I use my blog to tell people what I’ve been doing recently.  My readers are usually friends and family, unless a passer-by happens to stumble across something via Google that interests them.  My posts are generally about things I’m interested in, things I’ve done, things I meant to do but didn’t, or things that I want to rant about.

But now I’ve fallen in love with Twitter, my Twhirl client always running on my desktop, ready to accept my latest status update as and when I feel led to bend the world’s ear with my 140 characters of insight.  No logging in, no pressure to write unnecessary paragraphs of fluff, just a short blast of information.  No time like the present.  The result is that I feel like I’ve told the world what’s going on, despite the noticeable absence on my blog.  So I apologise that I’ve not posted more here in recent weeks.  Blame Twitter for being so darn addictive.

In fact, so addictive and successful is Twitter that I have all but forgotten the existence of Facebook.  Remember Facebook?  I used to use it to find all my friends and keep in touch with what they were doing.  But once all my friends were found it sort of lost its attraction.  I logged in occasionally to check the news feed to find out what people’s latest status updates were, and that was about it.  Don’t even try persuading me to take interest in an application, I have absolutely no desire to clutter my life with anything else.  Once I started using Twitter I realised that the status bit was all I was using Facebook for, and Twitter was just better at doing that.  So I suppose another apology is required for Facebook aficionados.  No time like the present.

So, an update, then.  Yesterday (which was Sunday) Ellie and I went to church.  Four times.  We went to the 9:25am service, which is the more traditional one, where we sang surprisingly few carols given it was the second Sunday of Advent and the first Sunday in December.  Then we hung around for the 11am service, which is a more contemporary and informal service, a bit like the old Chaplaincy services of yore.  While we were there they were advertising the Meditation service that was happening at 5pm, and we thought “why not”.  No time like the present.  So after lunch and an hour or two that I remember very little about, we headed out to church again.  The meditation was candle-lit, and was actually quite useful in getting my head focused on God again and taking Christmas seriously.  Then, after a few cakes and refreshments we headed over to the Salvation Army for The Gathering, which is an ecumenical Churches Together service with some singing and prayer, where we ate more cake.

And now we’re waiting.  Still waiting.  Our baby is officially due today, Monday 7th December, but I don’t think anyone’s told the baby.  We keep trying to persuade it that it’s much nicer out here, that it’ll have more room to move, that there’s more to see, and that there’s no time like the present, but so far there’s no indication of anything happening.  In all honesty we’re both getting a bit bored of all this waiting.  They say you should cherish each moment, because you’ll never get those ‘just the two of us’ moments again.  But then they said that about a lot of other things too, and we don’t believe them.  We want a baby.  We ordered it, we were told the delivery date, and it hasn’t come yet.  Maybe we should contact DHL and see if they have a tracking code for it…

Oh, and our house is all Christmassy.  We were thinking about it last week, and that with the baby due any day now we ought to get the decorations up sooner rather than later, otherwise they may never be put up at all.  No time like the present, after all.  So I dug out all our decorations from the garage, and we decorated the tree.  Trouble is, our house has grown.  That is to say, this house is significantly bigger than our previous house, and our decorations don’t go as far any more.  So on Saturday we went to Tesco to find some more.  We were very disappointed at their range of decorations, truth be told, and came away with very little.  So in the afternoon we went to Dobbies Garden World to see what their Christmas range was.  They had a huge range of stuff, but it was all rather expensive and arty, and we didn’t pick up much their either.  Turns out we have a much cheaper, tackier approach to decorations, and neither of those shops catered to people like us.  We managed to find some cheap tinsel in Focus though, and our house is now a lot more Christmassy than it was.  And in years to come I’m sure it’ll be even more heaving, what with paper chains and home-made decorations and suchlike.

That’s all from me for now.  Things to do.  No time like the present, so I’m told.

This is a useful Twitter widget - repeats everything everyone else has said.

I’ve never been one for associating with the ‘in crowd’.  I’ve never been particularly interested in trends, fashions, fads or crazes.  Well, I say never… I do remember a time when I was at primary school when Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle action figures were the big thing, and I saw everyone else playing with them, and I pestered my Mum to buy me one, and she did, and the day I brought mine into school was the day they went out of fashion.  It’s scarred me for life.  Not that I’m bitter.

