Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Google launching Buzz has crystalized a thought that’s been running through my head for a while.  Ever since the WWW came on the scene there have been a series of landgrabs for bits of the Internet.  Bits that give revenue which might be page impressions giving advertising revenue or e-commerce giving cold, hard, cash revenue.  Sometimes its been the potential for revenue or the myth of potential revenue.  That’s where we had the first big crash when the bubble burst.

At the moment a pile of the players are going after the social networking pie.  Google Buzz, Twitter, Facebook and all the other general purpose networks are all busy trying to tie us into their set up.  The problem from a users point of view is that we end up with our network fragmented depending on where our friends are.  These networks are quite crude at the moment.  Basically they tend to be quite private or quite public but with messages shared with everyone or just one person.

Then there are all the niche network sites built on old style forums where we meet up with people who share an interest.  There are all sorts of sites which may have something you’re interested in from personal blogs by friends, news sites and everything else in between.

Keeping up with all of those takes time.  RSS and Atom feeds made it easier to keep up with sites by letting us know when there was something to read rather than having to trawl over the sites every few days.  TweetDeck lets you pull your social networks together in one place.

So after all the preamble here is my real thought – is the real winner down the road not going to be whichever social network grabs the most members or gets the model right but will it be the tool that we all use to keep up with Social Networks, RSS, forums and Email in one place.  I don’t know if it will be a web app, something you install or a mix of both but I wish that was the Buzz Google had launched today instead of the one we got.  That would seem to me to have been closer to Google’s mission to organise the world’s information.

I noticed awhile ago that I was blogging less.  Partly I put it down to frustration with the time it took me to add a page to my web site.  If I couldn’t easily add a page about something I didn’t need to blog about the page.  Partly it was a disatisfaction with the blog and site not being integrated.  Partly it was a concern about what I was blogging about.  I like posting about fun little discoveries – you tube videos, interesting web pages, announcement and all the other stuff thats going on.  However I was always picky about how much of it I posted.  I knew it could easily swamp out my own stuff in a huge noise to ratio disaster.  Its bad enough that I choose to post on several different themes I’m interested in rather than focusing on one theme.  Thats why I use categories and tags to classify my blog posts.

So I delt with the first two problems by switching my site to using WordPress as a Content Management System.  I know some people will say WordPress isn’t a CMS.  Frankly if it isn’t a Web CMS then every other Web CMS I’ve ever worked with isn’t either including the one those people are touting.  Yes it’s a blogging platform but that doesn’t stop it also being a CMS.

The third problem, the noise to content issue, I’ve pretty much put to rest by the happy accident of using microblogging.  Now I signed up to Twitter sometime in 2007 to see what all the fuss was about.  I didn’t really do anything with it till this summer when I needed to know about it for work (and probably foolishly removed my few early tweets since I was using it to test a development at work).  Anyway I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now for amongst other things the noise stuff and just consolidating the posts to my blog once a week.  Twitter has the added bonus that unlike blog comments, which tend not to end up being conversational because the lack of a consistent alerting system, twitter can have at least a bit of a discourse.

And the point of this post? I’ve no idea really.  Maybe that blogging, like the web, is still evolving.

Anyway I’m off to do something more useful instead.  Just as soon as I’ve checked Twitter…

impworks Twitter Background

I decided to have a go at making a twitter background using Vue on Sunday night for my Twitter page. After making a series of quick test renders using preview mode to test in Twitter I settled on the layout above which echoes the skyscraper image on the impworks web site. The render at 1800 by 800 pixels took just over an hour to run with custom settings in Vue 7.5 Infinite. I did a little bit of colour correction in Photoshop Elements and then saved it out for the web.

I’d love to know what you think of it.