Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

  • Twitter Annotations are going to change your life

    While the news of Twitter Annotations has been around for quite a while, it was announced at Chirp in April, outside of a geeky developer audience it hasn’t captured the imagination of the Twitter global echo-chamber. For me the potential of Annotations could mean, for Twitter, this changes everything. Again. At the same time it could lead to a lot of divergence and confusion in the client marketplace.

    Twitter Annotations allow metadata to be delivered along with a tweet, that is additional structured data outside of the 140 character limit. Now some Tweet metadata already exists, such as geolocation and a specific tweet you may be replying to and there is also some unstructured user created metadata such as #hashtags and @replies. Twitter Annotations is going to allow developers through the API to deliver any form of structured metadata they want to.

    How it looks inside the machine

    For the technical inclined the Annotation format is going to look something like

    [{type1 => {attribute1 => val1, attribute2 => val2, ..... attributen => valn}},

    {type2 => {attributen+1 => valn+1 ... }},

    ......

    ]

    For the not technically inclined, this means that a tweet can contain a number of keys and values, grouped into a type of attribute. For example if you were watching the awesome Argentina v Germany match. You might send a tweet like this, that Tweet may contain an attribute like:

    Screen shot 2010-07-05 at 08.46.23

    [{"world cup match" => {"round" => "Quarter Final", "home_team" => "Germany", "away_team" => "Argentina", "home_score" => "4", "away_score" => "0", minutes => "89"}]

    This information is very unlikely to be entered by the user Tweeting but instead added by the client dynamically depending on the context of how it is being used, much like how a mobile Twiiter application will use GPS to insert your current location into a Tweet at the moment (random statistic as of late last year only 0.23% of tweets were geotagged.) You could easily see how a BBC iPlayer Live Twitter application, or Google TV Twitter application could add that data while watching a match.

    How this data is then used depends if the receiving client (or website) knows about that annotation format and what it means. In the Tweet above I added some metadata using the unstructured format that is the #hashtag, by adding #ger Twitter have displayed a little German flag, a nice touch but you could see how this data can be expanded to provide awesome insight and commerce potential. Twitter have said annotation tracking will be supported in the Streaming API and likely in the Search API which means in the example above, a site or app will be able to collect and display all the tweets of people watching that match or TV programme (combine that with some demographics analysis and you could get an awesome contextual advertising)

    Changing everything

    Now the example above is quite complex but it could be as simple as including metadata for a link to a website article you are Tweeting about, saving those valuable characters and making link shorteners less relevant. It could also include an image or video URL to be shown inline in a Tweet. The possibilities are quite literally limitless.

    And it is those limitless possibilities that also cause the problems. For Twitter Annotations to be relevant, they need to be produced by and application and consumed by a Twitter client in the same way. This could lead to a free-for-all of competing standards and markup. Twitter have announced they will do no annotation “validation” on their side, but they will lead by example and have already published some recommendations for recommended types. The annotation structures that “win” will likely be a darwinistic process driven by the crowd depending on usefulness and adoption by popular clients. Twitter will need to get this right for annotations to be successful and plan to publish an Annotations “explorer” with statistics of most used, most adopted and trending annotations to identify “winners”.

    What we are likely to see first

    Twitter’s recommended types give us an indication of what the first use cases will be:
    Read full post

  • My name is Tim Malbon, and I am a Soreen Addict

    I’ve been meaning to post thanks and share my exciting Soreen unboxing moment. Yup, *amazingly*, the good people who look after Soreen’s PR sent me a hamper of malty goodies for my birthday recently.

    Yes, they sent it addressed to “@Malbonster”. Nice touch.

    I say “amazingly” because along with some other fans of ‘the dark loave of malty fruitfulness’ (notably @SaulPims) I initiated an experiment…

    Read full post

  • Our Digital World: A Snapshot

    I did a quick poll via Twitter and email last week to see what sites, services and apps some of the people I know are using in their daily lives. These are of course likely to change as more and more services make their appearance (or, as I sometimes wickedly dream in the case of Facebook, slowly die), but for now I notice some clear trends:

    News sites will continue to be a key source of information, even as print fights for survival

    BBC News, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Dallas Morning News, Al Jazeera, News24, the Daily Mail and the Sun were the most commonly visited sites amongst respondents to my poll, with the BBC and Guardian clearly leading the pack. Smaller, more local sites still have their audience amongst people who have an affiliation to those areas. News sites found a mention by all respondents, so whatever happens to print magazines, their digital avatars are here to stay. As the Times prepares to go behind a paywall, it will be interesting to see how they respond to the changes in the behaviour of their audience – something that is bound to happen.

    the times

    Social networking is going nowhere but up, and Facebook still leads

    Much as we may love to hate Facebook, everyone continues to use it. Accessing Facebook via the mobile phone is something that, as Facebook themselves say, is on the rise, as 1/4th of their 400 million+ users visit the site via their phones. Twitter is right up there with Facebook, and Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, LiveJournal and Delicious also found a mention.

