Twittering and social media - 2

So maybe the next new, new thing is Google Latitude. http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html But it’s just a novelty, surely?

Privacy concerns – maybe. You’d certainly have to be careful when using the (approximate) automatic location updates, to remember who you have given permission to and where you are. The potential of course comes from what else it will be able to do: match your location with local services, act as an alternative to foot-bound map reading, find out where your younger children are? Not sure. 

Whatever, it must be tied in with Google Android mobile OS and the T-Mobile G1, so it’ll be interesting to see what’s coming next.

 

Twittering and social media - 1

I can barely keep up. Too much Twittering. Let alone RSSed news and blog feeds. It seems to be  getting to that critical mass stage where it seems that everybody is doing it (well, almost). It’s now being talked about in the mainstream media.

Bobbie Johnson said yesterday that he felt that ‘I'm finished with 'social media' http://bit.ly/JNXZ Eh? Up to a point, he’s right. Social media are just another way for people to keep in touch, to chat, to gossip. Nothing new, so why all the fuss and bother?

You can argue that they give people a means to do it faster, to more people (globally), and more often, and more easily and cheaply.

Hence that fact that I cannot keep up. Filtering the mass of stuff is a problem. Some Tweeters seem to be constantly tweeting, pushing other useful Tweets down and off the page (and the next…) too often in my view. And with all those bit.ly links to follow too. Impossible.

Some tools allow you to do this better (TweetDeck, for instance) but even they need effort to set up and get going and maintain.

Time soaks away.

I wonder what the next ‘new, new’ thing will be?