It’s a Me, Me, Me, Meme World
The “me, me, me, meme.” What is it?
Cool tech geeks start something online. We jump on the bandwagon. Our friends see what’s going on. A crowd forms, asks questions, then follows our lead. Lifestreams form.
In the video game Final Fantasy VII, the Lifestream is a river of Mako energy coursing through the Planet. The Lifestream is considered the blood of the Planet, which in turn is considered a collective conscience similar to the Oversoul of transcendentalist philosophy, but not quite the same as the type of entity proposed in the Gaia theory.
Our own personal lifestreams, or “public timeline’s” if you prefer, are slightly more mundane that the one from Final Fantasy, however it can still be pondered in an analogous manner. Our lifestream threads together everything that we are. Where we go, what we say, who we interact with, how we express ourselves, concepts inside artwork that we create, symbolism that we identify. All can be considered “us” or “me” in some, hopefully non-banal, way.
We say “me” a lot in our lifestreams. Not always directly. Indirectly also. Off the top of our heads. Well thought out over hours of writing and editing. At the snap of the shutter on our iPhone. While visiting at parties and gatherings. By connecting/friending/following through social nets. Generating our APML wake and bow waves through the public timestream. We are the social seed for our downstream online and offline, everyone has a built-in personal wetware network and many people let this stream filter back online, forming a personal lifestream wake.
When we say “me” we say “we” a lot as well. The “we” message is buried in context of the “me” and provides the rich matrices upon which our lifestreams thrive. “ Frank is watching the Chicago Bears and blogging <link> - #twitter” tells me what Frank Gruber is up to, but the link was meant for his followers -”we”.
When Dave Winer snaps an iPhone photo in the Palo Alto Apple store, I see his Twitter/image post and also note, based on her earlier Tweet, that @StephAgresta is in the store at the same time. @SamHarrelson then notices that Dave might have captured @StephAgresta in his iPhone shot of the Apple store. I then see Stephanie twitter about a happenstance meeting in the Apple store with Dave, Robert Scoble and son. I know all these people, but am I watching a personal version of my own external life unfolding in a Twitter stream? Am I watching Dave’s? Robert’s & Patrick’s? Sam’s? Stephanie’s? Later on I notice (from his Twitter wake) that Robert and wife had their new baby and he might have been in the Apple store in connection with that wonderful event!
Now imagine a person walking up to you, whom you may not recognize immediately, saying “hi Dave/Steph, I just noticed from your twitter stream that you were in the PA Apple store and wanted to say ‘hi’ because we were in the same place at the same time. Our twitter streams crossed in time.”
Wow, new types of meetings are happening in today’s silicon valley technology stores … a new dimension to social meshing is occurring based on bridges being created between online and offline lifestreams.
Me. I’m in this place. I’m in this photo. I’m live video streaming you at this moment. I’m playing pool. I’m waiting at the airport. I’m on AirforceOne. I’m pondering my navel. I invented a new drug. I’m at a funeral. I participated in a Senate hearing. I’m blogging. When saying “me” we don’t like saying it into a vacuum, but that’s the way all lifestreams begin. Erupting from a birth-point in time. The spot upon which we first create a social persona and declare “I am me, and you shall learn more”, like some holy writ dug from the sands of ancient lands. In a world of 6 Billion people we are standing up to say “hello world - I am an individual.”
Now lot’s of folks are saying, “ya, but what about ‘them’, all of you ‘me’ focused people. “Them” - those outside our personal sphere, our socio-economic plateau, our comfort zone. “When you focus so much on yourself you ignore all those people around you.” It seems that if you place your thoughts out into the public consciousness one can be labeled “narcissistic” Who knew this would be the response from people who don’t do it, so can’t “get it?” Duh.
I say create a Twitter wake - drop your social seed and watch it sprout. “Me” “We” “Them” will intermingle. This is the power of connected networks of people.
Of course the solution to the “starting in a vacuum” problem above is simply to participate in life offline as well as online. The wetware networks feed your online social existence. Groupings, micro-crowds, followers, friends, whatever you want to call it, the systems of social interaction which we participate in will subsume our individuality to a greater good if we give at least as much as we receive. However, perhaps when we network in person, face-to-face we can talk about something other than “me” or “we”, I’m so tired of hearing “so, what do you ‘do’?”, perhaps we might re-focus a bit and put ourselves into the shoes of “them” and see what that feels like as a community after the “them” concepts we discuss filter back into our online “we” stream.
Filed under Diatribe, Geo-temporal, Microcrowds, Tagclouds, Web Marketing | Comments (7)Emergency Social-Repeater System
Since I first posed the question in April “Has a Twitter emergency alert system been built yet?”, I’ve noted that several other people have pondered the same concept. Some examples are here, here and here.
It has already been substantiated that when an emergency occurs almost anywhere in the world, the first notification of the event occurs online among socially connected individuals using systems like Twitter.
Social groups of loosely aggregated individuals with similar interests, microcrowds as I’ve been calling them, or groupings as Stowe Boyd calls them, seem like an ideal communication channel for use in emergency situations. Microcrowds overlap and each have “pack leaders” or “social seeds” with deep downstream social connections in the form of followers or friends. The leaders in these groups are generally highly connected through the use of communication hardware like WAP phones and laptops with EVDO connections so highly important information can flow through the #microcrowd channel in near real-time.
If Chris Messina’s concept of #hashmarks as an impromptu channel creation methodology is adopted in Twitter, then perhaps this can also be used to create a repeater system that binds together the alpha leaders of the largest social groupings and emergency response teams, thereby using the massive redundancy of social nets to ensure that important messages are broadcast far and wide.
