better way to spread information be it trivial or relevant in a 140 character limited post that can be easily digestible?  Hence, it’s common association as a micro-blogging tool.

Blog Early Blog Often not Blog Snail

It’s been some while since my last post, some time before the Golden Globes of which I have a small snippet to write about.

So why has it taken me so long to write a post? Well, for the past couple of weeks I have to say that I did have a post up that was half finished (for the few “clicks” of traffic I got from that highly tagged post it was the iPhone apps that I use regularly and recommend). I also had the edit page on that post up in my browser in the hope that whenever I had a spare moment that I would work at it bit by bit. Unfortunately that didn’t work probably because I use my browser as a to-do list of various tabs of sites I’m reading, emails to be fleshed out and various other resources.

The point of the matter is, in order for any site to sustain it’s traffic and position as a forerunner/leader in it’s space, content must be often and early. In other words Blog Early Blog Often (or BEBO as is the acronym for the original Bebo social network before it’s reinvention). One of the reasons I have also held back on publicizing this blog is the fact that I realize content is important in the retention of readership and though there are some that are less forgiving (myself included) there are also many that are more forgiving and will return.

Something else I will attempt to do but believe I will fail somewhat is trying to keep my posts short and digestable since I believe the length of a post can potentially affect the retention of readers. There has been many a webpage or article I have ‘bookmarked’ for later because of it’s length and my lack of time, only to sit archived and forgotten. One of the reasons why micro-blogging has been a great hit I believe and what I will write about later (or now!).

Awards Season

It’s the Golden Globe Awards this coming Sunday.  It’s always interesting to see who’s nominated and who wins.  Anyway, the reason I mention this is that not too long ago last summer, I was round a friend’s and a group of us were discussing the best actors and actresses of our generation.  It turned out to be quite interesting and though we never wrote down this list of actors and actresses, one thing I do recall clearly and being stated during our discussion was the ratio of actors to actresses in the list.  The fact that there were very few actresses.  A couple of days after the discussion I made a list of the names I remembered and will post them up for reasons unbeknown to me, possibly because I like to document stuff but probably because I’m interested in seeing if I can populate this list and balance it out between both males and females.

Damages – Season One

So… (an oft repeated word in the first season) I first came across Damages in the morning of Friday, February 16th 2007.  How do I know the exact date?  I was in New York city nearby City Hall with my fiancee, visiting from San Francisco having recently relocated from London.  I was walking in the area when I realized that I had walked into a shot that a camera crew were filming and I recognized the actress and actor in the scene – Glenn Close and Tate Donovan respectively.  A quick question to the crew regarding what they were filming and I was told they were filming a new series.

Months later and Damages was premiering on the FX network and I recognized the cast as the shoot I had walked upon.  The amusing thing is, despite seeing various promotions for the series and being somewhat interested in viewing the series, I never really took the time out to watch it.  Possibly because at the time I was caught up in other series and didn’t have time.  Anyway, over the recent Holidays I noticed the various promotions for the second season of Damages and decided to take the time out to watch the first season.

I have to say that from the first episode I was gripped.  It’s been such a long time since I have watched a series and been absorbed by the issues, characters, politics, morality and drama.   From the various characters with various motives, to the different methods with which they achieve their agendas and the web of relationships that affects their decisions, it made for a tense legal thriller.  Additionally the format and way the events unfolded with flash-forwards was refreshing, although not innovative by any means was executed well.

Browsers

As somebody that spends a more than unhealthy time online, alot of this is done through a web browser.  I personally use Firefox and there is one primary reason why I stick with it – extensions (now known as Add-Ons in FF3).  I do however have a love/hate relationship with Firefox.  Despite catching myself furtively casting glances at other browser alternatives the functionality and features offered by the extensions in Firefox are invaluable to my browsing and interaction experience.  Some extensions though I found have drawbacks (FF version incompatibility to memory intensive extensions resulting to a bloated browser) but if one is aware can find a compromise accordingly.

My personal laptop is a nice little Samsung Q30.  It’s over 2 years old and the original hard drive died on me earlier this year but then it was never marketed as a top spec laptop.  It’s an ultraportable laptop that has a low CPU speed to increase longevity and at 5 hours of use on an extended battery, it’s exactly what I need from a laptop.  However with a low CPU it means that memory resources are limited and thus when it comes to using apps one of my core concerns is memory usage.

For most people that keep a close eye on the tech scene they would know that Google recently released their own browser called Chrome that reportedly handles memory and CPU resources more efficiently.  I’ve tried the browser and given it a very limited run but what I can say is that until extensions are developed or possibly some OpenSocial API (possibly ‘OpenBrowser’) equivalent is started, I can’t see myself moving to Chrome or even considering it seriously.  Though I own a XP Pro laptop, I spend most of my time on my work laptop, which is a Mac and I’ll be happy to give Chrome a spin on it once it’s released.

My next browser related post will detail focus on the Firefox apps that I use and various tips I employ to get the best out of my browsing experience.

The iPhone 3G

Back in September 2008, I purchased the iPhone 3G.  Partially because I required a monthly contract but more so because I actually wanted it!  It has been a couple of years since I had a new phone and I had been using the LG Chocolate (poor menu, unreliable but aesthetically beautiful) and the Samsung E720 (robust, intuitive menu, reliable but somewhat dated aesthetically) before.  In my younger teenage and college years I was a gadget fanatic who would buy the latest phone or MP3 player but never owned a “smartphone”.

I have to honestly say that after a weekend of having it, the novelty wore off very quickly.  My previous disenchantment with upgrading to the latest devices was the lack of new features, compatibility with other devices or features that I didn’t find useful.  In essence, the success of any device/platform/service is it’s features and in the case of the iPhone, it’s apps and more so the community of developers it’s spawned with it’s App Store.

Before the App Store however, existed Installer and Cydia.  Jailbreaking (enabling your iPhone to run third party code) your iPhone meant you could run apps that offers features far beyond what the App Store can bring.

My next couple of posts will include a list of apps that I have on my iPhone and Cydia apps that I use.