Liminal Existence

Google Code Love
Originally uploaded by liminalists.

My Jabber::Simple project, extracted from Twitter's Jabber/IM support, got some love today from Google Code (thanks, eric!)

Here's the list of cities I stayed in during the course of 2006. Memes away. I've only included cities in which I spent at least one day and one night. I've preemptively added a few spots I'll be visiting over Christmas, too.

San Francisco, CA
Fresno (FresYES!), CA
Tahoe, CA/NV
Seattle, WA
Vancouver, BC
White Rock, BC
Victoria, BC
Whistler, BC
Reykjavik, Iceland
Ólafsvík, Iceland
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Aberystwyth, Wales
Norwich, East Anglia
London, England
Lewes (Brighton & Hove), East Sussex
Barcelona, Spain
Portland, OR
Grande Prairie, AB
Santa Cruz, CA
Mojave Desert & Las Vegas, CA & NV
Zion National Monument, UT
Tucson, AZ
[Near] Calistoga, CA
Chilliwack, BC

All in all, pretty good, though I'm hoping for maybe somewhere more less-European for 2007. We'll see.

Labels: travel cities meme 2006

A few weeks ago, Kellan and I whipped up what is tentatively known as "WeatherBot". It's a simple tool to provide weather updates to Twitter users. Every morning at 7:00 AM and 3:45 PM (local time, that's 07h00 and 15h45 for those of you across the pond), our fleet of WeatherBots will send a weather update to Twitter.

If you follow these bots, you'll receive those updates wherever you normally get your Twitters; IM, Phone, RSS, or just on the web. So far, we have bots for the following cities (links are to the bots' twitter profiles, for easy friending action): Boston, Brighton, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Singapore, and Vancouver. If you'd like to see another city, just ask and we'll provide.

The source code is available over on Google Code as Twitter Weather. Kellan and I will be providing follow-up posts (and hopefully talks!) about how we built this, and updates on future improvements, so watch this space, and if you're not already on Twitter, sign up already! We're building an awesome space, and want you to have as much fun as we are.

Labels: twitter weather presence jabber source attention

Kathy Sierra has a great post, talking about Continuous Partial Attention and Twitter. Before you read my response, go read Kellan's excellent post on the matter.

Twitter is really nothing new, it's just new to the web (and IM/SMS). IRC has been around for ages, and functions in much the same way. Campfire, 37signals' group chat application is a similar application, but more task-focused. So to say that 2006 is the year of the singularity is probably too much of an exaggeration.

I held off on using Twitter for a long time, even though I work at Obvious, because it was too much of an attention drain for me. I have a 5 year old Nokia cell phone, and the SMS experience is one of mind-numbing pain when you receive 15 or 20 SMSes per day (not to mention expensive!). IM, on the other hand, is seamless. Like Kellan, I have verging-on-sub-conscious Growl notifications for IM, and as such I spend less than a second processing each incoming Twitter message.

A phone call, on the other hand, can easily eat half an hour for me, because I don't "do" the phone very often. I find it intimidating, because most of the time the interactions involve long hold times, anti-human menus, horrible bureaucracy, etc. Email is more distracting than IM or Twitter, and so on. Calling friends and family is also a major time commitment, especially if we haven't talked in a while.

I'm more than willing to put up with certain levels of interruption in order to have that sense that I "know" what's going on around me. I have friends who live far away, and whom I don't speak to on the phone, email, or see regularly. Twitter perfectly fills the gap, and allows us to keep each-other "in the loop", bringing us closer overall.

Sure, I could close myself off, and just work all day - but I feel like all these emerging (emergent?) "ambient" communication technologies actually help to make me happier, and feel less alone in our highly abstract and disconnected world. Having "community" is extremely important; far more so than our productivity. Maybe it's just sad that we allow ourselves to live in this paradoxically disconnected online world, "cyberspace" as it were. I like to think of it as just another progression of human adaptation. To say that people are lonelier or happier, more or less fulfilled, busier, or more productive than they were 10, 50, 100, or 500 years ago is a falsehood. We're different, and we're all just trying to make the best of where we find ourselves.

Labels: twitter identity happiness productivity kathysierra continuous attention singularity