Tweeting

 

 

 

X-posted from custardether.co.uk
 

I was recently persuaded to try Twitter after observing its use at the NLab Social Networks Conference, where a live feed of everyone’s tweets appeared on the main presentation screen throughout the event.  This could be used playfully (a message appearing behind presenter Steve Clayton read: “Steve is a vista pimp”, which later sparked some twitter interaction) or more meaningfully for people both within the conference theatre and those who were unable to attend, but could follow proceedings via Twitter.  We also discussed the way Twitter could be used as a “global pub” – a way of throwing questions out into the community and receiving “trusted” responses or generating debate.  It certainly got me curious about the Twitter-buzz…

 

As I have mentioned previously, I am an avid Facebook status-updater thanks to my iPhone, so never really saw the point in using Twitter as well.  However, in the name of experimentation, I signed up and quickly discovered how easy it was to integrate Twitter with both my Facebook profile and my website, so my updates automatically appear everywhere I could possibly wish.  It was extremely easy and suddenly I started to understand why Twitter is a much better interaction tool than the Facebook status update alone.  Excellent!  Couldn’t be happier!

 

But there was one slight snag with this brilliance.  The snag was a question of grammar:  how does one construct a tweet that makes grammatical sense in all of the different contexts in which it appears?

 

I might tweet:  ”Wondering how to use grammar!”

Most mobile phones (including the iPhone) would automatically capitalise the first letter of the text message.  

As a tweet, it would be delivered to my followers in this format:

custardether: Wondering how to use grammar!

This would appear in Facebook as:

Kirsty Wondering how to use grammar!

On my website as:

Twitter Update:

• Wondering about grammar!

 

To capitalise, or not to capitalise?  And what about the ubiquitous “is” – subject of much debate within Facebook?  It is implicit in the context of Twitter, as the service is based on the premise that you are answering the question: “what are you doing?”.  But as soon as you take the answer (your tweet) out of that context, it can require an “is” to make grammatical sense.  The app integrating Twitter with Facebook has recently stopped automatically inserting “…is Twittering:” when adding a tweet to one’s Facebook status, compounding the problem.

 

In reality, this is not a big issue.  As online readers we are use to ellipsis and a general relaxation in punctuation conventions.  After all, the essential message (”what am I doing?” or “what is my current status”) is conveyed in all circumstances – just not as elegantly as one might wish.  

 

As with all grammatical questions, it comes down to style.  What we consider hard-and-fast rules-that-have-existed-forever today are merely popular stylistic conventions which will evolve in time to form new hard-and-fast rules, which people will also believe have existed forever.  It will be interesting to see how those developing the applications responsible for integrating the various status update mechanisms handle the grammatical issue create a seamless integration – or whether we as readers simply adapt to accommodate the clunkiness of the sentence structures created.

 

I think I will now go and take refuge within the pages of Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves, where there is safety for my inner stickler.  I will keep tweeting though!

NLab Social Networks Conference – Panel

 

 

 

X-posted from custardether.co.uk

The conference concluded with a panel session consisting of Roland Harwood, Chris Meade, Vijay Riyait, Andrea Saveri. Here is a brief summary of the questions raised and some of the responses…

 

o.    How do you get people to see that these tools are not just time wasting devices?

-       more conferences

-       more opportunities for people to get together and learn form each other (both small and large businesses)

 

o.    What social networks would you keep?

-       Roland = Twitter and Facebook

-       Andrea = del.icio.us and blog aggregator

-       Chris = Facebook and the blog (as a platform for everyone to have their say)

-       Vijay = Facebook and Twitter

 

o.    What is the killer reason for cash-tight, small businesses to use social networks?  What is the commercial incentive?

-       depends on the business

-       saves money

-       most businesses are already doing social networking offline, but now they can do the same thing cheaper and quicker online

-       you wouldn’t expect a return on the plumbing, but the business cannot function without it

-       expand markets and jump out of small market niche

-       getting information/feedback

-       collaboration

 

o.    Do people get fed up?  Users are more savvy and will spot the agenda

-       people still want stuff and want it sold to them in a way that is authentic and relevant

-       there is always a competition when new technological developments come along, so it will sort itself out

 

o.    We haven’t addressed the massive shift in landscape (China has more graduates than we have children).  How much do you think social media will support this shift in landscape?

-       China has the large number of bloggers, so they are participating

-       The collaborative nature of the net means that people will swarm together

-       Anyone on the internet can make a change that will affect everyone else on the internet

 

o.    Social networking enhances relationships with customers and forces traditional businesses to think about how they do business.

-       we need case studies from academia to businesses

 

So, the final thoughts for the day?

 

Lots of mystique gets built up, but Andrea recommended that businesses pick one small, low risk thing to experiment with to find out what’s right for their business.

translating reality into the virtual

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is really quite odd to consider what elements of real life people choose to translate into their virtual existence on the Internet.

 

We have translated the “Christmas card” – a symbol of former friendship and regard – into the badge of appearing on someone’s “friends” list, receiving cursory updates and greetings from acquaintances/former friends who are no longer part of our current lives via tools like Facebook.

 

We have taken advertising with us into the virtual world, but done away with ad breaks, which force us away from the box to make a cup of tea.

