Rich Mintz

I’m in the process of updating my blogroll in the left rail. The list of people I read most religiously (“The Best”) is already up; the lists comprising the other stuff I read consistently or intermittently (“The Very Good,” “Honorable Mention,” and “Other”) are on their way.

My workday today included 3 social obligations, and they demonstrate how porous the boundary has become between the social media world and the real one, and how naturally younger people (and I’m generously defining “younger” to include myself) move from one to the other. Consider:

I had lunch with a friend (I’ll call him “Charlemagne,” primarily because that will make him laugh when he reads this) whom I met on IRC in 1994. I did shortly thereafter meet him in real life, but over the past 15 years the overwhelming majority of our contact has been online (these days, usually via instant messenger and Facebook). In a typical 60-day period I’ll talk to him online every other day and maybe see him once.

Then I had coffee with a woman I’ll call “Cleopatra,” whom I was meeting for the first time. (There was a professional context for the meeting.) I brought along “Napoleon,” a coworker of mine whom I knew on Twitter and Facebook for a year before I met him in person.

(By way of backstory, Cleopatra and I were introduced in email by a woman — I’ll call her “Victoria” — whom I initially met after she tweeted about me behind my back and a dozen people brought the tweet to my attention. I did later meet Victoria in person, once, for two minutes in a hallway; but I’ve exchanged dozens of tweets and emails with her — and because she works in social media for an organization I support, I see evidence of her online activity constantly.)

Finally, I had dinner with my friends “William” and his wife “Mary” (not their real names). I was introduced to William online by my friend “Hatshepsut” (not her real name), whom I did know personally, years ago, but whom I last saw in real life in 2005. I see her online every day. I’ve talked to William online at least weekly for almost a year, but have only talked to him on the phone once, and never met him until tonight. William and Mary and I made special advance plans to meet for dinner while they were here visiting New York, and we had a blast.

If there’s any evidence here that participating actively in social media impairs a person’s ability to negotiate real-world social relationships, explain to me what it is. Maybe I’m atypical — but I don’t think I am. That canard that the Internet is a place for social misfits to hide out is dead, dead, dead.

(Also, can you tell I’m in the mood to play Civilization IV?)

This deserves more than a tweet. Congratulations to Gene Koo and Rachel Anderson on the birth of their son Jacob, who entered the world this evening. Jacob (who I’m sure will eventually be reading this in some Internet Archive of the future, no doubt telepathically or via an implant or something) has the distinction of being the first human child whose impending arrival I followed moment by moment online from hundreds of miles away — via his proud father’s Facebook Mobile posts (on Android, natch).

To the Anderkoo family, all your friends and family, wherever they are, are thinking of you on this happy day. And to Gene (who is one of my colleagues) — we look forward to having you back at work soon, but not too soon. Enjoy these days that will never come again.

The Washington Post’s Ellen McCarthy introduces us to the online dating ghostwriting industry, which, no, I wouldn’t have believed this existed either. But especially in this economy, where there’s a niche, there’s an unemployed opportunist (oops, sorry, “Virtual Dating Assistant”) to fill it. And so you get anecdotes like this:

Richard, a 39-year-old marketing executive who uses the service, would like to say, for the record: “It’s not like I really have a lot of problems dating people in the real world.” It’s just that he’s busy, splitting time among four cities, including Washington and Miami, and he figures it’s best to meet as many people as possible.

Online dating has worked for Richard, “but it’s all time-consuming,” so when he heard about Virtual Dating Assistants, it seemed like a convenient solution for an on-the-go guy. “Just from a cost-benefit analysis — me spending all this time on doing things that are purely almost secretarial doesn’t make any sense for me,” says Richard, who asked that his last name not be used because he doesn’t want colleagues or potential dates to know he uses the service.

And because he doesn’t want to advertise to the whole world what a douchebag he is. Seriously?! A “cost-benefit analysis”? There’s a reason why guys like these aren’t batting a thousand out on the market. Read the whole thing, then go take a shower.

So here I am blogging again, for the fourth time in one day. I guess I just decided that if I’m going to get into the rhythm, there’s no time like the present. Plus I now have this iPad, which makes it incrementally easier to just do it (cf. my post from earlier this evening). Plus I spent 7 hours on a train today, and there’s only so much email a guy can answer. So there you go. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep it up — if you comment and tweet you’ll give me the social feedback I need in order to feel obligated to keep it up.

