The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

Attending a Tweetup tomorrow

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Tomorrow night, I’m going to attend an Oxfordshire Tweetup at the Fallowfields Country House near Abingdon.  I’m not sure what to expect, but I saw it was coming up and thought I would check it out.  A tweetup, as I understand it, is just a bunch of Twitterers getting together to meet each other.  I follow a few people in the Oxfordshire area (they actually help me by letting me know when the roads are bad or if there is anything interesting going on in the area) and it would be nice to meet them.  I’m not sure what to expect really, but it will be nice to meet some new people.

A few years ago, when ECademy was at it’s prime, I attended a local networking evening.  It was okay, but it was really a room full of people trying to sell themselves and their companies.  I never met so many life coaches as I did that night.  But it wasn’t awful—and i met some nice people who I spoke with afterwards.  I’m hoping that the tweetup is not so business-focused.

I’m looking forward to it.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  If you live in Oxfordshire and want to attend, the url to register for the event is here: http://twtvite.com/mkp8da

The Virtual Revolution

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BBC started airing a very good documentary about the internet a few weeks ago called The Virtual Revolution.  I finally watched the first episode just the other night.  It’s amazing how much has happened in such a small time.

Google was incorporated in 1998 (went public in 2004).  Youtube started in 2005.  Twitter in 2006.  The World Wide Web was created in 1990 with the first web server being created by Tim Berners-Lee in that year.

It was a fantastic documentary and it really makes you think. 

We are still very much in the beginning of all of this.  There are still things to be done that no one has thought of yet.  We still haven’t reaped much of the benefits that the improvements in communication channels will have lent to science and medicine and as much as the internet has changed all of our lives, I’m sure it’s nothing compared to what’s to come.

I routinely chat with people in China and India (and back home in the States) while visiting offices here in the UK. In high school, these places all seemed so far away.

This twenty years of the internet will one-day seem like just a blip to us.  One day years in the future, people will talk about how the newspapers and music industries cried foul before they found their own way.  We will talk about the quaint days of waiting for our favourite TV programs to be aired.  Soon, we will look back on Twitter and Facebook the same way we look back on the old newsgroups (it was all so crude!).

The other day I found myself falling into the trap of thinking that everything had been invented already.  Surely, there are no new opportunities out there because they’ve all been invented.  Or, someone is already working on them.  But the truth is that we’ve hardly scratched the surface. 

There are still things that aren’t quite right in technology.  Still loads to do.  For example, as much as webcam chat is fantastic and a nice novelty, it’s still too complicated to get “ordinary” people to use it. 

As much as things change, we still think in old terms.  Artists still come out with Albums, even though we can buy and download only the tracks we want.  Why do we need the album grouping?  We still have business people who think they need to fly thousands of miles to have a meeting in another office, because we haven’t found a method of communication that is better an 8 hour flight.  Too many of us still get up in the morning and drive or take a train to an office building to do work that could easily be done at home.  When we get to grips with some of these new realities, we will start thinking differently and even more innovation will come.

I was reading the xkcd comic strip (if you haven’t read it, you’re missing out—http://xkcd.com), and saw this this strip:

Xkcd strip

2003 wasn’t that long ago. Or maybe my age is just catching up with me.

What Twitter is becoming

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I enjoy Twitter.  It’s easy to update.  The low character limit, rather than being a hindrance, encourages people to start using it who would never think of started a self-serving blog.  It’s easy to put off a quick statement without having to think too much about it.  I find I update Twitter far more than this blog.

I’m getting lots of followers.  This is good for the ego until I look at who they are.  On any given day, I will get a few email like the following:

SomebodyYouDontKnow is following you on Twitter.
Followers: 300
Status Updates: 121
Following: 1421

Now, I ask you . . . how can someone follow the status updates of over 1400 people?  How is it even possible?  Why would someone want to do it?

I get two or three of these type of followers a day.

I’m also seeing a lot of articles on the web titled “How to increase you followers in Twitter”.  It’s like the new SEO.  There are people now calling themselves “Social Media Consultants”.

I suspect that people follow thousands of people so that those people will in turn follow them.  It makes sense I guess– you send more mail when you want to get more mail.  However, there is just something spammy about this.  Maybe they are looking for the top spot in the Twitter stats.

Twitter is not like Facebook where you have to give permission to people so they can see your status.  You can search all tweets (unless the author specifically selects to option to make it private)– so there is no reason to follow 14k or more people. 

A few years ago, I kept getting contacted by SEO charlatans saying things like “I can get your company in the top 10 on Google.”  It was a ridiculous statement.  I asked if they knew what my business did or what keywords I wanted, but they didn’t. 

I now soon expect to be told, “I can get you 20k followers on Twitter. ”  But who wants that?