 

We have translated our forums for chat – our coffee bars and our high school reunions – but we have not translated our quiet spaces to ponder.  The Internet is a doing place, afterall…

 

The reason I have come to consider this odd division of things we have translated and things we have not is because I am currently trying to improve on a standard online system by translating real world values into a virtual format.

 

I am trying to create an online tour.  If you look at most online tours, they can look pretty neat… you can usually swivel round a 360^o picture until you feel sick and click on a few hotspots to get some information in the form of text.  No problem there!  A virtual equivalent of a real world activity – taking a look around a place and getting some contextual information about it…

 

But is that what a real, live-guided tour does?

 

Very often, we get so wrapped up in the idea that our lives have a virtual parallel dimension that we forget to compare the virtual with the reality to see whether we are really achieving this dream.

 

In the case of virtual tours, they generally miss out so much of what a real tour guide is doing that aside from giving a visual experience of a place, they can hardly be said to be “guides” at all. 

 

I analysed the role of a tour guide and compared this with a survey of the variety of virtual tour variations available.  I was surprised by the number of recommendations I could make for improving existing standards and concepts of “virtual tours” based on this comparison.  It was almost as if the designers and standard setters, whoever they may be, had devised a way of doing a really cool thing, called it a tour, but never really thought about what a real tour does at all. 

This sounds like a harsh analysis, but when I started to look deeper, I found that this was often the case.  Virtual equivalents to reality are being developed all the time without much reference to the actual reality that they are trying to represent. 

 

Sometimes this is a good thing.  We can improve upon the reality we have in our virtual world in a kind of utopian fashion.

 

But in other ways we risk missing out skills in our new world which would enable and facilitate users greatly.  The skill that the virtual tours miss out is narrative – none of them provide you with an overall narrative for the place they are exploring in the way a real tour guide would, and so we have a virtual world where spaces – physical or otherwise – are described with nuggets of information and connected by hyperlinks, rather than being connected by a narrative that could enhance understanding and contextualise the information.  It is almost as if the virtual world is a stripped down version of reality in this sense: dispensing with the subtleties of connections whilst claiming to make links and connections between things clearer. 

 

If this is the world we are supposed to be bringing storytelling into, we need to be thinking not just about places we can locate stories, but rather the whole attitude and design of this virtual reality and how it could be altered to enable storytelling in all its forms – just like the real world does.  Basically, we need to think more about how and what we are translating into our virtual realm from our real world, and how it all hangs together, rather than just trying to blindly create a utopian equivalent in flat pack form.

Status: intrigued

I am ashamed to say that Facebook has been taking over my life. 

I find myself checking my news feed between tasks and when I am on the bus… I update my status frequently… I message people… I am generally hooked. 

The reason for this confession is that I have noticed an interesting communication phenomenon whilst engaging in all this social interaction: status conversations.

One of my contacts has subscribed for the Facebook Mobile service, whereby he receives text messages when anyone updates their status.  I don’t need this with the iPhone, but regularly check my friend’s status updates anyway.  This has enabled us to engage in a type of dialogue through our respective statuses.  I say a type of dialogue, because we are not talking to each other directly.  We are broadcasting our state to everyone on our contacts list, whilst effectively making a slanted comment towards each other.  One might say they are “extremely tired and wrecking havoc on the roads” whilst the other might respond that they are “considering the need for caffeine injections for all drivers”.

There is actually more of an art to this than might at first be apparent.  In each case, our status must make sense as a statement of our current position – relevant to all of our contacts, but at the same time making a conversational statement towards one particular person.  Since we share only four mutual contacts, only four people can actually follow the conversation in full, should they choose.  It is like having a public text messaging conversation, in which each side of the conversation must make sense in its own right. 

It strikes me that this is a very odd way to communicate – particularly given that I see the person involved every day at work and rarely speak with him properly in person.  However, we both seem to appreciate the play involved here and have most recently taken to winding each other up via Facebook.  Updating my status to “Kirsty is worried by references to throwing buses around” when sitting unobserved a few rows back on the bus, might get the response: “X has eyes in the back of his head”.  These conversations occasionally spill over into real face-to-face conversations, which equally seem odd to others around in real life, as they appear to start with reference to some invisible factor.  Walking in and asking “so, how many sandwiches does it take?” breaks conversational norms in most contexts, but status updates provide a context for this type of conversation, no matter what Mr Grice says. 

I imagine the same effect must also be created using Twitter and other applications which feature some form of status update mechanism.  I have started conversations with people on MSN before based on the content of their “personal message” statement, but this is usually a private interaction, which triggers a more normal conversation pattern.  The difference being that through Facebook the conversation is public, and broadcast to different people in different ways, depending on their presence on one, other or both friend lists.  This effectively creates three levels of “listening” engagement in the conversation, which have to be considered whether conscientiously or otherwise, by the two people involved.  I have not yet participated in a conversation like this between more than two active parties, but theoretically it would be possible. 

What this demonstrates, for me, is how conversation can be utilised for purely playful reasons.  It is an intriguing type of interaction – but that might just be me!  Has anyone else got any interesting observations about status updates and how they are used?  Don’t bother with the postcard – just comment below.  Or ponder.  Whichever suits.