.oO Tailwind

All this digital stuff is funny isn’t it? My ‘digital friend’ @Charliegower is more up-to-date with my moods, locations and general activity than my real-life, long term buddy Nick Foster (who’s not plugged in enough to have the Twitteresque ‘@’ prefix on his monicker).

Charlie and I have only met once, we share a mutual friend in Nick, but we’ve hardly met really. Yet somehow, some reason we’re connected on all the usual social properties, Last.fm, Facebook, Flickr, Plaxo, Linked In, Twitter, Plazes, Dopplr etc etc

Twitter in particular interests me at the moment because of what it’s doing to relationships I have with people. The ambient familiarity is an extra layer that I think is only beneficial. It ‘warms the cockles’ as they say to know that:

@drpig (Will Bloor) is making homemade pasta

@brackers (Andy Braxton) is engaged!

@casablance (Phil Whitehouse) is struggling to install his BT Vision box

@melb (Melissa Bezar) is off to another posh London restaurant

@charliegower (Charlie Gower) is (again) procrastinating by going swimming

@gavinedwardsuk (Gavin Edwards) is on the train to Sheffield, again

@stephenbarber (Stephen Barber) is picking up his guitar (which is what he should do more often)

As we all know, Twitter is a broadcast medium where users can announce ‘what they are doing’ via sms, instant messenger or the web. It’s predominantly utilised as a ‘I’m doing…’, ‘I’m feeling…’, ‘I’m thinking…’ medium.

I’ve also used it in a practical means when trying to navigate New York looking for a top-drawer deli for breakfast, but it’s mostly used like Facebook Status, informing your ‘followers’ of what you are are doing.

Personally, I protect my updates a i don’t want people I don’t know seeing that I’m ‘out of my house’ or I’m ‘away on business’. Scamsters could mine a lot of information from active tweeters.

It stands to reason, that people ‘Tweet’ when they are doing something interesting or when they are killing downtime in a bus queue or on a train (see my post on living an ‘ALt-Tab’ existence), so you get a skewed view, but it makes entertaining reading nonetheless.

Of course, you would never say ‘Just listening to some Mariah Carey’ (Gavin Edwards) or ‘Having a poo’ or ‘Just had a row with the other half’.

No. That’s too much. You have to filter.

It’s interesting that people whom I work with are the ones I engage a lot with via Twitter. None of my ‘friends’ use it, of course I consider many of my colleagues and ex-colleagues friends, but I also Twitter with clients, friends friends, and as a result I feel like there’s something there, known between us that in some way, sustains or affects the personal relationship. Not in all cases, of course.

Phil WHitehouse wrote Ten Commandments of Twitter, which I wholly disagree with. the only rule should be ‘there are no rules’. Although I HATE people who follow but don’t Tweet. Lurkers. Blurgggh!

So, to wrap up, I could meet @Charliegower down the pub and have a rip-roaring evening of conversation, feeling like I already know him. I know his work situatiion, his exercise habits, his music taste, hi ideas and via Plazes or Dopplr, his location.

That’s all bonkers. But if you keep it real by only using such technologies with real people you are likely to meet, I think it’s quite a nice relationship enhancing tool.

Fancy a beer?
Continue reading ‘My Twitter Chums Know More’

Whilst eating some toast this morning I caught a report on BBC 1 suggesting that we’re not hugging enough. We’re not extending human contact in the form of hugging kissing and touching and we are failing to receive our RDHI (Recommended Daily Hugging Intake).

(Sorry I can’t find a story to link to on the BBC website).

Psychologists behind the report suggest that we are relying far too heavily on non-human-touch methods of communication such as texting, email and ‘pokes’. Hugging makes you happy.

I’ve been arguing for a while that humans require real, genuine and tangible value when it comes to their relationships with other humans and that social networks as they currently stand, fail to satisfy our long-term human needs because they are limited to facilitate only synthetic relationships.

Look at your Facebook account. How many ‘friends’ do you have?

Are you one of those people who accepts every invitation through fear of offence? Or are you one that only accepts invitations from people they actually, really and still know?

Do you consider tenuous links with colleagues you are simply ‘aware’ of? Or do you keep it focussed down into people you actually know? People you are actually friends with?

