Infinite micro-blogging
Social Proprioception
Speaking of monitoring what people are doing, there has been a lot of talk recently about micro-blogging, especially in the form of twitter. Essentially they are ways of people leaving traces of their lives online with little effort. There was an article in wired about a month ago talking about it and why they are useful:
“It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.
Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.”
It’s an interesting description of it, and justification for why twitter-related stuff might be around for a while. I’ve been trying out the different ways of doing it, and I don’t know if I’ve found something satisfying yet. I kind of stumbled into doing it on Facebook. I used to just send people links and videos through email or IM, but posting it on Facebook was a more passive way to share without bugging people. It was up to them to click on something if they were bored.
Too many accounts
By way of doing research for various projects I forced myself to sign up for things like Twitter, Jaiku, and Tumblr just to see what they were all about. Twitter is nice and simple, but won’t work on the phone I have free texting. Jaiku is great because you can import feeds from anywhere into your own feed. It tends to clog things up a bit, especially if you are bringing in Last.fm or a news site. It also limits what you can see in one post, so images and videos are just links, which is good in some respects. Unfortunately I forgot the password for the Jaiku account that had my phone linked to it, so I had to start a new account and my phone number is “in use by another account” that I can’t get into.
So that leaves me with tumblr. I like it because it’s a little more focused on showing the actual content. So when I post a photo or video it is shown. It’s essentially a lightweight blog that makes it easy to just throw your content into it and also allow for feeds to be imported. Because of this, it’s a little less focused on the “social” part of micro-blogging.
In the end, I really wonder what will become of these sites. The link to mobile is what I think will keep them afloat for a while. It was very liberating to be able to snap random pictures and have them sent directly to a new post (although using way too many button presses). I don’t know if the average person has a need to use them or if they just aren’t aware of them. Maybe the younger generations that will see the usefulness in the same way that they gobble up Facebook and MySpace features.
Infinite Loop
One last point, when I was signing up for these, the idea of being able to clog these micro-blogging sites with feeds from anywhere was kind of ridiculous to me, so I tried an experiment. Just like you might put one mirror in front of another, I fed a tumblr feed into jaiku and a jaiku feed into tumblr to see what would happen. At first, nothing, but when I pulled in a third feed (it was randomly Herbert’s flickr stream) it started echoing forever. It’s kind of a play on the idea of people updating these things constantly and automatically.
