01.27.09
It’s for the birds
I have a Twitter account, but have so far not found a good use for it. Being part of the tech world, it’s sort of due diligence to keep abreast of the latest trends. I consider myself a late adopter though I tend to adopt eventually. I have been found commenting on other people’s photos on Flickr, editing css in the awful SQL wrapper that was myspace, and I’ve had a scrabble match which lasted 3 days on Facebook.
However, I found it very hard to be enthusiastic let alone understand a technology that you have no real use for. Doing your ‘research’, i.e. creating an account and messing about for an hour, or downloading software to your phone and using it for a day is not enough – it lacks the ecological validity of a real experience.
Shazam is just a very clever demo until you find yourself a few months later in a coffee shop which is playing an infectious 1930 jazz rarity and suddenly, the identity of the tune becomes the most important pursuit of the minute and Shazam for a brief moment becomes perhaps even useful.
Listening to Stephen “I have never seen a SmartPhone I haven’t bought” Fry. It’s hard to imagine anyone I’ve met in the industry talking about phones with such gusto and geekyness. Paying too much attention to Fry makes me feel like I’m in the wrong industry, but then I’m reminded that amateur enthusiasts often have a lot more affection for the field that they are not bound to (Fermat – the hobbyist mathematician springs to mind).
Just as someone who works on building railways doesn’t necessarily care much about the interiors of trains. There are an awful lot of very conservative, late adopters who work in the mobile software industry. Not only are there engineers who are interested in the technical challenges of a developing such a constrained device, yet have little interest in the end product, but you will also find them in the marketing meetings waxing glibical about some feature or trend that you know they will never use or truly understand themselves.
If you are not of the ilk that can just hammer away at technology for the sake of technology, then you might find the onslaught of the new services utterly exhausting and so you try and ignore them while all the while adding drip by drip to your pool of status anxiety. In the end, it’s either curiosity or social proof that brings you to a new service : when most of your friends do something, you start to take an interest for fear of missing out.
Although I’m sceptical about the true importance of social networking, lets face it if all your friends are on facebook then it’s a damn sight easier to arrange group events and post aftermath photos using facebook tools than any other method. I’m not sure if that was Facebook’s original goal, but certainly all of these services have benefited me in ways tangential to my original expectation (I’ll post some examples in future posts).
So, I won’t be closing my Twitter account just yet…
Perhaps the following story justifies the existence of Twitter alone:
http://www.davidhenderson.com/2009/01/21/key-online-influencer/