I love that my non-twittering friends are now not only privy to my tweets (a dubious privilege, indeed) but able to respond at length without having to join Twitter themselves.
Not only this: they’re now able to converse with one another in the course of commenting. This is gold. When they said Buzz was like writing a message without a “To:” I wondered initially how that was different from Twitter or a Facebook update. I get it now.
With Buzz I can do what I thought I’d be able to do with Wave before I used it and got confused, frustrated, and finally bored.
I haven’t checked on my Wave account in months (has it been months?) but I’ve checked in on Buzz a dozen times already, not counting the emails (are they emails?) that alerted me via my Android phone that someone had commented on something in Buzz.
Of course I’ve checked in a bunch of times: it’s email. We all have email. Specifically, we all have Gmail.
If Wave has failed to take off it’s because it’s
in need of some enterprising gang (Basecamp, can you hear me?) to build a killer app on top of it so we don’t have to Wave in the raw and
requires another signup and the inconvenience that comes with migration.
By anchoring in Gmail, Buzz removes signup and migration pain in one step. And it’s got just enough functionality to make it interestingly messy, but not enough to overwhelm.
Buzz isn’t perfect right now but I won’t get into my quibbles with it because they’re boring, obvious, and probably already fixed and being tested as I write this. And I won’t say “this will fundamentally change email” because prognostications are just as boring as complaints.
But I will say that I think sharing stuff on the internet with my friends just became a little bit easier and therefore made the internet a little bit more fun.
There were a couple of reasons I quit using it, the least of which was the delay between my sharing the item in GReader and its appearing in Twitter. I never knew when a post I shared would be tweeted and for some reason that bothered me. I think I was afraid that I’d be in the middle of a really witty exchange someday and be interrupted by some asinine thing that hours prior I’d thought was worth showing around (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
But the main thing that made me dump Twitterfeed was the lack of context. Soon after I found out that it would tweet just the (shortened) link preceded by the headline I found that my sharing behaviour changed. For a number of days I shared only posts whose value was self-evident.
I told myself I was actually becoming a more selective GReader sharer, that the quality of my feed was improved for having the burden of a larger subsidiary audience. But this was not actually true.
What I’d become was a highly impersonal sharer, pointing at posts but saying nothing while at the same time trying to limit my sharing only to posts whose value was self-evident. In short, I had become intentionally obvious, which is a polite way of saying “boring”.
The value of GReader isn’t just the eclectic mix of posts you get to read by following your friends and others who share what they’re reading. It’s the ability to easily editorialize that makes it so compelling. Because GReader users can comment on the stories they share (and on the stories their friends share) they’re able to offer more than just a cool link: they’re offering context in which to appreciate the value of that link.
Seeing someone’s GReader shares through Twitterfeed is like watching Seth Godin give a talk without the sound on. You can see he’s saying something, but you’re constantly wondering, “Why are you showing me this?”
Can I truly be interested in everything all of the time?
There are two kinds of things I want to know about right now:
things that are important, world-shaping, and deserve my immediate attention, and
things of very little value that aren’t going to have any value at all unless I know about them when they happen.
Twitter serves up both equally well and at exactly the same rate. Is that a problem?
We’re all guilty of boring our families with diatribes against the 6 o’clock news when they jump from coverage of violent revolution in some temperate clime to the discovery of a family of squirrels that resemble various ex-presidents. But left to our own 3G devices are we any better? What would “better” look like? More sombre? Serious? Erudite? The opposite of frivolous?
I’ve been watching the Twitter stream on Iran’s crooked election today and found myself by turns horrified and inspired. But I’ve also kept up with friends. I’ve had a nap. For dinner I had leftover curry with a cold beer. I’ve listened to Queen.
I don’t have any profound moral conclusion to draw at this point (and I hope for the sake of the readership of this blog I never do). But I wonder whether, as the power to filter information shifts downstream, our increasing responsibility for the use of our own attention comes with a moral imperative to attend to certain things that wouldn’t be otherwise accessible, or is this just a transition towards people acting more like themselves?
We Datachondrians have been worrying about what’s going to happen at parties now that digital media is rendering shelving obsolete and with it the joy of browsing and passing casual judgment on every party’s hosts. So far we’ve had only a bright idea or two about what might replace shelves full of CDs or books in this very strange but important social space.
We’re still coming up short of anything exactly equivalent to being interrupted while deploying the next tactic in the strategic seduction of the girl in your building who you’ve run into in the laundry room enough times to have made possible an invitation to this very happening shindig of yours by your guffawing brother-in-law waving your copy of REO Speedwagon’s greatest hits.
Today Apple released iTunes 8.1 and with it a feature they’re calling iTunes DJ. On the surface it looks like all they’ve done is rename the Party Shuffle smart playlist but they’ve also added functionality that allows the playlist to be manipulated by anyone with the remote app for the iPhone or iPod Touch. Not only can your guests browse your entire music collection as judgmentally as ever, but they can also vote for the next song to be played — and if they really can’t stand the present state of tunage they can interrupt the song currently playing.
I’ve held off from the iPhone for a while now, but with the way Apple keeps adding fun new ways to use the device I can see it might soon be time to give in.
When you’re young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you’re single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important.
We surround ourselves with books and other cultural objects not only because we enjoy them and may wish to enjoy them again. They also help us to moor ourselves — to remind us of the identities that we have constructed for ourselves; to delineate those identities to others; to remind us of the arduous processes we’ve undergone to create and solidify our cultural perspectives. Cultural objects actually come to embody us if we allow them to. We arrange our book collections — consciously or unconsciously — to show a side of ourselves to others and back to ourselves.
What’s true of books can be even more true of music, which is more explicitly public. Music, obviously, transforms the atmosphere around you, both figuratively and literally. Unless your sole experience of music is by headphones, your visitors and friends are exposed to your music regardless of their own preferences or interests. Music selection at a party is as critical a part of the activity as planning food and inviting the appropriate mix of people. While displaying your books — just like prominently reading Gravity’s Rainbow on the subway — is public manifestation of a (usually) private activity, listening to music is always, by default, public.
What better way to show off your superlative cultural taste than to have your guests literally stand in it?
This is why, I think, the digitization of music risks losing an important element — the ability to have one’s music collection available for the browsing of visitors. Without LP bins or CD shelves, how might a casual browser chance upon something that showcases your cultural identity?
Fortunately, we already have a model for this. It’s been around for decades, and it has served as a model for the iTunes GUI for some years.
Bolt a high endvirtual surround source to the screen, and you’ve got a one-panel touch-screen media centre. Naturally, you’re already using an iPhone as the remote control, so why not employ it to calibrate the system to the room? Sync it to the unit and follow the instructions to stand a little to the left, a little to the right, hold it, point iPhone at the screen, away, got it, and voila, reflecting surround sound calibrated without employing anything as cumbersome and wasteful as a cheap single-use proprietary microphone.
Note that the virtual surround effect works best if your walls are free of clutter, i.e. shelves full of books and CDs.
It’s the perfect fusion of a classy consumer product and a cultural need. We surround ourselves with cultural works not just because they speak to us — about their authors, about our memories, about who we were when we experienced them for the first time — and because they speak to others about us. Locking all your stuff in your hard drive obscures this. But technology should enable all aspects of our relationships to culture, not only those that we think are most obvious.
I stopped using 
Today Apple released iTunes 8.1 and with it a feature they’re calling 