This post is about twitter. but generally internet communication mediums. but its really about Adium. A while ago i was going to write a post about twitter, but never got around to doing it. So this is what i was thinking of.
I got a twitter account sometime around easter in 2008. Not an early adopter or anything, but I beat Oprah to it. I was inspired by an article in wired which i can’t be bothered to find anymore. It pretty much made twitter out to be something that was interesting to use, and possibly useful sometime maybe in some sort of context that might occur somewhere. I think the most ‘useful’ use of twitter at the time was when someone was arrested in egypt and sent a tweet about it. It’s actually not that impressive. This just kind of highlights the main question people have about twitter. “What is the point?”
I got an account because I figured it would be interesting to play with. With pretty much everyone on facebook, and a massive limit to what you can do on twitter (really, just the one function) I guess it didn’t make that much sense. There was a sense that maybe this would be my joining of the technological revolution. These social tools would actually make life better by connecting people more. I sent a slightly passionate email around to some friends about joining twitter so that it would be more interesting. I found that it was useful for telling my friends (followers in twitter speak) things that weren’t worthy of email, or were too urgent. One day I saw a steam train leaving the station, not really worth sending an email about, but interesting nonetheless, I sent a text message to my twitter account mentioning it. My friends could see the post without the bother of checking through emails expecting something more profound.
I once sent a tweet announcing that i was boarding my plane home, my brother saw the update and let mom know that I was on my way. You could argue that this was pretty much pointless as she knew when i was due back anyway, but you have to take into account that a mother is always glad to hear where her son is, even if she already knows.
Other people have clearly found uses for twitter as well. The local paper tweets their latest headlines, and even covered a federal trial through tweets.
They have launched a new channel JFP_local which announces local events, currently it seems that they text every time their favorite bar has a drink promotion, but im sure there will be more useful updates soon. This is a great service, if you follow the feed, and have it sent to your phone, you would get texts with ideas for going out every week. Not a bad use. Urgent updates and casual conversations live side by side with drinks deals and details of lunch in my feed.
At the end of the day, twitter helps keep me in touch. I can see little glimpses of the lives of my friends. Its not something that weighs me down to check, it doesn’t take much time to update, glance at everyones updates and go. It is another one of the tools that people who happen to find themselves in front of a computer screen use to keep in touch with other people who find themselves in front of a computer screen. Before twitter though, everyone was on AIM (or MSN). Chat programs were what kept me in touch with people online before the days of facebook. When I got an iBook before senior year in high school, my brother recommended Adium as a client for my AIM account. It was simple, easy to use, and had a cute green duck as the dock icon, he even flapped his wings and quacked when someone wanted to chat.
It is hard to convey the importance of IM programs at the time. It is just what people did – we chatted online. I would leave adium running whenever i was on my computer. I would leave adium running whenever i was not on my computer – this lead to my mom thinking that i was just ignoring her all of the time. Unfortunately in the last year I have not been on Adium as much. I have been working more, studying more and wanting to be disturbed less. Now this goes against the idea that I would get more into these technologies to get more out of them. Deep down I still prefer Instant Messaging to other technology assisted communications – its always available, quiet in the background, and not distracting. With adium it is easy to organize multiple conversations across accounts. It is a good thing that I could connect to everyone. If I am to keep adium up and running all of the time, it makes sense that I update twitter from it as well…
Opening safari to update Twitter is a hassle. The twitter clients that are available for my old Mac os 10.4 are limited, very limited. In fact, only Twitterific appears to work (well, tweet deck too, but it asked for unrestricted access to my system and network connections. I dont know what that even means, so i figured it would be best to stay away). Twitterific is far from ideal; besides, i prefer fewer things running. It just makes a lot of sense to update through an IM client. Support for IM updates was poor in the past, and apparently was cancelled at some point. Adium 1.4 promises Twitter integration, but it appears that that will not be available on my old Mac OS 10.4, besides, waiting is difficult. excla.im restores the simple IM update to any jabber account. A simple way to update twitter, through a client I already have and use. After signing up for jabber and making a few tame authorizations, i had an update. The creator, Harper Reed, was even kind enough to give it a “little kick” for me when i decided that 17 seconds was too long to wait for it to start working properly.