    Gaming sites are an advertising opportunity being missed

    Eurogamer and Gamepro, sites which I’ve never heard of as a female not too much into gaming, emerged as two sites mentioned by a few of the respondents whom I know to be young British males. I thought that was quite an interesting piece of information, and having taken a look at the sites in question, I noticed that the only products being advertised are more games. I can’t help thinking that there’s an opportunity completely being missed by brands whose target audience is this demographic, such as Lynx or Axe, or even consumer electronics brands. As Gamepro clearly states, of their primarily young male audience 80%  plan to buy a laptop and 60% plan to buy other consumer electronics in the next 6 months.

    gamepro ad

    Google continues to rule the Search domain

    Literally and figuratively, that is. There was absolutely no other search engine mentioned. Sorry Yahoo!, sorry Microsoft. I wasn’t very surprised, because have Yahoo! or Microsoft given us the sheer joy of being able to play Pacman lately? No, they have not :)

    Other (not as remarkable) conclusions include Tweet Deck and Tweetie being the most commonly used Twitter apps and Google Reader being the feed reader of choice.

    Of course these conclusions are based on a very limited pool of respondents, but I find it helpful to do this every now and then to have a reality check. Much as I like Diaspora, for example, I don’t really think Facebook is in too much danger yet, and as I found with the gaming example, sometimes we overlook simple things.

  • Too many tweets, but who’s the twat now?

    The past five days have contained two of the more epic social media fails in recent history. Most of us remember last year’s Skittles fail — the one where the brand reworked their homepage to display a live and unmoderated Twitter stream of every tweet hashtagged #skittles.

    It was a bold act, but an epic fail — as soon as the public realised what was going on, they started hashtagging all sorts of things #skittles… and all sorts of non-rainbow of fruit flavours content landed on the Skittles homepage. It was a brave move, but a foolish one, and the brand quickly took the tweet stream down.

    Nestle’s big social media don’t

    Last week, Nestle opened themselves up to goofy comments, vitriolic — if comedic –criticism and ultimately, brand slaughter with an unmoderated, totally public Facebook page. Unsurprisingly, the brand page (fan page?!) very quickly turned into a Wall of Hate. It’s not the smartest move for a brand that has attracted its share of criticism from some very outspoken groups. It’s even less intelligent given the whole Skittles fiasco. So what gives, Nestle? Did you think they wouldn’t find you? That greenies and breastfeeding advocates don’t use Facebook? Lo, they do, and they’re as happy to speak up here as they are in rallies and on their own blogs:

    “It’s not ok for people to use altered versions of ur logos, but it’s ok for u to alter the face of Indonesian rainforest”

    To their credit, the brand did post that it was ‘learning social media as we go’… but with an angry audience kicking forth gems like the above, it shouldn’t have taken long for the message to sink it. Alas, no: the site is still live and attracting flak.

    Along comes Cash Gordon

    If you’ve been under a rock or off the grid for the past few hours, you may have missed Cash Gordon, a Conservative fail so epic, so swift, and likely so catastrophic as to qualify as a nuclear fail. Read full post

