The Flow

The small pieces of updates sent to you from other people via services such as Twitter and Facebook "status updates" might be seen as nonsense and non-important information. Well, they may be that. They are the messages that are not worth to be sent via e-mail or instant messaging. But still, the messages are not meaningless. They can even be sort of addictive to read. Suddenly a friend or a person you met at a bus stop three years ago is telling the world what he/she is doing right now or what music he/she likes or whatever. And in a weird way it's interesting because you get that person in your mind's eye, which would not be the case otherwise. Flemming Funch writes about this phenomena in this blog post:

"But it keeps people on your radar screen. You don't have to respond, but you can, if something somehow rings a bell. It doesn't have to be your close friends either. It is surprisingly meaningful, even if it is people you've never met, but you have some kind of interest in what they're up to."

He continues:
"I watch a screen where a few dozen people say something once in a while, and I can say something too. Interestingly, they aren't all watching the same screen, as they have different groups of friends than I do, although they overlap. They aren't all there at the same time either, and they aren't all paying attention. But once in a while somebody feels like saying something. That will be something that relates to what's going on for them at the moment, and it will also be something they feel like saying into that fuzzy kind of space, usually without saying it to anybody in particular. They typically don't expect a response either. Other people do the same. Whether you directly comment on anything else or not, what you say will necessarily be colored a bit by what you see already on the screen."

I wish I could summarize this in some kind of a definition. I guess that will take a while. For now I call this phenomena "The Flow".

Micro-blogging

Our brains seem to become more and more connected. This is of course a good thing. What would the world be like if there was no international net open for all? Pretty boring. Blogs have given us the opportunity to read about other people's ideas, knowledge and lives. Using instant messaging and social networks, we get increasingly bombarded with information sent by other people. Facebook introduced a new type of communication a couple of years ago - the "status update". Probably it was just a fun thing created by the Facebook developers. Short, sometimes meaningless sentences like "Jim is watching TV" pop up in the never ending history of Facebook events. The idea was adopted later by Twitter, and really took off. By answering the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less, you can send your friends updates ("Tweets"). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS and RSS. Anyone with a cell phone can send and receive updates any time, anywhere. Users can send messages as text, video or audio. Other sites such as "Jaiku" and "Yammer" have taken the idea even further. They all go in the category "Micro-blogging" and are now used by millions of people.