3rd Digital People in Peterborough meetup – Thursday, Feb 3…

It’s always a bit of a wrench when you take a break from something over Christmas and New Year, and then have re-ignite everything in January. That’s one reason I didn’t take much of a break from working with clients or on my own site, but due to everyone having personal and work commitments, we took a bit of a break with Digital People in Peterborough.

But now it’s back, and the next pub meetup is February 3, 2011, at 7.30pm in the Beehive Pub in Peterborough. Not only that, but the website has got a great new design, the new forums are up and running, there’s a DPiP Facebook page, and also a Twitter account to remind you when events are happening.

And you can see more details on DPiP #3 and RSVP on the forum (or on Facebook).

So there you go – I’m really looking forward to it, and it’ll be interesting to see if changing the date/venue encourages a few more of you in the Peterborough and surrounding area to come along!

Google Wave fails to cause a splash

Just saw the official Google announcement that Google won’t be continuing with Google Wave in the future:

‘But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.’

from The Official Google Blog.

The curious thing is that Google is building a legacy of projects which attempt to utilise social tools, but then end up losing dedicated effort or closing.

Jaiku

Lively

The social ages of videogames

I’ve been thinking about the concepts of game theory, play, and videogames for a while now – and they’re a lot more prominent in my thoughts considering the recent coverage of the success and controversy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Coincidentally, there seems to have been a rise in discussions about whether videogames and social networks are turning our youth into antisocial loners sat in dark rooms, existing on caffeinated drinks and sugar, and basically living up to the outdated stereotype peddled out every so often by media and politicians too old to bother actually spending some time experiencing this world for themselves (Obviously I’m generalising, and the fact most 30-40 year olds have grown up with computer and video games means coverage gets more balanced every year).

I started to think about my own 27 year+ love affair with videogames (Writing that made me feel shockingly old all of a sudden – I started young!)

My own introduction to videogames was via a family friend who had a 48k Spectrum – I have memories of sitting around chatting and playing various games, before investing my time gently persuading my parents I had to have one.

And from there, my gaming really splits into 4 distinct periods:

  • Going to a friends house to play console games (This was the era of the Megadrive and the SNES, when 4 or 5 of us would meet after school and hangout whilst playing games for lengthy periods)
  • Going to a friends house to hook up PCs for primitive LAN parties. (In the era of the 486, networked gaming meant a kitchen table creaking under the weight of prehistoric desktops and enough cabling to connect a small village)
  • Having friends come round at university to play videogames (Having first invested in a Sega Saturn, I’d realised I should invest part of my student loan in a Sony Playstation. A better longterm investment than my donations to the Student Union bar).
  • Hanging out with friends via Xbox Live now work and family mean I can’t visit/go to the pub etc as much as I’d like. (I’d dropped out of gaming until the Xbox, but being able to play online quickly, easily and without a PC was too much to resist – and since then almost all of my friends have succumbed)

Of course I also spent time playing single-player games when no-one else was around, but the idea of playing in a total social vacuum seems to me to be a myth – why else would you conquer a game or a high score table if not to share that triumph?

And during this period I played sports a lot (school teams, inter-mural teams at university and becoming a bit of a gym addict), played music, read a fair amount, had girlfriends, drank beer, went clubbing etc. All the things you associate with a well-rounded social teenager and adult.

The only real difference was that rather than hanging out listening to music, or watching films etc when we hung out at home, much of the time was spent sat chatting and issuing instructions, suggestions, commentary and insults towards whoever was in control of the console/computer at the time. And once I’d become addicted to the Xbox I became friends with work colleagues and other local gamers who I then met in the physical world to either play games, sink a few pints, or even work on ideas like the sadly dormant at the moment Disposable Media. Some of that gaming experience and the friendships I’d made also led to my first work experience in the media, and indeed my first paid freelance work published in a national magazine.

Obviously a sample size of one isn’t going to give much insight into gaming as a whole, but I figured that amongst all the other dangers of video-gaming, a career in the media industry hadn’t been highlighted yet!

Enough self-indulgent biography – I’m off to play some Forza Motorsport – which has more than enough community and social aspects to warrant a more analytical blog post of it’s own later in the week…

Still room for improvement in Google Reader

A lot of people have commented on the new social features which have been released for Google’s RSS Reader – and most of them have been pretty positive.

Recent changes have included showing more information on who likes and shares posts, and being able to connect with more people who have interested with content you like. And the option to ‘Send To’ various listed or custom social networks from Google Reader has also been a step towards improving the influence it has.

Both the basic ideas behind the improvements are good ones, so it’s just a shame that there are a couple of major niggles which mean they’re not as good as they could have been.

Firstly, I use Google Reader for around 2 hours every day when I’m travelling to and from work by train. The access to free wifi means it’s completely replaced ever bothering with a newspaper or magazine, and I can get all the information that I’ve requested delivered to me.

But it also means that the fact the Send To option doesn’t occur within the reader itself means that I’m still stuck waiting for other pages to load before I can Stumble them, for example, and that’s no at option on shared wifi. It still means attempting (and failing) to remember which articles I loved and going back to promote them when I’m on a better connection.

Secondly, and this is the biggest problem – the more people sharing with me, the more times I’m seeing duplicate content. In some cases, the same feed item can appear 4 or 5 times – once from my own subscription and then numerous times from my friends and contacts.

That means I’m loathe to add anyone, particularly in my areas of interest, because I’ll end up with 200 items every day that I’ve already seen, added to the 150+ that I get anyway.

It’s frustrating, because I’d love to see what a ton of people are sharing, and it’s a nice alternative to short urls with no explanation on Twitter.

Still, it’s good to see Google investing some time and effort in Reader, even if the supply side of Feedburner is as flakey as ever.

And there’s also an interesting Greasemonkey script for Firefox (called gReactions) which has just been released to show blog comments, Friendfeed, Twitter, Digg, Hacker News and Reddit underneath each post.