i now have five accounts consolidated into my Adium. The original AIM serves my american friends, the rest of the world can find me on MSN. Facebook and Gmail chats (pointless in a browser) are now consolidated in. Why facebook and gmail added chat is a mystery (well, no its not, they want more information, to sell more ads). The real question is why are the chat services so poor. Both of these require that you remain on the site to use it. After the initial excitement of facebook wore off, I realized that I really had nothing to do on facebook besides an occasional update or message. Checking gmail only takes a moment (or less when I don’t have any email). Having chat on these sites gets in the way of the useful bits of the screen, the buggy conversation windows just keep me from getting things done. Most annoying is if someone navigates away from the site, the chat ends completely. People do use these chat features, and adium has rescued them from my disdain by bringing them into the fold. Throughout all of this, adium has remained pretty much the same. There are more accounts, more people to talk to, and i can customize the look (‘smoothseparatelines‘ theme message window, buddy list 35% opaque, spacing adjusted to the pixel, and a bounding Hobbes as my dock icon upon launch). Other than that, no real functions have been added, no irrelevant uses have been invented for it. Adium is a small window which holds my text conversations. Nothing else is needed.
Moving twitter onto adium will definitely get me on adium more. Integrating the accounts have made it more useful, and it will get more use from me. Maybe full twitter integration will come with the next adium upgrade, but until then, I am happy with excla.im. I know that chat and twitter updates are not really the best way to connect with people but it is far better than not connecting. For all of the time that i would spend on my computer, online or otherwise, having a line open to chat is convenient. Hopefully this will work out as I originally hoped, and I will be able to get more out of the technology. I do want to get in touch with people, i just don’t want these to chain me back to my computer screen.
Posted by jrtaff 
I will tag this post ‘local’
August 6, 2009There is a battle going on over what ‘local’ really means. I figured that it would be rather good fun to jump into the fray. So here I go.
I was informed of the rising storm on the fourth of August, sometime in the evening. A twitterific update by one of the JFP’s self referential accounts indicated that ShopLocal had ‘declared war’ and linked to this JFP article with the details. This is what had happened.
A JFP article criticized ShopLocal, the Clarion Ledger and the parent company of both, Gannet, for the misleading use of the word local. ShopLocal responded in a post which tried to belittle the JFP and claim that ShopLocal itself was local. This then led to the twitter post and article which came to my attention.
Its a bit odd, the ShopLocal post. The title asserts that they are local (it actually says that explicitly, “ShopLocal IS Local” you can tell they are serious because even the ‘is’ is capitalised), but their article provides absolutely no support for it. Their article is dedicated to saying that national chains can actually in some sense be considered local (more on that later). They end on the surprisingly weak point that they “support” local retailers. By this, presumably, they mean that they take local retailers money in exchange for advertisement. Support really isn’t the right word, they provide a service, for which they get paid; they are not investing in local businesses, they are quite literally taking their money. I will allow them this massive discrepancy and focus on their two separate claims.
The claim that ShopLocal supports local businesses rests heavily on their definition of local. By clarifying the definitions as they are used in daily parlance, I will disprove both main claims made by ShopLocal. The three definitions of local they provide are absurd. The presence of a business is the only factor in determining if it is local:
It is easy to see that the only consideration is the distance from a certain town in discerning if it is local or not. So presumably this makes every Wal-Mart a local store, because, they are, after all, located in only one place. Actually, this makes every business a local business wherever it is located. Toyota becomes local – they have a dealership here, Nissan even has a plant nearby! This is kind of like HSBC’s marketing slogan “The world’s local bank.” Even though it is based in London, every HSBC branch is a local business, according to ShopLocal. Furthermore, if you have internet banking, HSBC has a presence wherever your computer is. The ‘local’ locations are endless! This means that while I was in Bristol, England, Trustmark National Bank (based in Jackson, MS) had a local presence in England – making it both local and international at the same time!
To define “local” we must look at what people mean when they use the word. The meaning is easily multifaceted. There are considerations like the distance of a business from the reference point (community, city, etc) which ShopLocal understands. People refer to places as local when the management has a local presence, understands the clientele and can respond to community needs and wants. This is roughly having not only local management, but also locally autonomous management. Lastly, the local business model that many people cite comes from a more economic standpoint – a local business is one that invests in the community in which it is based.
In Bristol, my Local (pub) was about a 90 second walk from my house. This is clearly very local in the grand scheme of things. The problem is, there were four other licensed establishments (excluding the restaurants!) which I had to pass in order to reach my Local. Did this make The Cat and Wheel less local than the others? While distance and location play a role, its not the whole story. While being a local business implies that the business is located in the locale in question, the implication is not an equivalence: merely existing in the locale in question does not imply that the business is local.
