Jules Says

DRIVE director commentary via Twitter

Last night's Twitter experiment was interesting. Drive is a new Fox show made by Tim Minear, the same guy who made Firefly. It stars Nathan Fillion, the same lead actor. Fox decided to offer director commentary during the premiere of the show Sunday night.

Sadly, the show itself was pretty lame. I'm sure there are some very disappointed Firefly fans out there. It definitely didn't hold my attention well, so you'd think I could have easily kept up with the tweets. It didn't really work that way, though. Twitter is very fast, but it's not real time. Doing standard DVD-style commentary and saying "we wanted to do x here..." doesn't work. By the time the tweet is delivered, "here" has passed. I'm sure sometimes it was the 140 character limit keeping any more descriptive info from being included. If that's so, then perhaps this isn't the right medium (or 140 characters isn't the right cutoff point) for real time commentary.

That said, I think this was a clever experiment. I'm sure we'll figure out better ways to do this sort of thing. We'll look back on this first attempt and why some things weren't more obvious to us. I still think advertisers have to love this sort of thing. They're all scrambling to find ways to deliver ads to people with DVRs. Well, here's one way. Normally I'd record the show so I could watch it later and fast forward through the commercials. Instead I watched it in real time so I could get the commentary, which means the advertisers got my partial attention.

I'm sticking with Twitter. I still believe it (or something very similar) is going to become an important tool.

The screen shot is obviously not the Twitter web site - it's a sweet little Mac desktop widget called Twitterrific.

Previous posts about Twitter

Twitter keeps getting more interesting

A mere month ago I was playing with Twitter at SXSW, thinking there could be some interesting uses for it. Already a couple of interesting new applications have sprung up.

You can join the Drive, uh, flock? covey? murder? Drive is a new Fox show made by Tim Minear, the same guy who made Firefly. It stars Nathan Fillion, the same lead actor. The show and the star had a tremendous following - no doubt they'll be turning out in hoards to test Drive (sorry). Apparently the director of the show is going to serve up commentary via Twitter during the premiere Sunday night. Clever - I'm signed up. Advertisers have to love this. Normally I'd DVR the show and watch it without commercials. Instead I'll be watching real-time to follow along with the tweets.

Dave Armano reports that several media outlets such as Fast Company and USA Today appear to have reserved accounts, while BusinessWeek and Newsweek may have been hijacked by squatters (nesters?) if the silly email address associated with the account are to be interpreted (both are associated with pleasantcreature @ gmail.com). Still, Flicker is a great platform for quick updates from media feeds. Nothing revolutionary here, but it falls into the useful category.

BART in San Francisco uses Twitter to announce up to the minute schedule changes.

What have you found out there that looks promising?

Best 404 page ever

I hate getting ugly 404 errors. When I went to a file-not-found page on Twitter, I got this instead. Not only is it amusing, it's helpful. What a novel idea!

I'm Twitterized!

I finally got the Twitter widget working on this blog - it's way down on the left column. It seems to show only the most recent entry, which seems less than useful for a blog. That's kind of a big box for a single entry, too... Well, it's an experiment. We'll see how long it lasts.

My original post about Twitter is here.

To Twitter Or Not

There's plenty of chatter going on about whether or not Twitter has any real value. Twitter is sometimes called a microblog. It's basically group SMS with a web interface and social networking features. Sign up, and you have a 140 character limit per post. You can post as often as you want - in theory you post throughout the day: heading to work, at Foo's for lunch, blogging, going to bed. Then you add friends to your network, and you can keep up with who's doing what when. You can see updates via the web, or receive them via SMS or IM. I signed up for a SXSW Twitter group (flock? conflagration? murder?) just for fun. When I sent a Twitter to the group number, it was broadcast on several plasma screens sprinkled throughout the convention center. I assumed I'd also see twitters on my phone from the rest of the group, but I only saw those of the developers and others in my twitter network, which was only Tori. Not too useful. Did I need to know that Jack was in line at Magnolia Cafe at 3am? No. No I did not.

After SXSW, Tori was none too happy. She emailed me:

I’m really aggravated at Twitter. Not at the technology, but at the sheer gall of the Twitter guys who evidently think I want to be on the end of a one-sided conversation. I’m completely convinced that’s what has happened. You sign up, and you get grouped with them, and no one else (unless you go to the effort of adding friends, like we did). Did you ever, once, see one of them respond to anything you had typed?

No. Why?

