heyNathan

Twit-lebrities?

I just overheard Jason Calacanis suggest (via his UStream.tv channel) that celebrities Paris Hilton and Kobe Bryant will soon be Twittering.

I have one friendly question for you Jason. Are you insane?

I’m willing to admit I might be wrong about this, because who am I to try to understand what’s going on in the brilliant minds of Paris, Britney and the like. But it seems to me that a service like Twitter would have little value for top-tier celebrities. Understand that one of the largest challenges these people face is over-scrutiny of their private lives. We don’t see many celebrities rushing to blog or participate in social networks, outside of faux-celebrity or promotional profiles maintained by interns at their respective agencies. While I once enjoyed the fact that Heather Graham was my friend on MySpace, I never really believed she was behind the curtain. And while I’ve never asked a celebrity myself, I imagine most of them value privacy above almost everthing else.

Furthermore, services like Twitter are popular in part because they enhance users’ social lives to varying degrees. At best, they provide a more efficient means of creating, sharing, managing and filtering real-world connections. At their worst, they provide a way for otherwise lazy or socially-inept people to feel some sense of community without getting off their ass. Do celebrities really need any of this? Do they have a shortage of social options? If Scarlett Johannson or Conan O’Brien decide they need more friends, is it really a problem for them to expand the posse? It may be hard for them to develop natural relationships with people who can look past the bling, but Twitter won’t help in that department. As for self-promotion (the other big reason people use Twitter), that’s not really a good match either.

Most importantly, despite my taking the time to write this post, I don’t really care if Paris Hilton twitters and neither should you. My biggest beef with Twitter and many other social apps is that they are so damn focused on ego - case in point, Twitterholic.com. Is this the nerd equivalent of People magazine’s 50 most beautiful people issue?

People are self-obsessed, plain and simple. So when you create a platform based primarily on connecting people, you get a lot of self-important garbage. This may prove to be the fatal flaw of social media, unless…

Developers and content creators - please learn to focus on connecting ideas and content, not people! The sites and applications that have figured this out (and there are quite a few already) should be around for years to come.

The New Look of Working

cubicle17:

I’ve heard some ridiculous chatter around the office recently about how some people “obviously aren’t working because they don’t spend enough time at their desks”. While it may have been true in the past that employees were working only when they were sitting in their desks with their heads down for 8 hours a day, that simply isn’t true anymore. These days working looks markedly different…

These days working looks like staying at home so you can get more done with less distraction. It looks like walking around the office so you can talk to your colleagues face-to-face instead of through e-mail. Working looks like taking a break every hour so you can remain focused over an entire day. Working looks like a day without meetings, and looks like eating lunch somewhere other than your desk. It looks like leaving two hours early because you’re ahead of schedule. Working even looks like spending the weekend doing what you want to do, not spending it in the office.

One thing that working does not necessarily look like, however, is busy. After all, the only real way to tell if someone is working is by their results, and that’s how it should have been all along.