Tag Archives: twitter

What's New Pussycat?

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I really do wish that Plinky would re-organize their interface in a kind of whack-a-mole motif. They post questions to answers you blog about afterwards. It would be more convenient to be able to see a list of Plinky prompts you haven’t answered yet so you don’t accidentally answer a prompt twice or more. This is a general motif I wish more sites would adopt, especially the more social sites. Twitter would be nicer if you could mark stuff you’ve seen so you can see only the new things, same way with Facebook. Tumblr? It would be nice to have tracking tools for what you have seen, what you have saved, and what you have reblogged.

This sort of thing was answered well enough by Twitteriffic, back when I used Twitter a lot and I quite enjoyed their new-tweet-marker. I can only hope that other services help bring these features to the forefront for users to take advantage of. Only time will tell I suppose, if an idea like this will take off, or not.

Something new, something borrowed, something blue

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Just in case anyone got excited, it’s nothing to do with weddings. Instead I’m trying out some new, some would say old technology again. When it comes to Internet browsers I’m a fickle sprite. Flitting from Firefox, where I was a fanboy for a good number of years, through a Safari phase, and now I’ve ended up using Chrome. Each browser has had it’s charms and reasons for me to use them. I’ve pretty much written off Firefox because it never seems to operate as well as it used to, it feels like I’m constantly having to Force Quit the application and dump the profiles just to make it return to function. I left Safari because it took forever to start, and for some unexplained reason would no longer display HTML5 rendered YouTube data properly. I switched to Chrome and things are looking better! Sites are working now, especially HTML5 on YouTube and the browser starts much faster and has a snappier response time. Like anything else, we’ll see how long this lasts, as I said, I’m fickle.

Another application that has drawn my interest is Twitteriffic. Again this isn’t anything really new, but they recently updated the application to provide a supremely compelling new feature, Timeline Sync. With this feature I can read my twitter stream on multiple devices and the last-read-tweet is marked for me and saved. On my iMac, my MacBook, my iPhone, and my iPad this feature is absolutely INVALUABLE. It’s something very small, but in the end means a lot, especially when following a lot of twitter streams that sometimes can blow-up with activity.

I’ll write again once I have more experience with both, I’m sure along the way I’ll have gripes. 🙂

Hall of Mirrors

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The landscape of social media is a hall of mirrors. There are so many services that I’m on, and they all seem to conflict or collide with partial fits, all have different audiences, it’s terribly confusing. So far I’m registered with these providers:

  • WordPress.com
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr
  • Posterous
  • FourSquare
  • Ping.FM
  • Instagram

So far I’m approaching these services as individual pockets of social engagement. I really need to decide what I am going to put on each of these services. The trouble comes when you find that all these services have in some limited ways cross-linking. It seems like a waste to share to each of these services but there is an in-built concern that if you close a service you are somehow cutting off real audience or potential audience. If a service is free, then why not use it?

There are some services that definitely are built for certain things. WordPress is great for really long-form blogging. Twitter is great for short-status-update messaging and link-sharing, Facebook has an odd blend of every service – using Notes for long-form blogging, using status updates for short-status-updates, plus all the picture and video hosting you could want which pretty much marks off the next two… Posterous and Tumblr. They kind of float in the nether-space outside of the previous three. Instagram is bound tightly with its iOS App, so it is social but only tangentially so and Ping.FM is more of a tool than an actual destination, so the tangent gets even further out.

WordPress publicizes to Facebook and Twitter, Facebook can be linked from WordPress and Twitter and Twitter itself? Anything can be linked to and from that service. In many ways it comes down (at least for the big three) a matter of audience. There are friends and family on Facebook who aren’t on Twitter, there are people on Twitter that aren’t on Facebook, but since WordPress publicizes to both platforms, it’s the equal opportunity platform.

I suppose my feeling of waste really comes down to Posterous and Tumblr. They seem like utter duplicates of each other. I can’t really say that placing content on either service adds any value, it’s just easy to crosslink them to all the others. Even when it comes to drop-in-one-place-spread-everywhere the two of them are almost identical. Each service champions what they provide, but even still, there is almost no information on why someone would choose Posterous over Tumblr, or Twitter for that matter, when you factor in all the “helper” sites such as TwitLonger, yFrog, and all of those.

