Software, Software Development and other Atrocities

I work as a Project Analyst. Strictly speaking I am not a techie (or a nerd or a geek!) but I know about the techie world. I understand the processes by which software are designed and produced. I also know about users and their work. I talk to them, I study their behaviour and business processes, their needs (what they need and what they think they need), and make conclusions about how we can help them. I pass that information to developers. This is not an easy task, believe me. I am bilingual. I am like a U.N. interpreter. I speak the language of software developers and the language of users. I listen to users and then tell developers about them by using words like searching, browsing, screenshot, widget, dataset, datalink and object. They, of course, would consider these very basic terms and reply with machine-code-like language. I take those words plus samples of their work (prototype, pilot, etc) go to users and explain them what we are doing. For that I use words like browsing and searching but avoid technical words as that would confuse or annoy them.

As a project analyst I also have to do some reach out, project advocacy and dissemination: meet people and talk to managers, directors and alike. Tell them about our work and the benefits for them. Then, I am trilingual because this last one is management, strategist language.

I think that, within a project realm, a project analyst is an important role. Techies, users, strategists and other stakeholders speak different languages and have different agendas. A project analyst is the person who keeps all of them together. Without the project analyst all these people would be heading in different directions.

This feels like being a double sandwich. Like the meat between users and software developers, and the cheese between the producers of software and the project stakeholders.

I also have to do a bit of academic dissemination through traditional means: conferences and papers (I work in an academic institution.) Perhaps this aspect of my job takes me to a different dimension, not completely related to the practical aspects of the project. For academia it would not be enough to produce software and to make it succeed. Academia needs explanations and analysis, reflections on how things were achieved, design of models, building up on established theories or developing new ones based on the data collected. Academic dissemination does not necessarily play a crucial role in the success of the project but I find it the most fulfilling as it allows me to reflect and analyse strategies and also build on my academic career.

I’m starting to see the picture of a chameleon here.

Now, you may want to ask me why on earth I am doing working as a project analyst in a software related project if I want to pursue an academic career. The answer is... I don’t know :p lol Did I mention that I like my job? I think I like the "practical (hands-on)-academic (reflective)" combination. I am an analyst, I like software development and I like to talk to users. I am also a sort of ethnographer. I like to mingle with techies and users. I like first-hand experience in (not necessarily academic) projects. I question different interpretations and I like to reflect on what I see. And I like to write about the things I do.

I have been on Twitter for a few months and I have formed an opinion. My opinion is limited of course. It is based on the few interactions I have had, the few people I am following, the tools I am using and some technical problems I have encountered (yeah yeah problems too).

Having used Hi5, Flicker, Facebook, Linkedin and similar sites I have to say that Twitter feels quite different. My first impressions are:

Twitter is not so good at allowing social interactions. In that sense Facebook and MySpace outplay Twitter. Social relationships on Twitter feel incomplete and weak as there is only one way to communicate. Twitter is a one way communication channel. Facebook and MySpace offer a number of possibilities for expression and communication which help members to know better their contacts.

Twitter asks a question “What are you doing?” which does not make sense to me. Are they suggesting we should only post about what we are doing? Can I post about what I did, will do or haven’t done? Can I post about what I am thinking? Can I repeat other people’s posts? and so on... the answer is yes we can, and that is why lots of people ignore the question and post whatever they want.

One can chose the kind of information to get in their personal timeline by following relevant people. Some people post about their personal live, their leisure activities, sports, etc. Others post about their work or businesses. There are people who use twitter to advertise their businesses and websites. And among them there are some who see Twitter as a market and not as a social space. Problem is, there is no guarantee that one will understand everything these people say.

Twitter has poor content. 140 character tweets are not enough for providing context and meaning as most people are used to. See for example the following tweet: “God help us... the adviser has a heavy accent :(” Ok I understand the adviser has a heavy accent and that isn’t good, But I do not understand why, what they are doing, who the adviser is, where he is, etc. To know this I would probably need to search for previous tweets and hope there is an explanation there. But do I care so much to take the time to do that search? NO.




Although one can post consecutive tweets to convey better developed ideas, we do not know if followers will receive the whole package as we intended. Each individual twitterer has their own timeline comprised of the tweets of the people they follow. Those tweets come all together in chronological order, so some packages intersect between them. Again, to understand some of these tweets I would need to filter my timeline and of course I rarely do this, unless there is something there that attracts my attention.

