Where does Twitter fit into all this?

This, of course, is the world of social networking and communication.

I have to confess, that as is my style, I arrived somewhat belatedly in the rather confusing world of Twitter. I have a habit of that, but equally tend to make it my mission to embrace new things once I’ve worked out how they work and what they’re for, and to be honest that usually doesn’t take long if you put your mind to it. I think the jargon is “late but enthusiastic adopter”.

But here is where I’m already struggling. I am not convinced I know where Twitter comes in. It’s not that I don’t understand the concept: that’s simple enough - 140 characters to post or “tweet” your innermost feelings and reactions; a host of celebrities from A to Z classes, often mindlessly twittering away all day long, though I have to suspect that some of them employ a member of their PR staff to do so on their behalf. Or does Lady Gaga really sit on her iPhone and type it all on herself?

A moot point I suspect and one that really doesn’t matter terribly much. If you want to believe it’s her you can. I’m not too fussed one way or the other.

It does all seem a bit overwhelming at first to be honest, but with a bit of hard work you can pick up the basics in no time. And that includes the use of the # key as a sort of label, grouping keywords in a searchable manner. There’s trends – basically a list of the top keywords, twitpics – a means of posting an abbreviated link to a photo – remember those 140 characters! You can message people directly, re-tweet what they have said – a useful means of spreading information or interesting blogs for instance. Then there’s #ff where you promote some of your favourite Twitterers, on Fridays!

You can follow pretty much whoever you want – I do have a small number of friends who tweet, but only a couple on a regular basis. You can follow celebrities, popular television shows, or makes of cars – the list is pretty much endless.

Twitter is how I came across the world of bloggers, or rather re-discovered it, as a couple of my friends have blogged for quite some time. That was one of the most interesting aspects to me and although I can’t say I read all of their blogs all of the time, a lot of them are pretty interesting stuff.

Quite a few of the people I follow are political and here it seems Twitter comes into its own. The last Scottish Parliament elections were a splendid example of this, with the different parties punting their points of view, with varying degrees of success it has to be said. In my, naturally unbiased, view the SNP won this particular political contest hands down, and one of the more interesting observations I made was how the party message stayed consistent no matter who was tweeting it at what level of involvement. Some claimed the 2007 elections were the first real “internet” contests but my own view is that last year the internet came into its own for the first time in any substantial way.

Back to the “what’s it for” question and here it really depends on what you want it to be for. My brother for instance, never tweets anything, but follows the tweets of others. I myself tend to go through fits and starts, and often don’t log in for days at a time. It’s an instant source of news, of the more cutting edge variety than is to be found on the mainstream media pages. You want to know about gadgets for instance, and many do, then you follow the likes of the “Gadget Show”. Music, politics, television, history...the list is endless.

You choose who to follow, and then less often in my experience, they may choose to follow you too. Not that that side of things really matters unless you are one of those insecure people who keeps a daily tab on how many followers you have. I have to confess it can irritate me if I do notice my list has dropped a few, but (so far) I’ve not really taken the time to scroll through them to find out who “un-followed” me. Think friends and “un-friending” on Facebook if that helps you grasp the concept, though it’s not entirely the same.

Talking of Facebook you can link the two so that anything you put on Twitter appears on your Facebook newsfeed too. My local SNP councillor does that, and I have to say it was fascinating as a result, to be able to follow the progress of “Baby Nat” throughout the Holyrood election campaign, bringing back many memories of my own “Baby Nat” in the 1990s! The beauty of linking is presumably that your message reaches a wider audience, but personally I found the intrusion of the @s and #s of Twitter a trifle annoying over on Facebook so I unlinked the two fairly early on.

You can have a conversation of sorts on Twitter, and indeed two of my friends do just that. It’s not as easy to follow as a Facebook one though, but it is for instance, largely how I communicate with either of them.

And the bottom line is that communication is what it’s all about. Like anything on the internet there’s a side order of spam, but that’s easily removed. And just like any other social network, some people post too often for my liking and their own good. But because you can’t “hide” tweets from an individual, or at least if you can I can’t work out how to, and to be honest what would be the point, then you either put up with it or remove them from your list.

There is some kind of etiquette, or is it ”twitter-ette” about such things but on the whole I’m not convinced anyone follows it, and I have from time to time, un-followed someone simply due to the volume of tweets.

So back to the start and where does Twitter fit in. I’m not sure I can really shed any light on that to be honest. It appeals to some more than others, but that’s true of Facebook, lager and marmite too.

It can be fun, and if you approach it in that manner, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed! I hope my short journey through the world of Twitter might just inspire one or two of you to give it a whirl!

