Our Geek Life

Would you like a side of rude with that 503?

Posted by shegeek at October 8th, 2009 | No Comments »

Another day, another crappy user experience on Twitter.  Sadly, failures have become de rigueur which leads me to longing for another option.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m still having a love affair with Twitter, but the bloom is off the rose.  The new car smell has faded. The moon has lost its honey.

Gone are the gut-wrenching, mind-bending panic attacks.  I am so thoroughly geek that I have previously mourned the outages.  Lately my attitude has undergone serious degradation, sinking from the once experienced OMGWTF to a more apathetic status of Meh.

Although I am rather cavalier about the outages, I still use these times of Twitter-exia to come up with new ways to poke fun at Twitter and those of us who use it.  What fun is a ridiculously obsessive self-absorbed addiction if you can’t humiliate yourself and others like you when given ample opportunity to do so?

Can I get an Amen?

During one recent outage I looked over at my amazingly geeky other half and said, “I have the perfect alternative to that idiotic Fail Whale.”   I proceeded to explain what I believe to be a new and greatly improved Twitter Failure Mascot – one with less sweet and more meat – less happy and more snappy – a snark among snarks wrapped in the familiar net of doom and gloom.

Yes, my friends, the goofy and somehow happy-to-be-a-failure Fail Whale has been replaced by his snarkier cousin, Fail Seaman.  I believe that there is an animated version in the future, complete with Twitter related snarky commentary.

*gasp The dreaded UNfollow

Posted by shegeek at August 20th, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Do you view following as a commitment and unfollowing like a broken promise — or worse — a divorce?  Do you watch your follower count and immediately unfollow anyone who has unfollowed you as if to say, “AHA! You don’t deserve to have me as a follower when you don’t follow me!”

What does following mean to you?

Most of us have had it happen.  Someone you converse with on a regular or fairly regular basis – you might even consider this person a friend – stops following you.  Maybe you tried to send a DM and couldn’t.  Or maybe you’re obsessive-compulsive frantic and oh-so-devastated over the loss of even one spam or pr0n bot follower and endlessly review your follower count, your follow-to-followed ratio and your follower growth metrics.

One…One Thousand…One Meellyun? Meh.

I don’t fret over my follower count.  I routinely clear out spammers and other questionable accounts as well as unfollow random tweeps whose conversations I really don’t want associated with me.   I’m sure that’s snobbish to some.  I’m not a Twitter Saint by any means.  But if you’re tweeting about how much pipe you laid last weekend while you were drinking like an Amish junior college freshman, straight off the farm and very curious about life in the big city, pretty much, there’s not a commonality there that I want to explore. (more…)

Ripples of Influence

Posted by shegeek at July 30th, 2009 | No Comments »

Every day I find more and more influence graders online.  The basis for these false metrics are number of followers or friends, number of tweets, retweets and links.  All of these things are arbitrary and do not speak in any way to the impact we have on other people’s lives.

Have you ever wondered about the people whose lives you impact daily simply by being online and having conversations?

You don’t have to be a “person of influence” to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they’ve taught me.

- Scott Adams

So tell me, what is “real”

Many times I have seen social networking minimized, put in a sad little box called “much ado about nothing”.  People who think they know and understand, comment that online relationships aren’t real; that there is something wrong with those who connect and form so-called friendships online.  Let me assure you if you are questioning online relationships – they are very real, very tangible and for many of us,  very important.   There is nothing fake or virtual about online friends and I believe it is an insult to put “online friends” in a different category from “real friends”.

What is a real friend? Does a real friend share life experiences?  We do that online.  Does a real friend comfort you, celebrate with you, cry with you?  We do that online too.  Do you have to be in the same physical space to be a real friend? If so, cross off all those friends of yours who live across the state, on a different coast or in a different country.  In fact, cross off all those “phone friends” too – you know the ones you haven’t seen in months or years but still live across town from you but you never seem to make time to visit them in person.

Outside of the people you interact with every day online, do you think about those you don’t talk to, those who are reading your words, those engaged by your lifestream?  Do you realize that you impact their lives too?  (more…)