I am certainly not the only one to notice. Here is @Ev talking about trying to lower barriers to entry (specifically from 3:20 onwards).

I think this is the big issue for any start up. They have to be able to make it easy enough for people to get into, while providing a stimulating enough experience to keep people in. A List Apart have a good article regarding flow for websites which I think is appropriate for any tech startup. And it’s step 2 that I think Twitter fails on – “Provide Immediate Feedback”. This is much easier for the celebrities who enter the Twittersphere who, as soon as they are introduced, get a massive influx of followers. After Stephen Fry spoke about Twitter on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross I thought I’d check out what kind of messages he was getting and it was obvious there are those struggling when they start off. Other startups such as Last.fm, Spotify or Dopplr enable the user to immediately interact by listening to music or discover how much CO₂ their last trip created.

So can Twitter make it easier for people to get started? Lets hope so. I love it here.

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The intention now is to keep blog posts here and “lifestream” to Tumblr. However I’m not really sure how that’s going to work out since I so evidently like my widgets here. Only one way to find out. Let me know what you think about the changes being made to the blog and hopefully you’ll see lots of improvements in the near future.

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Christmas will have to be a post by itself though it’s one I’ve been putting off for a while so maybe it won’t

Got back to Lufbra shortly after the New Year with the intention of getting some work done. This has been my first week back and we have had three courseworks plus a French exam. Right now I’m shattered having submitted the final piece a couple hours ago. I had been running on adrenaline up until that point so my bodies crashing now and claiming expenses back on what I’ve been putting it through, feeding it naff food and sleeping at funny hours with no pattern.

Taking languages has turns out to be a two sided coin at Uni. I take French at level seven currently – that’s the level you go into if you have an A-level – having previously taken level three, five and six (don’t know how/why I skipped level 4 but there we go). A language invariably means that you have language assessment very early. It also means later on as our Engineering exams tend to be later on, I have less exams than anyone else and so more time to do revision. But it can screw you over when you have other stuff to do such as coursework.

It also doesn’t help that nine days ago one of my house mates texted to let me know she’s taking a leave of absence from Uni through till October. That wouldn’t be an issue but we have a house group for our Development Project work. She had done all the original research and so the rest of us didn’t bother getting involved expecting her to present us with that work and we could move on from there. Or at least using that as an excuse to be lazy. So to find out we had a couple weeks to do a bunch of research and put together a report wasn’t great fun. At least we’ll get an Impaired Performance form that should help. Incidentally to throw in a little tech here I did use Freemind to create a nice Mind Map of the information. It’s slow and I didnt have a clue about how to get it to print at 100% size over several pages instead of cramming it all onto one page. Ended up taking screen shots and sellotaping them together.

One thing about all this Social Media stuff, it does make you very aware of the power of sharing. We used this to good effect. Or at least I tried to. First up I stuck all my research onto our living room wall. If we had worked in the house and not gone onto campus I think it would have worked out really well. Also used
Zoho Projects as a way of sharing documents. This was more benificial but everything like this requires people to learn to use it. So whereas two of us what update version so there were only a couple files getting updated, the other member would upload each revision as a fresh. Easier for him than looking into the app but not using the kind of power available. Talking to the other member who at least made some effort she felt that it was too small a group to make really effective use given that a quick IM could update us on the latest information which is a fair point.

While I’m shooting off on tangents here’s another. I want to set myself up my own domain. I dont know how I want to approach blogging. I like finding out new things and setting stuff up to have a go. Hence this Tumblr blog when I haven’t updated Wordpress in a couple months. But maybe a Hosted Wordpress account would be more interesting and able. Or take a leaf out of Jennifr’s book and have a Tumblr subdomain as a Lifestream to a Wordpress account. I’ve been using Xona’s site to try and come up with some decent URLs. I’d love to have www.lu.ke but unfortunately Kenya aren’t selling .ke’s at the mo. Very disappointing. Then I got chatting with my ex and she Tweeted that she had, instead of a PA, a PG (Personal Geek) and that got me a-thinking. It’d be cool to set up a blog with absolute baby steps on how to set things up such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. Once the basics had been done I could move on to stuff that I’ve set using tutorials that weren’t very clear. But for that I need a good name and so the search continues.

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At the beginning of the Easter holiday it was all sparked by my discovering I could get Firefox 3. I was investigating this development where somewhere along the line I heard about Flock – I had also seen it advertised on Facebook. Looking around Flock I read their news that they had won an award at the SXSW conference. Obviously this lead to reading about all kinds of goings-on at this geeky sounding event.

Nevertheless I started using Flock, much to my satisfaction. I like being able to log into the tools I use day to day and being able to monitor them constantly. But what is this I see in the side bar? Twitter? More investigation (and quite a few stories from the SXSW conference) that sounds pretty funky too so now I’m signed into that as well!

And of course other than a new browser and notification service, I decided to set up a blog! I chose Wordpress simply because I’ve used it to manage the Loughborough Students Ultimate site previously though since then there has obviously been lots of improvements and I like it!

So I’ve had a great time geeking it up and ignoring things like coursework and selecting final year projects but trying to think about all the possibilities open to me now.

Tags: tech, firefox 3, flock, twitter, blog

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