Five reasons to get Twitter

12:48pm 23 Feb 2012 16 comments

Twitter is huge, no doubt about it, but for many it seems stupid. "Why would I want to hear about people's breakfasts?" they inquire, and so on. Let me attempt to convince you.

1. Interesting people don't just tweet about what they are doing. The only people I follow who just tweet about what they are doing all day are usually doing really interesting things. Most of the 817 Twitter users I follow post interesting links, make funny calls, and generally comment on things I am interested in, be it news or design or advertising. If everyone you are following posts boring stuff, stop following them. It's not like Facebook - you generally have fewer real life friends on there and thus less obligation to follow some random guy you knew in high school. Twitter is for following people you wish were your friends.

2. You don't have to tweet if you don't feel like it. For some reason people feel that just because they have Twitter they have an obligation to tweet five times a day. You can just listen. That is totally fine. My brother had Twitter for months and just checked it to see what his favourite authors/musicians had to say, that is a totally legitimate use. Plus, once you get used to rhythms and tropes of Twitter, you might eventually realise something just happened to you that is totally tweetable.

3. Keeping up with the Kardashians. I don't follow them, but I have a friend who uses Twitter for this sole purpose. Seriously - every celebrity on the sun has a Twitter, and some, I'm talking @50cent and @kanyewest, are both hilarious and insightful. Gossip rags routinely just report Twitter drama these days, so why not bypass the middleman? If you aren't really into those kinds of celebrities, heroes in your industry probably have Twitter too, and they will be tweeting all kinds of things relevant to your field. Authors, scriptwriters, the lot, so many important and interesting people have Twitter now.

4. You will be ridiculously up on it. I can't overstate quite how fast Twitter is. If you wish to be the person who announces huge news to your office/friends, this is the way. Just follow some good insider news people - they are more likely to tweet faster than the official agencies, though if you love them find their "breaking" accounts.

Signing up for a website

08:40am 21 Feb 2012 16 comments

Websites love user accounts. A user with an account can be assumed to come back to the site, and the website manager can pass that on to advertisers, along with all the demographic data collected. You can blast account holders with email too. Signing up for an account is no fun for a user, though. The more fields the worse. I've turned away from countless sites because they want me to take five minutes out of my life to fill in forms that shouldn't have any relevance.

Designers know how much we hate making accounts. They call signups "friction points". A huge amount of people reject sites with screeds of forms to fill in. These days most sites that don't need to send you anything make do with an email address and a password - I remember when you had to tell people your phone number for every account you made. Still more sites let you login with Facebook or Twitter. This works well for the user: we don't have to remember a billion passwords, just the one or two, and we don't have to type a million things in to make an account on a new site.

Some sites really try to hook you in before you have to type stuff in. Dailybooth encourages you to snap a pic before signing up - but then of course if you want to use the picture at all you need to make an account. Ecommerce sites wait till you've filled up a shopping bag with items before asking you to make an account - that's the most annoying. Having my credit card remembered and an email address for the site to spam is barely more convenient for me and much much more valuable to them.

The problem seems to be slowly going away via social media logins, but is that we want? When websites can only be accessed via Facebook sign-in, people get mad. Nearly everyone has a Facebook account, but lots of people like keeping their Facebook identity very separate from all the rest of their logins. Techcrunch apparently got rid of half of its trolls by not allowing comments without a Facebook login - so you can see how the link to someone's real-world identity can be seen as both advantageous and censoring.

What stops you from signing up to a site? Are you more inclined to use a site if you can easily login with your Facebook, or does that annoy you?

TGIF: 1789 Problems edition

01:40pm 17 Feb 2012 6 comments

I have 99 problems, but none of them involve the fact that it is Friday. Here are some links.

* Someone put Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Jay-Z/Kanye West's N***s in Paris together. Adding Hemingway to things generally makes them better.

* The How People See Me/What People Think I Do meme is kind of already old, but here is a roundup.

* I was with you by the first frame of the video (a cat in glasses) but it got a lot better.

* Who is this Bonny Bear guy anyway, and why did he win best new artist?

A weekend away from the internet

10:21am 14 Feb 2012 6 comments

I don't need to tell you all how disgustingly addicted I am to the internet - I get enough comments about that. I love that if something important happens anywhere in the world it is likely I will know about it rather fast. Blah blah blah get out more blah blah, most of the time it's checking a few things on my phone or I'm at work.

Anyway, my point is I didn't go online from last Thursday to Monday. I was at Camp A Low Hum, (CALH) and I had my phone but decided to leave it off. I didn't miss it until the drive home, when I started to wonder if anything major had happened. Whitney Houston was the only big news I seem to have missed, along with about half of the Grammys.

Usually I would feel pretty disconnected from my friends if I was offline all weekend - most of our night-time plans happen via group Facebook chat, but of course I was with half of them at the festival anyway. CALH had even created a "real Twitter room" (see photo) where I could scrawl how much I was enjoying so and so on a Post-it note. I didn't end up actually using real Twitter, but it was hella funny.

I kind of wanted to tweet a few times, mostly to #humblebrag a little about amazing, amazing music (Hngghh + more hnghh) but it was never a real compulsion. My cellphone camera is horrible; I was taking plenty of pictures on my DSLR but you can't upload them straight away, so there was none of that "look how cool the place I am at is" tweets that needed sending.

Coming back on Monday, the internet was of course better than ever, filled with op-eds/blog posts/Cracked lists for me to gorge on. I only really do it when I go away with friends or family - even when I'm out all weekend I like to check Twitter in the morning, but having a little time away from the Internet can be a glorious thing.

Your morning tabs

12:40pm 07 Feb 2012 40 comments

There a few pleasures in life as recklessly 21st century as five tabs simultaneously loading, while you sip your coffee and pick morning music. Granted, we don't all go on the internet in the morning - many of us first get online at work/school, and some wait until they get home in the evening. Some people don't even go online most days, but those people probably aren't reading this blog anyway.

I would guess quite a few people load their email, a few news sites, and a social network or two first up. But what else, and which ones? I open the usual suspects, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, gmail, Stuff, NYTimes, but it also gets a bit more specific to me, Techmeme, Pandodaily, AdWeek, and ShortFormBlog. Truly, without the middle click (if you didn't know - the middle click opens links in new tabs. Try it.) this would be a painful experience.

I used to be all about the RSS feeds in my Google reader, but now I pretty much only use RSS for work, Twitter seems to have replaced what I used to use it for. I also used to read TechCrunch every day, but its quality has deteriorated due to the loss of some important writers. I used to read the Guardian too, but NYTimes has slowly replaced that.

So which news sites are you all about in the morning? Do you avoid Facebook early on or check it immediately? Are there specific blogs that you find important enough to check immediately? Or are you maybe more spartan in your immediate use, checking your email before closing your browser to do some serious work? If so, whoa. Does being at work change what tabs you immediately open?