Social networks tap into out latent need to belong, to be part of a community and to be recognised. They provide us with recognition and allow us to say “I am here and I belong”.

It’s a Maslow thing.

But over a long period of time social networks will fail to deliver real value in the form of tangible, off-line and physical benefit unless they evolve into real space. Doing something, actually being there together, in real terms.

A search on the BBC website reveals this:

A hug is, first of all, a form of non-verbal communication. It brings people together in a feeling of mutual love, comfort and safety. Research suggests that everyone needs physical contact to survive, especially infants. Hugging is an act of giving and receiving support, moral and physical, and love

BBC - Guide to Hugging

Loving the ‘Huggers’, ‘Huger’ and ‘Hugee’ references there.

Great digital ’start-ups’ such as Facebook, MySpace and Last.FM could just be limited by their lack of real physical space and I wonder if this is something they’ll need to evolve in order to survive?

It’s all very well having ‘friends’ on these sites and receiving witty pokes, funwall messages and music recommendations, but I can’t engage with them on a “so how are you doing?” basis. I can’t really and truly care.

I personally have noticed some of my more distant friendships relying on Facebook to stay in touch. We poke, message and send things to each other whereas before we’d phone.

That’s rubbish. I’m changing it. By using Facebook to message each other we’re saying that we don’t really care.

I’ve also observed some friends and family resolving sticky issues via email, text or by writing a message to someone’s Facebook inbox. How sad is that? Complete avoidance of true, emotional disscusion.

What is that doing to society?

I guess in the old days we used to write letters but I don’t consider that the same thing. Letters unlike email/text etc, take time. They take effort and flow from the end of your pen in an emotional, stream of consciousness kind of way.

Email is synthetic, easy and impersonal.

We all know that teenagers don’t use it.

Emoticons were invented to try and bridge this emotionless communication. ] :p :s =|

(My blog tool has probably ‘emoticonned’ some of those).

I remember back in 1996, when I started using IRC (internet Relay Chat) in the form of Foothills and Resort, we communicated using a telnet window using text only using the ‘emote’ command to show emotion.

Warren> Emote is happy.

‘Warren is happy.’

Fundamentally, even though the technology has evolved the need hasn’t changed and the need hasn’t be fulfilled.

When we are born and as babies we learn primitive methods of communication such as touch and hugging. But as we progress to our teenage years the level of non-family touch drops away considerably.

I don’t know about you but on a personal level I’m getting bored of social networks. On a professional level I’m still enjoying the challenges of seeding a community and designing tools for them, but I have to say, I’m not really seeing any great value.

I could talk about Twitter here, but that’s for another day. this post is already too long, if you got this far, well done and thanks.

As I write this post I can’t help but laugh at the fact that next to me on the train into London, there is a couple smooching, kissing ad making lip-smaking noises, cooing and warbling together like teenagers.

They are in their late thirties and it’s irritating the hell out of me!
xx

Image credits: Dina_Mehta

Technorati Tags:
social networks, community, backlash, behaviours, emotion

First seen by Barbd, Ex.plode.us allows you to search social spaces for people’s profiles and it draws them together.

You can run a search for Warren Hutchinson and Snowbadger (My alterego) and get different results.

This make it easier for people to ‘dig up’ the real me. Eeek.

I worry about advertising here.

I wonder what this does for the privacy, professional / social persona debate I mentioned in an earlier post.?

Here’s a list of me and my friends… It’s interesting that Snowbadger has more friends than Warren hutchinson.

Hmmm.

10 things to ring my bell this week.

1. See how much of a cliché you are
2. Cool panoramic of Paris by night.
3. New easy to read wine labels from Wine That Loves…
4. Bruce Mau’s ‘Incomplete Manifesto for Change’ - A list to make you ‘do’ differently not just ‘think’ differently (Via Brand Autopsy)
5. Sing n search, you sing it, it will find it (provided you have a decent mic built in that is)
6. Record last.fm and other stations if you have a PC
7. Gmail keyboard shortcuts Improve productivity with Gmail, some secret delete shortcuts in here.

Twitterlinks:

1. Twitthis Tell people via Twitter about a blog or posting.
2. Twitterbuzz See what ‘Twits’ are linking to.
3. Celebrity Twitter Follow the lives of your fav celbs on Twitter. Yaaaawn.