  • South by round up Day 1

    How quickly can I fire off a blog post?
    Bag a waste of time. Recycling
    Passion vs process
    Exploring Austin
    Sitting in a talk
    MxM homepage
    Our home page
    The reaction to our Twitter home page take over has been overwhelmingly positive. Thanks everyone for their feedback and comments. It was really fun working on it and seeing it in use in real time has sparked off lots of ideas about how we could use something similar as our permanent home page once we’re back home. Somehow we need to find a way of showing our social presence and network on the web, whilst combining the conversations around us.
    My favourite tweet about our home page?
    <they look beat up>
    Ah, our avatars. Always a source of amusement (or horror) when a new set arrive from our amazing illustrator (Paul Davis). I’ve always felt that their style reflects the Made by Many way – sketching and creating things being a big part of who we are and how we work. However, to clarify, in real life none of have fascinating skin conditions (@saradotdub), badger strips down out forehead (@bobbyc) or bolts sticking out of our neck (@malbonster).
    The SXSW experience
    After registration at 11 yesterday I spent the entire day with a goodie bag slung over my shoulder, just like many attendee. I think the first thing we all did was sit down and throw stuff away:
    <silverlight>
    After getting rid of so much junk I was still left with a heavy bag of newspapers and directories to carry around. If we come next year I won’t bother picking up the bag at all – it’s just a hodge podge of sponsor messages that no one is interested in. Straight into the recycling bin. I just wish they hadn’t bothered to print it in the first place.
    Sitting in a talk
    Watching the rest of the conference crowd in a session is fascinating. We’re all geek boys, so everyone has an iPhone and/or a laptop. This constant connection to the digital world has taken over – no one sits and just listens. Everyone is tweeting, blogging, checking which session they’re going to next, checking which sessions they’re missing out on right now.
    It must be a slightly threatening and interesting measure of engagement. No one was truly paying attention to me talking, but I did get a shed load of tweets!
    Post match shake down
    It sounds from much of Made by Many that we went to quite a varied mix of talks yesterday. Some good, some not so much… However, even the talks that didn’t hit it off became the start of a very interesting debate afterwards. Over a drink of course, this is Austin after all.
    The “Passion vs Process” debate was particularly interesting. Some of the MxMers who went were a tad scathing:
    <tweets>
    The main crux seemed to be that people should focus their careers on their passion. However, no lee way was given for your skill level. Just because you’re passionate about something doesn’t mean that you’re any good at it. (And that certainly isn’t going to bring you happiness!)
    This turned into an interesting post match talk about what passions some of us had followed and whether they had worked out or not. For example, one of the MxMers once went to a virtually deserted island to write a novel for 6 months. Others had started off their college years being amazing at sports, to a near pro level, but knew their passion, whilst strong, wasn’t enough to get them through to the final yard line.
    At this point the conversation became a wider discussion about skill. Most fascinating of all was hearing @shanerichmond (first passion: music journalism, not the brilliant technology editor of the Daily Telegraph) talking about writer’s block. For him as a journalist it’s rarely an issue – if you’re writing a news story you have facts to report, if you’re writing an comment piece you have your opinion. You never ever start off with a blank page.
    As a designer it struck me that at Made by Many we never start off with a blank page either. The way we work and our processes are nearly always intended to lay layer upon layer upon our ideas. That traditional moment of a designer firing up Photoshop for the first time on a project, sitting behind a white screen of empty pixels searching for something to start with rarely happens at MxM. By that stage in the project we have sketches and prototypes to work with. You have the information and service design in your hands – a framework (or in Shane’s case the facts or opinions) to work with.
    Not so much a revelation, but fascinating to view our process from the perspective of anotherOur home page

    The reaction to our Twitter home page take over has been overwhelmingly positive. Thanks everyone for their feedback and comments. It was really fun working on it and seeing it in use in real time has sparked off lots of ideas about how we could use something similar as our permanent home page once we’re back home. Somehow we need to find a way of showing our social presence and network on the web, whilst combining the conversations around us.

    My favourite tweet about our home page?

    Picture 6

    Ah, our avatars. Always a source of amusement (or horror) when a new set arrive from our amazing illustrator (Paul Davis). I’ve always felt that their style reflects the Made by Many way – sketching and creating things being a big part of who we are and how we work. However, to clarify, in real life none of us have fascinating skin conditions (@saradotdub), badger strips down out forehead (@bobbyc) or bolts sticking out of our neck (@malbonster).

    The SXSW experience

    After registration at 11 yesterday I spent the entire day with a goodie bag slung over my shoulder, just like many attendee. I think the first thing we all did was sit down and throw stuff away:

    Picture 7

    After getting rid of so much junk I was still left with a heavy bag of newspapers and directories to carry around. If we come next year I won’t bother picking up the bag at all – it’s just a hodge podge of sponsor messages that no one is interested in. Straight into the recycling bin. I just wish they hadn’t bothered to print it in the first place.

    Sitting in a talk

    Watching the rest of the conference crowd in a session is fascinating. We’re all geek boys, so everyone has an iPhone and/or a laptop. This constant connection to the digital world has taken over – no one sits and just listens. Everyone is tweeting, blogging, checking which session they’re going to next, checking which sessions they’re missing out on right now.

