Modnov update and tales of tech to come

First, a cross-post from the Modest Novice. My hope is to light on something by the middle of this month, and then maybe get consensus and then just do it. I think we could debate what we have now pretty well. It will give us social contract and justice, with a hint of oaky morality and blackberry overtones: it’s an ambitious little topic and I think you’ll be amused by its pretensions.

Meanwhile, mostly these last few days I’ve been slogging through Twitter and Facebook and their communion or lack thereof. What’s the best way to use these things? The fact that the new Facebook interface is, as many have suggested, a Twitter interface clone, is interesting. If Twitter is for fast-paced stuff, and Facebook is more for general communication, you gotta wonder. Anyhow, I apologize in advance to people who follow me on either of these venues (not to mention people who will have to suffer reading about it through this venue), especially if all you’re interested in is my complaining about other coaches. (Okay. O’C sucks. There. That’s your fix for the day.) I’m going to be doing a lot of experimenting over the next few weeks as I play around and learn and figure out what I really want to do. Ignore me for a while, if you must (although I have asked O’C, who really doesn’t suck—although he does know the names of the characters in the film “Dumb and Dumber,” which does make you wonder—to enlist as a Twitter tester for me). Otherwise, I will be keeping you posted up the wazoo. You’ve been warned.

Twitter is a piece of work, let me tell you. First of all, I’ve got two perfectly good accounts. One is jimmenick (I thought long and hard about that one) and the other is tabroom (another user name that was less than elusive). But here’s my thinking. Tabroom would be for literal tab business at tournaments. Follow tabroom at Twitter and you’ll get instant news about the tournament, like sked updates and round releases and the like. Very useful especially at big, multi-location venues like Yale and Princeton and Columbia. I’ve set it up so I can send a message to tabroom from my phone and have it broadcast over the tabroom channel. This is a bigger issue than you think because you can only have one phone connection to Twitter, and I’ve already set jimmenick to be that one. I used GroupTweet to make this happen. So anyone following tabroom will get the latest about tournaments, probably starting with announcements before the tournament (closing dates and the like). That can be useful. At least, that’s my thinking at the moment. It is bound to change.

Trying to set up a third account has not been easy. First of all, if you look up “down” in the dictionary, they have a picture of Twitter. No wonder people are tattooing themselves with the fail whale. Down is Twitter’s constant state. I’m thinking that if immediacy is the issue, we might need to backup with Facebook postings as well. I mean, you can follow someone’s Facebook postings on your phone, if you want. That may be a better solution? I’m not sure, but probably not. Is a puzzlement, though. Anyhow, the third connection was so I’d have a channel to communicate solely to the Sailors and their families, things like bus timings and ETAs and come here Watson I need you and go get lunch and that sort of thing. For some reason, I can’t access/follow my third connections (I’ve tried a bunch). Communicating between tabroom and jimmenick has been a breeze, but nothing further than that.

I don’t know. I don’t really want to use Facebook for this because, well, I use Facebook for other things, like keeping up with alums and (real) friends in general rather than minute-by-minute. A communications network that is solely (or at least primarily) phone-based makes sense in the universe where everyone has phones. But everything I’ve heard about Twitter’s unreliability is proving out (it was just down for the last half hour, for instance). And Facebook has its own phone connections. We’ll just have to see. If you’re going to Yale, be ready for some serious testing. And as I say, over the next few weeks, I’ll be talking about it a lot.

Meanwhile, I hope you’ve enjoyed a pleasant April Fool’s Day. I, for one, do not specifically celebrate this holiday, believing instead that the spirit of April Fool’s Day should be spread throughout the year. Everything I have said today has been the absolute truth if, in fact, there is such a thing as absolute truth, which is another subject altogether.

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