Daniel Greene

Category: Communication

I got my BA in English with a concentration in Communications / Media Study. These posts represent my interest in those fields of study, including: Movies, Television, Websites, Blogging, HTML, CSS, Social Media, etc.

  • Geeks vs. Early Adopters on Twitter (and elsewhere)

    In the month-or-so that I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve gotten the impression that a lot of people on it are geeks, a lot of them are early adopters, and a few are “regular folks.” And I wonder if some of the angst I’m feeling is that I’m more of an early adopter than a geek.

    I define geeks as the people who create the latest technology and early adopters as the first people to use it. I have read geeks’ writings and conversed with them on the Internet, such when I participated in the newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html in 1996. I learned HTML and CSS by reading, asking questions, and eventually answering questions. I became one of a handful of people in the world to publish a web page in HTML using CSS in August 1996. Yet I didn’t become a professional Web developer. I didn’t become a recognized “expert” in the field (unless you count being interviewed by Wired in 1998). Why? Because I’m not a geek. I don’t take well to sitting for hours in front of a computer screen hacking code. I don’t know any of the languages it takes to write CSS that can render properly in any web browser; i.e. I can’t use JavaScript to insert “browser-sniffing” code that delivers CSS written for each browser’s idiosyncratic (read “faulty” or “noncompliant”) way of rendering CSS… But I digress.

    My point is: I’m not a geek; I’m an early adopter. And it causes me angst, because I’m a lot more geeky than most people, yet I’m not geeky enough for the geeks. It’s sort of like my IQ: my intelligence is above average, but I’m not a genius. I’m smarter than most people and not as smart as the geniuses I admire.

    Twitter seems to be a place where geeks and early adopters collide. Or maybe collude. Ha ha. I guess you have to be a little geeky to spend any real time on Twitter; you have to be interested in being on a computer or mobile device for a longer period of time than the average person. You have to be interested in taking a couple of minutes out of your life every once in a while to tell people what you’re doing and thinking. You have to be interested in how people use new media to communicate with each other. But you don’t necessarily understand why so many people write “FAIL!” or “WIN!” And you might feel intimidated or confused by the way people tell “in” jokes. At least I do…

    It’s late at night now, and I’ve stayed up late because this is bothering me a lot. Without going into too many details, I had an experience today of being told that something I found extremely offensive was merely a reference to a source of humor for Internet geeks for over a decade now (I don’t endorse the site, but if you’re curious, it’s timecube.com). Some geeks thought it was funny to place a link to that site in the guise of a “Terms of Use” hyperlink at the bottom of every page of a website I stumbled upon the other day. For them, it was a big joke. For me, it wasn’t.

    This experience made me think about the interesting mix of geeks and early adopters on Twitter at this moment in time. (Of course, there are also a huge number of “Social Media / Social Marketing / SEO Experts” on Twitter too, but don’t get me started.) It got me to thinking about who’s talking to whom. I’m currently reading The Cluetrain Manifesto in book form (it got too hard to read on my T-Mobile G1 with Google), and it talks a lot about how markets are conversations– conversations among consumers, conversations among corporations, and conversations between corporations and consumers. Basically, the book says that both consumer markets and corporations are composed of people and people need to speak with each other in a human voice. (At least that’s what I’ve gathered so far; I’m up to Chapter 3.)

    So, where is the human voice on Twitter? Some would say it’s everywhere, but I find too often that the voices I “hear” on Twitter are not speaking to me. Too often, they’re trying to sell me something. Too often, the “tweets” I read have nothing to do with me. They’re either over my head or about things I don’t have enough context to understand. (This is especially a problem with @replies. I read a blog recently that said – and I paraphrase – “if you don’t understand them, either follow the people they’re replying to, unfollow them, or stop complaining.” I’ve searched for 10 minutes to find this blog, but it’s almost midnight and I can’t find it. Sorry. Leave a comment if you know the URL.)

    Even the marketing strategy people say you should figure out who your market is, who you’re targeting. Are you targeting other geeks? Then continue to speak geek. But if you’re targeting regular people, then you might want to be less arcane. Take it from this early adopter, we’re smart, but not “brainy.” We’re cool, but not cliquish. And if Twitter keeps expanding, which I think it will, there aren’t going to be as many of us “early adopters” and then you’ll really need to stop speaking geek and start speaking human.
    This is not a monologue; it’s a conversation. What do you think? Please leave a comment. I would like to hear your perspective on these social and marketplace issues, whether you’re a geek, an early adopter, or (to quote The Cluetrain Manifesto), “Joe Six Pack.”

  • I thought I was a social outcast. Then I came to my senses.

