As a result of owning the car and knowing no better, I joined the Punto owners club forum and set about arguing with as many people as possible. For no reason at all.

I was young, full of (incorrect) opinions on everything I didn’t know anything about and, crucially, hidden behind my keyboard, like a soldier crouching behind a sandbag. I was safe and could toss literary grenades at anyone who dared disagree with me.

The most memorable of arguments involved car air conditioning. No, really, stick with me. I argued that turning it on did not affect fuel economy, or engine power. I screamed about it in italics until several keys pinged off my keyboard. I’d used it for years, I said, and had never noticed a drop in either my MPG or less oomph when giving my right foot the beans. I was right and everyone else – including car manufacturers and respected motoring journalists – was totally wrong.

Only, I knew I was talking out of my backside. I was arguing for the sake of it. More worryingly, I was also getting deeper and deeper into a topic I knew literally nothing about. To make matters worse, my opponent did know what he was talking about and, to my horror, began detailing exactly how air conditioning works in cars and why it has adverse effects.

I can’t remember how it ended, but it probably involved lots of expletives and meaningless acronyms followed by a swift closure of Internet Explorer. That’s all I had. I was out of grenades.

It’s been a long time since I got involved in anything similar, but I spotted the following retweet from Chris Moyles earlier today:

RT“@BrightNomad: lots of decent new music; just doesn’t get played by subhuman scum like @CHRISDJMOYLES” Merry Christmas to you too

I decided to check this BrightNomad chap out. I spotted he’d tweeted over 38,000 times which is pretty heroic in the world of social media. And when I say ‘heroic’I actually mean catastrophically depressing. Bearing in mind Twitter only started in 2006, if we hypothetically suggest BrightNomad joined back then, he has tweeted, on average, twenty times a day, every day, for five years. That’s a lot of tweets, even for people with not very many friends at all.

His timeline was full of replies to people who had presumably tweeted him after seeing Moyles’retweet. So, I thought I’d do the same and kindly point out what a terrible waste he was making of the wonderful tool that is Twitter.

What follows is a transcript of our conversation:

Mark Ellis: I suggest you read your timeline, although I’ll warn you – it makes pretty pathetic reading. Is this what social media is for?

Martin: I suggest you fuck off. Try it.

Mark Ellis: brilliant. How old are you, 12? And… Try what? Come on, you can do better with that keyboard. Hit me.

Martin:  you have trouble fucking off then? Hardly surprising #MoylesScum really don’t know when to fuck off.

Mark Ellis: I’m just not sure where to go. I’m sat at my desk at work. If I leave, I’ll get sacked. ‘MoylesScum’? Please explain. And before you think I’m being a smart arse, I’m genuinely intrigued. A quick scan of your blog shows you’re a literate chap.

Martin: OK I apologise. You’re clearly not #MoylesScum that was a determined polite question & respect that.

I’ll be honest, I expected a bit more from him. Had this been on the Punto forum we’d be arguing into the early hours. Not so. Perhaps Martin and myself are of a similar age and therefore beyond that type of behaviour, but as far as keyboard duels go, the above is pretty pathetic.

I hereby withdraw my sword. I will not fight another battle.

…Because I have no idea. I certainly didn’t need to.

A quick check of the ‘Social’folder on my iPhone tells me I now have no less than six apps which are of the networking variety. Let’s take a quick look at each one:

• Twitter: the most interesting and useful of all six. A genuinely brilliant and concise way of sharing web content and keeping up to date with whatever it is that you’re into. Those who long for the day of unlimited character length tweets are missing the point entirely. If that ever happens, the site will be rendered pointless. Those 140 characters are key to its success.
• Facebook: unadulterated, mindless attention-seeking and photo sharing housed in a truly dreadful website and even worse iOS app. It’s also the only place where people you went to school with beg to be your friend, regardless of the fact they spent their entire time at school ignoring you. Observing the startling fall from grace of those you once deemed untouchable is quite enjoyable, though.
• Foursquare: a limited shelf life, when you realise that all you’re doing is telling people where you are and they, in turn, couldn’t give two shits.
• Linkedin: the corporate world’s Facebook where the number of ‘connections’you have is directly proportional to the perceived length of your penis. From what I can tell, there is no other point to the site (I have 28 connection, incidentally).
• Soundtracking: probably the most self-indulgent of all six. It allows you to build the ‘soundtrack to your life’by boring people to death with what you’re currently listening to. A useful, free marketing tool for labels, mind, and that has to be praised.
• Google+: new, currently invite-only but, as far as I can tell, far more sensibly designed than Facebook. It also allows you to arrange your friends into ‘circles’, which they are not aware of. You know, pretty much like you do in your head, in real life – friends, family, work colleague, morons, etc.

