Instant Gratification

From Wikipedia:

Gratification is the positive emotional reaction of happiness in response to a fulfillment of a desire. Maturity is often defined as the ability to delay gratification (patience), and progress as the real or imagined perception of movement towards gratification.

The recent infatuation with Twitter can be seen as a manifestation of instant gratification regarding information. Twitter is the sound bite of the written word. I have fallen for the trap myself. See my previous post Surfing Evolution. In the short time since that post I've noticed that I'm relying more and more on Twitter to feed me the newspaper headlines and then using the headline to determine what to drill down on. I feel there needs to be a balance between being informed on what's happening this very minute and information that has been researched, analyzed and given thought. The text bite is good for knowing that your Metra train is delayed. It is not good for selecting your elected officials.

When making an important decision, don't base it on a ten second sound bite or a 140 character tweet. Take some time to read, listen and formulate your opinion before pushing the send to brain button.

Photos as Visual Clues in User Interfaces

Our minds are very good at recognizing subtle changes in visual content. Take a website that you visit on a regular basis. They change a color or font size and you take notice. I'm not talking about the recent Facebook layout changes. No, I'm referring to small changes. This effect is more pronounced on sites with basic content and not a lot of glitz.

My recent experience with this has been with Twitter. It is not a change in their design but rather with the profile pictures of people I'm following. Robert Scoble recently made his profile green and Hulk-like. This made it stand out but I still knew it was him. The visual clue that I was alerted to deals with our brain's facial recognition system. I am following two people who have similar pictures. Blue background, white shirt and both male. See below:
1)

2)

Every time I see a tweet from these two gentlemen I need to look at the Twitter name to confirm the source. In the setting above they don't look that similar, even to me, but imagine the Twitter layout with many images and rapidly scrolling through the list to find something interesting. If it only occurred once I could ignore it but it seems to happen every time I come across their images.

Two events this week caused me to focus on this topic. One was an episode of Hak5 that had a segment on a facial recognition application for Facebook the other was the presentation on Artificial Life by Larry Yaeger at the Chicago ACM meeting. Our brains can make the same mistakes in recognizing images that computers do when not presented with enough data, context or time to complete the analysis.

Slightly off topic but this is a ramble. David Byrne of Talking Heads fame has a book/DVD, Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, which explores using PowerPoint in ways you've never seen before.

This brings me to the lyric, "I've changed my hairstyle so many times now" from Life During Wartime, Talking Heads. Does anyone have a class to train men to recognize a change in their significant other's hairstyle? I'd pay for that one, because I've already paid.

140 Characters Or Less

Twitter's limit of 140 characters can be good and bad. It forces us to get to the point in order to convey our message. On the other hand it can lead to unintended consequences when computers or humans shorten a longer message.
Two examples:
I captured this two months ago.

Just this morning, I ran across this:

At first glance, I thought it was referring to an organ-selling operation by way of my brain's highly trained tweet word extender function.  Then I checked the link. It is an opera not an operation. The non-Twitter headline is "Barrington native stars in an organ-selling opera". The tweet was only 74 characters so another 6 to add "stars " would have clarified it.

Flutter is proposing a 26 character limit. Watch the video here:

It's a joke, or is it? What if someone presented Twitter 3 years ago in a similar fashion? Would we have taken it seriously or thought it was a joke? Do we take it seriously today? How many if you have gone to your boss and said, "You need to Tweet."?

Who would have thought that Twitter would take off. But for a generation of texters accustomed to 140 characters or less, this is a way to share their thoughts with the world. The rest of us are just catching up.

Don't Fear the Tweetup

1. Tweetup
An organized or impromptu gathering of people that use Twitter. (A meet up of people that 'tweet' using Twitter.) from urbandictionary.com

Don't be afraid of Tweetups. It is just a way for people that use social media to actually socialize. This is a good thing. We can get out from behind our computer screens and cell phones and meet people face-to-face. Those of you that feel intimidated by social technology can flaunt your people social skills and learn something about the tech side in return.

I recently attended three tweetups.
Last Thursday was the Social Media Club of Chicago's B2B Social Media Tweetup. I didn't physically attend this event. A last minute client emergency prevented me from going to the tweetup but I was able to attend virtually via the webinar and the Twitter hashtag. This was a formal panel discussion on how to use social media in the B2B world followed by social interaction.

Wednesday's tweetup was in downtown Elgin at the Douglas Street Sports Bar. This was the first tweetup I organized. The Downtown Neighborhood Association promoted it with an email blast, Twitter and Facebook. 35 people enjoyed Speed Learning on Twitter, Facebook and blogging. We gave away three Swingline Red 747 staplers as raffle prizes. Watch the movie Office Space if this doesn't make sense. There will be more tweetups in Elgin, just follow @downtownelgin on Twitter to keep in the loop.

Friday's tweetup was in Schaumburg at John Barleycorn. This was organized by CHI Suburbs Tweetups. I met marketing people, PR people, software engineers, programmers, web developers, neighbors and more. This was just socializing, no formal presentations.

As you can see by the examples above, tweetups can take various forms. So the next time you see a Tweetup announced, don't be afraid, and remember it is an opportunity to network, socialize and maybe learn something new about social media.