9of.us

Update: If you’re using a feed reader, this next paragraph won’t make much sense. The behavior I describe only works on 9of.us.

First off, I’d like to introduce a neat bit of technology I’m going to be using below. For the time being, they are called inline-notes. Here’s the idea. I’d like to write about technical stuff. Some people will know the technical jargon and some people won’t. If you’re reading and see a linked word that you don’t understand, click on it and an explanation will appear inline. Then just keep reading. They’re easy to use. Try clicking “inline-notes” two sentence back and see what happens.

I just read an interested blog entry by Leisa Reichelt about Twitter. Twitter is an interesting service that allows you to post away message-like notes on Twitter’s site. Twitter will show that message to whoever is interested as well as all of your previous notes. Check out Leisa’s twitter. In her post, Leisa coins the term “Ambient Intimacy.”

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.

The whole post is worth reading. There are a couple things I find particularly interesting. First is the idea of being present to a lot of people, and in turn, having a lot of people be present to me. Twitter isn’t the first thing to transcend the bounds of space and time. Cell phones, blogs and IM have been doing that for a while. I’ll be interested to see if Twitter is a worthwhile addition to my presence arsenal.

Also, I’ve noticed that a lot of people on my buddy list are using their away messages like Twitter, and I’ve really enjoyed it. With Twitter though, I don’t have to manually check everyone’s away messages and I never miss an update.

On the other hand, how many pieces of technology can we handle in being present to the people around us? I’m already spending most of my time face to face with people. There are two draws on the remainder of my time. There are blogs to read, photos to check out on Flickr, emails to read, and IM’s to pay attention to. On the flip side, I need to respond to the IMs and the emails, comment on blogs, post my own pictures, write blog posts, send emails. Now there are twitters to read and write.

I’m not convinced that Twitter is worthwhile, but I’m giving it a shot, and I’ll write more once I’ve spent some time with it.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 7:51 pm by Jeremy and is filed under Technology, In Common. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.