It was my 11th Twitter birthday yesterday

I've been a member since 15th December 2006. Eleven years. I was one of the early adopters in the UK. This is how it happened.

The calm before the storm
London Tech Christmas Party December 2006

I was part of the London Tech community's Christmas 'Mega Bash' of 2006 led by Ian Forrester of BBC Backstage. The idea was to get all the London tech community groups together and to have a big Christmas bash on Saturday 9 December 2006. Swedish Beers was one of the groups involved alongside London Girl Geekdinners, Geekdinners, London Perlmongers, London Webstandards Group, London Ruby user group, Open rights group, London 2.0, Mobile Monday, LondonSEO. Of those, Swedish Beers is definitely still going strong with no sign of letting up any time soon (I hope).

The sponsors on the night fared better. Trusted Places went to Yell. SkillsMatter, Chinwag, TechCrunch UK, and O'Reilly are all still around in one form or another. AdMob sold to Google for megabucks. And Connect Me Anywhere was the precursor to Iovox.

Twitter didn't quite make the grade as a full-on sponsor, but they were involved in some way. It's a long time ago. I can't remember the detail. There was some Twitter activity that night, but I hadn't been organised enough to sign up to the service. And in all honesty, I really couldn't see the point of micro-blogging. I'd been doing long-form blogging for 3 years at that point and I'd been an active member of Flickr since 2005 and even had a PRO account so I could store more photos. That was my social network of choice at the time. We used that and Moblog a bit like Instagram is used now except we took our photos on our mobile or cameras and uploaded via desktop or laptop computer.  My business networking was done on Soflow, Ecademy and LinkedIn. So I could see the point of social networking (although we didn't call it that then), but microblogging? Yeah, wasn't so sure on that one.


I took some nudging from Ian to get signed up to Twitter. I did it as a favour to him after the party to help him meet his obligations to Twitter. And in those early days, I really couldn't see the point so I wasn't particularly active. And my first tweets don't reveal very much of note either. Also at the time, Twitter wasn't market leader. We also had Jaiku and Pownce. Jaiku has more functionality. I seem to remember Pownce having some weird USP that I can't quite remember, but they were both also about micro-blogging.

Fast forward to February 2007, and it's 3GSM in Barcelona - what is now Mobile World Congress. Twitter is integrated with SMS and you could do things like create an interest group and everyone in the group would receive the messages via SMS. You could post and receive via SMS for free as well. In Barcelona, on roaming, and many of us on the same mission to find out where the action was at 3GSM, Twitter suddenly had a purpose. The most similar thing to that now would be a WhatsApp or WeChat Group. Now I got the point. We could share messages with each other easily and for free. We could find out about what was going on and get answers to questions. All useful stuff. And now, all superseded by other services.

It's fair to say that for a few years I was an enthusiastic Twitter user. I met many people via Twitter. Engaged in the offline Twitter meet-ups and I met new clients via Twitter as well. It was still small enough that you could keep track of the people you were following and in turn, you could be found and make an impression. Most people still couldn't see the point of it so it stayed in the category of quality not quantity in those days.

But as the masses joined in, the usefulness and relevance for me decreased. And for the last few years, I've hardly used it at all. Facebook and LinkedIn have taken over in usefulness and reach for me - particularly the former, even for business-related content.

But, I'm still there and I'm using it a bit more again since I picked up the blogging pace this November. It's harder work because of the volume of stuff to wade through. And I'm not sure how much reach I get from Twitter. My blog stats say Google and Facebook are my main drivers of traffic with Twitter barely showing a blip these days. But maybe that will change now that I'm a bit more engaged. These platforms have a way of ebbing and flowing over time. And maybe now that Twitter is not quite as micro-blogging as before, it will make a difference.

If you'd like to relive that London Tech Mega Christmas Bash 2006, you can do that here. And if you're feeling brave, you can check out the photos. We certainly look younger, but so many of the photos are deeply, deeply unflattering!

Day 16/25 Blogmas

Facebook makes you sad

Well, sort of. The sample size is quite small and it’s early days for this kind of study, but this article in the Economist is worth a read. The teens and twenty-somethings in the study all reported more negative feelings after they’d spent time on Facebook versus spending time with people in real life. I’m not sure that this is much of a surprise – especially for that age-group for whom it looks like everyone else is much cooler and having a much better time than you are. As you grow older, I think you probably grow out of that so I wonder what a similar study would reveal about older age-groups. Anyway, expect to see more of this sort of thing as the web matures.

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Social media– some recent linkage

Sharing some links and some thinking about social media from the last week or two.

The biggest sites in social publishing – seems like the Huffington Post is ahead of the game by miles http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattbuchanan/the-biggest-sites-in-social-publishing

Pinterest is hot. I’ve just started playing around with it. I can see why it’s appealing to women. The shareability, the visuals, the ease of use – all make it a lovely site to play with. I’m currently using it as a digital scrapbook – Delicious on steroids if you like. And as a crafter, I’m really loving the access to a wide range of ideas and projects that I can both admire from afar, but also actually be able to do myself. So it becomes a source book of inspiration in much the same way as I used to subscribe to Essentials and Prima in the early days for their patterns so I’d always have something to inspire me when it came to sewing. Anyway, where you should be sitting up and taking notice, is that Pinterest had 18.7m users back in March of which 80% were women. And a picture really does paint a thousand words. Read more here http://jamiedunham.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/marketing-to-women-a-picture-on-pinterest-is-worth-a-thousand-words/

