What to wear (Seesmic), what to scorn (GPS, Rogers), and what you’ll read

WEAR THESE:
Seesmic and 12seconds.tv
Video interaction isn’t for everyone but it is desperately fashionable to have at least tried it. Seesmic is video conversation. It is a small but now fairly well-formed community that includes every age and ability from peepaws to fidgets, hackers to luddites. Deepak Chopra and Harrison Ford have both made appearances so it must be important. I only use it with my dog Jesus as my avatar. Magicalpowermako (a masterful Seesmic poster) uses disturbing puppets. So, grab your kitty or your toilet and join the debate about shirtless posting.

12seconds is like Seesmic with a 12 second time limit. I prefer these short bursts because poorly-lit talking heads reminds me of my childhood without cable TV. It has a teeny-weeny user base so it is very easy to join 12seconds and make friends and become a top poster.

Indenti.ca
The biggest critique of Twitter it that it does not follow the Open Micro Blogging protocol. You know, Twitter is down with THE MAN. Here comes sweet little Canadian Identi.ca to the rescue. Open source and portable it is the first Twitter clone to actually do something Twitter can’t.

Friendfeed
Once you have joined Seesmic and Identi.ca you can use Friendfeed to unite these services and any of your walled gardens into one open conversation. Offering dozens of network combinations and the ability to reply within the Friendfeed stream makes it more useful than merely a feed aggregator. Think of it as the mouth where all the disparate network streams flow together into one hot tech mess.

ESCHEW THESE:
Plurk
A Twitter-clone with a timeline and karma (!?) points. Blech. I abandoned yoga for pilates because of karma-talk crap. I certainly don’t need to get it from my socialnet.

GPS Anything
Location-aware applications on the iPhone are are taking off, but because I am Canadian and all out of organs I can’t enjoy it, thanks to Rogers. So I expect everyone to lay off using GPS so I don’t fall behind. I actually want ads sent to my phone from the stores I am walking past. And to see people as they use Twitter (I still won’t talk to them but it would be neat).

Weekly Anti-Rogers Tangent: Rogers has also hijacked all their ISP customers’ fail-to-load pages so they re-route you to their own ad-filled page. So now if you type in a URL incorrectly you get Rogers. There are ways around this but few will bother. I want my fail page back, unmolested!

OVERVIEW OF FUTURE TECH BLOG STORIES:
Blogging is so over.

Blogging is 100 percent of journalism.

Product X is the new Twitter.

Google’s method of “Build it and they will come and make us money” will/won’t work for socialnets.

Google is buying/destroying Digg/Yahoo/Microsoft/Product X.

Mobile computing with the iPhone etc. is overblown.

OVERVIEW OF MY OWN TECH BLOGGING FUTURE:
Men/Colonialism/Luddites/Ahistoricity is evil and roar! monsters make me tweet ack ack bonkers.

Tags: google, mobile web, social network sites, tech trends, twitter fail, yc combinator

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Posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 5:46 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.