    It must be a slightly threatening and interesting measure of engagement. No one was truly paying attention to me talking, but I did get a shed load of tweets!

    Post match shake down

    It sounds from much of Made by Many that we went to quite a varied mix of talks yesterday. Some good, some not so much… However, even the talks that didn’t hit it off became the start of a very interesting debate afterwards. Over a drink of course, this is Austin after all.

    The “Passion vs Process” debate was particularly interesting. Some of the MxMers who went were a tad scathing:

    Picture 5

    Picture 4

    Picture 3

    The main crux seemed to be that people should focus their careers on their passion. However, no lee way was given for your skill level. Just because you’re passionate about something doesn’t mean that you’re any good at it. (And that certainly isn’t going to bring you happiness!)

    This turned into an interesting post match talk about what passions some of us had followed and whether they had worked out or not. For example, one of the MxMers once went to a virtually deserted island to write a novel for 6 months. Others had started off their college years being amazing at sports, to a near pro level, but knew their passion, whilst strong, wasn’t enough to get them through to the final yard line.

    At this point the conversation became a wider discussion about skill. Most fascinating of all was hearing @shanerichmond (first passion: music journalism, now the brilliant technology editor of the Daily Telegraph) talking about writer’s block. For him as a journalist it’s rarely an issue – if you’re writing a news story you have facts to report, if you’re writing an comment piece you have your opinion. You never ever start off with a blank page.

    As a designer it struck me that at Made by Many we never start off with a blank page either. The way we work and our processes are nearly always intended to lay layer upon layer upon our ideas. That traditional moment of a designer firing up Photoshop for the first time on a project, sitting behind a white screen of empty pixels searching for something to start with rarely happens at MxM. By that stage in the project we have sketches and prototypes to work with. You have the information and service design in your hands – a framework (or in Shane’s case the facts or opinions) to work with.

    Not so much a revelation, but fascinating to view our process from the perspective of another profession.

  • When blogging met Twitter: meet Ready for Ten

    We’re now the proud parents of a site for, well, parents. Ready for Ten is a conversation space for mums and dads of 6-9 year olds. We built it for Fruit Shoot, which is the UK’s top brand for kids of this age group, and as such, wanted to create a resource for parents. Ready for Ten is a website that brings together the best of the web — blog posts, links and tips — for parents of kids in this age group.

    RFT

    All the content on the site is generated by the parents who use it: by the mummy bloggers who write regular blog posts on parenting, by the parents in the Ready for Ten Twitter stream, and by the people who comment on these posts and tweets. We refer to Ready for Ten as being parent-powered because the conversation on the site is steered by these parents, rather than an editorial board somewhere, without a parent in its ranks.

    The site has been live for just over a month now but it only came out of private Beta this past week. Take-up has been good thus far, with more and more people following on Twitter, reading and commenting. We’re excited about the site as it’s a real departure for an FMCG brand to use Twitter this way — we think it’s pretty forward-thinking of Britvic, the company behind Fruit Shoot, to connect with their audience like this.

    Let’s take a look under the bonnet…

    ReadyforTen.com is partially built out of Twitter, but in a highly controlled way. Twitter is fast becoming the most powerful discovery tool on the Web. When you subscribe to a bunch of people’s tweets, you’re subscribing to all of the sites they discover. By following lots of people who are good at discovering great stuff online, you can save yourself a lot of time. In our case, we saw that although most mums of 6-9 year olds in the UK aren’t currently using Twitter, the leading mummy bloggers and social networkers are — and so we could use Twitter to aggregate value from all those pots into one pot: it’s about bringing the best of the Web for mums of 6-9 year olds instead of expecting them to spend hours visiting loads of different sites to collect. It’s the ‘come to me Web’.

    This approach was based on an insight gained very early on in the project from a group of mums who tested our initial thinking. What we heard from them is that they don’t have very much time, perhaps even less time than the parents of younger or older kids. They go online, but sometimes they don’t get much further than checking their email (the reason we’re offering an email digest, by the way). For those parents who get past checking email, we wanted to make it as quick and easy as possible to find this stuff.