This leaves us in a tangled web of interconnecting online databases with which we share, inform and bore. Updates from Foursquare can be automatically fed through to Twitter, whose tweets can be shoved directly into Facebook, which automatically displays the latest music you’re listening to via Soundtracking. Ultimately, this means you end up with the same list of your previous actions on every site, albeit with a free bit of advertising from the original source.

Sound confusing? It is.

This all begs the question – why don’t they all just get together and create one service? A mammoth social network which takes the best bits from every system above. Sound impossible? Well, it probably is, but it won’t stop me suggesting it.

We all accept advertising is inevitably going to appear on the majority of these sites, so that’s ok – let them all share the profits. I’m sure the people behind Twitter would welcome some real cash rather than hypothetical flotation valuations.

Get the governments involved. Get them to fund that rather than hair-brained Big Society schemes.

The biggest problem, though? What do we call it? Facebotwittsquaretrackingin+? I’m sure there’s other, minor technical and comercial implications, but we can cross those bridges when we reach them. This must be decided first. Answers on a postcard, please – I’m starting to bore myself.

Who’s in? Mr Zuckerberg?

Momento iPhone App

As a new decade chimes in, the unstoppable leviathan that is social networking continues to provide a vehicle for the millions of people who feel it necessary to inform us all of what they’re up to. Whether it be on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, an incomprehensible number of people are more than happy to provide an intimate (and nearly always hugely dull) account of their daily lives. This always makes me smile, bearing in mind the aforementioned sites’roots as domains for the terminally geeky.

While I use both Facebook and Twitter regularly, I’m of the opinion that people don’t really give two hoots what I’m having for dinner or where I’m going at the weekend. I struggle to care myself, sometimes.

It was therefore with some delight that I discovered Momento, developed by d3i. This beautifully designed App allows you to create what it refers to as ‘moments’. Daily thoughts, an account of what you’ve been up to… whatever you like, basically.

Where it gets clever is with the way in which Moments are organised. They can be categorised via tags, places, people, events and even a star rating for you to hunt out and reminisce on those good days past.

Key to Momento’s inevitable popularity and the reason it takes pride of place on the first screen of my iPhone is its ability to make diary writing addictive. The simple process of being able to tag entries with the information described above makes it a joy to use and something that you’ll keep coming back to.

Integration with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Last.fm helps ensure that you have a complete, searchable record of your digital account of life.

I’ve never kept a diary, but being fond of writing and somewhat cautious over the publication of my private life on social media networks, Momento has got me right into it. I can jot down whatever I like without the fear of boring people and the handy password entry means no one can read my incompressible ramblings and thoughts.

Furthermore, photos taken are stored against their respective dates, undoubtedly making this App a very handy tool for Photographers.

So, here’s one of the few iPhone Apps that has a genuine longevity factor – Momento. In fact, it’ll probably hold that crown for life, as I suspect it is something that will accompany people for the majority of theirs.

10/10. Go check it out.

I’m struggling to think of anything else I’d rather do for a living. I really am. Making music and being paid for doing so is about as good as it can get, as far as I’m concerned.

I love my current job, don’t get me wrong, and I’m one of the silent minority who enjoys coming to work; I don’t see it as a chore. That isn’t a disclaimer in case my boss is reading, either.

What depresses me slightly is the path the majority of these guys have taken to musical nirvana, as it is uncomfortably close to my past.

Like me, they have a parent who is a musician. Like me, they took the opportunity to bash around on said parent’s kit. Like me, they fell in love with midi and software such as Cubase at an early age. Like me, they spent an inordinate amount of their youth producing music for themselves.

Unlike me, they kept this up and went on to make a handsome living out of it.

In my late teens I made a very conscious (although difficult) decision to pursue a path in IT rather than music. The latter seemed a little too unattainable, if I’m honest, although that’s code for ‘I was too lazy to bother’. If I’d applied myself, I could have gone to university to study some form of music technology degree, or finance a college course off my own back. Instead, I ended up maintaining a computer network at a window and door component business in Daventry. Rock and roll.