Having only 140 characters forces people to communicate by small, discrete blocks of ideas. Best twitterers are the ones who master this art. For example: “What a day! What a week! I'm shattered. Tomorrow: snooker with #timsawesomegrandad & lunch with my sis & niece b4 #timsgoingsurfing @ t'wknd” Mastering the art of text compression isn’t easy and I admire the ones who can do this and still say something meaningful and interesting. But as usual I always want to know more. I would like to know why “What a day! What a week!” Was it tough? Was it good or bad? What happened??

I can always ask the twitterer if I want to know more. That is something I prefer to do rather than browsing through tweets. I have found that exchanges with other people are more interesting. It is a personal opinion of course. When I talk to someone on Twitter, the context gets clearer after each message, and it feels like having a conversation or a social interaction. However although Twitter can be used for conversations, it isn’t a natural chatroom or forum.

One way for making up for poor content and lack of context is to use tools which help to organise content by filtering it. The hashtags site is one of them. I usually go there when there is a major event like the Wimbledon final and follow the tweets there. I also use the TweetDeck search option to filter tweets by a certain topic, like for example #socialsoftware.

Twitter is excellent for distributing and disseminating messages. Like a chain reaction machine. This is because people RT a lot! For example if a celebrity tweets he is getting married, one hundred thousand followers would probably RT that message to their own followers, some of those followers would RT it again, and so... in a few minutes millions of twitterers can come to know about that wedding, even if they do not follow or do not like that celebrity.

People post links to the online resources they write and/or read. These sites have longer texts with more complex and elaborated ideas. Bloggers for example do not use twitter to say what they want but to disseminate what they write in their blogs. I follow a few news accounts as well and I find them very convenient to know about what is going on in the world. The news posts have a short text usually the news headline and then a link to the actual news site.

Some people send their tweets to their FB accounts so their friends can also read what they are doing. I do not think that is a good idea as those are different contexts with different audiences. This presentation does a good job at explaining this http://www.slideshare.net/themarketingnerd/why-your-tweets-should-not-feed-to-your-facebook-status-its-a-fail-1314380.

From the above I conclude that Twitter is good as media and not so good at social. Through my twitter account I come to know about lots of things happening around the world, have found good blogs, read a lot, but I know very little about the people who post those messages. On Twitter I have developed rather loose links with some people whereas for the rest I am just a lurker, occasionally reading their tweets sometimes without understanding them. I guess it would take a few million tweets more to get to know some people.

Speaking of people, for some the success on Twitter is measured by the number of people who follow them. That is a measure of popularity, which in most cases, I believe, does not say anything about the quality of their relationships or the quality of the content of their posts. If you are public figure thousands of people will follow you even if you post boring tweets. With this I am not saying that all twitterers who have a large list of followers are boring to everyone. People in general follow people whose tweets are interesting to them. But of course there also people who would follow people expecting they would follow them back.

Followers and following lists are very important. They are connections to the rest of the Twitter world. Losing them is something that can ruin the twitter experience. Rebuilding these lists could be an impossible task especially where they are made up of people who are not know to the twitterer. And it is here that I want to talk about one of these many “bugs” that affect twitter, and has affected me as well. I recently lost over 70 followers and while seeking for support I saw I wasn’t the only one. Hundreds of people are losing their followers and what is more worrying their following lists are going down to zero. Following zero people means they do not get any tweets and are virtually blindfolded. That has never happened to me on FB or Hi5 and makes me wonder about Twitters reliability.

Regardless of the above Twitter has this addiction effect. I see lots of people who are obsessed and cannot live without tweeting everyday (yes, I am talking about you!) However I think I am still immune to Twitter because of the reasons I discussed above (I prefer social media rather than just media). However there was one thing that boosted my participation maybe by 5%. At the beginning I found the Twitter.com interface boring to use. I installed twibble on my mobile and then I became a bit more interested. After that I installed TweetDeck and twhirl in my computers and things became even more interesting. Getting notifications when I get a Tweet and being able to organise posts makes this thing a bit more manageable. Because of this, I think, I tweet a bit more.