Facebook shenanigans!

Over the last week or so my Facebook newsfeed, like many of yours I expect, has been filled with posts initially about the new newsfeed format, and laterally about paying for the site, not to mention the forthcoming “timeline”.

To deal with the second point first, and not like me to do things back to front you may be thinking, it at times beggared belief to see those people who actually fell for the nonsense that a multi-billion dollar organisation would suddenly start asking us all to start paying to continue to use it.

Despite the fact that right under the log-in section it says “It’s free and always will be”, it was amusing, but at the same time alarming, to see so many panic-stricken posts about the matter. More amusing were the couple of spoof posts, one or two of which I was cheeky enough to copy, totally scotching these groundless rumours, including one which ended with “But you can get it for free if you send your bank details to gulliblebastards@hotmail.com”!

I did actually see someone (not one of my friends before you all start wondering and trawling through your own newsfeeds) asking what she should do about having sent someone her credit card details in order to pay, but was undecided as to whether she was having fun or genuinely dumb! An extra in TOWIE was my eventual conclusion!

But enough of this nonsense (which of course is all that it was in the first place) and back to the newsfeed story.

Somewhat belatedly, as is my fashion, I first discovered the “Lists” function, and what an excellent idea it is! I already have one for the friends I made in China, one for Dundee United, one for those friends I’m actually really interested in keeping up with (only 12 of those!), and even one I cheekily called “Drama!” – There is only actually one person in that, although he does have two profiles, but no in his case I don’t actually follow his reasoning.

You can have as many lists as you want – perhaps one for work colleagues, another one for distant relatives, and a third for those friends that you don’t really keep up with but about whom it is always interesting to discern a few interesting facts. The possibilities are endless and for once Facebook has got this totally right. In fact I’m off to create a “Politics one” now!

But having mastered this, and I can’t say it took longer than five minutes, my format eventually updated itself and lo and behold there was this “ticker” that everyone and their aunty was going on about.

It’s on the bottom right of my homepage, although allegedly on the top right of others, and I dare say if you allow it to be, it could be viewed as downright annoying. But to me it’s a quick link to what is going on in the world (of Facebook – and that is the real world, isn’t it?) around me.

The last time I looked at my friends list, and I would recommend that you do this every now and again, though not too often or people start getting insecure unnecessarily, particularly if you announce your intentions by means of a “Facebook cull imminent” status update, I had 221 friends.

Now I am sure I once read elsewhere that 150 was the most you could realistically interact with, and my 221 is already double the average thrown up in this recent research: Virtual or real online friends

But what was more interesting, and what brings me back to the “ticker” is that I already have the newsfeeds of 51 of these friends hidden from sight! I already don’t want to know what almost one quarter of my “friends” are up to!

As Burns said : “Oh would some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us.”, and I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering, though not usually for too long, quite how many people have MY Facebook newsfeeds hidden from view, what with their outlandish and obscure photographs and dodgy foreign music You-tube videos!

But away from that worrying thought and back to the ticker, and what an American choice of word that was! I don’t actually see the harm in it, especially with the built in hover function, whereby you can hover over someone’s quote in your ticker, add a “like” (though sadly not yet a “dislike”) or a comment and then one click later you’re back where you started.

All of which brings me nicely back to where I started and the third of the new Facebook functions, the timeline.

It’s not on general release as yet, but anyone with only basic Google skills can find out all about it as there are videos and newsprint articles by the score.

As ever with a Facebook change there will be howls of anguish but let’s be blunt here – we already live in the age where a misplaced drunken photograph on a night out, when you phoned in sick with the flu that morning, can lead to disciplinary action at work, and perhaps rightly so.

If your newsfeed is like mine, then some of your friends already post from time to time photos from time gone by, and it can be frustrating, unless you have a wonderful memory, and mine is sadly falling out of that category these days, to try and remember just exactly when that night out was!

So the thought of having your life history unfold before the eyes of your friends does not fill me with any particular dread. A few imminent cringes I dare say, but that’s just part of the rich tapestry of 21^st century life. And increasing social interaction is the way things are going to be, there’s no two ways about it.

I do have a few friends who don’t interact much online, often by removing their Facebook wall, but they still do interact by means of messages, and I do consider it a fallacy to think we can hide from the world at large, as anyone who types their name into Google has no doubt already discovered. You haven’t? How odd!

But otherwise internet action is taken as the norm these days, although for some there’s a degree of catching up to do, as I discovered at last year’s school reunion, when it transpired that the number of Facebook accounts was barely out of single figures. But that’s the generation gap for you!

