early adopters

[DISCLAMER] before anyone reads this and gets offended by what I have written, note this; it was not written about anyone in particular, it is a rant so you can expect coarse language and opinion, note OPINION. If you feel like rallying against me, go ahead I will ignore it all. Also if you are one of my close friends then know I still love you all dearly and again I AM BLAMING MYSELF FOR MY PREDICAMENT. [/DISCLAMER]

Let me first put this into context. I am not angling this at a certain person or persons, this is something born of watching a twitter feed I filled by mistake (a recommendation of people but i see this is a mistake) I am not blaming anyone for what I have done but myself, I now know I shouldn't try to be one of the cool kids. Hell I never was at school, and even though the Internet has swung to my favour in the technological age, I should have known i wouldn't be one here either.

I am angry,

I am not angry for a cause, this is no political post, this is not a call to rally behind me. I am angry, depressed and without hope. But why? I thought i was past all of this, I am. This is not a long term thing this is just a fleeting feeling. And it stems from twitter. I am not rescinding my early post about twitter, i believe more of my friends should join the service. It would give me someone to talk to . I also believe it is a cause for good, trying to do right, and facebook has become bloated and useless. It is the next myspace. So why am I upset at twitter?

I am not an early adopter. I never have been, it took me a good year and a half of people nagging me about facebook to get into that, I tried twitter off my own back when everyone was still going on about Stephen Fry, a name which has now become a cliche, I did not pick it up early on by no means. I jumped on the band wagon, and why not? I am one of the great unwashed heard...or that's how I'm being made to feel.

The early adopters of twitter (of which on of my best friends is a part of I'm sorry to say but it is not you, you are very open and welcoming) and friend feed, and phreadz and all of these sites are doing everyone else a great service. I acknowledge this, they pick up new technology tell us if it is any good, and then we invest. It's been that way for a long time, in fashion and arts, they are trend setters, but as people looking in / up they are still unreachable. We can't be them.

Luckily they don't want us to be there either, if we were then where would they go, what would they do? They would be slumming it with the unpopular kids. This is why it makes me feel as depressed as I was in school, I was not popular in school, no one really liked me but the bizarre friends I had. Same in college etc (but this was also angst) I was sent to Coventry at university in my second year and I had a nervous breakdown. This has always been a problem for me, so i should have seen the signs.

I should have noticed that when I started "following" these people they were all talking about concepts and topics I was interested in, but when I joined in there was no response. Even if it was well wishing etc, it felt like whenever I used my voice I was being ignored. After a while I felt like i was merely squawking my name out loud. This is a common theme of my life most notably in university (a long story where I ended up ostracised by all but about four people in my second year).

It all began when my good friend sat down with me and recommended I follow some folk. All very well and good, I don't resent them in the slightest, best of intentions and all. This was fine for the first few hours possibly day, (hell it only happened Friday proof of how quickly the world of tech moves / influence). Actually no it began before that really.

It is hard to be on twitter and try and keep up with the newest technology (as i tried to do to keep up with this blog) without falling into the category of an early adopter. In this category there are people you here about, other more influential and powerful than you, people amplifying cons, talks, sites and concepts. you end up trying to contact these people and not hearing a thing back (see above statement) so really it happened a few weeks ago. I started plugging in to twitter and the Internet really hard. I immersed myself in everything but I was seeing no pay off for my work and attention. I was pouring a lot of myself into this. I had nothing, and now it is really starting to hit me hard. Hence I am blaming myself for how I feel but I will still point the finger.

OK at this point I have had an hour or so to look back at what goes above, yeah it may seem a bit harsh, and more than anything a bit rushed and angry, and although I may not agree with the exact words I used up there I still hold the sentiment. If you aren't in the in crowd you are out, and unless you are brought in, then you are out.

I will still point the finger though, at no one in particular but the finger wags at you alllll.....

The prime example I can think of at this moment is the AudioBoo party. I have only just come into audio boo really. (as I said I'm not an early adopter) I get the concept and I like it, its a more personal micro blogging alternative. It requires some time investment on both sides but can really be worth it. But recently they had a party at their offices. Not a bad thing by itself, companies like this have parties all the time.

The worst part of this was, it was invite only, you got an "in" if you knew the right people or were the right people. And this is cool, companies have parties and guest lists like this all the time. But this is where the social media which had been adopted by the masses turned into something terrible. I and the twitter/audio boo/12seconds/blog-verse was flooded with stories, photos, sound bites, videos and amplification of the party. It looked like fun, it looked like a jolly good laugh, good for you.

But from the outside it felt like this.