Continue reading ‘Tailwind Lazy Links 2′

I saw this post charting the growth of Twitter. Will it stay? Will it go? I don’t know, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

The same post also has link to an interesting article on why Twitter isn’t so good.

More stuff to read.

Blogged with Flock

Blogs for sharing thoughts (WordPress, Movabletype, Vox, Blogger), photo blogs for sharing pictures (Flickr, HQ23, Photobucket), video blogs for sharing videos (YouTube), music blogs for sharing you music preferences (Last FM, Pandora, Pure Volume), presence blogs for telling the world where you are and what you are doing (WAYN, Twitter, Dodgeball) and rather ironically professional blogs for casting a professional image onto the web (LinkedIn). Oh and the new raft of Mobile Blogging tools that make all of this nice and easy (if not cheap) from the palm of you hand (Moblog, Radar, Mozes).

If like me you ‘play’ with these things a lot, then like me you’ll find a self-erosion of privacy well underway. Is it possible to work in experience design and not bare your soul to the world?

No. Not really.

Identifying this set me to thinking about how things used to be prior to the explosion of community offerings and social networks and the point at which anonymity is desirable or not.

What occurs to me is that the boundaries between ’social me’ and ‘professional me’ have long since blurred. Colleagues know me by my web alter-ego ‘Snowbadger’ and I know them by other fantastic monickers such as ‘DrPig’, ‘ParisHasslehoff’, ‘SonicPixie’ and ‘Boomtish’.

Brilliant. Insights into people’s minds I could probably do without!

Which prompts the question when do I use Snowbadger and when do I use Warren Hutchinson? I started using Snowbadger on the basis that no-one else was using it and I hate the idea of being Warren29876.

ID continues to be an issue but that’s another posting, If you haven’t sniffed out the Open-ID project, then I suggest you protect you alter-ego now.

It started with MSN Messenger and Email when we started having to reveal our personal email addresses in order to get connected to each other and chat with friends while at work. But this soon developed into a business tool and we needed to chat to colleagues as well as friends. The problem was we all had silly ‘call signs’ due to the registration issue. MSN messenger recognised this when it introduced the ‘business tab’ to the chat client which enabled you to have 2 identities on MSN but by then it was far too late, we were all exposed!

When I am meeting people that I don’t know, particularly when I’m interviewing for a role here at LBi, I try to create a rich picture by digging up some background information on them from various sources. I can get a professional take from Linked In, a personal take from Friends Reunited, see what music they are into at Last FM, check out their thoughts on a their blog (if they have one) and even look at their pictures on Flickr. All this without even running a Google search.

Weird or wise?

There have been lots of postings written about blogs being your new CV, but what about the other sharing properties?. A search for my name brings up my linked in profile, my Last.FM profile, some Tailwind postings, my book on Amazon and some other stuff.

Is this the new CV? This post thinks so. The idea of personal branding is old, but in this context new.

Is trying to remain anonymous a good or a bad thing? Would you be conspicuous in you absence on these things?

The prevalence of social networks and community sites is eroding our ability to keep ourselves to ourselves. In order to ‘take part’ you need to give a lot away and if you don’t play you could be conspicuous by your absence.

So anonymity Vs nymity (?) ;).

We’re in the middle of a project for a client where this dichotomy is patently obvious. It’s a community around a professional discipline that has had active forums for some years now. It’s an established community based on old-skool tools. There are numerous professional resources available in this system and there is a lot of professional support that takes place within the forums. There have been marriages too, which any community worth its salt should be able to boast!

We’re looking for ways in which to make these active communities more real, more connected and create more ‘currency’ in the system so that people take part in a positive and conducive way.

But there is a paradox at hand. Members of this community want to share resources and artifacts that they have created but they don’t want to append their name through fear of failure, through the artifacts not being good enough. That said they do want recognition if the artifacts are deemed useful and are downloaded by the community. In essence they crave peer recognition but are scared of failure.

On the flip side, they use this network for significant amounts of personal support and often discuss their workplace issues with virtual friends. They have a strong desire to remain anonymous through fear of retribution. In their daily jobs they are quite isolated despite having many colleagues. It’s a solitary role at times where asking question about how to do something could be construed as failure.