There is a part of me that wants to crisscross Twitter and Facebook, but even there I’m conflicted. Not everyone on Facebook would appreciate the “nuclear follow cost” that my Twitter stream commands. I’ve kind of left Facebook to be a destination-dump for all the other services to send to. FourSquare sends to Facebook, WordPress sends to Facebook, as well as all the others except Twitter.

I think this entire segment needs to undergo a consolidation event, where a few winners are selected and their usefulness is clear to see and different from all the others. In the meantime, those that follow me have grown used to how I share information so I presume that maintaining the status quo will keep the boat afloat. I just wish there was a clear reason to select one over the other and resolve this tangle of odd duplication.

Creeping Dead Zones

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Has anyone else noticed that there appears to be two very prominent creeping dead zones that surround the weekend? I mean, think about it. Nobody is really conscious Friday after lunch, and when you get to “High Tea” around 3pm, where really civilized countries are napping already, you could strip buck naked and streak through the office and NOBODY WOULD NOTICE. The same fuzzy non-time surrounds the beginning of the week too, that nothing of meaning ever happens between Friday afternoon and Monday afternoon.

The comical part of me sees this as a creeping problem. First we lose Friday afternoons and Monday mornings. Then as time goes on, people start making allowances for Friday mid-mornings and Monday afternoons. The work week is being effectively gnawed down on both sides by this creeping inertia.

Case in point, a help desk’s ticket throughput during these dead zones. Nobody has problems, principally because they’ve already checked out and can’t be bothered. I swear that sometimes you can hear tumbleweeds dashing along our office during these dead zones, it’s so quiet. So we keep busy. I bet a monumental amount of network traffic is bound for Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, and yes, my dear readers, WordPress.

The people who manage productivity should be alarmed. The weekend has sharp pointy teeth and it’s getting bigger! 😉

P.S. This is the first time the WordPress Proofreader didn’t have piss OR vinegar for me. YAY!

Poor Comic Book Sales

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I’ve seen this show up on Twitter quite a bit, the slowly degrading sales figures for popular comic books and what might be behind it. As a light consumer of comic books I can at least state a few things that keep me from buying many comic books:

  • Dullness – Many series, even some that I’m very fond of like Brightest Day from DC are rather dull. For Brightest Day I have faith that the chief writer, Geoff Johns, is simply warming up for some stupendous issues-to-come but so far it’s shaped a lot like a Stephen King novel, huge wads of detail with action all piled up at the end. There are some titles that I won’t even touch because they are monumentally bad. I won’t name any as to not injure people who feel passionately about their favorite comic and start a flame-out.
  • Impenetrability – Marvel Entertainment is chiefly centered when I bring up this point. Unless you establish serious time to your comic book experience you find the bleeding edge zooms away from you quite quickly. What I mean by impenetrability is that there are entire stories that I have yet to read, and by the time I’ve got both time-opportunity and funds-opportunity the number of comics you’d have to read to get the whole story is monumentally large. It feels a lot like it does when I wander through a library. A good metaphor for these feelings is the confusion/starvation of a shark in the middle of a cloud of tuna. There is no real place to start, there are too many options, there isn’t any handy map or checklist so you can enjoy a storyline as it was intended to be told, so you end up not reading anything. The entire oeuvre becomes impenetrable. I don’t start because I don’t know where to start and I don’t have the time or money to properly enjoy the unfolding story being told.
  • Digital Shrink – Comics are leaking out through channels that have nothing to do with the distributor or the publisher channels whatsoever. People are scanning comics and posting them for free online to the detriment of all the hard-working people who spent time and energy creating the material in the first place. It’s a double-edged sword and I’ve written about this in the past as well. These digital copies being free is only incidental damage, there is a lesson as to why these formats are so popular and it has very little to do with it being ‘free’. It comes down to format choice. Ever since April 2010, when I first laid my hands on my iPad, it became my go-to-device for reading both digital books *AND* digital comic books. There are companies like Comixology which are doing their best, but the publishers have to pay lip service to their distributors and their brick-and-mortar children, the comic book stores. The reason that digital comics haven’t been a cash-cow for comic book companies has everything to do with incomplete, inconstant, and inconsistent vending by publishers. I don’t want to buy paper comic books anymore. I want to subscribe to all my favorite titles digitally and I’m fine with coughing up a credit card number, setting subscription preferences (pull lists) and buzzing around the one central Comic Book app that ties everything together. That would get at least $20-40 a week out of me instead of my current $2.99 a week strategy.