    The information gap for parents of 6-9 year olds

    Finding stuff quickly and easily was particularly important in this case because the 6-9 age group represents something of a ‘gap’. There are tons of sites and blogs dedicated to babies, as you’d expect, because that’s the scariest period of time when your information and support needs are the most acute. There are also many dedicated resources on older kids, as well as in categories such as education. But what seemed to be missing was a dedicated site about 6-9 year olds. What I’ve just said does not mean that there isn’t a ton of useful content for this group, just that it’s dispersed within sites like NetMums, ParentDish, iVillage and so on. This poses a particular challenge to the time-poor consumers of this content, and the aggregation idea seemed to work well as a solution to this challenge.

    Twitter and the Ready for Ten conversation

    It’s important to say that while Twitter is a big part of the site, we knew it was important that the parents who use it shouldn’t even have to know Twitter exists to get the value from this approach. We expect lots more mums to join Twitter in the future but we know that a relatively small percentage of all parents of kids in this age group would have a Twitter account. But some do, and for these parents there’s the option of connecting their account and joining the conversation on a more significant level, as the site then publishes their interactions with Ready for Ten into those parents’ own Twitter feeds as well. This is great for propagating the site but also means that you don’t even have to come to Ready for Ten to benefit from it. It’s a great way of using Twitter to reach the right mums and dads through their own networks. And of course, Twitter works really well on a mobile (we know most mums are never without their phones).

    Each of our bloggers is also a tweeter, and we augment their aggregated feed — the Ready for Ten Twitter stream — with tweetage from ‘trusted partners’. Our bloggers are also curating the best links and tweets from the rest of the web, so the Twitter aspect is largely self-moderating (although we obviously built moderation workflow into everything anyway. With this model, we avoid getting Skittled!).

    As with every real-time conversation, feedback is crucial. We’ve invited Ready for Ten readers to feed back via comment, Twitter or a feedback link. We are keen to develop the site in line with what its users want and expect, and we’re hoping that the conversational tone we have set in its design and functionality will encourage this to happen. We also really want to know what our community of creative peers thinks about this project. Has anyone done anything like this? What do you think of an FMCG taking this on? How would you develop it further?

  • SXSW countdown: one day!

    At long last… tomorrow morning we’re off to Austin!

    Stu and Antonica, Made by Many’s de facto cat herders, are limbering up even as we speak to corral the lot of us from Heathrow to Dallas Ft Worth on to Austin. Assuming no one offends Homeland Security on the way in (you know who you are…), we should all be ensconced in our Texan digs by tomorrow evening.

    Our departure is big news for our website, as it means our super-dynamic, sex-on-Twittter-toast* SXSW special homepage will be live. We’re kind of excited about this page. As well as all our latest tweets and links to our Twitter accounts, it shows off the latest Made by Many blog post and the most recent addition to our Flickr account. It offers a smooth user experience, too, as everything updates dynamically and in real time.

    The page will be live the whole time we’re away, which means you can keep (non-creepy, please) tabs on us and get a sense of what the SXSW experience is like. You’re also heartily invited to @ or DM us with suggestions, feedback, jokes etc while we’re gone — this is, after all, a conversation.

    For those who missed the earlier posts on this project, we took this page as an opportunity to open up our creative process and design in public. Here’s the first vision of the page. We followed this with a post on the idea’s evolution before whipping the curtain back for the big reveal.

    Thanks very much to everyone who offered feedback on this work — and of course, if you want to do so now, you are more than welcome.

    So on that note… have a great week and, um, watch this space!

    *not my words but damn do I love ‘em

  • SXSW countdown: one week

    And lo, ready to roll a full week before we take off for Texas, here it is — our Twitter-powered SXSW people-tracker:

    sxsw_d15

    For those who haven’t been following the posts and discussions around this project, here’s the story…

    Just about all of Made by Many is heading to Austin, Texas for SXSW interactive. Several weeks ago, we decided to build something onto our website to bring our SXSW experience to life for the people who aren’t going to be there with us. We thought this project would also be the perfect occasion to throw the doors open on our creative process and actually share the journey we go through as we work an idea through to a final execution.

    This series of posts started with shots of our original approach. We then showed how this idea was refined a few different ways. The third and final instalment in this design journey is above.

    The idea for the page is very simple: all of our most recent tweets on one page, updated in real time as it happens.

    The design started out as a series of coloured panels, one for each person, laid out on a very regimented grid. However, we all felt that this was a bit strict – it neither reflected our personality nor the event we’re going too.

