The Content Factory

Buzz. Facebook. Twitter. And a bucket load of socials you’ll never use because you’ll never hear of them. Every one carries the same banner: social engagement. A way for us to relate. A noise that has a different tone to that of the edicts fed to the masses by traditional media.

And so we’re a week or so into the launch of Buzz. It’s different. A different noise. Right now, it’s mostly being made by people talking about using it. Which is always strange; kinda like those people with £10,000 camcorders and nothing to film.

No doubt the masses will join the conversation. They may even switch from Twitter, and Google will finally claim a big social media scalp (it hasn’t bagged a whole load of those remember).

But even if it does, there’s a nagging question remaining: is the rabid urge to exchange actually changing a damn thing? Oh I know: I’m too high of waistband to understand. And at the end of the day, is a 4000-post thread in Buzz actually bringing the world to its knees?

No, it isn’t. But neither is it making a tangible difference to the thing outside of that window (you know… The World). In fact, the last I looked it was a more cynical, vacuous, viscious place than it was 10 years ago. Now if only someone, somewhere could prove me wrong…

I kind of wondered what I was doing for a few minutes.

I’d heard that Twitter was adding a Lists feature, but frankly didn’t care a whole ton. The web’s a constant thrum of world-changing features that change nothing. Today’s revolution, this evening’s ho-hum.

Then I got home from work, and found myself playing with the new Lists. It took my 98-year-old mind 10 or so minutes to grasp the sub-plot, so forgive me. But when the penny finally dropped… you clever bastards.

See, there are two fundamental problems in Twitter for the average human. The first is that we don’t have that many friends, which is somewhat at odds with the social media revolution – the phone keeps on getting bigger, but it’s still the same two school chums who ring. Sad, but admit it’s true.

The second is that the average wall of Twitter posts are indigestible. The sea of hash tags, boil-washed URLs and incomprehensible retweets befuddle the mind. Not the geek mind, sure, but that’s not the point: if Twitter hopes to crack the mainstream consciousness, it must play by the same rules as the rest of us.

So… how to solve (or start to solve) both problems at once?

Lists. Within minutes, I started looking for people with something decent to say to add to my /technology list. Oh sure, I started by adding the people I was already following, but it soon extended beyond that. And within a further 10 minutes, I’d followed five or six new people.

And now, twitter.com/markyp has a tidy panel of easily digestible categories set above the fold – it tells any visitor what I like, without having to skim-read the painful sea of hash tags and bitly urls for clues.

So I doff my cap, Twitter, you made me do two things  – find and follow more people, and add site navigability – without even being aware of doing them. Clever, clever bastards.

Please don’t tell me this is true.

The day that would never come did: a Blackberry blog editor that works with Wordpress. Google Wicked App. And if you’re reading this, it bloody works. If you’re not… Well, it’s a whole different conversation.

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Every reason to live in terror of a resurgence in Japanese militarism. Someone spent months making this thing.

I’ve seen too many game changers that morph into gaping yawns. But Google Wave looks as though it may just have re-arranged the rules forever. Beta invites going out very soon, apparently. For now, gawp at this.

OK, so it’s a little stiff-kneed, but this is actually a perfect promo video for its audience – honest, well-edited and informative. I’ll live without the tricksy cuts and in jokes: I wanted to go try and site at the end of watching the flick.

Fashion… what a wicked mistress you are. Back in the day (2005), Delicious was gravitational – objects gyrated around it, and you were nothing without a cooler Delicious bookmarks page than the next delusional geek.

Four years (and one Yahoo buy-out) later, fewer objects gyrate around Planet D. Firefox probably didn’t help (why stick your bookmarks into a public cloud, when a mix of the Awesome Bar and Weave reduces the whole tagging concept to dust?). And also, we kind of just… forgot about it. Phrases such ‘where links go to die’ didn’t help.

But hey, today’s a D-Day. Delicious has just enjoyed a serious splash of paint. Better recommendations, better tagging, better search… all good. Now all I need to do is care.

Only the NPR would turn a goof into a 15-min read.