Mar. 22nd, 2009
A smart use of Twitter: I’m at the Information Architecture Summit, being held this year in the beautiful Peabody Hotel in Memphis. As usual at such geek gatherings, there’s a healthy backchannel running on twitter under the hash tag #ias09. The hotel is following the stream, and answering our questions, such as: Who serves good bbq? Where can we get a real espresso? They’re even using twitter to greet guests, and deal with complaints about rooms at the hotel. And, of course, they throw in a little marketing for their famous ducks. Event venues take note!
What do you think? Leave a comment…
Jun. 19th, 2008
Update: based on this article Feedly has made some changes (and damned fast, 5.5 hours) to the first-time experience. Make sure to read the comments.
So everyone has been talking about Feedly. It’s a Firefox plugin that gathers your feeds from Google Reader, does some magic, and tries to present all the articles you love to read in a magazine-like way (I’ll link it further down, but recommend you read the post first). It’s a beautiful idea that I was immediately excited to try out. Considering how much time I spend reading feeds, and how little time I spend with well-designed newspapers and magazines, and how boring and ugly even the best feed readers are, my first thought was, “I’m on that bandwagon!” I signed up, installed, and restarted Firefox.
I had my first creepy Feedly experience in just 2 seconds. From the first load, Feedly showed me all of my Google Reader content. Why was that creepy? Well, I never logged into Google Reader, and Feedly never asked me for anything. It just pulled all of my feeds in there automatically, I assume by taking my Google Reader login from a cookie. I very consciously avoid saving my Google passwords in any browser, so this was creep-out no. 1.
Creepy Feedly experience number two occured the next morning, when I cooked myself an espresso and opened Google Reader on my iPhone. I was actually just thinking, “Hrm, for Feedly to actually be useful to me, I’d have to be able to open it on my iPhone.” Then I scrolled through my list of folders/tags (Google’s still confused about these terms). First of all, most folders had far more unread items than they should’ve (everything was on 0 yesterday), and secondly there were 3 new folders/tags: z.feedly.favorites, z.feedly.people and z.feedly.seeded, and they were all overflowing. The night before I’d played with Feedly for all of 5 minutes, and not selected anything as a favourite, nor selected any people, nor “seeded” anything, whatever that is. Feedly just added tags/folders automatically, and based on some criteria I don’t understand and were never explained, added articles to them.
So the Feedly folks have taken a great idea—a feed reader with a magazine layout—and have turned me, someone who’s actually wished for something similar in the past, completely off of it in less than 24 hours. I’ll be uninstalling now. I understand that Feedly is just trying to be helpful. A neighbour might break into your house to wash your laundry for you with the same motivation, but would you thank him?
If at some point Feedly sufficiently explains the mysterious things it does before installation, or makes invasive man-handling of my Google Reader account optional, I’ll reconsider using it.
And if, in spite of all of this you want to try it out, go install Feedly (Creeply?) and see for yourself.
Update: thanks to Kosmar I now know how to uninstall Feedly properly, and a little more about privacy and Feedly. Kudos to Edwin Khodabakchian, the guy behind Feedly, for being so straight about these issues.
What do you think? Leave a comment…
Jun. 15th, 2008
Stowe Boyd responded to a typical re-hash of the “connectedness = overload = falling productivity” argument against social media, but to be honest, the argument (yawn) wasn’t nearly as interesting as Stowe’s response. It’s a lovely visionary rant about a future most people can’t even imagine, from a guy who sounds like he’s been there. This is what he calls Boyd’s Law:
Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity.
At the the risk of sounding like some sort of Boyd fanboi, this is the stuff that flashed my ass off last year at Reboot.
The willingness to swap personal productivity for connection is just that: it is an ethical choice that asserts that the bonds of connection, today and over time, are more important — not just abstractly, but in the most concrete way — than making headway on this piece of work, right now.
As someone who’s got more friends who’ve never heard of Twitter than have, it all sounds pretty damned far out to part of me. But there’s also a part that has begun feeling incomplete without an hourly dip into the stream of contact that today’s net makes possible, and that part can see Stowe’s future from here, and is eager for everyone else to get on with it and get connected.
I have said for years that the centroids — media, religion, government, and corporations — would war against connectedness and the flow consciousness that is needed to operate in the new social Web. It is inherently subversive, because at its core flow is about remaining connected to those that matter to you over the more formal and official relationships that individuals are supposed to have with organizations.
I’d agree, but so far in my experience the biggest hindrance to a more connected world are the people themselves, and not the media, church or whatever. For example, I’ve been evangelising Twitter quite a bit lately, and the first reaction of most people is a pitying look—“Matt, my soft-brained friend… I hope he’s not dangerous…” Of the very few who actually give it a try (possibly only to pacify me), almost all come back to me after a day and say, “I don’t get it. What’s the big deal?” When I try and show them, and see that they’re only following one person—me—I try and explain it’s about connectedness or as Leisa Reichelt calls it ambient intimacy, and that you can’t be very connected with only one contact, and, and… and then I often run out of steam and mumble something like, “you’ll get it if you do it long enough…”
The reason I know Stowe’s onto something, no matter how far-fetched and techno-hippie it sounds, is I’ve seen this kind of transformation happen. Firstly to myself (I didn’t get it to begin with either), and occasionally to someone I’ve browbeaten into trying Twitter for more than a day. The transformative power of social media is made clear by the aversion most feel to it at first—it’s foreign, unimaginable, and therefore threatening—and the “I get it!” moment most experience at some point after giving it a try. If it was just another fad, just something to play with and forget, everybody would try it without resistance and nobody would care longer than a couple of weeks. But for most, it’s becoming an essential part of everyday communication, and it’s changed who they are. And who we’re becoming is more connected, more aware and faster thinking people, through the influence and support of our networks. And that’s such an optimistic vision—such a rare optimistic vision of the future—that I can’t help but grin to be a part of it, and can’t help but thank Stowe for pointing it out to me.
What do you think? Leave a comment…