There are other tools that help to complement tweets and enhance the Twitter experience (or addiction?) These are just a few examples. Twitpic is used to post twitterers’ pictures. There are also tools to tag users and find people with the same interests: Twibes, TwitR or wefollow. There is also Twibbon where one can start a campaign, cTwittLIKE where one can see Twitter like someone else, Tweeting Too Hard where one can find original tweets and Cursebird where you can see who is swearing on Twitter (this one's fun). Oh and TweetRadio where you can listen to Tweets as if they were news by Twitterer or by Topic. I have explored these and more sites but still Twitter does not convince me as a social networking tool. Ok, I can have fun conversations here and there but I do not consider them as social relationships but as random loose links. I think Twitter is poor at social, weak at meaningful content, good at quantity of content, good/excellent at disseminating news and links. And if you want to explore the potential of Twitter as a disseminator you can use Tweetburner a tool that shortens URLS and tracks the links that you share.

Anyway, last point I want to make in this post is that I would not have been able to say all this on Twitter. That is why I have a blog :) But hey, don't panic I'll stay on Twitter. I won't call it social networking but broadcasting machine. It is interesting and I kind of like it.

Social networking and social media are concepts that define activities that integrate people and technology. These activities can take written form as in online conversations, oral form as in video or audio streams or visual form as in video again and pictures. Social media can also be seen as the places where you go to have social interactions (in many forms as stated above) with other people.

Social media has this enormous and growing audience of people hungry for online interactions. Millions of people use social media and it has become one of the most popular online activities. This is why, I think, it has become a very attractive gold mine for wolves.

Yes, marketers and strategists see social media as places they can use to do their business and to increase their profits. I see this as interference, as having uninvited guests in a house party(1). Businesses have their own places on the web, they can also have their own forums, online communities, etc., if they wish. However as real social networking sites are more populated they are potentially more fertile lands for businesses to grow profits. Yes, it is easier to go where the people are than make people come to them.

Have a look at http://mashable.com/2009/08/03/what-is-social-media

By engaging into apparent social interactions with real people they want to gain their trust and make them buy their products or follow their religion. Marketers and strategists accounts in Social Networking Sites (SNS) are in fact social masks that they wear to appeal to their public. But those are not the real them. In reality marketers and strategists have their own agenda: make money out of you. They do not want to be friends with you they just want to sell you things, they do not want to listen to you they want you to listen to them.

I do not blame them. That is how businesses have done business for years. Before, they kept themselves to their places. Slowly they claimed territory into our private lives, in the newspapers that we read, on the TV, and now into our online social interactions. This had to come sooner or later, and I think we will get used to that. What worries me though is that by carrying out this invasion they are changing the nature of these spaces. They are taking the social out of the social media and adding the profit to their business playground. In fact they are misusing and subverting SNS in a way that potentially threatens their existence.

For example I do not mind a few ads on Facebook but I mind too many. I mind strange accounts sending me messages about buying this or that, or reading this website about god knows what! Facebook is an excellent SNS exactly because you can have social interactions there. You can do all the non sense you like. You can talk to your friends, you can gossip or bitch. You can share your photos and videos, you can fill these stupid questionnaires, or eat fortune cookies, or you can follow your favourite music band or charity organisation. That is what Facebook is about. If it gets infected by people who think I am their audience or their customer I will not like it anymore.

There is one place though where marketers and strategists fit better: Twitter. Twitter is this strange place where people talk to everyone and to anyone at the same time (unless you are using the @.) Some people on Twitter are geeks, some are egocentric, some are normal (like me) and some of them are into business. Thousands of people join Twitter to advertise themselves or their businesses. I can post links to this blog and tell people hey there is a new post! Promoting or advertising things on Twitter is an accepted practice even though that does not answer Twitters question “What are you doing?” but who cares if people are happy. On Twitter promotion and advertising do not feel as intrusive as in other sites. This, perhaps, is because Twitter is very impersonal and has very low social presence. Twitter is more media than social. What Twitter has is a very high rate of exchange of information and lots of potential readers (or buyers!)


There are other kinds of interference attempted into social media. One of them is by eLearning. Some people would like to use real SNS to teach and I cannot understand why. The fact that children and teenagers use these sites a lot does not mean that they will welcome their teachers or their classes there. I however think that social networks, web2.0 type of tools can be used for teaching, but in separate spaces where purposes are clearly defined and the word educational replaces the word social. Have a look at http://monitorhypothesis.typepad.com/esl/2008/07/facebook-and-i.html Added later --> I also think that initiatives such as eGovernance can make good use of web2.0 kind of environments because citizens are familiar with them. And I think I would welcome their intrusion into my social network as long as they are kept minimal and seek citizens' benefit.

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(1) This view is perhaps influenced by my understanding of social media as online communities. In fact I think social media is just another buzzword that represents the latest step in the evolution of online communities.