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« This virtual world — Got a Mac? A business user how-to guide for Address Book and Mail »
Of technophiles, social networks, telecoms and neo-Luddites…
Wednesday, 19 November 2008 — by Wayne Smallman
In the world of technology, change is good, and comes thick and fast. I’m certainly no technophobe. On the contrary. I’m probably a technophile. But I also see myself as something of a neo-Luddite, too. Now you’re wondering how I manage to be both…
Last week, Google announced that Google Mail now offers voice and video chat. For someone like me, this changes absolutely nothing. Why? Skype works just fine.
And then there’s the technical minutia, like the fact that Google’s video offering uses the ubiquitous Jabber, now called XMPP:
“Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), a set of open XML technologies for presence and real-time communication developed by the Jabber open-source community in 1999, formalized by the IETF in 2002-2004, continuously extended through the standards process of the XMPP Standards Foundation, and implemented in a wide variety of software, devices, and Internet services.”
As an aside, which name sticks in your head; Jabber or XMPP? Thought so. That’s what happens when you let engineers near product names.
Skype, on the other hand, is a proprietary system. But from an end user point of view, who the hell cares? So long as the service works and enough of the people you know use it, Skype is sufficient.
There you go! I just made a business case for using Microsoft Windows. Oh, wait…
I’m a neo-Luddite and proud of it!
To qualify that statement, what I mean is, I’ve built my workflow, my clients and contacts are using broadly the same services / applications, which work and we’re all reasonably happy with. So why the hell change things each and every time a new whizz-bang application comes along?
A guy in my social network called Robert Sanzalone had this to say a while ago:
“Just logged into Skype for the first time in months. Beginning to question Chatterous. Will take a while to ‘ween’ people off Skype.”
Robert is a self-proclaimed technology evangelist and blogger, and if you have a very long memory, you’ll also remember he was the one who broke the news of Twitter4Skype, which is, as it’s name suggests, a tool that turns Skype into a Twitter client.
Here’s a guy who’s pretty much everywhere from the Pacific ring of fire, right up to colds of Canada. So having a good, reliable telecommunications infrastructure is essential.
However, as experienced as Robert is when it comes to telecommunications, VoIP and such like, in my mind at least, someone would have to show me some demonstrably major benefits to using Chatterous, Google Mail’s video services, or anything else for that matter, before I even considered going to those in my social network and suggesting we all, en masse, make the migration to the next new whizz-bang application that comes along…
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« This virtual world — Got a Mac? A business user how-to guide for Address Book and Mail »
I know where you’re coming from, but the whole point about early adopters is that they live up to their name. We let these guys try out all the gadgets and gizmos and tell us what’ so great, once the benefits above and beyond what one is currently using then become obvious then the rest of us migrate.
I must admit I’m kind of a neo-luddite early adopter myself, a hybrid character, I sign up, download, try out almost everything at least once, and then carry on using the original tools I was happy with. Except now that I’ve got into ping.fm there’s no way I’m going back to manual plurking and tweeting…