Really the biggest point I have to make here is that by not being “The Brave and The Bold” when it comes to digital comics, people like me aren’t going to make any investment in the product and we’re just going to lurk in the dark and keep our buying power in abeyance. I’m not interested in a teaser issue with the punchline at the end being “Visit your local comic book store for more!”, sorry, but no, I don’t want to. I want to “Visit my Comic Book App for more!” when I want more. Unfortunately by not heeding the opportunity, not filling a vacuum, regular folk have filled it. Nature abhors a vacuum and in this case, certain services and new open-source file types such as CBR and CBZ have filled up all the space that could have been occupied by profit-making comic book sales. I’ve said it before and I will repeat myself here, if you fail to innovate, your customers will innovate without you and then you’ll miss the train completely and be left walking along the tracks. It’s funny to see how many old-school publisher/consumer business models failed to adapt to the Internet, you can see the bodies littered all over, Music, Movies, Television, and as unpleasant as it is to say, Comic Books. By not embracing the bleeding edge of technology each model has created subsequent vacuums and people have found ways to fill those vacuums without any one publisher being able to draw any benefit. When popular media takes technology and the Internet seriously, then you’ll see a turn-around, but not before then. As they stuff their heads in the sand, ever deeper, the erosion will just get progressively worse.

You could sum up this lesson that popular media really should learn in one really great curt statement: “Innovate or Die!” So, get busy innovating, or get busy dying.

All Too Shocking

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I’m pursuing a new passion at work, advocating for increased use of social networking at Western. As I see it there are three phases to what I have to do in order to bring about change around here:

  • Identify the organic condition of WMU’s position in the social networking sphere.
  • Identify and recommend avenues of future development and arguments for increased activity in social networking spheres.
  • Educate and encourage management to see the value in the arguments and endorse pursuit of our goal of increased social networking involvement.

So far I’ve looked at a batch of social networking services and one thing is crystal clear to me. WMU has as an organization done very little to take ownership of its social networking “Voice”. The current Voice is being controlled by students, a mish-mash of staff and faculty, and various organizations in Kalamazoo such as the Kalamazoo Gazette. I myself was contributing to the not-WMU Voice wrangling before I clenched up my privacy and online security, so that my Facebook and Twitter streams are private now. The only still-public wrangling I give the Voice is here on my WordPress blog.

I would like to say I was shocked, but I am not. I’ve known for a very long time and I’ve been agitated with the knowledge that everyone else but WMU is actually in control of the “social message” of this University. This “social message” should be firmly in-hand here at WMU. We should be leading the discourse, guiding the “social message”. It’s not only that we don’t control our “social message” but we are also inexplicably ignoring a vast and ripe market space by treating social networking as a passing fad. It is very much not a passing fad.

I’ve often times used the metaphor of a herd when discussing market cohort groups. In case of “young alumni” I see them composed of Generation X and Generation Y members, people in my age bracket who graduated from University from 1995 into the current year. These people are easy for people like me to understand, as I am in the group. If it appeals to my model of what my cohort finds attractive and compelling then I know it will succeed. In many ways I imagine Western to be much like other institutions out there, we’re all competing for various scarce resources, such as money, students, legislative power, and finally, social relevance. Currently WMU and Kalamazoo are “on-the-map” because of a Glen Miller song, Teaching, Aviation, and Paper Technology. Outside of those sharp niches we’re just another public state school. Because we don’t actually inject any controlled content into the social networking sphere currently, our most powerful method of advertising and promoting our institution is in the hands of everyone else but us.

I have to admit that when I look around the sense I get is one of shy victimhood. Because we are never in control of the social message we are perpetually defending ourselves against every critic and because we are mute when it comes to our social message we cannot hope to make any progress on the sort of initiatives that matter the most to our organization. I think what is most telling to me is the nearly universal response I have seen from recent graduates and young alumni. The expressions they share are not of indifference but rather of belligerence, derision, and hatred. WMU didn’t do anything for them while they were students, and it continues to do nothing for them as Alumni, yet WMU calls with their hats in their hands asking for money. I’ve personally witnessed at least a handful of  times being the message-mule to inform WMU that certain alumni want absolutely no contact whatsoever from their alma mater.