In other news, there’s been hot debate about the new promoted posts over at Facebook. There has been an outcry. I’m not sure why. The model has been working for mobile social networks such as Peperonity and Flirtomatic from day one. So I don’t get that side of the uproar. The side of the uproar I do get is the fact that Facebook may well be holding page admins hostage to their own fans. You’d think by liking a page that you’d get to see the stuff that was posted on their in your feed. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. I haven’t been monitoring it *that* closely for my Facebook pages for my blog, Swedish Beers and Heroes of the Mobile Fringe and Mobile Monday Shoreditch. And it’s hard to know how many of your likers are online at any one time to see something you post anyway. But the numbers are down and by paying, you guarantee that your post will be seen by x. For me, it’s not a lot of money to promote the odd item and is probably worth it for events and special one-offs. But it’s essentially a tax on being popular. The more popular you are, the more it’s going to cost. Seems a bit unfair but have a read of this article on Dangerous Minds and see what you think. http://dangerousminds.net/comments/facebook_i_want_my_friends_back

One of the things I’d like them to change back is the ability to message people who have said they’re coming to your event – especially when there are changes or when you’re running a new event. But I guess that’s one to tackle for another day!

BlackBerry Outage makes the news

It was a sad day for BlackBerry users in EMEA yesterday suffering an all day outage of all data services except text messaging. But it was good news for yours truly as I got invited to comment on the situation live on Al Jazeera news. It was the first time I’d ever done a live news piece so wasn’t sure what to expect.
My main points about the outage were a criticism of the lack of customer communications about the outage – despairing but loyal BB customers just wanted to know what was going on, what was being done to fix it and when to expect normal service to be resumed – that’s not an unreasonable expectation. And since BlackBerry use social media to recruit new customers to the handset and, in particular, to BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) it seemed odd that they hadn’t used those same channels to reassure customers that they were doing all they could to fix the problem.
My two-minute piece isn’t available, but I am quoted in the video below which is very gratifying. And yes, I know my fringe is too long. I’m growing it in anticipation of a new hair cut!

Rather gratifyingly, I also get quoted by David Murphy at Mobile Marketing Magazine in his article about the outage.
It appears that most BlackBerry customers now have their service back to normal but I’m not sure it has been revealed yet what was at the root of it. And it will take a little time to see if formerly loyal customers remain loyal or if sales and brand sentiment will take a dive.

Update 1: It seems that two days on and BlackBerry is still suffering problems but they are at least being a little more communicative with customers.

Update 2: I'd forgotten about this lovely 'BlackBerry' sketch from Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield which some of you may enjoy. I know I did when I saw it again. Hat tip to Benjamin Ellis for tweeting it.


Update 3: BlackBerry users have been offered compensation in a smart move from RIM. They're getting $100 of free BlackBerry apps which means that those who take advantage of this will (hopefully) remain advocates of the platform. More over at The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/17/blackberry-free-apps-compensation

Update 4 (Does this story never end?): Traffic accidents fell by 20% in Dubai and 40% in Abu Dhabi during the recent BlackBerry blackout. Wow. More here http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/blackberry-cuts-made-roads-safer-police-say

Alfie’s Blog » Blog Archive » Twitters model is partially broken: Europe the first casualty

Technorati Tags: sms,twitter,network operator,mobile,social networking

Alfie Dennen (of Moblog fame) has done a write up on Twitter's recent decision to stop the free SMS element of its service. I've seen quite a bit written about it and most of it lacks any understanding of how SMS or the operators work but this post makes some sense of it so worth a look.

For the record, I would pay to receive my (selected) DMs (that's direct messages to the twitter uninitiated) via SMS as well as email. I don't get a huge amount each week, but enough to warrant me buying some kind of bundle.

And for those on the facebook group on this topic who think that the pay to receive SMS on twitter is tantamount to paying to receive junk text messages then they clearly don't understand how the privacy and DM settings work - it doesn't *all* happen on SMS you know. Most of the interaction is web-based - be that mobile or full-fat internet.

Alfie’s Blog » Blog Archive » Twitters model is partially broken: Europe the first casualty

Big growth predicted for Mobile Social Networking

eMarketer forecasts that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012. As you can see from the image below, the millions of subscribers are a small percentage seeing as we've already hit 3 billion subscribers globally. But the potential for growth is clear. And early findings suggest a strong customer demand for mobile social networks. This doesn't surprise me in the least as mobile is all about *communication* and *community* and social networks fulfil both those needs so tying in with mobile makes perfect sense.


As discussed at the recent Mobile Youth Workout, we already know that mobile social networking is driving data usage on mobile. Typically, Japanese youth are spending 2 hours a day on the mobile internet - largely for social networking (on sites like Mixi). And with the general growth of facebook, myspace, linkedin, twitter et al, including a big chunk of that on mobile, this growth doesn't seem far-fetched.

"For example, MySpace recorded over 7 million unique visitors to MySpace
Mobile in the US in the six months since launch. "It wasn't until we rolled out
m.myspace.com that we got a sense of how powerful demand was for MySpace on cell phones," Brandon Lucas, senior director of mobile business development for
MySpace, told eMarketer.

Facebook claimed 4 million unique registrations. Mobile-only social networking players such as airG, Mocospace, myGamma and itsmy.com all reported several million users soon after launch."

And there are more mobile socnets than that - Peperonity with over half a million home pages representing a fraction of its customer base, and Mxit immediately spring to mind, not to mention Cyworld (SK Telecom-owned and now available in the US as well as Asia) and Mobikade and Trutap in the UK.

If mobile social networking is your bag, or where you think your bag should be, then emarketer's new (paid for) report on the topic may well be worth a read.