One Thing They Haven't Changed Yet

It's never nighttime on the Starship Enterprise. They very rarely beam themselves onto a planet's surface to find it's the dead of night and everyone's sleeping. Come to think of it, who are the people on the other shifts, and why isn't the First Officer the one to man the ship when the Captain is sleeping? ...


2:35 am. Laptop boots but Skype still churning, nothing seems to be online. In that half-funk between sleep and psyching yourself into presentation mode, I hobble over to the router. No blinking lights. Pick up the phone. No phone line.

On the one hand, you can't really blame the ISP for choosing 2 am as a good time to do standard maintenance. On the other hand, I'm supposed to be speaking to Tokyo, Sydney and Mumbai at 3 am.

Fast forward 20 minutes, an all-night coffee shop, after ordering some decaf to pay my rent, hooked in with my laptop, earphones and mic.

"We're getting a little background noise," says our host in the US.

"I'm having a few technical difficulties, sorry I can't do much about that," I answer. I've asked the waitresses to turn down the background music, but there's not much I can do about the coffee grinder and putting up the chairs to mop the floors.

While I narrate, my colleague shows the demo from his laptop, in his home, 30 kilometers from my coffee shop. The host in the States and some unknown people in the Far East ask questions, and 40 minutes later we're through. It went well.

Looking 2 tables over, I wonder about the lone geek with his laptop. What's his excuse at 4 am? I go home.

The host has thanked us several times for being flexible for the international sales meetings. We tell her this is infinitely better than having to fly to other time zones.

Truthfully, there really is very little in life that beats international web or video conferences for just general coolness. There's something about having 20 people from 12 countries in a virtual room together, speaking to one another and asking questions. You'd think by now the cool would have worn out, but no matter how many times I do these calls, it just cools me out all over again...

On Starship Enterprise, nobody seems to think it's even the least bit cool to talk to beings from different planets or to just beam yourself around.

When someone teleports in, the host never says: "How is your spacelag? Gosh, what time IS it on your planet?". Of course, the answer would be something like "It's 37 minues past the hour, " because on any given planet, it's every hour, but it's the same minute, everywhere, except in those weirdo time zones that are half-hours. Or where they don't have minutes.

Nobody wears a watch in space, because there's no time of day. Indeed, there's no standard length of day. You have to start wondering what kinds of work shifts they have to work out, with all kinds of different beings whose bodies are adapted to different sleep patterns. I'd be really surpised if any other planet came up with a standard of 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day...


Anyway, even if I can't time-shift, I can sleep-shift, and I can location-shift. Thank goodness for all-night coffee shops.

Here a tweet, there a tweet.

I have to confess, I'm a sporadic tweeter. Some days I'll be on twitter regularly, reading all your tweets, and tweeting a bit on my own. Some days I'll just follow a few people. Most days, to be perfectly honest, I just can't be bothered.

It's easier to admit this behavior because it's quite obvious at this point that many people are occasional tweeters. You see it all the time, a sudden spurt of 5 or 10 tweets in a day, then for a week, nothing.

Or then there are the occasional tweeters, who put up a tweet every week or two. I'd ask what the point of that is, but actually, those are people I probably will never un-follow, since they are no trouble.

In fact, I don't see myself changing my habits any time soon. When I am on twitter, it's on days when I don't have a lot to do, and it's nice to see what the latest geek-speak is.

The true mystery is that even when I've been off for a couple of weeks, I don't get that feeling like I "missed" something important and can't follow the new conversation. On the other hand, I feel like when I am reading the tweets, I am getting information I needed. Truly mysterious.

I suppose it's no different than what Yossi Vardi discovered with ICQ: being in communication is a basic human need. Wherever the conversation is, it brings us human value to be part of it. Apparently, the business value is secondary, and comes mainly as part of the "being in communication" rather than some specific tweets that you just can't miss.

Annual FB Birthday Report

As another birthday passes me by, I am overjoyed to report that. like last year, I got lots of birthday greetings. Unlike last year, I really know almost all of the people who greeted me on FB or by email. I didn't get even one birthday tweet, which I also consider "in good taste". Twitter doesn't seem the right forum to get or give birthday greetings.

Two main trends appeared this year. One is that I got fewer greetings. I don't know about you, but as I have more and more friends and contacts, it becomes more difficult to check in and birthday greet everyone every day. So I definitely got fewer greetings than last year, but the ones I got were a bit more meaningful, that is, from people that I feel more warmth towards.

The other change noted was that social networking, for some people, has become a substitute for real relationships. I saw a griping youtube clip on this a couple of years ago, saying that FB is for people who don't want to talk to you. In other words, if I don't want to talk to you, I can send you a Hatching Egg or an e-card, and I got out of my obligation to actually speak to you on my birthday.

I am sure lots of people wanted to talk to me and just couldn't get through because my phone was busy talking to the people who did get through. Almost all of my good friends had the good taste to actually call. Those who didn't probably forgot my birthday, which in my book, is totally cool. I don't usually tell anyone my birthday either, so if you don't pay attention to Plaxo or Facebook, I expect you to forget.

Unfortunately, in a few cases, this year, I definitely identified a few cases of people who left two-word wall postings because they were too cheap, too busy, or just didn't want to call. I'm not really insulted by that. It's just a trend, from my perspective, towards people becoming further from the people that they had originally intended to be closer to.

Baggage Check

I sent my daughter, aged 10, to the US to visit her grandparents. On the way back, she goes through the usual routine.

First the security officer asks her if she prefers Hebrew or English. She says she doesn't care, so he asks her in Hebrew, "Who packed your bags?"

"What?" He repeats the question in English, but she still gives him a look like: "What?" Grandma explains they packed together.

