Thinking and Working in Singapore and other more Virtual Places

Singapore Tweetup Update

Come and meet fellow Singaporean and Singapore-based Tweeters at Singapore's first ever Tweetup. Ever wondered who really lies behind that @name ? - well, come and find out! A great networking opportunity and chance to make new friends.

There will be some free food and a great one-for-one drinks deal.

My thanks to Andrew Peters and to Geek terminal for helping organize and being so generous with their hosting.

See you all there!

All Are Welcome!!!!!

Date:	14 May 2009
Time:	19:00 - 21:00
Location:	Geek Terminal (Raffles Place MRT / Golden Shoe Car Park)
Street:	55 Market Street #01-01

So, I have decided to organize a Singapore 'tweetup' -well, I say organize....

So, I have decided to organize a Singapore 'tweetup' -well, I say organize - I will sort out a venue and date and time and do my best to see that it's well-publicized.

Why am I doing this? Well, the lovely @belindaang encouraged me (unsuccessfully I should say - my own laziness) to attend a recent event she was going to saying it would be nice to put a face to the tweets.  I agree with Belinda and I'd like to put her face to her tweets too.  I was also one of three people (@aplink and (the wonderfully named) @popmycherry being the other two) who briefly tried to get the Singapore twestival up and running a few months ago. We were beaten back by the Singapore Government requiring several weeks' notice to grant permits for events that involve fundraising.

I muted this idea of an informal tweetup at the end of last week and got some positive responses from several people so I think there are enough people who'd enjoy it.  I'm not sure if we should have any specific objectives for the event other than it generally providing an opportunity for Singapore based Twitterers to meet each other.  I am also very conscious that a 'physical' meet up isn't necessarily what Twitter is all about for some people and I'm half expecting some ardent local Twitterers not to be interested in attending.  That's fine of course.  (I'm actually quite disappointing in real life but I will be there!)

                                                                                                                                                                                                   But, I would love to hear from anyone who has some ideas on what we could or should do - maybe for future events if not this one.  I for one am looking forward to meeting (if they are able to come) the wonderfully Web 2.0 @belindaang, the very bright and informed @Nisha_Lakshmi, the very funny @roycheong1, the ever-popular  @AngMoGirl, my new good friend @callumlinden, some of the Twitterers with the best profile pictures @applelovesshoes and @deliciatan, the @StephenFry loving @laure_f  amongst others and all the other Singapore based Twitterers that brighten and inform my day.

Am I too soft, naive and romantic when it comes to Twitter?

The other day I went to meet someone to talk to them about supporting them in organizing an event here in Singapore.  We’d spoken briefly about this on the phone before and he seemed pleased at my offer to help. 

Practically his first question to me when we met was, however, ‘how many friends do you have on Facebook and how many followers on Twitter?’   Clearly a good part of my perceived worth in helping organize this event was how large my networks were – and not my real world network or ‘sphere of influence’, but my virtual friends and followers numbers.  At least I was able to give him an actual number which I don’t suppose I would have been able to do had he asked me a more pertinent question about what my influencing power was. (That's where the really interesting bit is I think)  He seemed slightly disappointed when I told him and then revealed that he had about twice as many people following him on Twitter and considerably more friends on Facebook.  It should also be noted I think that in both worlds we are very small players when it comes to numbers of followers and friends.

I should not have been that surprised at his question I suppose.  This guy - who is a friend of mine - had recently been involved with an event in Singapore that had been a big success - certainly in terms of the number of visitors.  As a friend of his on Facebook I had received a lot of emails on the run up to the event giving me the latest information and news.  There was an event ‘group’ too of course.   So I suppose if he wanted to adopt the same social media ‘strategy’ in promoting this next event, then having an organizing partner with lots of friends and followers would be a good starting point to a repeat strategy.  But isn’t this a tiny bit like looking for a mailing list?  I say ‘tiny bit’ because clearly there are some big differences – I know or at least have some sort of relationship with my virtual contacts whereas a mailing list may be cobbled together in any which way. 

It still irks me a little that I should be valued by this criterion (at least in some part).  Needless to say the strategy would have involved me being asked to email (within Facebook) all my friends but this is a bit like spamming isn’t it? And it begs the bigger question of course - is social media just a numbers game?

I really really hope it isn’t.  I’m aware that I might be kind of a bit naïve and maybe, in some ways, romantic when it comes to what goes on with Twitter.  My friend, whom I was having the meeting with, sees social media simply (I think) as a marketing gig.   Indeed - almost all (if not all) of his tweets are links to web pages often promoting an event or promoting social media as a marketing tool in itself.  Hey , there’s nothing wrong with this and I think he knows that I think that, but I have, shall we say, a ‘softer’ approach and I love Twitter because I get to, for example,  follow Stephen Fry, someone who  sees and uses Twitter from a position a million miles away from my friend.  I can’t help be reminded of the ‘marketing at’ position and strategy adopted by some companies in Second Life bombed.  Isn’t seeing a bunch of tweets from someone you follow that just point to websites that advertise an event or advertise the marketing medium itself a bit too much like getting direct text (SMS) messages?

I don’t know where Twitter will go when it gets monetized in the future but if it simply becomes a place full of social media marketers then I’ll probably bail – for me, whilst I am happy to see all sorts of people doing and experimenting with all sorts of things, the magic remains seeing what people like Stephen Fry are up to, having a laugh with Will Carling and being part of topics and conversations with some really cool and imaginative people.