As I posted on Facebook a short time ago, though strangely not on Twitter despite my comment falling well under the 140 character maximum, I am currently sitting with no fewer than seven social networking sites open, and that’s without the afore-mentioned Twitter! I have to say that thus far this fine day I have only interacted with anyone on two of them but there you go.

Is that wrong? I think not as long as your “real” life still exists, and pause for reflection on those less fortunate than ourselves, who perhaps through illness or infirmity, don’t have a real life. But they can still interact online with others.

As with anything in life if you get it wrong well you get it wrong. But what’s the worst that can happen? You meet someone new? I did just that on Saturday night – someone I have interacted with, usually in a humorous way, up until now online. But now he is “real”, whatever that is.

As ever in the course of my writings I have touched on lots I could digress into, but that’s for another time. I haven’t mentioned Facebook subscribers, or off at a tangent the dot.scot campaign. For now it’s off to publish this on Twitter and Facebook....but then that’s where you found it all in the first place isn’t it?!

Shanghai!

When you spend four weeks in another country, it’s hard to know where begin talking about your experiences; when that country is China then the task becomes harder still.

But Shanghai is where we did begin our tour so that’s probably the best place to start.

And what a place! Anyone who has watched “Empire of the Sun”, arguably Spielberg’s best film, will be familiar with the opening scenes, with that spectacular view of the European buildings of the Bund. But until you’ve seen them close up you just don’t get a sense of the grandeur of the buildings put up at the end of the 19^th and start of the 20^th centuries.

In their time they were opulent enough, but now a 180⁰ turn and a glance across the Huangpu River and you see 21^st century architecture at its very best with the vast swathe of skyscrapers that make up the Pudong area, until the 1990s agricultural land.

We took a trip up in the lift of the Jin Mao tower – 88 floors in 45 seconds. Yes seconds. And what a view! It wasn’t even the tallest building – that lay beside us – a huge rectangular beast of a tower with a square “hole” near the top. 

 

The view down to the bottom was mind-boggling to say the least but as we wandered round the observation lounge we were exposed to our first taste of one part of Chinese culture – an overwhelming desire to take photos with Europeans! Clare, with her red hair, is to be found in photographs all over whatever the Chinese version of Facebook may be, and even I found myself in several pictures over the course of the month. But the immediate source of attention for the hosts of Chinese tourists (foreign visitors make up only about 2% of the market) was a guy with dreadlocks! And how the Chinese lapped that up – at one point I swear there was a queue to get a picture with this particular “foreign devil”!

This leads nicely onto another cultural trait – rudeness! Now perhaps if we lived in a country with a population of 1.6 billion we’d be rude too, but it got quite exasperating being pushed past and jostled, not I have to add with any malice; it’s just the way they were. And the rudeness extended to the photographs on occasion – many came up and asked in broken English to have their photo taken, but others merely stood at a distance and pointed their cameras in our general direction without a please or thank you! Later on in the trip as we staggered up the Great Wall of China there was even a policeman bawling through a megaphone, exhorting everyone, we assumed, to get in single file! But that’s for another blog!

Back to Shanghai, and as it was lunchtime, the next stop on our Chinese adventure was a date with chopsticks! I have to say I faced this with some trepidation, and of course my innate clumsiness resulted in several spills in the first few days, but by the end of the month I, and 7 of the other 8 in the group, were chopstick experts! I could devote a whole blog to the food, and may well do so, but at this point I’ll just say that with the exception of the pea-flavoured ice-lolly, it was actually pretty damned good and much better than I had feared, not being a great fancier of Chinese cuisine on the whole.

But I digress so I’ll move on with some speed to our next excursion, which was to take place at great pace – a trip on the Maglev train. It was hard to believe that we were hurtling along, or to be more precise above, a track at over 400 km/h! The news a couple of days later that there had been a serious train crash involving two other high speed trains was a little disconcerting, but thankfully nowhere near where we were, and so it did not affect our trip.

Back to our hotel for a rest, a pleasant enough building of Premier Inn standards, though I’ve never seen turtles and fish swimming in a small pool at the entrance to a European hotel! We actually didn’t notice them when we arrived, but that was par for the course during our stay as there was so much to see and take in that sometimes we missed things the first time around.

The evening was spent on a cruise on the Huangpu River, and almost every one of those skyscrapers from earlier in the day was lit up, at municipal expense, with coloured lights; a truly spectacular experience. My favourite building, and the photo subject of this blog, was an amazing television tower, which truly would have been at home in the spaceport of a sci-fi series set in the future!