Had I chosen my other path, there would have been significant differences in my personal life, which is worth bearing in mind. It’s unlikely I’d have met my girlfriend and I’d have a somewhat limited social life, as have the likes of Funkagenda, Dave Spoon and Chris Lake. So, perhaps I shouldn’t complain…

Makes you wonder what might have been though, doesn’t it…

Can we finally make Twitter work for business?

Some time ago, I blogged about our company Twitter account. We now have around 160 followers which sounds marginally interesting. Only, it’s not.

The biggest problem is perhaps our name, which includes the word ‘computers’. This has unfortunately invited scores of computer shops, assorted geeks and a plethora of ‘bots’to follow us. From a business perspective, this is next to useless, as none of these people are potential or existing customers (of which we only have around 5 following us).

We’ve marketed the fact we’re on Twitter. It’s on every e-shot we send out, for example, but it simply hasn’t caught on. Several customers have signed up, only to leave their account untouched, no doubt somewhat bemused at the service’s insistence on asking what they’re up to. I don’t blame them; taking on Twitter from a commercial point of view isn’t an easy decision.

Or is it?

We had a brainwave recently which has transformed the way we use Twitter. As you may know, Twitter publishes RSS feeds for anyone that tweets. RSS feeds are highly useful as they can be incorporated into any website and, as we’ve discovered, locally-installed applications.

Without going into too much detail, we develop software for hotels. One element of this software has always been earmarked as a potential tool to distribute news to our customers. News and, of course, product promotion.

So, our clever technical team very quickly incorporated our Twitter RSS feed into said application. They’ve done it in such a way that the end user has no idea the text they are reading has come from Twitter. It wouldn’t matter if this wasn’t the case, of course, but it looks a little tidier and bespoke as a result. Clicking the links takes them directly the URL within the tweet, not the tweet itself, and we’ve even got a bit clever with dates and such so that only the last seven day’s worth of tweets is displayed and, if none are available, or the internet connection is down, the news section disappears altogether.

I’d encourage any software developer to consider this method of utilising Twitter. The alternative we had was to make our application display a web page, but updating this would be a much more arduous task. In comparison, Twitter can be updated with a couple of clicks and from anywhere, as long as we’ve got an internet connection.

Please get in touch or comment below if you’ve found similar ways of making Twitter work for your business. I’d love to hear from you.

Secondly, www.twitterfeed.com allows you to Tweet RSS feeds which would be hugely useful for blog/news sections of websites.  I’ll certainly be looking at getting RSS feeds set up for ours to make use of this site.

So that’s it really.  No sales made yet and I have the distinct impression the majority of signs ups from our customers were just that.  Like millions of people out there, they were recommended a Twitter account, dutifully signed up, posted something a long the lines of ‘I’m signing up to Twitter’, spent a moment wondering what on earth it was all about and then got on with their lives.  Need to keep them interested somehow…

The five followers that are genuine customers have all signed up as a result of an e-shot we sent out and, interestingly, seem to have been intrigued enough to sign up to Twitter to view our updates, as none of them appear to have been Twitter members before.

It’s early days, but I’m encouraged by this initial response. With a little more coaxing I’m sure we can get more on board, but the few that are there will at least benefit from the ease with which you can fire updates to Twitter land.

Whether or not it will become a genuine sales channel remains to be seen…

I do seem to have stumbled across a possible use for the networking site today, however. It appears to be a viable marketing channel, allowing businesses to quickly issue news ‘bites’relating to new product releases and updates. This could prove perfect for our business which is software development. Rather than relying solely on e-shots and – the highly ineffectual – traditional mail shots, a quick ‘Twitter’will inform any of our followers that we’ve just released a new version of product X. Think about it, what quicker way is there to release information en-masse? Twitter is growing massively by the day and the traffic it can generate is substantial.

It’s early days, but I’ve set up and account and will be informing customers of its existence soon. What is there to lose? Well, within five minutes of the account open we were being followed by Sarah, a girl seemingly content with brandishing the majority of her chest area to internet users and informing us that she is ‘bored and ready to chat’. I didn’t think she’d be particularly interested in the merits of a property management system, and therefore blocked her.

Someone in the office believes Sarah may simply have been a ‘bot’, a non-human entity terrorising cyberspace, as it were. If this is true, and if Twitter is subject to such pointless entities, it could prove to be one downfall.

Breast-brandishing bots aside, I think this could be an interesting experiment. Any ideas on how to make best use of Twitter at work would gladly be received!