The power of this social network has the ability to seed a cultural change for this profession making it okay to ask questions, gain support etc.

For me its a running example of the need to be ‘me’ but cast a professional guise at the same time.

This is a very quick post to point you in the direction of Twitter. If you haven’t already started telling the world what it is you are up to, I suggest you do so now so that you’re not last ‘at it’ in those chats around the coffee machine / water cooler.

I’m committing to trying it, yet I’m still wondering what the point is (does that remove me from the target market? Oh well). But.. there are some rather lovely little Google map / Twitter mashups such as the imaginatively named Twittermap and Twittervision which is quite addictive to watch.

It’s like trying to eat a Fruit Pastel without chewing.

On Twittervision you can see twitter posts come up on a map as they happen. The US UK bias is quite interesting.

Okay.

It’s not.

Vodafone has struck a deal with My Space in a bid to put mobile blogging into the pockets of Europe’s Generation ‘C’. The deal will place important connectivity features directly in the pocket of 24/7 connected types such as post/edit videos/text/photos, manage network, view/manage profiles, mail and so on, all ready to go, out of the box.

This is a smart move I think as it’ll certainly help to make Vodafone more attractive o the teen audience and maybe claw back some declining market share. However, as teenager’s rarely pay their bill, who makes a decision about which network to join will find the idea of ‘Communitied-up’teens burning data fees like wild fire particularly attractive.

Of course this isn’t jut for the teen market, but its a point.

Which leads me to my key issue with telcos and their ‘connected’ services. I’ve been working on a number of ‘community’ tools for mobile companies over the last 2 years and there is always one thing that I think would greatly boost adoption.

It should be free to use.

They sell you camera phones, with email, wap, IM etc, then preclude usage by having non-transparent data charges.

At the moment I use (play) with a lot of mobile community services such as Shozu, but it always occurs to me that there is a black art in understanding how much it costs to use. Handset UI design is particularly useless as are the pricing models from the telcos.

On upload of a picture, or after a wap session users are often greeted with an unhelpful ‘435222 bytes transferred’ message or something similar, or maybe nothing at all.

This doesn’t help.

It certainly won’t help my mum understand what she’s paying for if her tech savvy son can’t.

Also, it’s always a real bind having to pay for services which are essentially free from your desktop. It seems silly to use services such as Shozu unless you really need to post that image to Flickr immediately, which of course none of us do.

This lack of transparency on costs is clearly a barrier to adoption for telcos and the one who’s brave to offer data/communication/entertainment services for a fixed fee will be a winner, surely.

Telcos are growing into converged service companies offering round-trip digital connectivity, yet they still act and sell as if they are a mobile phone company.

Broadband offers seem like they are bolted onto mobile phone propositions, services aren’t integrated, phones are feature rich yet the pricing remains a barrier. However, what is interesting is that Vodafone haven’t tried to replicate a blogging/network service offering in a walled garden. I only hope that these ‘My Space Inside’ handsets allow users to set-up any blog service the user requires.

My second point to make about the My Space / Vodafone deal is that I’m not so sure the brands are compatible. When big brands get involved with established social networks the relationship is often viewed with cynicism, My Space has been declining in popularity since it’s formal relationship with Murdoch and Flickr didn’t get off too easily when Yahoo! took over the reins.

Anyway, interesting. Let’s see how others respond and what happens.

Check out this ‘useful’ social network called Fon.

the basic premise is that in exchange for access to your access point at home, you can get access to other Fon points when you are out and about, a kind of gentleman’s agreement.

Use the map and check out who’s playing ball in your area… I was pleasantly surprised.

There are 3 types of community member (from the site):

Foneros are members of the FON Community. There are actually three types of Fonero:

• Most of us are Linuses. That means that we share our WiFi at home and in return get free WiFi wherever we find a FON Access Point.
• Aliens are people who don’t share their WiFi yet. We charge them just €/$ 3 for a Day Pass to access the FON Community.
• Bills are in business and so want to make some money from their WiFi. Instead of free roaming, they get a 50% share of the money that Aliens pay to access the Community through their FON Access Point. They can also advertise their business on their personalized FON Access Point homepage.