Ultimate Reality or Ultimate Inanity

[Rafe]

In his latest editorial rant Steve has something to say about Twitter and similar services. Do they allow closer connections or are they another unnecessary time-sapping burden?

Read on in the full article.

[krisse]

You're absolutely right Steve, this is an obsession with technology purely for the sake of using technology. There's no practical or social value to documenting every single event of your life in this way.

Say you DID want to do it, for the sake of documenting a day in your life, a much more interesting way of doing it would be some kind of automated documenter. That way it would capture everything you did in a representative way, and not just the bits that you notice. Something like wearing a camera wherever you go, that kind of thing might actually be quite fascinating in years to come when the world has changed.

Imagine being able to watch an entire day in the life of someone, anyone, from 100 years ago, that would undoubtedly be very very interesting.

[slitchfield]

Yep. With photos, which is kind of what Nokia hoped Lifeblog might become...

Steve

[krisse]

The problem with photos is you still have to actively decide to take the picture, there's no sense of recording your life "warts and all". Unedited uncensored things are what historically interesting documents are all about.

[neilhoskins]

The example of keeping in touch with colleagues at, say, an exhibition, would be much better handled by something like TomTom buddies. You're absolutely right, of course, but don't knock it: if it provides revenue to the operators then their prices for the services that "we" are interested in may come down.

[krisse]

"if it provides revenue to the operators then their prices for the services that "we" are interested in may come down."

Operator prices are artificially high and bear little relation to their true costs of operation. This explains the huge variation for identical services in different countries. Operators put their prices as high as the market will bear, they won't reduce call costs just because people start using data as well.

The only thing that will bring operator prices down is real competition, and that isn't going to happen when they can lock people into particular handsets and long contracts.

Lot's of people write and read blogs even if at the same time many are not interested in doing either one. In my social group I have noticed that people close to their twenties ("my kindergarten had Internet") use Internet very differentelly than people that are only five years older, like twentyfive ("we had to format disks in the computer class") . Internet for young people is about connecting with friends, sharing fun stuff, chatting, having diaries, etc., many community features Jaiku and Twitter present to the mobile side. The power of sharing these "inane" bits of information comes from the community, having all your friends in one place, it is more about belonging to a group, connecting with people and sharing feelings than it is for sharing usable information or about being productive. Young people use instant messenger, old people use email. Young people see Internet as community, old people see Internet as an information source. Young people using instant messengers already communicate their moods, presence, etc. daily with their friends.

Okay I agree all this is a bit oversimplification, but I think it can be assumed that most people in older generations don't have _all_ their friends in myspace or using instant messengers, so the benefits for using these social tools are also lower.