As a geek I have an appreciation for the versatile: the Swiss army knife; the command line terminal emulator; the roll of duct tape.
I also have a fetish for the simple object ruthlessly made perfect for a single purpose. My new Sigg bottle is precision-engineered to carry liquid. That’s all it does. It doesn’t attempt to thermally isolate it. It doesn’t leak and it doesn’t impart any taste. (I bought the bottle for carrying water with me while commuting on the hot, cramped tube, in the hope that it might eventually save me money on buying expensive bottled water. Efficiency: another geek goal.)
Sigg bottles are available with some fairly fashionable designs, but mine is black. Why black, when I could choose from a myriad colours and patterns? It’s not that I don’t appreciate beautiful things. (If my girlfriend is reading this, you alone are proof of that!)
What started as me wondering about this turned into a revelation about what means to be a geek. As a geek I see beauty in function as well as form—and there is more beauty in the unadulterated functionality of the Sigg bottle than there could be in its exterior form.
I’ve decided that I don’t post enough photos and pictures on this blog.
Over the bank holiday weekend just passed, I took my girlfriend to stay in Liverpool at my parents’ place. We visited the Formby coast where in the “attractive pine woods” there are “playful red squirrels, often brave enough to scamper up close”. Red squirrels are a rare sight in Britain where they suffer from competition from the grey squirrel.
I’m excited about the potential of the budding SwitchABit platform.
It shows promise of breaking the monopoly that various social tools hold over certain types of social content. It will also help to mitigate one of the causes of these monopolies—the network effect; the runaway success of a particular service once its user base reaches a certain fraction of its market.
We already have services and tools which ease our simultaneous use of the many discrete social tools by helping us to post the same stuff to more than one place. A very simple example is the Twitter Facebook application, which solves the problem of many people using Twitter and their Facebook status for the same purpose by automatically updating their Facebook statuses whenever they tweet.
Most of these existing tools, as far as I’ve seen, require us to feed our data into the helper tool first in order that it can distribute it for us, or that the helper tool (e.g. the Twitter Facebook app) be controlled by the service from which we want to set free content (in that example, Twitter). If I understand it correctly, the paradigm shift in SwitchABit is that the helper tool becomes a transparent intermediate layer, distributing our social content without us needing to know how, or from where, it works.
I recently started using Dave Winer’s TwitterGram: Flickr-to-Twitter service, which has just been ported to become one of the first applications on the beta SwitchABit platform. Flickr-to-Twitter scans my Flickr photostream for me and finds photos which I’ve tagged with a ‘twitterthis’ tag. It creates a tweet-friendly TinyURL for the full Flickr URL of a photo, then tweets the photo’s title and the URL from my Twitter account. Simple steps, but ones which are tedious to perform myself at best, and downright awkward if I’m using a mobile device. Now I can email a freshly snapped photo from my iPhone to Flickr and see it tweeted to my friends very shortly afterwards.
I can’t wait to see more transparent helper tools like this come together to form a pervasive medium for the diffusion all sorts of social content.
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