Convergent services

• December 27th, 2010
• send to twitter
• found in misc.,
  tech and gadgets
• tagged with

One of my resolutions for 2011 is to use the internet more. And by that, I mean give services like Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare second chances. Honorable mentions that I would try but probably won’t include Foodspotting, Gowalla, and Tumblr. (Nothing will convince me to use Facebook, however.)

I’m confused, though. You can post photos with Foursquare, post new tweets with Instagram, and add location to your Twitter posts. Your contact list on each service probably has huge overlap.

So basically, the service or app means very little. Instead, the format is what matters. By now, we’ve determined this to be: short text, media (probably a photo, but sometimes video or audio), location (and contacts’ locations).

The general reason I originally felt like these services weren’t for me is that I believe technology should make less work for us. For example: Reeder makes reading online easy and efficient, whereas Flipboard makes for more content I don’t care about and a less efficient way of sorting it. Similarly, these services give me more feeds to check and places to upload things. A website, two blogs, Flickr, and two portfolios is plenty to manage, thank you very much.

More specifically:
-Instagram: First, I hate faux vintage photos. They’re the photographic equivalent of a drop-shadow: for when you don’t have a better idea. I also own a real camera, which I prefer to use. And finally, because now the photos exist on my phone (and subsequently in Aperture or iPhoto), on Flickr, and in Instagram. Headache.
-Foursquare: It’s an idea I can get behind, but I hate how Foursquarers have their faces buried in their phones for the first 10 minutes you get anywhere. Also, I have no friends on Foursquare because I don’t have Facebook and Twitter contacts aren’t necessarily ones you’re on happy-hour terms with.
-Twitter: Too easy for opinionated people (hi!) to make asses of themselves.
-Tumblr: I’d rather customize a WordPress install, and I’ve already got two of those.
-Foodspotting: Sort of a disgusting perversion of food, but mostly there’s just too much overlap with the other services.

I’m going back and giving them another shot because, a. understanding this landscape is integral to my work, and b. there is something I like about these ideas. It’s not the social aspect as much as the way mobile devices are always on, with us, connected, and enable to us to create rich archives of our life.

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