Because they aren’t listening. I’d even venture to guess they had some flag set so that they see only messages to one another. Meanwhile, I have to listen to their banter, and am bound to a group where there’s no chance of me have any sort of interaction with anyone new, or even participating. Gee thanks, that’s awesome technology, guys.

Put that in your blog and smoke it.

That said, now that I know how to use it, I can see how it could be useful.

• In a workgroup - making that final multi-day push to launch, get the whole group keeping each other up on their project status
• At a conference - keep up with who's going to which panel, where they're meeting for lunch
• Travel of any kind with a group - again, who's where?

Feel free to check out my Twitter page, and sign up to follow or as a friend. You can see that it's not getting a whole lot of use right now, but it's still kind of fun to play around with it.

SXSW, Day 4

4th and final day. Recap: the first panel of the day for me was Web Typography Sucks, which proved to be far more in depth than I expected - I learned a fair amount and got some good suggestions for working around the traditionally poor type treatment provided by most blog engines. I'll share them here once I've ha a chance to check them out. After that I went to Combinatorial Media as Self Expression, which was a fun, engaging panel. Text, audio, video, mashups, comics, roll-your-own community - where are all these varied forms of media headed? The panel discussed what is, ultimately, the 2007 version of "multimedia", and what it means for playful and/or artistic content as well as more serious/educational purposes. Again, I have lots to look into as a result, and I'm really looking forward to sharing what I did up with everyone.

The afternoon keynote was delivered by Will Wright, creator of theSims, SimCity, and all the other Sims games. He's a visionary, to be sure. He talked about the nature of storytelling, and how games offer an opportunity for a different kind of empathy - taking the viewer out of the role of a character and putting them into the role of director. This led into his demo of Spore, which pretty much had the audience drooling.

In most world-building games, you create an environment that entices settlers. The better you run your government (city/settlement/country), the more your community grows in size, wealth, and sophistication. Spore has several modules - you start with a single cell, navigating around the primordial ooze, until you consume enough matter that and evolve enough to move onto the land. You must learn to survive on the land, mate, and eventually be part of a tribe. The creature into which you evolve depends on the earlier play and on choices you make. The creature-creator (six legs? eight? one eye? four eyes? purple? red?) is incredibly flexible, allowing you to stretch and mold as much as you want, taking milliseconds to render beautiful, complex creatures. You then move on ... you must run a city, get civilized, and eventually achieve the ability to travel in space. Now the universe is your oyster, and you can visit planets created by other users. You have complete terraforming capabilities, so your world will be out there too. The worlds will be populated by creatures evolved within other players' games. You may well visit a planet populated by a species that wants nothing more than to eat you, or you may find a compatible species with whom to settle. Will says it's not a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) so much as it's a Massively Single-Player Online Game.

All I know is I can't wait. During the demo, Tori turned to me and said "I've never wanted to buy a computer game in my life, until now." She also suggested that I probably shouldn't buy it, as I'd never leave my house again. Fat chance :)

The final program item was the traditional wrap-up talk by Bruce Sterling. He's always an engaging speaker, but I was kind of surprised at his speech. He seems to be part of the rumblings of the "backlash" I've been hearing about. My paraphrase of his sentiments... blogs suck, twitter sucks, mashups suck. He predicted that in 10 years we wouldn't know what a blog is, that the format would be dead. As much as I do consider Bruce Sterling brilliant, truly a visionary, he sounded a bit like a cranky old man at these closing statements.

SXSW, Day 1

I'm blogging from SXSW today, straight from the Austin Convention Center. So far, SXSW is being a blast. I went to the BlogHer MeetUp at Freddie's Place last night, and met several new folks. I think the turnout was much better than they had expected - we kept having to take over more and more of the patio. It was a beautiful night, the margarita machine was cranking out plastic cups full of frozen goodness, and conversation flowed, making for a great kickoff to the festival.

Today it's been solid programming. First it was Emerging Trends in Social Media and Technology - a topic near and dear to my heart, of course, but perhaps a bit too broad for a one-hour panel and 6 panelists. Next was Turning Projects into Revenue, which was decent, but really kind of too-basic for me. The Opening Remarks by Kathy Sierra were delightful, as expected. She really knows how to engage an audience (as she should, given her focus is "Creating Passionate Users"). Now I'm waiting for Wiki Commercialization to begin.

I'm blogging, twittering, posting like crazy, and basically doing all things social media in the interest of total immersion. Am I making myself a little nutty? Well, yes, but it's fun :)

Tonight there's the Dorkbot party, sponsored by Make, followed by the Frog Design party. And rumor has it that there will even be a small after-after party at my place. See you there :)