One of the perks of working at Hursley is the occasional trip to the pub at lunchtime. Today was one of those days, and in-keeping with previous trips with that particular group, I got a bit of a ribbing about participating in a relatively small number of social networking type activities. First I think it was blogging (the, um, rabble rouser
of the group now has a blog), then it was having a SecondLife avatar, and facebook, and today it was twitter.
Every time I start by defending the technology because I’m under (gentle) attack and feel I should, then sip on a pint and the discussion disappears so we never really address the issues. This is a brief attempt to do just that, because I think it’s an interesting discussion, not because of the comments.
Blogs - I think the potential value of blogs is clear. My blog is generally of interest to me, and occasionally to others. There are other blogs, written by authors, politicians, technologists, and CEOs which get these people closer to those who are interested and have opinions than before. A good thing.
SecondLife - shrug It’s an interesting experience, and probably represents a style of interface we’ll use regularly in the future. I’m not at all hooked and may never log in to that particular metaverse again.
Facebook - An excellent way to keep in touch with friends I don’t see every day, or indeed very regularly at all. Useage has dropped off a bit recently, but that’s at least in part because I’ve been experimenting with twitter. It’s a closed data platform which really isn’t something I’m comfortable with. I want to own my social graph, so facebook having proved it’s value to me, I’ll probably move as much out of their environment as possible.
Twitter - It’s been nearly 2 months, and this experiment is ongoing. I’d liken this to working in open plan writ large. I know what lots of people are doing. Lots of it is unexciting, and easily ignored. Some of it’s interesting, and stimulates ideas or laughter, and even seems to foster a sense of team… see the #currentcost activities in hursley spilling onto twitter as an example. Twitter deserves a full post at some point, but the short version is that while it’s quite compelling, at least over the short term, I don’t really know where it goes from here.
[UPDATE] The other interesting thing about twitter from a work perspective is that it’s large scale consumer pub/sub and event notification.
Dopplr - Every so often I get a notification that someone else is sharing their trips with me. I don’t travel enough for this to be interesting to me, though I know some people who do, so I should probably speak to them to work out if it’s as useful as the theory sounds.
So some successes, some not, and some undecided. Overall, I’ve got what I wanted from them. These technologies/services are all a means to a particular end for me. The end? Fun experimentation and keeping an eye out for interesting technology trends. I don’t need these technologies to be great for the experiment to be worthwhile.
