danielskog.se

As a doctoral student I now spend 80% of my time on working with my thesis. The rest of the time I usually teach, but this semester I also participate in a project called Umeå Live (the formal project title is Innovation Cultures). Umeå Live is one out of five Living labs in Sweden receiving funding from VINNOVA (Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems). The purpose of all Living Labs is to promote user centered services and products in a collaborative process that involves both end users, companies and partners from academia.

Yesterday the site www.umealive.se was launched and on that site we will try to present everything that happens within the project. I will also have a new blog there (in Swedish) and I will probably update it more often than I update this one.

I have just recently started using Twitter. I have been thinking about it for a while but it seems as if it has not taken off in Sweden yet so I don’t have that many friends who use it. Without other friends to “follow” (and friends to join as “followers”) it’s no point. But I guess it’s always nice to be one of those “early adopters”, besides I do have friends from outside of Sweden that are using Twitter.

It is too early for me to say anything conclusive about my experience of Twitter, but I think that I will like it. I’ve been on Facebook for a while now and have always felt that my friends’ status updates have been one of the most interesting features of Facebook. Twitter appears to be a refined version of the Facebook status updates. You can write a little bit more, but still only short messages. It seems to be somewhat easier to manage and people tend to update it more often.

I’ve been thinking a lot on why I find it so interesting to watch short and simple status updates from friends. I think that it has something to do with creating a narrative and making me a part of it. When I read about the things my friends do it becomes a description, almost like a story, about their everyday life and I get the feeling that I am a part of it. I can comment on it and react to it or just watch it evolve like a real life drama. Also, even though people of course can write fake messages about what they are doing at the moment, it feels more like the real thing than many other kinds of online interactions. Twitter messages are typically short and snappy and have a spontaneous and unstructured flavor to them.

Anyway, I hope to see more of my Swedish friends on Twitter soon so that I can really get a feeling for its pros and cons. For all of you not yet familiar with how Twitter works, there is an excellent video on Common Craft that explains it all.