Why Mattel should look at Guitar Hero Sales

  I have just been reading about GH3 sales passing one Billion Dollars ...Not too surprising I suppose knowing how gaming is the fastest growing 'entertainment' market - It was only a few months ago that GTA IV was the fastest grossing entertainment 'product' ever in its first weekend of release (if I remember correctly).

Some nice other stats too which would serve a nice purpose in any presentation I had to do in the near future - loads of User Generated Content being created as just one example.

But, perhaps the one stat  and point of interest I liked the most was how games like GH are creating huge amounts of interest away from the virtual environment...

...sales of real guitars were also up. Griffith [not me!] said two-thirds of non-musicians exposed to music games plan to start playing a real instrument in the next couple of years, while three-fourths of musicians said they've spent more time with their instruments since picking up a music game...

I should say that I don't understand exactly what the above means and the use of the word 'plan' intrigues me to some extent (not to mention the use of the word 'fourths') but I guess we should be fairly comfortable with the bottom line message.  My point, in case you hadn't guessed already, concerns Mattel and their determination to remove Scrabulous from Facebook (last year was it?).  One can't help feeling that their fight to remove 'their game' from one of the world's largest and fastest growing internet properties with an exposure that one can only be dreamed of in more traditional advertising spaces might have been a little hasty and one they might now be regretting...

It's better than TV

I was listening to Radio  Five Live on the BBC this morning.

There was a story about AOL buying Bebo for USD850m.  The story focussed however on Balderton Capital - the only institutional investor in Bebo.  Balderton provided first-round financing of USD15m to acquire a 15.7% stake in May 2006.  They will now make a return of 9 times that on their investment.


The story carried an interview with Barry Maloney, one of the partners of Balderton and a director of Bebo since the investment in May 2006.  When the interviewer asked him what led him to think about investing in Bebo he recounted how his daughters had stopped fighting with him for the TV remote control and he went to see what they were doing instead.  What a great story!  I wonder if they'll be getting some pretty damn nice ponies on birthdays to come.

There will be a 100,000-fold shrinking of computer technology over the next 25 years

Check out what futurologist Ray Kurzweil is saying about computer processing power, its size and what this will mean for our learning environments.  Powerful stuff.  I was speaking on Virtual Reality yesterday and talked about how we (and companies and organizations) need to learn to play with people in these environments.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Fully emergent games is really where we want to go. We will do most of our learning through these massively parallel interactions is how we principally learn and principally create,"  he said.

MySpace opens doors to developers

MySpace has opened its doors to application developers.  I wonder if the applications will all play horrible music and be incredibly garish in their appearance making you want to leave immediately like most of the MySpace user pages?

I must make a point of looking up the latest trend figures for memberships.  The article quotes 200M users for MySpace v 63M users for facebook but makes no mention of trends in new users... anyone know?

Block Memories

As you may know I have a keen interest in all that is Web 2.0 and 3.0 too of course.  And I am never short of new things to look at and check out partly because of my own research but largely too down to my good friend and colleague, Michael (Held).

Yesterday Michael sent me a link to EveryBlock. It is limited to a view cities in the US however, but whilst I was looking at it I was reminded of an exciting week I spent in New York in September 1992 - a week which turned out to be the first week of a 14 month tour of the usual round-the-world backpacker haunts.

So, remembering this week, I was checking out the site and, with the help of Google Maps, remembered and located the street where I stayed in New York - Vestry Street - a very cool street of Artists Lofts in the particularly cool area of SoHo.  As I was surfing Google Maps, I noticed a feature I hadn't used before - Street View.  You will find this as an additional button top right.  Using this features means you can view street level photos of all streets highlighted.  Now for Manhattan this looked pretty comprehensive but (although I am not sure) this feature is currently limited to a few major metropolis's in the US.  I did check London, for example, and it was not available.

Now people talk about community when it comes to 2.0 and Crowd sourcing and all the rest of it.  And very often the talk is about applications around the network of course but for me, very often, I find the use of 2.0 stuff very emotional.  For twenty minutes yesterday I relived some wonderful memories of my time in New York at the beginning of my trip and being able to 'virtually' walk the streets around where I stayed using the feature in Google Maps was really quite wonderful.

I have bookmarked the address - the Block - in NYC that I have now been gently reminded of, allowed to explore and live again and, by using EveryBlock , will keep up with the latest graffiti reports, crimes and other happenings of that few hundred yards of New York street.

What is happening to Facebook?

What is happening to facebook?  Suddenly (and it does seem to have rapidly escalated in the last 2/3 weeks) several things have happened to make my empathy with and my closeness to fb change - for the worse. 

The author probably ranting about facebook

When I used to see an email notification in my hotmail account... 'Facebook - xxx has sent you a message..' - this used to mean that xxx had actually taken the time to write me an email.  Or at least I was sharing in a thread with people I probably knew. 

But now?  Now, I get the same kind of notification in my hotmail inbox but now many of these are for messages posted on my 'funwall' or my 'superwall' or whatever kind of wall I happen to have right now.  And actually, they are not messages.  In some cases they are nonsense and, in others, vaguely amusing videos and, in an increasing number of cases they resemble that terrible spam crap I get from some people - you know the kind of stuff, pass this on to ten people in the next two hours or you will die or your friend's house will burn down or something...

Anyway, I don't like this direction.  I never warmed to MySpace and I have always hated Friendster.  Am I going to end up hating Facebook too as it dives into and gets lost in Gigabytes of nonsense.