A lot of people have been blogging about twitter lately, but not enough has been said about where this kind of service is leading us socially.
I’m not an addict, but I am certainly deeply interested in twitter.com as a social enabler. Twitter is hard to explain (so I won’t bother): you can explain the mechanics quite easily, but people just stare at you blankly, because its hard to grasp the benefits of using it.
If you’re at all interested and want to have a go, you’ll need at least two other people willing to start at the same time as you and become ‘friends’ on twitter.
One principal benefit of using it has been called ‘ambient awareness’ – and that’s my favourite part of it. I can be aware that a group of people I know are socialising casually in a time and place without any of them explicitly inviting me.
This benefit is one of the reasons I love living outside of London, in smaller places. When I was growing up in London, my social life was almost entirely prescribed. You had to arrange to meet people. Moving to a university campus changed all that. I could randomly bump into people I knew every day. Brighton’s good for this.
This has got me thinking lately about what mobile phones are NOT doing for us. They could be telling us when we’re near friends, for impromptu gatherings. They know where we are, they contain a list of people we know…. why not?
Anyway, give twitter a try: its not for everyone, but we’ll see more and more services like this in the near future. The mobile phone networks are behind in this respect, but I’m sure they’ll catch on soon.
By David Stone March 28, 2007 - 7:53 pm
Have a look at Jaiku. Their mobile app is very nice, and is starting or do what you describe.
If not that, plazes can be used from your mobile now.
By Gary Stidston-Broadbent April 3, 2007 - 10:35 pm
Hi Ben (and Dave),
I think what you are looking for is something like Nokia’s Lifeblog in combination with one of the gps modules.
With Lifeblog you can not only combine all your photos, text messages, and other information gathered on your phone, but with the aid of the new Nokia N95 or the N80 with the LD-3W bluetooth gps module and the Python interpreter with a simple script, you can export your current position (or travels for that day) onto your blog.
I also think that with the advent of phones coming out with wireless, you could create some sort of adhoc listener that could tell you if a friend is within 100m. You would of course have to be able to keep each of your friends mac addresses (kinda like how the bluetooth works now).
By Ben Sauer’s Blog » Blog Archive » Social Awareness, where’s our Local Awareness? April 25, 2007 - 10:34 pm
[...] social communication is going to change even more for all but the most frozen of hearts. My limited experience with twitter seems to back this up, although time will tell which technologies will grab the attention of the [...]