Adding geo-context to the emergency message would be an important aspect to consider. Temporal-context would also need to be applied so that as the message ages, additional information and updates can be properly contextualized along the timeline of the disaster.
As our dated analog systems fall further behind the power and immediacy of social communication perhaps it’s time to propose an emergency social-repeater system, where emergency information can not only flow quickly, but flow to the people and systems which can possibly affect the speed of response teams and mitigate the negative effects of any disaster.
Filed under Geo-temporal, Mashups, Microcrowds | Comments (8)Even Laundry Rooms Twitter Now
Even laundry rooms, like this one at Olin College Twitter now, so are you still waiting to create your own Twitter account?
When two washers, two dryers and a condom machine create content autonomously, broadcasting to the world their temporal status, available, unavailable, I smile because we are finally beginning to see a very granular point of view with web content.
Twitter is about “now” time statements. So LaundryRoom needs to continually ping their followers with updates, but they only ping when the status of a machine changes. The machine has a location that must be described in order to find it and the moment in time in which the machine status changes is important because as everyone knows, washing and drying machines are quite popular in large buildings full of students and you need to be on the ball to get a machine before others do. In this regard, Twitter is a great system to connect with a Laundry Room and a group of student followers.
Micro content regarding the status of machines is beginning to show up everywhere, from parking meters to washing machines, so why are humans so slow to adopt a more systematic organizational structure for geo-temporal tagging their own lives? We tag here and we tag there, and some systems add meta data for us, but overall we don’t yet use a uniform system for tagging our daily interactions with technology on a geo-temporal basis. The reason why this is such an important point to understand is because by adding Time and Place to our electronic trails, we can access our personal history and share what we learned on the journey. We might also pull other real or virtual people into conversations if we enable others to see where we are, when we are there. If my phone broadcasts my GPS signal and tells my friends automatically “hey, come visit me at this location”, even if I’m in a virtual world like SecondLife, the possibilities created are interesting to ponder.
So where Dodgeball has mostly failed to live up to the concept, perhaps other newer, simpler, more automated systems of geo-temporal “shouting” which work at a more fundamental web standards level, can gain some traction in the market and help us all connect more. Or we might simply want to wash our clothes and need to know when a machine is available in our dorm without interrupting our PS3 gaming to walk down the hall. I’d like to reserve the next available open machine….. Thanks Twitter.
Filed under Geo-temporal, Mashups, Web 2.0 | Comment (1)The Importance of Words in Web Navigation
Open API’s ROCK
I’ve written a few posts about Twitter already, fascinated with the simplicity of their pure concept. What a wonderful service, open to new ideas by exposing their API. In my eyes this is very forward looking because the Twitter team is expecting to see not just one community build up around the core service, but many communities. Twitter micro-crowds if you will, where all participants are engaged with the core service and valuable mash-ups. Already there are Twitter geo-location visualizers & user search (which exposes user post time-lines), continuously evolving Twitter books (140 characters at a time), Twitter stand up-comedians etc,. Every micro-crowd is using Twitter in different ways that meet the personal needs of each micro-crowd member.
Growing Pains
The use of Twitter and twitter-like functionality is expanding quickly, so I believe that the Twitter team is receiving a tremendous cacophony of Tweets about ways in which to improve the service. Instead of adding to the noise, I thought I’d add my $0.02 by pointing to a navigation issue that the Twitter team will probably fix shortly. In fact they are probably already planning to make the change, so perhaps I’m being a bit previous.
Why Word Usage Matters
Note the way that I used the last word in that last paragraph above, as “previous” can be defined as “too soon or too hasty”. While I am not an English Major, I was confused about how the Twitter.com service uses “previous” and “next” in navigation on the site. Today when I want to see Tweets that have been posted within the past, I scroll to the bottom of the “now” page, click “Next”, and I land on the page that represents data from my most recent past (page=2) in my “friends” time-line of posts. When I scroll to the bottom of this page I see “previous | next.”
I’m confused by what “previous” and “next” might mean in this context, because where Temporal considerations exist for me as a user I need additional clues in order to know what to do immediately. If I want to see older posts I know that I can probably click “next” and get to older posts, however I need to interpret this. I might also think that “next” will take me back to the next post in Time, the one that was most recently posted on the “now” page.
Words for Temporal Application
Previous and Next are usually a series of predefined linear steps where Time is not involved. Where Time is an important aspect of the user experience we need to add Temporal indicators into our navigation language.
For example, where data is representing “now” or “now-minus-a-few-minutes-hours”, textual navigation might work like this:
“Now and Recent || Older”
or just “Older” because we are probably already viewing data from “now”
And for data representing recent past, textual navigation might work like this:
“Now and Recent || Newer || Older”
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We almost need to invent a new word that means the time-span of “Now and Recent” in order to take into consideration all of the web services which involve a temporal flow of information. Users constantly try to stay abreast of information within a confined but loosely defined time-space prior to moving the information to “archive”, “delete” or “out-of-immediate-awareness” (like the messages that are deep in the past of your recorded chat-stream).
Let’s call it the “now-span” unless someone has a better idea.
It’s fun to make up words 
“X” = ” Now-span ”
Definition: The time-span of “Now including Recent”. “Within a limited recent history, including the present.”
“Y” = ” Now-spanning ”
Definition: To pay attention to geo-temporal events within (X). (i.e. To read a chat post sent to me in San Francisco from Stephanie in New York at 9:16 PST, while simultaneously performing other interactive tasks that are also geo-temporally tagged. Some tasks are completed immediately, others sit for awhile before being addressed)
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