Fast forward a decade or so and I’m still in a similar mindset, though it has evolved slightly.  My approach now is to observe the trend from a distance, and then when it’s established itself and the hype has died down, then I jump on the bandwagon, and hope to goodness that I haven’t left it too late.  As a result, I have never bought a brand new Mac, I still haven’t got an iPhone, I joined Facebook to find most of my friends already there, and I gave SecondLife a spin a year or so too late.  And now it’s happened again.  I’m on Twitter.

Now, before you all shoot me down for giving in (or praise me for joining the enlightened, depending on which side of the fence you’ve set up camp), let me explain why.

The way I see it, Twitter is basically the ‘status’ bit of Facebook, on its own.  You type in what you’re doing, and if people are interested they’ll read it.  Or, to be more precise, if you write something interesting and people are interested they’ll read it.

To be a tweeter, you need to have spare time in which to write your tweets, and need to have enough going on around you to have something worthwhile to tweet about.  To be a tweet reader, you need to have time to read through everyone else’s tweets, managing who you’re ‘following’ so that you don’t get tweets you’re not in the least interested in, and if you have even more spare time you can reply to tweets with your own.  For the average person, there are not enough hours in the day.  At least there shouldn’t be.  For the average computer geek, there are not enough topics to tweet about because most of it is already covered in your blog.

My primary reason for joining the ranks of Tweeters is business.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time the last few days concentrating on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) on my ChapterNine web site.  The aim of this is to make my site appear higher in search results, to increase the likelihood of people finding me and asking me to do their web site.  SEO is a complicated and mysterious art, with no absolute answers and no magic combination, which is undoubtedly why so many SEO companies charge so much for their services.  Of course, site ranking is only half the battle – for people to find you, most often they need first to be looking for you.  And that’s where social networking comes in.  Hence Twitter.

What I’ll be doing with my Twitter account is updating it regularly with what I’m doing at work, whether that’s researching new technology, designing, coding, announcing that a site has just gone live, reviewing something, or just replying to e-mails.  By mentioning my business it gets the name ‘out there’ in the community.  By reviewing other people’s products it means they might ‘follow’ my Twitter account to see what else I say.  Basically, it’s all about publicity.  The more I say, the more has been said, which can only be a good thing.  It’s not necessarily going to make a huge difference in SEO terms, but it’ll probably help a little, and even that is not to be sniffed at.

Second Life.  Remember that?  It was all the rage a few years back, when it pioneered the idea of a virtual reality platform for online community and economy, and if I recall correctly there was a lot of hype around at the time.  Of course, I’m no sheep, so I steered clear of it at the time.  After all, I wasn’t a loner with no ‘real’ friends, so I had no need for an additional life to maintain.

So why is it that I downloaded the software last week?  Why have I been wandering around the Second Life worlds, exploring interesting locations, listening to music, chatting to people, dancing…?  I guess part of the cause is how cut off I’m feeling at the moment, having moved away from my circle of friends.  Sure, we’re living in a land of bliss, surrounded by beautiful countryside, the smell of cow dung floating on the breeze, and glorious hills to gaze at.  But we don’t know anyone.  Well, not many, and not as well as our ‘old’ friends.  I miss AM and Sarah, and the Phil(l)s, and my youth group at church, and my badminton partner, and all those other ex-uni folks who dropped in all the time.

Which leads me to an interesting muse.  What makes a friend?  And why is it important?

Facebook, like so many other online technologies, has its downfalls as well as its bonuses.  I has worked really well at bringing people together, reuniting friends, and allowing people to share with others what’s going on in their life at the moment.  Twitter has taken inspiration from that, with its focus on the “what I’m doing right now” aspect, but that’s slightly less interesting to me.  What I find fascinating is how I get really excited about finding old friends on Facebook, and then never actually talk to them.  Most of my uni friends are on FB, a lot of my family are too, plus people from church (x3), my secondary school, even my first primary school (in particular the first friend I ever made).  I have well over 100 ‘friends’ on FB, which is a reassuring and ego-satisfying list to read through.  But here’s the rub – I hardly ever actually talk to these people.

