1. The strip is designed to keep you inside casinos. Inside my hotel (the Flamingo, because we information architects like to kick it old-school), every path you can take is designed to take you through or into a casino. The rooms don’t even have those terrible hotel-room coffee makers, which I presume is to get you downstairs, near where you could spend money, without caffeine. It’s bizarrely fascinating.
2. The keynote speaker at the conference has an office literally down the block from where I work. I walk past his building at least a couple of times a week. And yet I don’t think I would ever have just walked in to say hello. Now we’ve exchanged cards, and I’m hoping he or someone from his firm will come address our brown-bag series in the works.
3. Steven, in comments to my last post, directed me to the geeky story behind the Bellagio water display, which has made me unreasonably happy. Thank you, Steven!
4. I’ve seen the room where I’m presenting. I’m definitely going to need to run for a presentation-clicker. (I bought one in New York, which is… um, I think still on my bed at home.)
Twitter: the present of presence
So the first big news out of SXSW Interactive this year seems to be that Twitter has hit some sort of adoption tipping point: In Ross Mayfield's phrase, it's "tipped the tuna."
Twitter is a presence publisher: it asks you "what are you doing now?" and you tell it. It, in turn, tells your friends, or the whole world, if you make your posts public. Your friends can receive your Twitter posts via IM, SMS, web, or my preferred method, the Mac-only Twitterific app.
When I've been asked to describe Twitter, I call it "Dodgeball for people who don't go out." (And the fact that I can use that description tells you something about the tech-nerd quotient of the people asking the question.) Dodgeball is all about the ephemeral moment: we're here now, come join us. Twitter is a bit more stateful: it could be Dodgeball-esque, but the people on my friends list use mostly for less pressing things -- for updates on their moods, to describe a sky, and even for advice and a sort of asynchronous group chat.
However, Twitter is also apparently very useful as a Dodgeball-type app at a conference like SXSW, even though there is a Dodgeball Austin, and I wonder in fact if the long lagtime as Dodgeball has gotten integrated into Google will end up working against it: I'm not sure why it left the space for Twitter to move into.
I tried getting Twitter on my phone, on the Dodgeball model, and had to turn it off: it was making me crazy. I need to know that Clive is at his local New York bar right now: I do not need to be interrupted on the street to know that Emily in LA is packing for a trip. (Sorry, honey.) Having Twitter on my desktop makes a lot more sense -- it provides a light-weight, low-cost way to check in with the world outside my workspace.
Liz Lawley, a bigger Twitter fan than I am, says:
What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage--personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages--into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.I'm not sure about either brilliant or fascinating there, myself, but I know this much: despite all the other presence indicators available to me, I haven't turned it off yet. For the rest, I'll have to see. Note: I'm michelet on Twitter if you're interested, or want to add me as a friend. I'm not a hugely active poster, as you might have guessed from the above, but reading my previous "twitters" did remind me I still haven't posted here about The Coast of Utopia. Maybe when I start procrastinating tomorrow, which I've taken off to finish my IA Summit talk...
Design flashback
I am one of maybe five people in the entire world, if that, who looked at the new New Yorker site and had a flashback to the navigational structure of this site. But that's only to be expected.
(Thesis: there are interface design paradigms that speak deeply to lit geeks. Discuss.)
Goodbye to Mr. Bruno
I have had all sorts of things I wanted to say on this blog since I rebooted it, but I have been to busy and too intimidated by WordPress and too lazy. But this needs to be said.
My next door neighbor died yesterday. He was the sort of man you want to have in your neighborhood — the sort who knows everyone, who has a smile for everyone, who is genuinely interested in what’s going on with his neighbors and in sharing his own life with you in turn. He had a broad smile, and good taste in wine, and an enviable retirement, spent half in his Brooklyn home and half in Brazil. When I told him I wanted his life, he told me that I could have it once I’d worked as hard for 35 years as he had. I didn’t tell him this at the time, but I think that’s a fair deal, and I’ve only got 20-odd more years to go.
He came home every spring to spend the warm months sitting on his stoop, usually with my landlord until old age caught up with him, and I can’t even begin to tell you how glad it made me every year the first time I turned the corner and I saw him there. It meant that spring had truly come. This year, he came home a little early, because he’d gotten sick, but he reassured me that he was getting better even though he looked gaunt and tired.
His funeral is Friday. Spring next year will not be as warm.