{Cheese and Beans}

In a stunningly transparent example of the hilariously shallow nature of the global geek army spread throughout the internet , I would like to report that whereas I have had a tiny trickle of new Twitter followers in recent days, I have had so many new Google Buzz followers that I don’t know what to do with them.

I’m guessing the focus of the feeding frenzy is going to switch today towards lusting after Windows 7 Mobile Series – the long dumped on “next generation” phone operating system from the Redmond behemoth. The very same analysts, pundits and “technologists” (arf!) that proclaimed the iPhone as the second coming are now roundly denouncing it as old, staid, and decrepit.

Twitter exploded with a thousand technology commentators salivating over Windows 7 Mobile earlier – convulsing to be the first to report its arrival. Why they all had to chip in is anybody’s guess – a bit like cheering “hooray!” thirty seconds after a goal is scored in a football match.

The gadget fanboy crowd both annoy me and amuse me at the same time – it’s like they are all stood in a sweet shop where a new bag of sweets is dropped in through a hole in the roof every so often – and they collectively drop whatever they were eating, and run after the new tasty thing immediately, licking their lips as they go.

Even worse, the fanboy crowd start rumors among themselves about the purported features of new bags of sweets yet to fall… “they say the next bag is made of unicorn wings!”… “oooOOOoo”… “and it cures webbed feet too!”

Ho hum. Perhaps I’m just getting old and cynical. Having already ditched my iPhone, I took one look at the Windows 7 prototype and thought “I bet it doesn’t last until lunchtime on a single charge”.

Yep – I am quite the curmugeon.

In my valentine card for my other half (which I don’t actually agree with buying, but convention forces me to), I wrote “thankyou for putting up with me being such a grumpy old git – signed Mr Grumpy Pants”.

Over the past few days I’ve been thinking a lot about social networks – perhaps triggered by the reaction to my recent post about community, and children. I hinted that social networking was in many ways a part of the problem with modern society, and the breaking down of community.

Take Facebook for example. While on the surface Facebook enables you to keep in touch with friends far and wide – and allows discovery of friends from the distant past, it does not mirror real world communities. Facebook only serves the discovery and interaction with existing friends. It is insular. In the vast majority of cases it relies on the real world as a feeder mechanism – therefore you are far less likely to befriend strangers. You have no neighbours, no postman, no milkman, no boy or girl delivering your paper.

If Facebook is insular, you might imagine Twitter is the opposite – with your posts being dropped directly into the firehose with millions of others. The story Twitter would like you to believe is that the community will embrace you based on the value of the content you share. The truth is that given a large enough network, any meaningful communication on Twitter dies. You might liken it to situations in the real world – a small group of people in a room can each have a voice, and be heard. A larger group of people – in a football stadium perhaps – can still communicate with their immediate neighbours – only on Twitter everybody is heard by everybody, and therefore everybody stops listening.

It seems rather strange in this “connected” world – especially when I work on the corporate coal face of the IT industry – that I should be pondering the failures of the technology I use, rely on, and am helping to drive the adoption of.

There is a famous term, repeated endlessly – that modern communication methods have made the world smaller. Who would have imagined we would also have become more distant ?

While tinkering with some Javascript earlier, it occurred to me that it would be easy to rip the various users I follow from Twitter, and display a rogue’s gallery of sorts. Each picture links through to the Twitter page. Enjoy!

(p.s. while doing it, I noticed that Twitter only let you grab the last 300 – nothing I can do about that, sorry…)

"http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/48376122/Photo_37v_bigger.jpg" height="73" alt="nicholaspatten" width="73" /> c="http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/560184928/IconForWeb_bigger.jpg" height="73" alt="martharotter" width="73" /> height="73" alt="nbrochunb" width="73" /> dth="73" />

I gained access to the Google Wave beta earlier today, and logged in with quite some excitement. If you’ve not heard about Google Wave yet, you have either been living under a stone, or you have a life – you know, a real life, like normal people. I burst through the doors, and while not expecting anything in particular, I didn’t quite expect what I saw.

Tumbleweed blew by. I’m not joking.

Google Wave is designed to aid collaboration – and my admittedly (purposely) minimal past experience of “collaborating” had a key feature – other people. I felt like the kid who was told to check out the swimming pool on the roof, and was then shut on the fire escape.

Perhaps I’m a victim of my own enthusiasm for the proliferation of social tools sweeping the internet at the moment. Those of us with a curious bent will no doubt have explored Tumblr, Friendfeed, Identica, and Twitter. The rest of the connected world is only just getting it’s head around Facebook.

Facebook has a bell shaped experience curve. In the first few days of membership, people request the world and it’s dog as friends. They then discover the “applications” and waste 23 hours of each day completing movie quizes, throwing cakes at each other, or attempting to talk like a pirate. Their social graph eventually drops off when they discover Farmville, and their own family don’t see them again.

I sometimes wonder what the current “new generation” on the internet would have made of IRC and Usenet. IRC, or “Internet Relay Chat” still exists of course – providing a wonderful back channel to the advertising laden idiocracy that pervades the world wide web.

There seems to be a danger inherent in all forms of “social media” – that you may end up spending so much time cultivating, feeding and managing the various relationships you build that your time in the virtual world eventually exceeds the time you spend in the “real world”.

A news report on the television caught my attention while making dinner last night – asking if people could survive without their mobile phones. They were met with horror struck gasps and laughter at the clearly preposterous idea. I noticed they only asked women.

Is it so preposterous though?

Has social media improved or damaged our lives?

Wendy took delivery of her first “smartphone” earlier today – a Blackberry 8520 “Curve”. To say she is happy is something of an understatement; she’s been living with my old Nokia K800 for the last few months – putting up with it’s crashing, dropping of calls, and general crankiness.

I’ve been helping her figure out how the Blackberry works this evening – which in reality meant getting other things working – Facebook, and Twitter SMS. Seeing her face light up when a message arrived from Facebook was great.

Having now used the iPhone and the Curve, I am glad I have the iPhone, but the Curve works great too. It doesn’t have some of the nicer functionality, like CalDAV synchronisation (meaning no Google Calendar sync), but it will at least sync with the Mac via bluetooth with a little help from TheMissingSync.

I’ve ordered an 8Gb microSD card for the Blackberry. I can’t imagine what Wendy will fill it with, but I’m sure she will. I’ve seen how many applications she runs at once on her poor Macbook.

We just have to wait now for Orange to download updated settings when the account updates (on the 10th apparently), which should give her instant messaging, a browser that works, and push email. You may not think these things are important, but when you’re ferrying three kids between schools, arranging playdates, organising parent teacher meetings, brownies, and all manner of other craziness, a smartphone is a pretty essential thing to have in your pocket…