Simon Hammond Blog

Lively’s a virtual chat room that you can embed in web pages, mine below:

Kind of lite version of Second Life from Google which requires a simple download and a Google account. I’m guessing this is a strategic attempt for Google to stick a virtual rocket under their social networking effort. Coming to Orkut and Facebook soon, perhaps?

If someone had told me about this I can imagine I’d be sceptical; the bells and whistles of MSN turn me right off. But whilst there’s plenty to be said for a text-only chatroom, the strangeness of disembodied words stands out when you’ve got a chance to.. just be present.

Pros and cons, then. The urge to customise stuff to match your style is irresistible. But it’s nowhere near the level of sophistication of Second Life and it regularly crashes out. Sometimes the crash handler itself crashes, causing a cascade of apologetic alerts. Also, it’s only on Windows. It allowed PicasaWeb photo album feeds to be displayed in picture frame but that was buggy and it off right now. You can similarly have virtual TVs looping YouTube clips but that gets annoying very quickly. Public rooms devoted to sex seem to be irrepressible currently.

Still, I like the general idea and implementation and I think I could be a great place for certain small communities to just hang out. Just wish they’d done some testing on it first.

Tags: review by si
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I don’t own an iPhone (woefully) and I’m only an occasional Facebooker, so I’m just squatting here on the fringe and speculating.   But the latest post on the Facebook blog seems somewhat significant.

It notes that 1.5 million people regularly use the Facebook iPhone website since it launched a year ago.   Then it announces a Facebook Application for the iPhone (see left) which — along with a speed increase — features instant photo uploads and live chat.  Location sharing is in the pipeline.

This puts Facebook ahead of Google’s Jaiku in the mobile social network stakes for now.   Both have converged on the ’status stream’ model which has massive room for innovation.

For instance, I can see Google allowing posts to reference places in Google Map.  If your friend is at a bar, Google will want to show you where that is.

Facebook will take a big step forward when it allows the targeting of updates to specific circles of friends (like plurk).  A lot of diversity in your recipients is a natural consequence of a general social network (rather than a niche one like Twitter) inhibiting but is damn inhibiting.

Tags: social software, web by si
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I’ve been harbouring nagging doubts of late about referring to myself as an ‘early adopter’ of web goodies.  Reflecting on it the other day, I realised the full extent of my delusion.

home.html

I abused the computer science web server in 94 or 95 with multicoloured buttons and blinking text.   Along with my geeky friends I could see a future in which everyone had their own home page on Geocities.

Then Myspace came along and Facebook chased it up.  I was late for both.

e-mail

It was an introduction to Hotmail from a non-geeky friend in 1998 that weaned me off university e-mail accounts and onto webmail.  I later shelled out a couple of quid on eBay for a Gmail invite wanting to beat the inevitable rush.

Hotmail still trumps Gmail for numbers although ‘Facebook mail’ may ultimately bypass both.

web 2.0

From the Summer of 2004 I was tagging my photos in Flickr and bookmarks in del.icio.us.  Both were giving me stuff of real quality and motivating me to contribute.

I got the Blogger hoodie when they sold out to Google and paid off their paying users in 2003.  Five years later and most hardcore ‘bloggers’ are using Wordpress (without switching to ‘pressers’).

Before Twitter had sprouted it vowels, I’d registered as the 3018th user.  A couple of years — and SXSW events — later and I am now able to follow a selection of the local digerati.  But most of my geeky friends are declining to tweet, or even blog.

Facebook is a one-stop shop mail, photos, videos, status, sharing are all made supremely simple whilst actually being technically sophisticated.  Yet my adoption of it is only marginal at best.

my point

If I search for “welcome to” in the subject line of my inbox I get 130 hits.  I’m a serial tinkerer.  An inveterate fiddler.  A compulsive invite-requester.  But I’m clearly not an early adopter.  Rather than being further down the road I’m actually off the beaten track. Instead of being ‘ahead of the curve’ I’m actually zipping off it at random tangents.

There’s a small swarm of us in Brum who wouldn’t be without Flickr, Gmail, Delicious, Wordpress, Twitter et al.  We all get fantastic value out of these tools which connect, organise and inspire us to create.

Now, I don’t expect ordinary users to join us later on.  And I don’t find that a problem.  We adopt these apps whilst Facebook apps are adopting everyone else.  We are motivated differently.

So what does this mean for the ’social web’?

Tags: self-referential, social software, web by si
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