    This evening I had a brief bout of self-doubt, a fear of social ostracism. It began when I considered going to #evfn (East Valley Friday Nights), a Twitter gathering or “Tweetup” organized on Twitter and taking place, this night, in Chandler. Mind you, Chandler is pretty far from my home in Phoenix, and just last Friday night I passed on driving out to Paradise Valley to attend shabbat services because it was “too far.” So I was already questioning my motives. Why was I willing to consider driving out to Chandler to meet some “tweeple”? Could it be because I saw a tweet earlier today from Rene Gutel saying, “@evo_terra Mind if I join y’all?” (Rene Gutel is a local freelance journalist who often contributes stories to NPR, so I thought it would be neat to meet her.) Could it be because I see businesses bending over backward to support Tweetups in ways I’ve never seen them support Flickrmeets? (When local Twitter members went to a Phoenix Suns Game recently, they all got matching (free?) t-shirts and a welcome on the JumboTron. And at the #evfn Tweetup at Whole Foods in Chandler tonight, the store actually printed a gorgeous sign to welcome them.) Could it be the age-old yearning to hang out with “the cool kids”? Well, it could be any or all of those things. But something kept me from going… (more…)

  • Technology is a wonderful thing



    A Wonderful Thing
    Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene

    This little thing slips over my husband’s ear and makes our relationship different from any relationship in the history of the world– up until a decade ago. Okay, not just our relationship, but everyone’s. Just think of it– when else in history could a couple spend their whole commute home from work talking together in separate cars? We can now tell each other about our day, plan our evening, list things to do… sometimes we even discuss how we feel about each other and say anything that was left unsaid the last time we saw each other. By the time we get home after one of these discussions, we’ve moved past all that and are ready to settle into a comfortable evening together. Mobile phone technology and Bluetooth headsets have changed our lives, and I’d say for the better!

    I took this photo in response to a monthly theme / challenge in the Gay Photographers (Family-Friendly) group titled "Belonging to Your Beloved." The object is to share a photo of something belonging to your beloved with a brief description of the item’s significance.

  • But wait– there’s more! Ads cover even more of buildings.

    I posted a photo of this T-Mobile ad wrap on the Bank of America building the other day. Today, there’s even more to it– in fact it covers two sides of the building now. It looks like there’s a piece missing on the right side of the south wall of the building, so maybe I’ll see it completed tomorrow or even later today. It is interesting to me to see where advertising is headed. What is an exciting curosity might be an ugly invasion of public space if all the buildings downtown were wrapped. And I saw on The Science Channel that the buildings of the future might actually be covered with LCDs as ever-changing "skins." We’re already seeing more and more of our city’s billboards going LCD, so the idea of whole buildings wrapped in LCDs is not too farfetched. I just don’t know that I like the idea of it.

    P.S. I sent this to my blog-via-Flickr e-mail address earlier this morning, but for some reason it didn’t show up on either Flickr or my blog. Odd!

  • Twitter: Too much about too little

    I’ve tried to like Twitter. Really, I have. And I haven’t given up on it entirely. But it just seems like too much about too little. My long-suffering not-as-technophilic-as-I-am husband took a look at the Twitter home page on my desktop the other day and said it looked like the stupidest bunch of nonsense he’d ever seen. And I can’t entirely disagree with him! It isn’t that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with Twitter; it’s just that I don’t like the current implementation of it. In this review of my two week’s time on Twitter so far, I’ll tell you what I didn’t like about my experience in Twitterville and what I would like to get out of it in the future.

    For starters, I was disappointed to find that hardly anyone I know or care about following is actually on Twitter at this time. This experience was in sharp contrast to my entrée into the Facebook world, which was like showing up at a party where you expect to see the one person who invited you and instead you end up seeing almost everyone you’ve ever known. The lack of friends I know on Twitter was the first disappointment. Then there’s the fact that some of my friends who have Twitter accounts don’t even check them regularly enough to have update them or reciprocate my follow by following me.

    Then there are the people on Twitter that I did know and have enjoyed “socializing” with on Flickr. It was like a bubbly drink going flat. It’s fun to look at people’s photos on Flickr, comment on them, and have them comment on mine. There’s a lot of mutual admiration and wittiness that goes on in Flickr comments. But now, on Twitter, suddenly I’m hearing about their every cappuccino and reading @replies like, “@janedoe I know, right?” and “@simone Mais oui!” These tweets mean absolutely nothing to me and are of no entertainment value whatsoever.

    Then there’s the redundancy of the Twitter home page. It simply lists the most recent tweets (140 character updates sent from mobile phones or Internet devices either mobile or stationary) posted by people you follow in chronological order. This means that if some little bird you know (I won’t name names) is chirping like a bird in heat about every little thing — mostly @replies that make no sense to anyone but the @recipient — then what you get is a Twitter homepage full of a slew of meaningless tweets from one very chirpy friend. Now, does that mean there’s anything wrong with the way your friend is using Twitter? Well, yes and no. Yes, because I think it would make much more sense if they limited these private replies to “direct messages” (Twitter’s form of private 1:1 messages from one Twitter user to another). I mean why bore everyone on Twitter with short answers to questions they haven’t heard? “@barbie I’m like, so totally sure!” But no, it’s not all their fault; it’s also the fault of the Twitter UI. I mean, imagine if you logged onto Flickr and it was only a slew of images posted by all of your contacts in chronological order? I know with some people’s photostreams (you know the ones who upload every image they shoot, even if they all look the same?), my Flickr experience would be awful if that’s what I saw when I logged in. Why doesn’t Twitter do a little bit more to help its members organize their Twitter experience? It would be nice if, for example, your Twitter homepage could be configured to show only the most recent tweet from each of your contacts, allowing you to click on a control to view more if you’re interested.

    I have some other ideas that I think would make Twitter more useful. (more…)