Entertainment For Lively Minds
Now I feel old
Posted by nicktf on 16 November 2010 - 2:59am.
Facebook did not want to simply create an e-mail system because research revealed that e-mail felt too formal and slow for many people, particularly the young.
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I was afraid of this
We have a system at work where colleagues can hassle you instantly with an instant pop-up "chat" screen. This is presumably for those situations where when the telephone, texting, email or coming to see me personally doesn't quite cut it.
the medium is not the message
Your point is well made Austin. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, what we have here is a failure to communicate. In our desire for more and swifter forms of messaging, we are losing touch with the importance of clear and effective communication. Email, IM and twitter are all blunt forms of communication, open to misinterpretation and worse, as Stephen Fry has found, misrepresentation.
You might think you are expressing yourself clearly and unambiguously, but that really depends on the person at the other end. I had a situation last week where I sent an innocuous but perhaps too familiar email message to someone who took such umbrage at it, that I had to make an international phone call to remedy the situation. In some instances, there really is no substitute for an actual conversation.
As Bob Hoskins once said, "It's good to talk".
Mr Fry
"Email, IM and twitter are all blunt forms of communication, open to misinterpretation and worse, as Stephen Fry has found, misrepresentation."
Didn't Fry's problems arise because an interview for a print journal was turned into unrepresentative soundbites for a print media that looks for scandal at every turn and works on the basis that its readership can't deal with articles that are more than 500 words in length? I don't think any of the blame for the way he was grossly misrepresented can be apportioned to Email, IM or Twitter, can it?
That's a different story
If I recall correctly, Fry quit Twitter for a while last year after experiencing "unkindness" from another user.
OK
I thought Nick was referring to Fry's recent problems with his alleged "women hate sex" comments, but you may well be right Fraser.
Fry
I do think if you expose yourself to such a wide group of followers who hang on your every tweet, you are leaving yourself open to being abused. There's always one.
I think IM has its place
Everyone in my office is on Skype. If you have a relatively trivial enquiry that doesn't need storing and doesn't require an instant reply, sending an IM is quite useful.
But it's also a question of etiquette.
Skype is potentially very well placed
There you have the ability to message, phone - video phone even. Significantly, my teenage kids have started using the IM facility on Skype because Facebook is now considered too ponderous a messaging medium. Although why they can't use the IM facility on FB I'm not sure. Maybe there's another agenda, of communicating with one set of friends without another set knowing. It's complicated alright..
I don't know about other platforms...
...but Facebook Chat in Firefox on my Mac is a grotesque memory hog. God knows what the damn code's doing. It's pretty unreliable at message delivery too.
I'm not a great IMer, I must say. It's easy enough to be misconstrued by email, let alone IM.
IM is useful
We all have it and it's great for quick queries or just asking someone to give you a call when convenient. It's also useful for sharing presentations whilst people are on conference calls as well.
Of course some people abuse it - sending an IM saying I have sent you an email pls read is one. It's also great fun when you are on a conference call for some background chat about what your listening to.
If it doesn't need an instant reply...
...why send an instant message, then...?
So you don't
clog up people's inboxes with trivial messages of the 'I need to ask you something, can I come over' or 'where on the network is that presentation you did last week?' variety.
I get too much email
At the moment, I don't get too many IM's and, on the whole, people respect the fact that IM's are for flagging urgent things that may get lost in an overcrowded inbox.
Urgent
I can't remember who suggested that before responding to anything marked Urgent, you should ask yourself if it's urgent for them or for you. It's usually them.
A change in attitude
I've seen a huge shift in attitude where the quick and easy communication methods - emails, mobile phones etc - are seen as being there for the person who is contacting you.
My view, which certainly annoys people I work with, is that I'll decide when to respond to a phone call or an email. Just because you've sent something to me or are calling me does not mean I will answer straightaway.
It bugs me no end when somebody emails me - marking it urgent - and then calls me to see if I've read the email, and then asks me when I'm going to respond to the email ("If you get off the phone and let me get on with reading it I may just about find the time to respond")and then phones me up again ten minutes later because they've not heard anything. Hello, do people think I'm just sitting here inactive until they hit send or dial my number?!??!
Sorry rant over.
Sundown Rule
We have a policy at work whereby an acknowledgement of phone calls, emails and messages is expected by the end of the day. Seems to work OK.
It is frustrating when the other person does not respond. You don't know whether it is an angry silence or a satisfied one. It only takes a second or two to type "thanks for your help" or something.
And in my experience
in terms of good client relationships, there's definitely a positive result to be had from responding promptly.
Email
Is something like 40 years old and is really due for an upheaval. I had high hopes for Google Wave, but it didn't really happen.
Google Wave
E-mail works because of its simplicity, but people couldn't even figure out what Google Wave did, so it was doomed from the start. It was an amazing bit of coding, and I'm sure bits of it will show up elsewhere, but it was simply beyond comprehension for many users, and its features entirely redundant for most.
Genuine question
What kind of upheaval do you mean?
Email seems fine to me, though as somebody who has absolutely no interest in Facebook, Twitter etc, I appreciate that I don't really fit the times.