    So we loosened the design up, taking the hand drawn style of our avatars as inspiration. The page is a series of speech bubbles, laid out in a seemingly random and slightly haphazard way. Connected by lines, doodles and graffiti, the speech bubbles change colour with time: the freshest tweets are dark, the stalest white. The page will be darkest when the conference sessions are going on and we’re tweeting non-stop, but completely white in the middle of the night when we’re all sleeping. Except for @malbonster’s bubble. He never stops.

    As well as pulling in our tweets, the page also pulls in the latest photo in our Flickr stream, our latest blog posts, even twitpics. You’ll be able to see more tweets from each person by clicking on their avatar or simply going through to their Twitter stream.

    The idea for the page is very simple: all of most recent tweets on one page, updated in real time as it happens.
    The design started out as a series of coloured panels, one for each person, laid out on a very regimented grid. However, we all felt that this was a bit strict – it neither reflected the personality of us or of the event we’re going too.
    So we loosened the design up, taking the hand drawn style of our avatars as inspiration. The page is a series of speech bubbles, laid out in a seemingly random and slightly haphazard way. Connected by lines, doodles and graffiti, the speech bubbles change colour with time: the freshest tweets are dark, the stalest white.
    We imagine that the page will be dark red whilst the conference sessions are going on and we’re tweeting virtually non-stop, but completely white in the middle of the night when we’re all sleeping. Except for @malbonster’s bubble. He never stops tweeting.
    As well as pulling in our tweets, the page also pulls in the latest photo in our Flickr stream, our latest blog post, even twitpics. You can see more tweets from each person by clicking their avatar or simply going through to their twitter stream.

    We like the sketchy style and the playful execution. We also think the design has some dynamism to it, that it tells a story and carries your eye through that story fairly easily. All in, we think this is really close to who we are.

    This whole ‘designing in public’ thing felt a little strange at points (sort of like being naked in front of a lot of people, I reckon) but we got some interesting feedback here and on other blogs, which was cool. And it’s practice for us to be more open in the future — something we are really committed to doing.

    Our SXSW special will be live on Made by Many as of Thursday 11 March.

  • SXSW countdown: two weeks, one day

    We’re still keen to open up our creative process by sharing the evolution of our SXSW project.

    As mentioned last week, it’s a Twitter-powered execution that aims to give an as-it-happens update of what the Made by Many folk are up to, as we’re doing it. This week we’re sharing three snapshots to show how the design is coming together.

    Here’s where we were in the middle of last week:

    colours

    This was our first attempt in Photoshop. Each person gets a panel that shows their avatar and latest tweet. We’ve colour-coded the boxes to show recency, with the freshest content (hot colours) at the top, and the stale content (cold colours) at the bottom.

    However, we wanted the page to update in real time, which would mean people and their panels moving around the screen. We figured that was going to get far too busy and complicated… Onwards!

    Here’s the next stop on the journey:

    Flash

    Here we’ve brought in a bit of alpha-order to give everyone a spot on the page and keep them there. This solved the busy problem, but when the coloured panels are shown in a non-spectrum order, it looks confusing. We trimmed the colour back to what you see here but found that they meant less.

    Standing back a bit, we worried that this design was actually a bit boring and unemotional… just not MxM enough. Next!

    Finding the right conversational note:

    bubbles

    Here we’ve started to play around with something that’s a bit more conversational and has more personality. There’s still more work to go, but we think this could be fun. Now we’re moving in the right direction.

    We agreed this design and we’re taking it forward even as we speak.We’ll preview this project again next week, but in the meanwhile, feel free to tell us what you think.

  • New Year resolutions? How are they going?

    It used to be fags and booze that people gave up as a New Year resolution. 2010 was the first year I heard lots of people claiming they wanted to give up social networking. Fragile idiots.

    Between Christmas and New Year I saw quite a few tweets from people quietly waving goodbye for a while (the correct social media terminology here is a “Twitter hiatus“).

    Stephen Fry announced he was having a rest – in order to get some real work done. And then there was the Web 2.0 suicide machine. Oh – and a rash of articles and blog posts about social media being various shades of addictive, boring and deadly (some of which we’ve talked about here). At times it looked like the long-awaited backlash might finally break… the dwindling skeptical rump of luddites *soooo* want this to happenbut it hasn’t. A similar thing happened last year, and probably the year before that.

    On the other hand – I noticed that lots of other people resolved to look after their blog, or tweet, more/better rather than less in 2010.

    I guess you know something has really arrived when people start giving it up because they’re enjoying it too much.

    I also predict that they’ll be back – just like the smokers and boozers – with their tails between their legs. Losers.

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