"Did anyone give you anything to bring back with you?" (She's just spent 3 weeks with grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins.)

"Yes."

And so it goes. Apparently she did manage to pass security despite the suspicious gifts of girly toys, clothing, Webkinz, and Hershey's shower gel (don't ask).

I guess, at the end, she understood why she was asked those silly questions. I wonder how many times it will take before she figures it out and does the same as all of the rest of us. That is, if asked if anyone gave her anything, she'll say "No", irregardless of how many presents were showered on her by grandparents.

Come to think of it, shouldn't it arouse suspicions when someone travels to family and tells security that nobody gave them anything to bring back? What kind of cheap family do you have? You came all the way out here and they didn't give you ANYTHING?

How about over Christmas break? If you traveled somewhere for Christmas, and you tell the security guy that nobody gave you anything to bring back, shouldn't that arouse suspicion? Shouldn't you be immediately detained for resisting the authorities?

It's time we put an end to this rampant lawlessness. From now on, when we get to the airport, we should give detailed lists of each and every person who gave us something and what they gave us. If we all join the truthfulness campain, we could probably increase the required personnel by 20%, doing our part to combat global unemployment.

A tweet on twitter

I had my Tweetdeck open one morning, and it was making those faint tweeting sounds, as it is wont to do. My son walks in the room and says "What's that sound?"

"It's Twitter," I answered.

"It's annoying."

Amazing how an 8-year-old can sum up my Twitter experience in just 14 characters.

Untweetable

The first time I read about someone giving up their RSS feeds for Twitter feeds was about a month ago. I recovered from the shock quickly, but am not likely to make the move. Ever.

Twitter is an instant-gratification machine. No doubt, I have found articles and information on Twitter before it appears on RSS, and I've gotten info I would have not found otherwise. However, the main drawback of Twitter is that it's happening NOW. If I have a busy day and want to catch up, Twitter simply is not going to offer me a solution. If I want to catch up on just what's important to me, again, Twitter and its accompanying clients are inadequate.

RSS feeds are far superior for batch-mode newsing. I've got the key information under more than one category (tag) so I can quickly see what I've missed. RSS automatically displays at a glance what I usually read and what I usually ignore (427 unread posts -- obviously something I don't care much about).

And threading, where would I be without threading? On Twitter, of course.

Other than my personal preference, though, I have to ask myself what it means when so many people are talking about Twitter as an alternative to other news sources. Truthfully, if you are more than 200 tweets behind, you aren't going to catch up on your tweets. In other words, if you sleep or have meetings, you start to fall behind. If you don't tweet on the sabbath (hey, some of us don't), you miss information.

One issue with this is what it means culturally, when you have a group of people who basically have committed themselves to almost-constant connectivity. On top of that, it's non-threaded connectivity. This marks a major change in attention span. Firstly, if it's not happening now, it's not happening. Secondly, if you are online in this way, you are constantly dealing with interruption. Any task that requires more than half an hour of concentration is a challenge.

In other words, you are wasting a tremendous amount of time. I've seen a lot of apologists about how Twitter is useful for business, and how twitterers are more effective, etc. I don't find that particularly likely.

The main issue, in my eyes, is what something like Twitter does to the culture. What does it do for the culture when you need to be updated all the time, and anything that happened over 2 hours ago is passe? What does it mean that if you go to sleep, you are missing several hours of your important updates? Moreover, how can you enjoy anything when you need constant update?

I use twitter, a couple of minutes a day, usually, and definitely no more than half an hour a day. Let my friends say I'm old-fashioned or out-of-date. Me and my RSS will just have to live with it.

@shidurey vs. @ynet_co_il

Firstly, my apologies that this post is not in Hebrew. If the title caught your eye, it's a sign that Hebrew is probably your native language, but it's not mine. Take my word for it that you'd rather read my English than my Hebrew.

Secondly, I want to clarify that I am very fond of @yosit and @liorz. Their broadcasts are fun, smart, sometimes silly, and surprisingly entertaining. If anything, the experimental broadcasts prove that being real and having a compelling personality holds an audience regardless of the value of the content.

Still, the @shidurey vs. @ynet_co_il challenge is just a bit sillier than usual, so I felt compelled to comment.

Background: Yosi and Lior decided that they can get more followers @shidurey than @ynet_co_il. @shidurey, so far, doesn't broadcast much of anything other than news on this silly competition. @ynet_co_il is a bot put up by someone anonymous, to tweet the feed from ynet.co.il, the top news site in Israel. @ynet_co_il in fact says he/she/it isn't associated with ynet, so when you get to the profile, your inclination to follow the feed immediately dissipates. @shidurey, otoh, is friendly and funny and says it's run by some real people.

@shidurey passed its competition a day or two ago, and now has almost 800 users and @ynet_co_il has over 600. The race is apparently to 1000.

I started searching around and found some interesting tidbits, in no particular order:

• @ynet_co_il came alive and encouraged people to follow it, claiming that bots have feelings too.
  
• @nana10News, @nrgnews and @newsfromisrael are plugging for @ynet_co_il but even combined they have fewer followers than I do.
  
• In general, news sites in Israel don't have impressive followings. Haaretz (in English) has over 1300.
  
• It's unclear whether ynet knows this is going on, because their search engine is pitiful, but from browsing the site, it appears they are oblivious.
  

On the one hand, it seems like an unfair fight: A twitter ID with nothing to say against the top news feed.

On the other hand, it seems like an unfair fight: Two lovable guys with huge followings against a poorly-marketed bot whose feed is coming from an oblivious host.

Obviously, all of the parties benefit by getting increased followers.

Bottom line, as usual, is that this won't prove anything, but I think we are all having fun in the meanwhile.