Well, I think there's two issues
One is technical – the overwhelming majority of email is spam. There's a need for a system that can ensure the person sending the email is who you think it is. Email is based on a system that assumes all parties are trustworthy.
The second is one of organisation – I've worked on complex projects where email has been the primary tool of communication. And it's always been a a bit of a nightmare. There are much better methods of running a collaborative project, but people still cling to email. That's why I had high hopes for Google Wave.
Me, me, me! I'm important, me!
I wonder how much of this is driven by an, "I am the centre of the universe and I require anyone I want to answer or comment on any point I want to make to do so - RIGHT NOW" mentality. With a subtle sub-text of, "And I don't really care what you're doing. Drop everything and reply to ME. RIGHT NOW!"
That would be the telephone, then...
?
The always interesting John Naughton
Not the Word contributor (who is always interesting too, lig lig), but the Observer columnist, touched on something related in the first couple of paragraphs of this recent column:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/03/facebook-flickr-fotoped...
So email is, like, so old Dad....
BTW,
he also made some comments about itunes recently. Given The Announcement that Apple is heavily trailing for today, I wonder if this column is prescient:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/sep/26/the-networker-john-naug...
With Chairman Steve's
obsession with simplicity and usability, I often wonder how iTunes slipped through the net. It's a horribly bloated piece of software.
My analysis is...
Early versions of iTunes were fine. It was a Mac-only application and did one thing very well.
The problem came about when it was decided to port it to Windows for the benefit of Windows users who wanted to use iPod.
As more and more Windows users came on board, Apple realised that iTunes was their Trojan Horse into Windows users. They had iTunes but they might not be interested in any more Apple software so everything gets larded into iTunes.
Personally, I'd much rather return to the days of iTunes for music and a resurrected iSync for apps/data.
Amen
!
i-Tunes
Can't blame windows for that one - it's a classic example of an app that doubtless has a team of highly-paid programmers behind it. When it "just works" then they are all sitting idle, so along comes "Feature-creep" and before you know it you have a behemoth on your hands. See also MS Office, WinZip, AVG, Nero (god, especially Nero) Acrobat Reader (50Mb install??!? use FoxIT instead), in fact, most any piece of software you care to think of.
If I had a penny for every meeting I've attended where a programmer says "Wouldn't it be neat if...?"
Maybe...
although pre- the Windows port of iTunes, much of the functionality now in iTunes was in other OSX applications - noteably iSync.
Once iTunes gained some Windows leverage, the various sync functionalities were integrated into iTunes and iSync was killed off.
Personally, I preferred the split where iTunes was a music/podcast management package and iSync handled sync-ing to mobile devices.
Also...
...when the sodding hell are they going to introduce wireless sync?
Also also, the one thing about the whole iTunes/iDevices situation that strikes me as unusually clunky and irritating for Apple is the fact that your iDevice has to have a "home" computer, and can't sync with any other machine without wiping the device and starting all over again. That's shit.
With any luck, once iTunes starts serving content from the cloud à la Spotify, that won't be an issue: you can sync your device from anywhere with wi-fi connection. Because the current situation is bloody stupid.
At the moment, by way of example, I'm doing a project using iPads in schools to assess their vfm against laptops, which are essentially a case of taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut in most classrooms. I want to be able to deploy a standard iPad build out to all the devices at once, as you do with computers. Right now, that's very hard, because the iPads require a "home" machine, which can only be "home" to five iDevices at once. I have 25 of the buggers, and I want to make sure they're standardised. At the moment I have to set all their preferences one at a time (or, at best, 5 at a time). It's crazy. Apple need to sort out the whole issue of sync, and while they're at it, they could introduce support for network user accounts on iPad too.
*mops brow, breathes deeply, drinks calming glass of water*
I didn't realise a 'home' computer is limited to 5 devices
That's a bit kak isn't it?
Totally agree about the lack of user account in iOS being a pain; given that iOS uses the same underlying code as OSX I can't see why they can't enable multiple user accounts.
That's what our support team tell me.
They may be wrong. They often are. As far as I can tell, our recruitment team draws many of its candidates from special holding pens for morons.
Although...
...I've just done a bit of homework after posting that. They ARE wrong. Time to go and have an argument with someone.
Still, I wish I could deploy an image easily over our network. My complaints about the enterprise-size deployability of iPads stand.
Lack of wireless sync
Was one of the reasons I chose an Android phone over an iPhone. Unless you're copying music onto the thing, you don't really need to plug an Android phone into a computer at all (and I believe there's an add-on that lets you sync music wirelessly).
It's especially useful for all the podcasts I listen to (which download themselves over wi-fi). With an iPhone, every morning I'd presumably have to fire up the computer, start iTunes, wait for it to check and download new podcasts, find where I've put the cable, plug it in, wait for it to sync and turn everything off again.
You could manually
download the podcast from the iTunes app on the iPhone. It is wireless but there doesn't appear to be anyway to automate by subscribing.
There's an app that does wireless transfer of files
& documents from a 'proper' computer to the iPad.
I don't have the iPad to hand but I think it's called 'File Browser'