The Long View

The long road to Twitter paradise (1)

I thought that after about two months of tweeting (my first tweet was on 14 February to be precise), it would be good to give a brief update on how this social networking beginner is doing.

Now my first remark is that already I seem to be in a very different place from two months ago: once you have spent some time in the twittersphere it seems uncanny that still not everyone knows what Twitter is exactly. (it even seems there are some people who have never heard of it all).

So for the untwittered among you: Twitter is a social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time with what is happening in any of the areas you want to be connected to. Twitter aims to help you kill two birds with one stone: building a social network and keeping you informed about the topics you are interested in. It is instant information 24 hours a day. (Unless you turn it off, a bit like email, really just at multiple times the volume). 

Unlike Facebook, you can only send and receive short messages of up to 140 characters (including any URL links you want to include.

Some even say that Tweeting can be bad for you, but so can many other things…

So, how has it been going for me? In a nutshell: well, but slow. 

I have not been the most assiduous of tweeters (about 100 updates since the beginning), and after two months have now reached the 200-followers mark - some assiduous twitters count in the hundreds of thousands, just ot give you an idea. (Experienced twitterers will by now have detected my beginner’s language and naive mindset - but hey, we are all learning, not?)

Here are some of the things I really like bout Twitter as well as some that I intensely dislike.

Likes:

1. Ease of set up and use and the instant communication it provides to people and areas on the net
2. Discovery of entirely new industries, interests and mindsets
3. Ability to connect to a wide range of people, without prejudice or discrimination; to relate directly to people you did not know that existed 3 minutes ago
4. The general respect and politeness of the exchanges
5. Real-time updates on what is happening out there. While it may not always be the truth necessarily, it can come quite close to it on occasions
6. Creation of my own personal newsfeed in realtime
7. Ease of following and unfollowing - unlike facebook, there is no sense of ego loss. Easy come, easy go
8. The sense of expansion that comes with the growing network - it has already had an impact on my blog traffic, as well
9. Some good iPhone interface applications help keep up when on the move Twteety, Twitterphone (both on the Apple iTunes store) to keep you abreast
10. A new toy to play with. This should never be underestimated.

Dislikes

1. Cumbersome interface despite the apparent simplicity
2. Site can be quite slow and unreactive
3. To become really powerful, you need to master additional tools (more time, energy, learning - surely all for a good cause)
4. The amount of self-proclaimed social media gurus and twitter specialists that in reality are not much into sharing - except for their share of your wallet
5. Time required. Don’t get me wrong  - i enjoy spending time, and even think it is worthwhile - but on a busy day, I find it difficult to switch to Twitter and tend to turn it off
6. A vague sense of frustration about all that great stuff that you miss out on when you are not watching
7. Not sure today that the time invested is really beneficial - although this hesitation alone seems to tell me otherwise.  

So these are some first impressions. Overall, a good start. I am now celebrating my 200th follower (@N3W_Media), so the mass twitterers may still deride my early efforts. However, Twittergrader puts me at 92/100 this morning, up from 24 a few weeks ago.

Twitter paradise cannot be that far  away. Thank you to all those that follow me: @jeanmarcrommes.

(To be continued)

Welcome to the office of the future

Cubicles are just not what they used to be.

The Chief Happiness Officer shows (off) his office today: an exceptional space in Copenhagen. It's called laoficina. When you visit their site, make sure you brush up on your Danish (not the pastry).

No kidding, this is a shared office. Shall we move?

Then there is also this one in Sheffield which utterly belies the black coal reputation of this Northern UK city: electric works - a:

 "contemporary office place for creative, digital and media businesses".

Yes, this is a slide, to go down three floors. Full picture set on flickr.

Not to forget, of course, Google. Yes, this is Lego.

New blog page: SilverLining

There is a lot of complaining and moaning and fear mongering and panicking going and backside covering and ducking under the weight of the world going on at the moment.

And what we tend to forget is that in spite of all the doom and gloom, we continue to live and be active and work and heave ourselves out of the hole(s) that we have dug for ourselves.

So, I thought it might be a good idea to start putting into one place some of the good news that is happening (or some of the less bad, if you MUST look at the half empty glass).

Hence the creation of SilverLining, a separate page from this blog where I will collect the items of good news that I come across: economics, politics, society, major breakthroughs in science and tech, and even signs of positive Darwinian evolution where they might be detectable (this being the year of Darwin).

Please feel free to contribute any items that you come across might see fit to feature in that list.

I have no idea where this might go, but it felt like a good idea this morning.

And it's sunny outside, too.

2000 years of growth

Here we have another exponential curve: linking world income and population growth over the past 2000 years. Talk of taking a long view....

Found on Visualizing Economics.