Tom Adams

Facebook the most 'valuable' social network

Yes, I'm reading TechCrunch today, and in true post-arrhoea, am now frantically recording all the interesting things I find in case my memory suddenly fails (due to infant-related sleep deprivation). I should really just put a link to the website on here and be done with it. Still, Facebook is winning everywhere (particularly given the recent staff losses in non-key markets for MySpace) and this lovely pie chart proves it.

Sekai Camera

Very interesting augmented reality iPhone application demonstrated at TechCrunch50 by its charismatic if unintelligible creator. Don't look down, look up!

Twitter tree

This is a very nice short history of Twitter. Shows how much has changed since 2006.

It's official

It's one thing to talk endlessly in a strokey-beard way about the power of social media, it's another to have it brought home to you personally during a major life event. My daughter was born last Wednesday (coincidentally at the same time as the birth of our new company SapientNitro).

As soon as I had regained the feeling in my legs and drunk a restorative cup of tea, I found myself unthinkingly tweeting her arrival (something modest mind you) and uploading early photos to MyTwitFace. Not, I hasten to add, because I am 14 and have nothing better to do. But because I knew that would be the fastest, easiest way to share the wonderful news with our family and friends.

Similarly, my good friend and colleague Tom Evans is unwell at the moment (get well soon) and I found out he was on his way to hospital not by text, or from his wife, or by phone, but because he sent a 1 line tweet telling everyone (and no-one).

Somehow, and without any fanfare, it's simply become normal to share instant moments of the most personal kind with people you know. And people you don't. In fact, things don't feel quite as real until you've shared them.

Hold the tweet, you say, doesn't Tom do this for a living? Isn't this something he should have been doing as a matter of course 4 years ago? Well, the truth is I was. But in an experimental, try anything kind of way to find out how things work for myself. And most of it was from my laptop, which is mainly on my desk, which in its own right rules out spontaneous life experiences like skydiving or doing Tequila slammers with the Archbishop of Canterbury (not something that happens often).

The big difference is that it's now totally mobile. I can share images, thoughts and ideas in real time from my iPhone without any delay or loss of quality. I can be in the birthing centre, on a cable car (again, this doesn't happen too often) or at the end of the garden but nothing is going to stop me telling you what's happening right now. And that's the fundamental difference for me: it's unleashed a genuine spontaneity to my microblogging and networking that wasn't possible before. In essence, it's as much about my life outside work as my work life.

But that's the tricky thing. Just like mobile phones created a tyranny of contact, and Crackberrys made email an unbroken stream of consciousness, social media creates an expectation of immediate, personal and important information. I only hope I am interesting and funny enough... 

Samuel Tweeps

Hilarious and thought-provoking Twitter experiment from Paul Gyford who is tweeting from Samuel Pepys diary as if he were alive today. You can of course read the diary online here, but why not follow the unequalled self himself here. I'm not sure many tweets are as delicious as this from Monday: Lord! to hear how Creed pleases himself in behalf of my Lord Sandwich, and do inveigh against Sir W. Coventry as a cunning knave.

Augmented AR

Forget baseball cards with 3D holograms on them, TED yet again delivers with this extraordinary vision into the near future of augmented reality from the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT. A genuine journey into the '6th sense' where every physical perceptual experience can be augmented by the Internet - from looking at a physical book and seeing its Amazon rating projected onto the cover, to meeting a person for the first time and seeing their metadata.

From MTV to CCTV

You have to admire the inventiveness of this music video created entirely from CCTV footage of the band in public places:

Air penguins

Pointless and utterly beguiling floating penguin robots. An avian airship solution looking for a problem. Silent ops aerial photography in ToyTown perhaps?

It's been a while

I can't believe how long it's been since I posted here. Twitter has been invented and gone worldwide for goodness sake. But I'm back and rambling again. First things first: microblogging. One simple truth needs asserting: it's not good because of what I say, it's good because of what everyone is saying. And it gets even better when clever people like this man do things like this for Vodafone. Yet again proving that if you turn your back for 5 minutes, the Internets changes beyond recognition.