 

So that was the first day, or perhaps the first two; one of my abiding memories is how each day seemed to blur into the next with almost effortless ease!

Clare and I have both decided that Shanghai is one place we would go back to in an instant, and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone pondering a visit to China.

Some technology ramblings!

You’ll have to excuse me if I muddle technology, information technology and social media as I blog. There are so many strands to this blog that I foresee several follow-up articles to develop some of the issues covered!

I do, in my defence, come from a generation to whom the sliding doors on Star Trek were a thing of amazement. Little did we know that strings were involved! To me the terms are all pretty much interlinked anyway and strings usually are involved in most things!

Talking of Star Trek it’s quite amazing how it predicted some of the technological future that is now our present, as this article from a couple of years back demonstrates:  Top 10 Star Trek inventions

But as ever I digress. Somewhat belatedly you may argue I have joined the iPhone revolution. Months of nagging by my daughter and here I am at last. And I do have to say that in a matter of a fortnight I am pretty impressed. I have been described as a late but then very enthusiastic adopter of new technology and that’s about right in my view.

As apparently everyone does to begin with, and who am I to be the exception to the rule, I have checked in left right and centre, become the “Mayor” of my workplace and home, downloaded (and then often deleted) apps of all sorts (though not the vast number some seem to have judging by the plethora of recommendations I got) and generally marvelled at the speed everything happens.

I now know how my daughter manages to send so many texts in a month and how easy it is to do so! I have taken a picture and uploaded it to Facebook for all to see in record time, and even discovered quite independently of any advice how to add wee smiley faces to every message in sight! Which fact caused some more technologically savvy friends to exhibit signs of jealousy. But then I can find anything on Google!

I was most impressed when the Shazzam app managed to identify the Disco Polo song I was listening to - and then of course linked it to my Facebook page in seconds!

I marvel at the connectivity of it all to be honest.

But where is it all taking us?

There are as ever the harbingers of doom, forecasting the advent of the Big Brother of Orwell’s 1984. But let’s be honest that day arrived long ago, albeit without the worst totalitarian overtones. You can’t turn a street corner these days without being in line of a CCTV camera, and we all leave electronic trails as we shop. And I could tell you exactly where one of my friends in particular is over the course of a day as his progress is posted stage by stage on Twitter.

There are those who take the opposite view and trumpet the victory of the individual over the state, citing events in North Africa and the Middle East, and the part social networking sites played in these events, to back up their views.

As ever the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle; folk more intellectual than me have written of the battle between the demands of the state and multi-national business to impose some control over our access to information, and those advocating the power of the individual to surf the net and access information to their heart’s content.

And this, in my view, merely reflects the realities of the world we live in.

And perhaps no better place to illustrate this than the People’s Republic of China which I and my daughter will be touring in two weeks time. Even before I have left these shores I am aware of the huge extremes this world power encompasses. Andrew Marr toured an 8 million pound Shanghai penthouse in his recent Megacities series, which to some might illustrate the final victory of capitalism, but on the other hand for the whole of our visit we’ll be cut off from the world of Facebook altogether, and I have been warned to be prepared for the enormous chasm between the super-rich and the poor in this cavernous country.

And all this technology doesn’t necessarily translate into knowledge either.

Just this morning I have seen a poll conducted in the USA last year, linked on Twitter of course, in which 20% of those polled did not know from which country they gained their independence, and 6% named one other than the UK.

And equally having technology available doesn’t mean it is, or indeed can be, taken up. Two or three examples spring to mind. The first is a survey, and for once my Google skills have let me down, but I did read it online, which showed the low penetration of internet access to large chunks of Glasgow, with a number of areas in the 10 lowest in the UK.

The second is the touch-screen arrivals machine we have in our surgery waiting room. It’s designed so that patients don’t need to queue up to merely tell the receptionist they have arrived for their appointment. Although we haven’t formally audited its use, the firm impression of the reception staff is that the 70-80 year old patients head straight for the machine, recognising that its use will allow them to rest their weary legs quicker, whilst your average 20 year old stands in the queue, right beside the machine, and waits to speak to a human being!

And the third example is our use of online appointment booking. Again you’d think that the younger patients would be in the vanguard, but in fact the statistics the company has researched shows that use is fairly evenly spread through the age ranges.

We certainly live in exciting times, and the use of all this technology will become an increasing part of our lives in future years, especially when voice recognition technology, which strangely in my view seems to have lagged behind everything else, catches up and allows us to say, “Add this to Twitter”!

But voice technology is a subject all on its own for another day! More to follow!