Just Bru

Stub Warning: this post comes from a collection of post-its and is doomed to keep that flavour. Sorry :)

Here we go. A new year is starting...

...and thanks for all the flu
'cos apparently I got enough last few monthes and so far I've been immune to this "uncommon" wave of flu that's keeping londoners out of the office in the first few days of the year... with the nice side effect of making the public transportation in London quite enjoyable even in rush hours.
And speaking of that:

New year, new fares

Italian railway prices got up 15%. Everybody's complaining about it. And I can understand that. Then I landed in London to discover that a single ticket in zone 1 is now 4 pounds (if you pay by cash), 33% up from last year... and skyrocketing the price for everybody who doesn't have an oyster card (or travelcard that is) from plain absurd to totally insane. I love this city :) ...but now please double the congestion charge too! (and spend all that dough to give some more love to southern transportation system please please please).

Now for the gargantua stub...

Italy and the twitterati
I thought it was quite late when I finally joined the twitter bandwagon a month or so ago, but it appears that the bulk of Italian blogmob discovered it just a few days ago... And, boys, are we swarming at it: I've been continuously receiving requests for spaghetti friendships for three or four days now.

... so much so that this snowball effect is starting to involve other tribes as well: yesterday evening dotBen was complaining about receiving a lot of requests from italian speaking people he could not understand...

...and apparently Luca is going to write an article on Sole 24ore's Nova (this note is a few days old, I think he wrote it yesterday night...), so we can expect the crowd of spaghetti twits to expand more and more, good!

...speaking of Luca (one of Italian blogosphere's hubs), yesterday morning he made the resolution of not twittering in english until the time he'll have international followers.
Now, that perfectly makes sense, BUT for the fact that by doing so you're seriously impairing serendipity, and somehow pushing angst: try consider user Alice who has just Italian followers, and therefore twitters in Italian.
User Bob who is Italian too and follows Alice joins the conversation at a certain point, doing a twitter that relates Alice's one. Since the original was in Italian, he'll probably decide to keep it in the same language... but what happens to Charlie, who is an english speaking friend of Bob (and not Alice)? He'll receive a twitter from a friend in an unfriendly language... or even if Bob twittered in English, there's a good chance Charlie will be interested in digging in more and maybe he'll even try to track back the conversation to Alice, finding just Italian messages... do that at scale, and you'll see Charlie getting upset quite easily.
Somehow the ghost of Orkut comes to my mind: the place was colonized by more and more Brazilian users, until everybody else (at least all those I knew) just left. And no matter how much I'm proud of my nationality, I think an Italian only twitter would be a dystopian scenario to say the least.

...finally this night Davide wrote a really interesting article that turned out into a good conversation on Twitter and (in)utility.
Basically he points out how there's a substantial difference in how twitter (and blogs before it) can be seen: as just a useless dump of private moments nobody else should (would) care about or as a storage for unfiltered "raw" thoughts that can turn into serendipitous inspiration pool.
He also invites people who still do not to try twitter/IM integration, which helps a lot in "getting it", and to try to log all those meaningful moments that make every day unique (these are my words, I hope I grasped the concept): author you are reading is good, an intuition about a new cooking recipe is good, place you are going to is good, the fact that you're drinking a glass of water is (generally) not.
I totally agree with that, but added a few considerations... here I summarize them in english:
1. there is no "correct" use of twitter (and the same thing is true for any tool), and during these weeks I've witnessed many different uses of it, ranging from persistent, semi-asynchronous chat ("@friend ehy, you gotta check this out!") to self-promotional ad space ("Bru has just posted this and that on his blog"). Nevertheless, the main successful characteristics appears to be its pervasivity/immediacy (IM and mobile integration - thanks to the 160 characters limit - being the magic tricks here) and the feeling of "constant flow" (leveraged through a cunning obfuscation of the navigation features).
I find it amazing how Twitter's success seems to rely on it being a stripped down, strongly constrained evolution of existing tools.
2. Never underestimate the sheer power of scale: small concepts can gain momentum and even meaning when repeated/iterated enough. Or maybe patterns can be discovered in apparently useless/insignificant habits that can lead to new ideas. Serendipity lies inbetween the lines of everyday life.
3. Hail to the ubiquitous twittering: I have this habit of always carrying a small (paper) notebook with me, where I jot down ideas and topics as they come across. Many of these ideas end up with a "to be blogged" tag attached... and this is something that never happens. What I can do now is just twitter them, so even if I will never go back to them for lack of time/will/inspiration, at least they'll be free to infect somebody else's mind (and possibly find a more proactive host).
4. twitter as "background noise" - background noise is something we like and look for no matter what we do: it can be the radio, a tv, itunes, IM, whatever produces some element of change and gives us that feeling of "flow" without requiring dedicated attention (but see also kathy's post on continuous partial attention for the other side of the coin). Well, back in the days I used IRC as my background noise device, then I switched to IM (which means a smoothie of msn, gtalk, skype, icq, yahoo! and AIM), but that tends to require a lot of attention because all messages coming from it are direct. Nowadays I'm switching to twitter, as it seems to have quite an interesting signal to noise ratio, and just one global "room" (as opposed to IRC, that is).

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