laremy.sg

Something I’ve been thinking about recently – it’d be nice if developers at Facebook, Twitter, etc. came up with options to allow users to streamline their messages so that users can decide which messages they want to broadcast (general audience) or conversely, narrow-cast (specified audience).

I know someone is going to attempt to rebutt this idea by saying something along the lines of “But Twitter allows you to protect your feed” or “But Facebook allows you to create privacy settings”.

Well, that’s not what I’m talking about.

The features I mentioned above are very ‘all or nothing’ in that we only have the options of saying something to everyone or saying nothing at all, when in essence, we might be in situations where we want to say a particular something to a certain group of people at a certain point in time.

Let me illustrate with the example of my Facebook profile. My profile is protected in the following ways:

• Only ‘friends’ can see my entire profile, so you’ve got to add me as a friend before you can view my profile, and
• Only people who aren’t on my Limited Profile can see my status updates.

Now, let’s say I want to post something about work on my status. The colleagues whom I’ve added as friends can normally see my status updates. However, this time round I might  feel that this particular status update isn’t something I want my colleagues to see, perhaps because I’m afraid they might ‘view’ me in a certain way after they’ve read what I’ve said.

At this point, I’d like to be able to have an option whereby I can decide: alright, let’s publish this status message, but let’s exclude this person and that person from knowing about it, for the reason I’ve mentioned above.

Think about my idea this way – it’s the digital equivalent of speaking in hushed tones in the office, so that you get to control who gets to listen in to what you want to say, and who doesn’t.

At this point, someone else is probably gonna ask: “What about using private messages then?”

Well, private messages are precisely that – private. They have a different social connotation from status messages i.e. we’d only use private messages if the information was strictly meant for private consumption. In a face-to-face context, it’s the equivalent of whispering – and whispering to a few hundred individuals at one go doesn’t really make sense, does it?

So I think it’d be nice if social networking tools could start to reflect some of the nuances in face-to-face communication/social interaction that haven’t been duplicated in the digital arena yet. It’s probably one of the issues that will mark the next step forward in the evolution of the Web 2.0 landscape.

Since we are all aware that:

1. There is imperfect knowledge in the world,
2. The Internet is a gigantic brain, and
3. The Internet helps to smooth out the imperfections in knowledge,

I decided to pose the above-mentioned question to the almighty Facebook-verse and Twitter-verse. These are the findings on Facebook:

And on Twitter:

People generally seem to think that Jaben Network is the best. Funan Centre comes in second and Epicentre and City Music are tied for third. Brands recommended are V-mode, Sennheiser and Bose.

The conclusion? Well, if you really want to know… ask your own Internet brain!

I’ve been trying to arrange meetings/consultations sessions with students and it’s not always possible because of our different timetables. I’m now trying to find a free online appointment booking system that integrates with Google Calendars to serve two purposes:

1. Allow students to ‘book’ a meeting slot with me based on mine and their available meeting times without much hassle.
2. Automatically ‘pull’ info from my Google Calendar to determine when I’m free/when I’m not free + ‘push’ info to my Google Calendar to automatically update my schedule for me.

I don’t think anyone has come up with something like this yet so if any computing whiz wants to work on this, I’d say go for it (and let me know when you do come up with this so that I can use it! It’s my brainchild after all!). You can most likely sell it to companies/organisations that need this service when you’re done creating the program for it.

In case you didn’t know, all the geography in Full Tank! is real. (It has to be; I wouldn’t sell you a lie.) So the route that the tank takes is one that can actually be mapped out.

I’ve saved everyone (i.e. scholars who might want to study my works next time, LOL) the trouble of mapping the route by using Google Maps to show you how the tank travels. I’ve included placemarks in the map, so please click on them. There’s some very valuable information in there, including pictures, which might help you visualise the geography a bit better.

For those inclined toward academia, you may want to think about how geography is mediated in literature. Or perhaps how Web 2.0 tools might be used to bring literature/drama a bit closer to everyone?

View Full Tank! in a larger map

I briefly toyed with the idea of temporarily deactivating my Facebook account because it’s taking up too much of my attention from other things. However, I changed my mind when I saw the warning that I’d lose my administrator status in my groups/events/pages.

I think that’s going to cause major chaos later on when I log back on to Facebook again; besides, I just need some respite from the information overload, I don’t need major upheavals and subsequent administrative difficulties at this point in time. Once I realised that, it made everything a lot clearer – I just needed to make logging in that bit more difficult so as create a psychological barrier/aversion to logging in.

Let me just say that I never knew deleting a saved userid/password could bring so much relief.