How is it that I can supposedly call these people friends, and yet have little or no communication with them at all?  How can I legitimately call myself a friend if I never speak to them?  Part of this comes down to a shortcoming in FB, where the only relationship possible is a ‘friend’.  According to FB, there is no distinction between my best and closest friends and some random girl I was in a class with at school a long time ago.  As fun as it is to have Becky on my friends list, I have absolutely no interest in what she’s doing, because she’s a very different person to me, and she’s very different to when we were at school together, and to be honest we were never really friends at school anyway (if you’re reading this, Becky, please don’t take it personally, I’m just using you as an example).

At the other end of the scale, I met a guy called Dave at church on Sunday, and came away thinking “there’s a potential friend there”.  We had spent so little time together, we know so little about each other, but his is a personality I think I could get along with quite easily.  I’ve known him a matter of hours, and he’s already more of a friend than a lot of people I’ve got on Facebook.

I know exactly why I signed up and downloaded Second Life.  It wasn’t to try out the technology or join in the community spirit.  It was to find new friends.  I’ve reached a point in my life where I need more people.  Unfortunately, Second Life proved to be the wrong place to look for friends.  To all intents and purposes, it’s dead.  I’ve spent hours wandering around SL, and found many beautiful locations, but very few people.  And none that seemed particularly interested in talking to me.  The only place I found that had people there were the ‘welcome’ worlds, where there were avatars constantly sat around (probably part of a team, on a rota) waiting to welcome new users to SL and answer any questions they had.  A fantastic resource, sure, but not exactly the best way to actually make friends.

To my disappointment, there is nothing for me on Second Life.  Facebook seems to be the best way for me to keep in touch with old friends, but it’s not going to find me new friends.  I’m hoping to be able to force myself into making better use of Facebook (ignoring all the annoying apps), and will try to contact people through it more often, but that’s more of a maintenance task than actually enjoying a friendship.  I guess what it comes down to is that, despite the wonders of the internet, I need to see people face to face to really call them a true friend.

I did however succumb to a Facebook-related trend that is probably beginning to grow old now – I uploaded a profile photo of me as a baby.  Well, about three years old anyway.  I even got a comment left by a friend of mine saying how cute I was.  And it got me thinking – who actually remembers me from when I was that age?  No one I’m in contact with now, apart from family of course.  The only people who would remember me from then would be my old friends from my first primary school, but I’ve not been in touch with any of them since… well, since I left in Year 3.

And this is where Facebook really comes into its own – a quick search brought up an unexpected surprise, finding someone who is potentially the first friend I ever made.

Laura and I were in Nursery together, we were best friends back then, the two brightest kids in the class (we even skipped a year completely on account of our relative brilliance).  However, my parents eventually got wise to the less-than-satisfactory teaching at the school, and promptly moved me to a smaller but better primary school a little further away.  And so it was that I lost touch with Laura, Sarah-Jane, Ben, Zoe and Simon.

Finding Laura on Facebook was therefore one of the most exciting things that’s happened recently, on account of it being so significant.  I’m not expecting us to rekindle an amazing friendship – 18 years is a long time to be apart and still expect a friendship to remain – but just being in touch (even electronically) is quite special.  I have to confess to getting just a little over-excited when the friend request came through!

It does highlight something about how our society has changed over the last couple of decades.  Not long ago our friends were defined as people we spent time with, which usually meant they were confined to people in your local area, people you worked with.  Now, with the advent of easy communication via the internet and social networking sites such as Facebook, a friend can legitimately be anywhere in the world.  Laura is a fine example of that – I would never have got in touch with her otherwise, and keeping in touch with her would also be difficult as we’re in completely different parts of the country.  In some ways perhaps Facebook’s ‘friend’ status is somewhat limiting, in that Laura is now on par with my friend Sarah who lives round the corner, and there is no easy way of determining how strong or deep that friendship is (and I have to admit that despite our history Laura and I are most certainly not close friends any more, though more by distance than design).  However, that ‘friend’ status still means something, and if nothing else it’s a reassurance that people I have known in the past are still out there and within easy reach by just a few clicks.

I do wonder though whether this broadening of our social horizon has had a detrimental effect on traditional relationships.  According to Facebook I have 162 friends scattered around the world, but I don’t even know the names of my neighbours.  People who live in our road pass by our door every day, and sometimes we see them and pass them on the path, but no more than a nod and perhaps a grunt of acknowledgement is shared.  Has the internet made us less reliant on our physical community, to the extent that it doesn’t matter any more?