This points to another argument I made years ago when I brought this concern up to some paid consultants. I was told that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that I shouldn’t worry myself over these concerns. I have stated before that there is a huge social shift when you compare alumni who graduated in the 70’s versus alumni who graduated in the 00’s and later. In the great long ago it was a prideful privilege to attend a University, it was a mark of intelligence and was a source of pride and honor. The market, society, perhaps western culture itself changed in the 80’s and the 90’s and there was this shift towards a clear preference for higher education graduates and a dearth of employment for those without higher education. Suddenly a basic education was not sufficient, if you wanted a family and to be successful and happy you needed a degree of higher education added to your name. Higher education catered to this shift by admitting more people, but when they did it, they also became more insular and grew more callous, bureaucratic, and monolithic. What was previously something very special became exceptionally banal in just a few short years. Higher education changed from “University” to “K-16”. As this change was happening I was attending SUNY Buffalo and I immediately was confronted with something I was not expecting. Instead of an organization built on mutual respect, a passion for learning, and earned obedience and loyalty these institutions converted into featureless service and content providers. What was a chance to pursue difficult questions with like-minded adults and develop a higher intellect devolved into a high school sequel. This change has set both groups apart from each other, on one side the University with its staff and faculty and on the other side, the Student. What possible affection can be raised when your University is fundamentally indistinguishable from a Supermarket?

It is this shift that I brought up, that people graduating in my social cohort group are not enamored with higher education. It’s just another thing we felt forced into by society, we didn’t attend because we were passionate about it, we attended because there was no choice. These people are not going to give money to their University as much as they would write a check to a supermarket just because they happened to shop their once or twice. As I’ve moved along in my life and witnessed things, I have this sense that this shift was actually quite traumatic and there is profound scarring for both groups. I don’t know if modern Universities are ready to face a future where their better angels care not a jot for them and meet with closed doors, dial tones, and a profound lack of opportunities to raise money. All I can go on is what I have witnessed and that is summed up by this: “WMU didn’t do shit for me, I have a worthless degree and a lifetime of crushing debt. If they want money, they’ll have to find it somewhere else.”

So we return back to where we started. Will Higher Education embrace social networks? Can they? Is there sufficient scarring to make all of these arguments mute and this last sliver of opportunity, this last gasp of future relevance just so much pissing in the wind? At least for this place, I have hope that it is, I have hope that my arguments find some traction. Along with all of my hope comes my fear that a change-averse monolith simply hasn’t the capacity to move forward and that all this is just hot air being blown over a corpse that doesn’t know it’s dead yet and hasn’t quite gotten around to laying down in its grave. I suppose only time will tell, as it does with everything else.

Comic Con Day 2 -San Diego

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I’m sitting in the Sails Pavilion after enjoying a spot of lunch, which was a few oatmeal cookies and two bananas washed down with some bottled water. So far ComicCon has been like it has been in years past, very very busy and lots of great reveals and sneak-peek screenings. My iPad gets recognized and doubly-so when people see me reading comic books on it. I’ve attended a very digital comic heavy convention so far and the industry has caught a whiff that they may be behind the herd when it comes to releasing digital comics. I laugh at this, because they are very behind the curve. They are trying to approach the situation as a kind of transmedia experience, that people want a rich experience with audio, animation, video, and links. It is my opinion that they are right on for 2001. As for 2010, this should have all been old hat and the next wave they should be preparing for is the collision of digital comics and social networking. How do you mix comic books, digg, Twitter, and facebook all together? That’s where the future lies, until the herd moves on into post-social networking.

Seeing people getting all ooh and ash over digital comics when I’ve been enjoying then since April gives me a strong feeling of chagrin, i’ve been there, done that. What is new for me? I suppose I have to make it up for myself to really get any kicks anymore.

ComicCon 2010 has several oddities worth noting:
– more energy spent arranging shuttle services has made the con much easier to get to
– housing botch was annoying and demonstrates the inanity of the housing system
– line management in the exhibit hall needs more work
– out of control spontaneous photography in the exhibit hall clogs flow, they need photo zones
– DC’s snarky and immature preparations for releasing their signing schedules demonstrates that they don’t take their fans as seriously as Marvel does. The schedule needs to be online, in iCal format, and published two weeks before the start of the con.
– Artists are a capricious lot. Artists Alley needs a cork board for contacting free-range artists. We want to shower you with cash, but we need to see you first!