Pretty much any store, no matter how large the chain, has locally based management. When Brookshires grocery store opened in Jackson, they imported some managers from Texas to run the individual stores. The managers lived and worked in Jackson from that point on. When people talk about a business being locally operated, what they really are talking about is where the autonomy of management lies. Local management can react to the communities needs, desires and tastes; this generally means a management more responsive and dedicated to the community it serves. With a large corporate chain such as Wal-Mart, there is little autonomy of management at the local level. Each store looks the same and sells the same products. Local management is a matter of corporate paperwork, shift scheduling and signing off on deliveries from the corporate truck fleet. Local Wal-Mart management cannot actually manage the store in a way that reflects the community around it. Local products and local tastes are not found in Wal-Mart stores. Sure, they sell Mississippi Blueberries in some stores but that took negotiations by the state Agriculture Commissioner to achieve. On the other end of the management spectrum there are chain stores which really only carry the brand. In the Shell station in Macon, MS, the local management is fairly autonomous from Royal Dutch Shell corporate headquarters in The Hague (click here to listen to that in Dutch). Sure, the station carries only Shell gasoline, and pushes Shell credit cards on you, but they also have a deli which serves up breakfast, lunch and dinner for the town. Besides the branding, the stations management is free to shape the store to local taste, and adapt to feedback from local customers (and yes, I do realize that the management probably does not even live in Macon, and probably manages many other stations, but my point remains). Even with locally responsive/autonomous management, nobody would mistake the Macon Shell for a local chain. If you ask for something at CVS, the management will have to get permission from higher management to carry the item; if you ask for something from Deville, they will pick up the phone and place an order without having to ask permission.
Investment in local communities is what motivates many people to patronize local businesses. Somewhere on the interwebs there is more exact information on the topic, but the general idea is as follows. For every dollar in revenue, a locally owned and operated business will make a larger contribution to the local economy than an out of town chain. Take this example of two fairly identical stores, one a locally owned drug store, the other being an out of town chain. Since each is about the same, their taxes and utilities will be roughly the same. So for a dollar spent in each business, say, ten cents goes to taxes and utilities. We can now ignore that ten cents. Another fifty cents may go to covering the wholesale cost of the product bought – so that goes to the product maker/distributer. Chain stores can often lower this cost as they own distributers or can negotiate better prices from the maker, but thats pretty much irrelevant in this simplistic example. Say another ten cents goes to pay wages of the workers. The remaining thirty cents is profit, this goes to the owner of the company. With a chain, this goes to headquarters, way out of town (or to shareholders worldwide). With a locally owned business, this stays in town, with the owner returning that money to the local economy when they shop, eat out, and donate to charity. So thats the idea, when you shop locally, the local economy does better. Instead of acting like a drain for local dollars, local businesses act as a fountain, supporting businesses all around them. The idea is, this is a good thing. As a bonus, if a business uses local suppliers, those suppliers support the community even more. Why politicians spend their time trying to attract companies to open branches locally is a mystery – encouraging local entrepreneurship would grow the economy and boost tax revenue much faster.
The other day, I used an online service provided by a company called Google. I used this service to find the website of Deville Camera and Video, a locally owned business. So, I guess that ShopLocal would say that Google is supporting local businesses. We cannot really, on anyones definition, debate that Deville is a local company (they even have a big sign when you go in the store that says they are, with proof, and thanks the people who support them – the ones who give them money in exchange for goods). Google has done pretty much what ShopLocal would do: provide me with information on this establishment, including a list of all services they provide. If you aren’t convinced, Google even has the power to suggest local businesses that I have not even heard of when I only know the business type and location (just type in something like “camera shop in jackson, ms”) thus encouraging me to patronize these businesses. Google has done this without taking money from Deville though, so I guess they are just more altruistic in their support of local business. Should we call Google a local business? (What about local.google.com? Its got local in the URL!)
Google is not based in my house, it does not invest in my house and I do not have a say in the searching algorithm. Google is not local. ShopLocal is based in Chicago, the owners and operators are in Chicago and they do not actually support the Jackson community. ShopLocal is in no way local to Jackson. It doesn’t even appear that one could say that the retailers who advertise on their site (see below) could even be considered to be local businesses. There is a difference between having a local address and being a local business.
**UPDATE** Time has an nice article on the buy local point. This is besides all of the stuff in the JFP.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1903632,00.html