As a sometime programmer with at least a noodler’s degree of facility in half a dozen programming languages, I’ve often wondered how I might get started writing my own application. Well, now I know. I need to join Apple’s iPhone Developer Program and then learn Objective-C, either from a book or from a course.

Surprisingly, this doesn’t seem so hard. Not to say I’ll actually do it — I don’t anticipate finding the time anytime soon — but I now realize that I could, if I wanted to, learn how to develop the equivalent of

10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD”
20 GOTO 10

or whatever, upload it to the iPhone App Store, and make my fortune!

Incidentally, the half a dozen programming languages I noted above include Perl and PHP — both of which I could probably manage to make a living at if I absolutely had to — so I shouldn’t sell myself so short. But I’ve never studied any variant of C, and even if I had, I’m still a long distance away from being able to bang out the next runaway-hit iPhone game in a weekend and quit my job. Nice dream, though…

From Rob Davis, the leader of Ogilvy’s interactive video practice:

I don’t believe in “viral videos.” The “post ‘n’ pray” fantasy of putting a video on YouTube and having it magically spread to a zillion users ignores the importance of engagement and placement. I guarantee you that the million-views-a-day video has good content and at least one of three other elements: a channel with an existing audience, a strategic placement (paid or earned), and the appropriate level of engagement.

Hear, hear. Dear Interweb: more of this kind of sensibleness, please…

hat tip: Chris Royalty

Regarding Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto — not much to say except it’s very much worth reading. Part of the reason I let the blog go for over a week and backed off from social media is that I finished this book, and was reminded thereby that the human encounters I was putting off in order to spend time online are the whole point.

Technology can enhance human contact and creative expression, or can deflect the one and stifle the other, which is what Lanier fears is happening in various ways acknowledged and unacknowledged. In particular, enthusiasm for the technological future, Lanier says, encourages us to reduce ourselves in order to comply with the inherent limits and non-continuousness of technology, rather than envisioning smarter and better technology that can keep up with us. I can’t say he’s wrong.

Foursquare is taking off in NYC, so it’s worth saying something about. For the uninitiated, it’s a smartphone application in which you “check in” at all the places you visit as you move about the city, with your location being shared automatically with your friends as you do. (In the background, the users are building a venue database in real time, an asset that I’m sure the Foursquare development team has big plans for.) You earn points and badges for your check-ins, according to a somewhat arcane set of rules, and can thereby compete informally with your friends for social karma.

WIth my friends list hitting critical mass, and the venue database filling out, the whole thing is becoming more than a curiosity from where I sit. As a sort of experiment, I’ve tried to take the game seriously for the past couple of weeks — checking in religiously at every legitimate venue I visit, adding those that are missing, trying to recruit more friends to participate.

As a result, I’m currently leading my friends in points, and (as Andrew Hearst called to my attention this afternoon) I’ve hit the NYC leaderboard for this week, and am currently ranked somewhere in the mid-forties. (The numbers reset to zero on Sunday night, so I have another two days of glory before I fall off the list.)

This certainly won’t last (at a minimum, the resourceful Ryan J. Davis will certainly figure out a way to push back up to first position among my friends, where he usually is). But it’s been fun.

Foursquare has evolved; at least among the comparatively middle-aged people I know, it’s no longer only about keeping track of your friends when they “go out” at night. That’s resulted in some gray areas about what kinds of check-ins are legitimate, which the game designers didn’t or couldn’t anticipate or resolve. So in honor of the game, I’m going to publish a draft set of rules for fair play right here, for your review and comment.

(more…)

Not having used WordPress in almost two years, I’m staggered by the degree to which blog publishing on this platform (along with Twitter integration and a host of plugin features) has become nearly failure-proof.  It was fairly easy before, but the more sophisticated features required (or at least were assisted by) a fair amount of technical background knowledge.  But both on the back-end and the interface side of things, it all seems simpler now… and the full iPhone integration in the WordPress 2 iPhone app only makes it more seamless.

We’re still a bit away from Cory Doctorow’s always-on network-in-our-heads; but with each incremental improvement, we move closer to that point, which I feel certain to see in my lifetime. (How’s that for Omni-quality sci-fi boosterism?)