"We are having so much fun here, everyone is so cool and awesome and there are people here you could never comprehend because you are not part of the technological set so you aren't invited. But look at how good it is!"

It feels like technological celebrity watching.

There are more examples but this is one I can bring to the front of my mind now.

If you have reached this part then thank you for reading. This is ranty and i know some people will be hurt by some of the comments here. The only thing I say is this...I AM BLAMING MYSELF FOR HOW I FEEL NOT YOU, BUT BE AWARE YOU ARE IN POSITIONS OF POWER DON'T MAKE ME QUOTE SPIDERMAN (power / responsibility) COS YOU KNOW I WILL.

Thanks for listening doc, is my hour up?

IAQ

Infrequently asked Questions

 

Ok this one might get a bit rambly so bare with me here…Soemtime I get really annoyed at websites. Especially those which offer to send me goods for money, I would name and shame but I really can’t be chewed, so here is the problem I have. Well couple of problems…

 

Firstly, why do these sites carry so many things that I want. I have now cycled three to four baskets on the www.thinkgeek.com and www.routeone.co.uk websites each, everytime I am clocking anywhere between 70-100 pounds of goods, each time different things…damn them. But the main gripe I have is not that I cannot afford such things, or that there are things which grab my eye, because if this was the case I would have not shown the restraint I do now. No the problem I have is “FAQ’s” (yes I do pronounce that FACKS / FAX).

 

It would seem that during the tenure of some webdesigners / technical support all they seemed to be doping was wasting their time idly browsing the internet looking for cool things and cycling through hundereds of potential shopping baskets on various websites…yeh and what if I do I don’t have to write FAQ’s, and that’s my point. Sometimes people you shouldn’t be allowed to write FAQ’s without actually collating the subject matter first or shall we call them Frequently Asked fucking Questions! Let’s break the phrase down here, so as to extract it’s full meaning…

·         Frequently: adverb, often; many times; at short intervals.

                  I don’t know about you but I think this implies that you get asked something a lot, many times over such as. “I no longer have access to my email account. Why can I no longer access your                       website”

·         Asked: Verb, to put a question to, to inquire of.

                  Kind of self explanatory…right?

·         Question Noun, a sentence in an interrogative form, addressed to someone in order to get information in reply

                  This is the main part of a FAQ right, the actual questions. This is never much of a problem as FAQ’s generally only contains questions.

 

So there we have it a reasonably comprehensive breakdown of the definitions of a FAQ (courtesy of www.dictionary.com plus I can highly recommend the iPhone app from the same site). With such a simple definition you’d think it would be hard to screw up an FAQ. Wrong, apparently it is surprisingly easy, and a lot of places contain the incomprehensible IAQ, or Infrequently Asked Questions. These beasts lurk in the darkest recesses of the internet, fabled mythical beasts which are becoming more and more real. It’s easy to fall into a ravine if you are walking with your eyes closed, and it seems many sales teams / web designers have forgotten to wake up. The main one I noticed (And one for which I paraphrased my question earlier for the “Frequently” example) is www.facebook.com (as if you need the link).

 

A while back my email provider, Lycos, went under as a search engine and took everything with them. Lycos was not my main mail account by any means, it was my spam account (I have at least four email accounts all used for different things…) and as thus I directed all of my FB traffic there. I didn’t want to wade through tonnes of crap and i'm too lazy to alter the settings; however this is where the snag occurred. Apparently the FB “Team” sent out an email or something to confirm my account details, or at least tested the address was valid, (possibly when the received thousands of Mailer alerts they got the picture) and my account was disabled. I tried to change my password / email, but could not log in to the site at all, even the support pages. I trawled for what felt like hours through their supposed FAQ system, I used their search function combinations of black magic and ritual sacrifice just proved bloody and useless. I gave up, and launched a new FB account realising the time it would take to get it set up to my specs again…(this was pre twitter when I still cared about FB). I tried to search the help one more time, and then after just clicking on a seemingly unrelated link (I can’t remember the path now, as if it were a dream) it took me to a page of links one of which was the unlock procedure for my situation…(I understand that a lot of people trying to change email etc are either scamming or have been scammed but some of us are innocent) it also told me not to open a new account (crap…)

 

Anyway, the point is I had to resort to opening that new account cos FB fucked up their own FAQ! Now I am stuck with an account which points to my Google mail address (linked to my iPhone ffs) and forwards all the crap to me. After about an hour of FB spam I altered all of my settings (Another hour or so) so I would only receive email about Wall posts (something almost defunct thanks to status comments) and friend requests, and even these I find a bit much.

 

FB are not the only culprits they were however the ones I had the worst experience with, feel free to post your own experiences with IAQ’s below!

 

Luke out!