General | The thoughts of Kevin Dixie

New Blog URL – blog.kevindixie.com

Posted by KevinD on Feb 11, 2009 in General

Thanks to Lycos the ever decreasing circle of hosting, I am now permanently here. Hosted away from the madness.

Feel free to update any feeds or whatever you do to follow my pointless drivel.

Normal service will resume shortly, in the meantime, what do you think is making the girls laugh?

happy-times-at-autoshow

Why Twitter can kill Facebook

Posted by KevinD on Jan 9, 2009 in General, Sites Discovered

Recently Twitter has started to go mainstream (well in the UK and US). These past few weeks have seen Twitter mentioned on the BBC (see Declan Curry from BBC’s Working Lunch), radio and in most of the UK Newspapers, especially since Jonathan Ross started “tweeting”.

What is becoming clearer and clearer as time progresses and more interesting people join twitter is that the second it reaches non-geeks, it could kill off Facebook.

Why?

Facebook is useful for following main reasons:-

Finding old friends – since the demise of Friends Reunited in the UK all my old school pals are on FB.
Keeping up to date with what people are doing through status-updates (notice the once empty box now says “What are you doing now?”).
Looking at photographs of friends.
Emailing friends/people.
Live Chat.

That’s all. Throwing stuff, the apps etc, are totally useless in reality. Humans are interested in looking at people, seeing how they are doing (what they are doing now) and interacting. People are far happier to talk online than in real life to long lost friends, this is a fact as I often bump into old school friends (I left school in 1991) that are also FB friends, they are generally embarrassed to talk and normally offer a simple “hi” and wander off into the bustling high street..within an hour I’d get a “great seeing you today” message on FB!

Why is Twitter Useful?

Right now, none of my non-early adopter friends, ex-colleagues or family are on it, however, it is great for meeting new people relevant to both work and play, I have a real mix of people that I find addictive to watch and talk with on and offline.
Keeping up to date with what people are doing instantly.
Sharing links to interesting information.
Finding out who is in whatever location you happen upon ie “Who fancies a coffee in Oxford Street, right now?”
Talking to people instantly.
No limits on the number of people that can follow you and you can follow as many as you want (unlike FB).
Direct Messages (email?).
Getting out emergency notices, fast, such as this on Techcrunch today.

There are similarities to Facebook and it seems FB are actually copying “What are you doing now?”. I think the second my friends born in the 70’s and technophobe work colleagues and family are introduced to and understand twitter, I would actually stop going to Facebook, FB offers me nothing more than Twitter and I prefer the fact that Twitter has flowing conversation. The one thing Twitter needs is personalised homepages for each user and perhaps groups for friends, family and work (as we are discussing right now), and maybe allowing photos (the one thing Facebook has over Twitter). Partnering with Flickr could fix that instantly.

There have been rumours of Twitter talking to Facebook regarding a potential acquisition (although it has been denied). Of my followers not using an automated service to update their status’ the average friend updates three times per week..Not really live or helpful is it.

Maybe I am wrong and the fact Facebook has 150m users and twitter only 6m users in comparison means something..

I am however,convinced that Twitter, once understood and not just with geeks and people told they *should* use it, will take over Facebook. Maybe in two years, and the revenue will be SMS based along with businesses paying to use it internally. I know of many offices that have put bans in place stopping staff “wasting time on Facebook” – Twitter would be seen as a useful tool by bosses.

Your thoughts dear reader?!

UPDATE: It seems I am not alone with this line of thought other people are seeing the benefits including the UK public en masse

Tags: facebook, twitter

Here’s Why You Just Lost Loads Of Followers On Twitter

Posted by KevinD on Dec 19, 2008 in General

So you just logged into Twitter and found you have a whole bunch of followers missing, “what did I say wrong?” you ask yourself..

Fear not!

Twitter is finally deleting all the spammers from your followers, from their blog:-

Also: we’ll be releasing a change later this afternoon that will start removing deleted and suspended users from your list of followers. As this hasn’t been cleaned up previously, you may notice your follower counts go down. This is to be expected.

Phew, you weren’t so out of order after all!

Mine took a hit of 101 just now, follow me @kevindixie

Tags: following, lost followers, twitter

The BBC Really Has Lost The Plot

Posted by KevinD on Dec 4, 2008 in General

After all the hoohaa about Ross and Brand, now Moyles, it strikes me that the BBC has lost control. I just clicked on the international BBC site and am convinced they have lost the plot.

I understand the BBC feel it needs to make money out of its overseas online viewers, a simple, simple solution would be to offer BBC iPlayer to those outside the UK for a small monthly subscription say £5 per month, but no, that is just far too easy. For those that don’t know, you are unable to access iPlayer from outside the UK.

What the BBC decided to do was to put some adverts on the site. This started off with very discrete 468×60 sized adverts showing animated National Geographic links, very soft and pleasing on the eye, that was pre-creditcrunch.

Now, they have a huge advert on the right hand side of the homepage, I don’t have a problem with adverts at all. But I can’t understand who these adverts are targeting, how on Earth do they expect to make money from these ad’s? I mean, who is buying Rolex watches right now?? Surely a paid advert with a rev share would be better given the traffic the BBC generates?

Take a look for yourself:-