announcements

Twitter is not a social network

Just a couple of days ago I had a discussion with a friend of mine about Twitter. He is not too much into social networks, but hearing all the time about Twitter, he decided to give it a shot again, and still felt that it was in no way suitable for him. Normally, that would be enough for me to jump into my zealotical advocacy mode. However this time I felt different. I said that I’m not all that hot about Twitter anymore as I used to be.

You see, back in a day, Twitter had two things important to me, that it lost on the way to where it is now. The first one was SMS gateway. People could interact with Twitter via SMS. This was important to me, because I could practically get anybody register at Twitter. My grandparents know how to send SMS, using their pre-historic mobile phones. Also, SMS coverage is way better, more reliable, and cheaper than any mobile Internet connection. Unfortunately, Twitter limited its SMS gateway from global coverage to only a selection of countries (US, UK, etc), which don’t include the countries where I or my friends and family live. A huge disappointment.

Secondly, back in a day, Twitter was about status updates. That was partially enforced by the SMS user interface, where you just couldn’t assume that everyone has a browser nearby or even an Internet connection. So the messages were more of the text and less of the links. With SMS gateway going away, and with plenty of online marketing and PR people joining Twitter, this was also gone. Now, most Twitter messages contain a link to an external resource.

I think that that also changed the culture of a place. Before, 140 character limitation had a very good reason to be in place – that’s how many characters there are in an SMS message. People were encouraged to formulate their updates within this limit. Now that Twitter updates are mostly links, nobody cares about that limit. Why would I want to limit myself to 140 characters, when I can use as much of them as I want and just tweet a link to my text?

So, if it’s not a social network with status updates anymore, what is it? A news source? But we had RSS for that, didn’t we? Yes, we did, and we still do. But RSS works differently. RSS is more of a source-based system. You pick your sources that you trust and want to follow – CNN, Slashdot, etc – and you subscribe to their RSS feed. This will make sure that you get all published items, whether you are online or not. If you’ve got a new interest or hobby – just find a few more sources of wisdom and subscribe to their RSS feeds. Handling too much? Just unsubscribe from some and you done.

Twitter is different. It’s not so much as a source-based system, but an event-based system. It doesn’t matter who you follow and what your interests are. If something happens, you’ll know about it on Twitter. A gadzillion people will tweet and re-tweet about it, and you will eventually catch it. Or you can search for keywords that you have interest in, and then it will work very much like Google Alerts, letting you know about tweets that matched, no matter who or where posts them.

I am, personally, not a big news person. I don’t care much about news. What I care about are opinions and thoughts about news. So for me personally, Twitter is not that interesting, because it only tells me what happens. Slashdot and a collection of my other two hundred or so feeds tell me what happened and what people think about it.

For the last year or so, I only new that I am floating away from Twitter. Yes, it’s there. Yes, it’s getting more and more popular. Yes, I’m pushing a bunch of links to it too – my blog posts announcements, some delicious bookmarks, an YouTube favorites. Occasionally I even tweet a thought or a quote. But I don’t read and follow it as much as I used to. For the last couple of weeks or so, I was trying to figure out why, and now I think I have.

But until today that was only me and my thoughts. Today however I got a confirmation of my thoughts being in the right direction.

Kevin Thau, Twitter’s VP for business and corporate development, announced during a presentation at Nokia World 2010 today that everyone’s favorite micro-blogging network is not actually a social network.

It’s not, you say?

No, says Thau: Twitter is for news. Twitter is for content. Twitter is for information.

ReadWriteWeb is one of many resources reporting from Nokia World 2000.

The end of Bloglines

Via this post to Google Reader blog I’ve learned the Bloglines news. The service will be closed on October 1st.

Today, Ask.com let our users know that we will shut down Bloglines on October 1. Not an easy decision, especially considering our loyal and supportive (not to mention patient) user base, but, ultimately, the right one given business reasons simply too hard to ignore.

While I myself switched four years ago, I know that some people are still using the service (hi mom!). Everyone is encouraged to migrate to some other news reader. My recommendation is, of course, Google Reader. And the migration process should be simple and straight forward: export subscriptions as a single OPML file from Bloglines and import them into Google Reader.

While Google Reader is a superior service these days, it came later and from a bigger company than the original Bloglines. Back, when people were just figuring out how to use RSS en masse, Bloglines offered a simple and very convenient way. It was so simple in fact, that you didn’t need to know much about RSS at all. It was so simple, that even my mother, who avoids web services as much as possible, was able to use and enjoy it.

And even though I haven’t used Bloglines at all in the last four years, it’s sad to see it go. For me it was one of those milestones in the Web history.

Lock Stock rock band is now online!

I am helping out my friends at Lock Stock rock band to get online. They are performing hard rock music – Metallica, Sepultura, Nirvana, Limp Bizkit, and many others – all over Cyprus. If you are a fan of hard rock and you are in Cyprus – chances are you’ve heard them before.

There is too much that we can do, but we have to start somewhere. So, the first version of their official website is online – see it at Lock-Stock-Rock.com . There are some band news, contact information, and a Google Calendar- powered schedule of the upcoming events. Go check it out, subscribe, follow @lockstockrock on Twitter, and leave a comment. Let us know what you think. Let us know you were there. Spread the word. And stay tuned.

We have a lot of plans and a lot of material to cover, so there will be some activity in the nearest future.

4 Mbps with PrimeTel

Here is a quote from the latest PrimeTel newsletter:

PrimeTel upgrades for even faster Internet speeds and provides 4Mbps / 512Kbps as an upgrade option for the PrimeHome and PrimeADSL2+ subscribers. The additional monthly fee for the PrimeHome subscribers is EUR65,92 while for the PrimeADSL2+ subscribers is EUR53,33. Read more

Anybody tried that already?

Note to PrimeTel : By the way, I’d much prefer an RSS feed from your site to those Greek emails that you send me. Thank you.

Flickr videos

Flickr has recently added support for videos. Many thought (and some still do) that it was an April Fool’s joke, because the information broke out on the 1st of April, but it seems that it was no joke after all.

Screenshot of Flickr upload page

When I heard about it, I was a bit surprised, and had a slight negative feeling about it. Flickr seemed to do just fine as they were. The photo site community is very different from the video site community. And don’t we already have YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, and a tonne of other video sites? Why Flickr should be spoiled by videos?

But after I spent some time reading about and checking the implementation, I have to say that I like it. There is a FAQ about this new feature which does a good job explaining the idea behind it. There are many ways to define what a video is and how it should be handled. Flickr went for a very nice definition – “a long photo“. They have imposed a 90 second time limit on all videos, as well as allowed uploads to Pro accounts only for now. That’s about as right as it could have been done.

Indeed there is a need for short video support on Flickr. I do have a YouTube account, but it’s not what I need right now. I am not doing a lot of videos, and the ones I do usually complement the photos nicely. Most of my videos are very short and rather personal. For these needs, YouTube is a bit too much with its noisy community, channels, and subscribers. But Flickr videos seems to be spot on! I suspect there going to be a few changes and adjustments to the current functionality in the near future, but even as it is now, it’s pretty handy.

Have you tried Flickr videos? What do you think?