the never ending question...

...What is twitter? Every time I visit my family, in between eating and Aidan and I playing with my iPhone, we start talking about technology and its impact on society this question always comes up. They all get blogs, podcasts, and some of the other aspects of web 2.0 but twitter seems to confound everyone. The "In Plain English" series from Common Craft does a great job of simply explaining twitter as a utility.

But the strength of twitter goes beyond what is explained in the video. Twitter's open platform has allowed people to develop using the API. Twittervision is a perfect example, it allows you see all the public tweets visualized on a world map. Twittermagnets is an application developed as a crowd sourcing poetry project.

Twitter also allows for great data mining and there are a ton of tools can help visualize this. There are lots of ways to see what people are saying but one of my favorites is Cursebird which shows all the tweets that have curses in them and which curses are the most often used. Apparently, I curse like a bad golfer which is not very good assuming good is cursing a lot.

Twitter also allows you to follow some really smart people who are not tweeting about them mundane happenings in their lives but rather interesting stuff they are passionate about.

• Steven Johnson - Writer/economist
• Malcom Gladwell - Excellent writer and generally smart guy
• Mark Cuban - Owner of the Dallas Mavs and winner of the Yahoo! lottery, oh and really smart guy
• Saul Williams - Talented musician, writer, and actor

There are a lot more famous and non famous people that great to follow and you can follow your friend and know exactly when and how many times they went to the shake shack.

Ray Kurzweil

There is a documentary coming out about Ray Kurzweil called The Transcendent Man that looks really interesting mainly because Ray Kurzweil is an amazing and fascinating person. He is one of the people who deserves the title of Futurist. Over the years he has made a lot of predictions about how technology will evolve and change the way we live and most of what he has written about has come true. His predictions for the future seem amazing and unfathomable but based on his track record it is pretty clear that he thinks on a different level than the rest of us. This is one documentary I will definitely check out:

Swooning

Swoon is a street artist who primarily deals with creating amazing looking cutouts (like the one below) that are very multi-layered almost telling a story with each work.

Well now she is taking her art to the waters. Last year she worked with a group that created "Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea" that was an interesting work that sailed down the Hudson River as a performance piece.  The video below shows the culmination of what they did:

Well now she is taking this idea on the road, well the river, making collaborative art pieces that sail down rivers and engage the local people who live in the area. They sailed the Mississippi River and now are on the Adriatic Sea from Slovenia to Venice. This seems a bit too hippie for my tastes but I like the general idea of it and am a fan of Swoon mostly because of stuff like this, this, this, and this.

Qik and Facebook

(image found via mashable)

Qik just announced that they are lunching a instant uploading videos to facebook via facebook connect. I really think this is going to be a big deal especially once iPhone activates video. Qik has already shown they can create a pretty good iPhone App via jailbreak (see my video's here).

Also, I was talking to a co-worker about FB and he said something to the effect of how, over the years, he has seen all the next big things go down in flames and that was the reason he wasn't on FB. I tend to agree that several years ago there were a lot of social networks that started strong but went down in flames. I think one of the biggest reasons that happened was they tried to make money off of the product too quickly without really solidifying strategy. This tended to alienate and annoy their users. FB has had some negative feedback on some of their changes (the most notable is beacon) but I think most of their changes have been for the best and following the trend of feed aggregators like FriendFeed. And now with FB connect they have created something really powerful with and I really think they are being smart by trying get FB almost as a default platform. If you are a small company, what better way to engage with your customers than through FB, a network they are already highly vested in.

As for Qik if they can get live streaming to FB that will be a game changer and will bring mobile video broadcasting to the forefront and if at that point the iPhone does not embrace video Apple will leave the door wide open for a device that can shoot quality video with same the functionality of the iPhone (I really doubt the latter will happen because Apple has always been able to gauge the where the market is headed and move quickly to that path...and I love the iPhone so it can do no wrong).

City Planning

I am a bit of a nerd for good city planning, I guess that is one of the many reasons why I love NYC. This beautiful big city is probably this country's greatest example of city planning. From Central Park to the Brooklyn Bridge to Rockefeller Center to (my one of my favorite places) theHighline. Well now in Brooklyn the city is working on extending the Brooklyn Bridge Park on the pier south of the bridge. Below is a rendering of the design:

And this video was part of a segment on WNYC's Brian Lehrer show called Cityscapes where they have been looking at different aspects of NYC and how it has evolved.

These types of projects add to the greatness of the city and make it livable.

The music industry...

"Industry rule # 4080 record company people are shady, so kids watch your back 'cause I think they smoke crack. I don't doubt it look at how they act."

- A Tribe Called Quest, Check The Rhime (one of my favorite songs)

Now that I am tangentially working in the music industry I feel justified to comment on the industry as a whole. In the past week I have seen and heard some interesting things that are very telling on the state of the industry. John Mellencamp was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross and he said something interesting when he was questioned about letting Chevy use his song, out of context, as an anthem in their commercials. He said it was an experiment for him, which he was disappointed in mainly because of the way they used the song but he said he thought Chevy was a better record label than than any label he has dealt with because they delivered everything they promised. This is a sad statement on the way the labels treat the artists which ultimately translates to how they treat consumers.

The other interesting thing that I saw are kind of related. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails did this really interesting interview with Digg's Kevin Rose for a show Digg recently started called Digg Dialogg. The interview overall is pretty long but there are 2 questions (the first and the 3rd) that really get to the heart of the irrelevance of the major labels assuming you are not trying to be a huge pop star. Rezner offers up different ways for independent artists to make the labels obsolete.

NIN has offered up their music for free and experimented with lots of other distribution models. Now they are coming out with an iPhone app that looks very interesting if you are an NIN fan (see video below).

This seems like something an really smart way for a band to engage with their fans. This is something the labels should be doing on an aggregated basis for all their artists or better yet collectively create a singe app so that people can fully immerse themselves in their favorite music. But sadly I don't think the labels are even close to thinking along these lines.

Tracking via Social Media

Recently, a luddite friend of mine, who finds my frequent updated and posts on facebook a bit much, discovered my twitter feed and said:

"I always thought you were a little carried away with the Facebook updates...then I saw what you do on Twitter. Oh my."

It is my guess that he has recently discovered twitter based on what has been what has been in the news (here and here). My response to him was "Yeah I also use Qik, the share feature on google reader, and one or two other social tools. I like being social without the burden of actually interacting with people" but that is not the point of this post. In my new job one of my minor roles will be to help define how the company uses social tools and trying to track what is being said.

There are several ways to track what others are saying about you and any discussions going on. Search.twitter.com has a great feature called "trending topics" which lists out some of the top topics people are tweeting about. TwitterDeck is also a great tool to monitor all things twitter. Robert Scoble talks about how he uses Twitter in this Kyte video (it is a bit long and meandering but it will give you a good sense of how someone super connected keeps up):

I also recently learned about the rooms feature on FriendFeed which aggregates all feedback from several sources. I haven't started using this but will set it up tomorrow and see how it works.

Social media are allowing anyone to easily monitor and respond to anything that is being discussed about you. I wonder what this will do to public relations people I am sure the tech savvy ones will be able to pick up lots of new business, while the ones who ignore all the different tools available to the average person will suffer.