O.k., firstly I haven't tried Twitter myself (I left my role of work before Twitter took off officially), but tried a very similar system that some of the tech-heads might have heard about: <a href="http://www.jaiku.com">Jaiku</a>
I'll be honest up front, firstly I think of some of this as a passing fad. But then again, I think some of the hype over 'social networks' is a passing fad so what do I know? :) Still though, some of it is like one of the holy grail of energy: a self-sustaining system. From watching some people using the networks, they're essentially completely selling themselves to it, spending mad hours developing their pages to look like they want, link all their friends, update their status, etc. From Randomn3ss's blog, he basically gave it up as "the problem was no one cared, it bored me and I just couldn't explain what the service was well enough". Fair enough if you ask me!
Still though, while I'm of a similar attitude to the writer, I have seen some uses for it. Having had Jaiku up and running on my own mobile, and a few others throughout my work field - it turned out that it actually was quite useful knowing where your friends actually were. In essence, this is more of a passive system, where all it does is just shares out your cell ID (once again, only to friends who you've allowed to view it). The neat part is that the cells can be named (or will be named as more people use it). While it wasn't very accurate (you could be anywhere within the whole segment of the base station tower), it was great for getting an idea. There was actually one or two nights, waiting for colleagues where it was great to know that at a quick glance at the contact in my address book (it integrates directly into the mobile's address book and just puts a status symbol - red/orange/green - and a location point beside them) and I could see that yes there were in the same base station meaning they were nearby. No reason to disturb them with texts, phone calls, etc. - just sit back and wait. How many times have you called to find out your mate is 100 meters down the road and walking towards you. All you're doing is annoying each other.
The additional benefit was the colored status symbol. This was set according to the sound profile on your mobile. So, if you'd the volume and vibrate turned to 'on', you were green. If you were in 'vibrate' mode only, you were amber/orange (i.e. possibly busy), and red was, obviously, you're going to get the person's voicemail :) Very simple and it meant that you had an idea of whether to try call the person. In my eyes that a use for technology as it means you might actually be more careful with contacting people when they don't want to be contacted.
What are people's thoughts on this? Is it too Big Brother, etc.? Or even this just a gimmick?
No comments:
Post a Comment