Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
How lifestreaming is transforming the internet has been quite well documented, and this week on ReadWriteWeb, the future of blogging has been revealed. And yes, it’s in the form of lifestreaming.
Three thoughts:
1) Does it work?
I’d always thought of the “other” stuff that goes on in lifestreaming as a complement to blogging. They fill in the gaps but they’re not always the main content. Snacks in between meals, if you will. But in this day and age, who really has time to read a 700 word post anymore? Even a 500 one? Especially when it can be done in 140 characters. I fell ill a week back and didn’t have the energy to blog about it, but I did Plurk about it. By the time I was well enough to punch a blog post out, I realise everyone knew about it via microblogging, so it didn’t serve any purpose.
There will be “long form” bloggers as Sarah mentioned who will need to blog just as a way of capturing the content. But how about the average personal blog? If you look at the examples on RWW, my gut feel is they could work.
2) Is there a culture difference
Friendfeed is the epitome of lifestreaming. I know it’s hot, I know it has its’ uses, but it hasn’t caught on here in Singapore yet. Without any proper research, I’m going to guess that culture has a part to play. As a society we’re not that voyeuristic yet (some are, but it’s a small sample), which maybe accounts for some of it.
There’s also the element of privacy and collectivism that exists here which might result in self-censorship when it comes to lifestreaming. For example, it may not be the best thing to flag a certain controversial book you’re reading because it may not be socially acceptable in this setting.
3) It’s already happening
Prior to publishing this post, I asked aloud on Plurk (not that you could ask silently) what people thought about the article and got varied responses. In a sense that’s what lifestreaming is about isn’t it? Come across something in your life, share it quickly, get short 140 character responses back and then everyone moves on to the next item.
It’s all very interesting. I don’t know if it truly replace blogging per se, but it definitely will be exciting to see where this fits in in the next 6 months to a year. And more importantly, if everything (blogging, content, attention spans) are getting shorter, how do companies engage and connect?
Tags: culture differences online, friendfeed, lifestreaming, lifestreaming and the internet, long form blogging, microblogging, Plurk, readwriteweb, shorter attention spans, the future of blogging
Posted in Blogs, Plurk, Singapore, community, social media | 2 Comments »
Friday, April 25th, 2008
The article’s out today! I thought it’s pretty good. Hopefully more people will read it and get onto Twitter.
That said, I’m going to be a little cautious about Twitter. Steven Hodson blogged about some of Twitter’s troubles, financially, bringing us back to harsh reality that you can have the best product in the world in the Web2.0 space, but you better have a monetisation plan. Frederic from The Last Podcast updated us a couple of days ago about how Twitter has rolled out ads in Japan (which makes sense since they are so big in Japan)
All the financial worries plus the recent downtime over the weekend and Twitter’s lead architect leaving makes for a slightly worrying future for Twitter. Here’s hoping they can pull their act together soon.
Follow me on Twitter: @uniquefrequency
Tags: microblogging, monetization plan, the last podcast, today twitter article, twitter, twitter ads in japan, twitter caution, twitter downtime, twitter monetisation, twitter monetization, twitter worries, uniquefrequency, winextra
Posted in social media, twitter | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
It hit me in the shower last night why exactly Twitter is so powerful. It’s like IRC.
No, I’m not kidding and don’t run away yet.
Today @stripedshirt and @valene were talking about why MSN (aka IM) isn’t used by them anymore, simply because it’s too distracting. On top of that, MSN mostly allows for one-to-one conversations (yes I know you can add more people to conversations), but Twitter is cool in that you can have many people adding to a conversation at different times of the day and it’ll continue on.
And that’s what I like most about Twitter and that’s why it’s so powerful. It requires a short amount of attention, but it allows you to feel connected and part of a community more than IM does (at least for me). A real example is when a few of us just got started on Twitter. Me (@uniquefrequency), Andre (@stripedshirt) and Valene (@valene). So 3 of us kinda were messaging here and there but with only 3 people, there wasn’t much benefits to reap in terms of network externalities.
Fastforward 4-6 weeks, add in Andre’s group’s great presentation on microblogging, and now we have Nabilah (@allquirknoplay), Jacqueline (@jacquelinechang), Amelia (@amsie), Lionel (@gaothebao), Peiling (@gniliep), Alaska (@alaskie), Xiao Hui (@thehsuperficies), Mark (@beatmastermark), Gladys (@gladyschock) and Christina (@tinana).
The best part is I have less than half of these people on my MSN list, and yet I talk more to most of them than to other people on my MSN list.
It’s like IRC in that we all drop in the same “room” at different times of the day and maybe I’ll know that some of them are in the library, some are awake at 5am finishing a project, who’s in a Starbucks, and the list goes on. It’s come to a stage where we even have @SMUtweets to tweet school-related stuff to all of us. How cool is that?
To me, Twitter has truly become the new social water cooler.
You might argue that 13 of us out of a school population of 4,500 is insignificant. But is it really? If you were a company and you had 13 passionate advocates following your brand on Twitter, Tweeting things to each other and spreading your brand and/or message, wouldn’t you be happy? (Wouldn’t it be great if Frujch could tell us when the queue is short? Or if portobello melts are running out so we can ZOOM down to get the last few?)
I think this is just the tip of the iceberg and here’s an experiment I want to run: All of us SMU students currently on Twitter should aim to get one, just one, other friend on Twitter by Week 14 (just lean over to the person next to you in the library and do some convincing!). We’re going to try to double the SMU-Twitter population and see just how far we can go with this in really forming a community and network, and see what comes out of it.
Post your success stories and/or great Twitter stories in the comments section so we’ll know who to follow and we’ll review this experiment in 2 weeks! Let’s keep in mind that getting new people to sign up on Twitter is just the first step, we need to make them feel welcome to get them to stick around and enjoy it as much as we do!
Tags: alaska, alaskie, allquirknoplay, amelia, amsie, beatmastermark, christina, curiousfoodie, frujch, gaothebao, gniliep, im, instant messaging, irc, jacqueline, jacquelinechang, lionel, mark, microblogging, microsoft messenger, msn, nabilah, online conversations, peiling, smu twitter, smutweets, social media experiment, social water cooler, stripedshirt, thehsuperficies, tinana, twitter, twitter community, twitter experiment, twitter network, twitter population, twitter stories, uniquefrequency, valene, water cooler effect, xiaohui
Posted in SMU, Singapore, twitter | 17 Comments »