Next up are a batch more panels and perhaps some irrelevant wandering in the exhibit hall. 🙂

Get Lost II

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While discussing the nature of Lost on GeekTyrant’s blog, I had a thought:

Christian was dead cargo during the plane crash. I don’t know exactly how a corpse-in-a-pine-box can be an authority on what was real or unreal but it seems as though people have a huge investment in the Island being a real place and the things that happened on it likewise being real and not magical, make-believe, or purgatory from the start.

What I did enjoy was in the final scene, in the stained glass window behind Dead-Dad-In-A-Box was all the religious iconography – including a spoked wheel. That for me was all I needed to see the Island as a spiritual representation. I can’t really get past the Dharma Initiative and Namaste banner on the Island, Good and Evil being alive, Immortality, Miracles… for me it’s more likely that the Island is a dream-state-place rather than a real place. I also can’t get past the symmetry in Jack’s existence. He ‘woke up’ after the plane crash in the same exact place and pose that he laid down to finally die in. Did he ever really ‘wake up’ or was the past six years all about Jack and his trip through Purgatory? Were the other people on the plane real characters or just aspects that Jack needed to plug into his dying hallucination in a last-ditch bid for redemption?

Thanks to the writers, we’ll never ever really know. I find it an utter shame that Michael and Walt can’t get into heaven with the rest of the Lost. 😉

So that begs the question. Is LOST just the ramblings of a dying single mind? Six years of drama, characterization, development, scenes, meta, plot, myth… all of it just the flickering and guttering spark of Jack’s soul right before he dies on the Island? All the characters based on people he died with, that he saw on the plane, all just playing out Jack’s trip through Purgatory? Nobody else needed to actually be in Purgatory, it could have been Jack, all this time. Jack and Kate then would have been Jack just talking to himself. Jack and Christian, just Jack talking to himself. Just a big imaginary trip trying to seek redemption… Cuse and Lindelof perpetrating a six-year whammy on their loyal fans?

As I said on Twitter, it’s obvious to me that Jack is a Cylon. 🙂

Privacy is Stupid

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The echo chamber of Twitter, the Blogosphere, and Facebook are reverberating with journalists and pundits going on at length, with intense fretting and dry-handwashing regarding the respect of privacy in social networks. I have two problems with the complaint over privacy in the 21st Century.

My first problem with privacy in the 21st Century is that privacy is the antithesis of socialization. The rage now is social networking, joining sites, finding others, connecting with people deep in your past and right around the corner. There is a kind of magic when you put a whole bunch of people in a social web, from the dissemination of news, information, to the most recent demonstration of altruism regarding the fellow on Metafilter who had people coming out of the woodwork to prevent a possible instance of human trafficking in New York City. We have tasted the candy of socialization and we like it, we have expanded into Facebook, Twitter, even WordPress in order to share ourselves with the outside world. Each of us consumes vast amounts of information now, instead of hunting for it at a Library we now wade through information online, and the places where we engage this social network are vast and varied, the bedroom, the bathroom, the boardroom. We have seen something shiny and the herd has put its head down and begun a social stampede. How does privacy last in this situation? It simply cannot! Privacy is DEAD. If you want to share, then how can you be private? “I want to be found, but I don’t want any of my information to be found.” This is utterly irrational.

The second problem with privacy in the 21st Century is this odd predilection for being utterly truthful to a fault. Lets say you would like to preserve some small shred of privacy online, why would you be utterly 100% honest to social networking sites? There is nothing absolutely binding you to only one email address, and you can elect to not include information you don’t want to provide! Even if you are pressed for information, what prevents anyone from stuffing the box with bogus details? What is my address? 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Obviously. Why are we so driven to be utterly honest online and then pitch a fit when that information is misused? I cannot understand why people who are driven to privacy haven’t yet constructed an alias, a completely fake persona, or even bogus contact information!

These two problems I have just bounce around in my head and I get more and more agitated and irritated when I see people whining at length about their precious privacy. Declaring that they will abandon Facebook because their privacy policies don’t fit in with their utopian ideals. It’s a free service, you aren’t held to be 100% truthful, so why all the bitching, moaning, and above all else impotent whining? If you haven’t poisoned the well when it comes to personal information in order to preserve your privacy, then your privacy is dead. Utterly DEAD. Get over it! Stop complaining about Facebook and Twitter and how you don’t want to share information. You are in a social stampede, all you can do really is stop running with the rest of us and allow yourself to be trampled.

It’s lonely being all by yourself. But at least you’ll have your precious privacy to keep you company.