Tag Archives: google wave

altc2007

A blast from the past #altc

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University of Nottingham

On this day in 2007 I was at the ALT Conference in Nottingham. This was the fourth ALT conference I had attended. What I really remember about this conference was how blogging became really big and important at the conference. We were blogging about the conference sessions, we were blogging about people blogging and lots of other stuff too. I think we were blogging because we didn’t have other tools that we could use, Twitter was just over a year old and most people were not using it (we didn’t have hashtags back then), so blogging was the only real online platform we could use.

I believe that people were blogging at previous conferences, but it was the first time that we had an RSS feed of all the blogs in one feed. This made it much easier to find blog articles on the conference and as a result the bloggers themselves. Importantly and this is why I think ALT-C 2007 was a sea change (and especially a sea change for me) was that these social relationships continued beyond the conference.

One of the sessions I attended at the conference was the Web 2.0 Slam – ‘Performing’ Innovative Practice workshop run by Josie Fraser, Helen Keegan and Frances Bell. This was (probably) the best session at the conference, certainly was for me and influenced a lot of stuff I did at later conferences.

Web 2.0 Slam - 'Performing' Innovative Practice

They started off with the classic Web 2.0 Machine Video, which was shown at a lot of conferences I had been attending.

I think it still resonates today.

One of my early comments on this (and this was before Twitter really took off, so I did it on my blog) was

Josie Fraser is now giving an overview of Web 2.0, “think of it as a wave”.

Did Josie predict Google Wave, two years before it was launched?

As we were in Nottingham and we were put into groups to prepare something, I was in a group with Andy Powell, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme and Kath Trinder. We decided to create a Web 2.0 movement. We created a blog, a Facebook group and probably other stuff lost to time…

We called our idea Hood 2.0 (well we were in Nottingham, with Robin Hood) and are vision statement was:

A group that looks at how Web 2.0 services can be used to take from the “rich” and gives to the “poor” in terms of user generated content, advice, guides and case studies.

There were lots of familiar faces in the room. We did a fairy bit of arm waving if I remember correctly.

I was certainly one of the few people using Twitter, so I did a few tweets from the workshop.

and

You can see these were limited in scope and content. We didn’t do images or hashtags back then.

Though we didn’t win (we was robbed) we certainly enjoyed the session.

I can’t remember who won, but hopefully someone can remember and put it in the comments.

Having said that we didn’t win, the website we created for the session still lives….

web 2.0

Churning and Waving

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At a recent presentation by Dave White, he used the word churning to describe the rapid pace of change we went through around 2007. That was the year most people joined Twitter, it was the year that Facebook became mainstream, YouTube was starting to hit the big time. There were all these new services and tools, some of which are still with us, some of which have disappeared, Jaiku anyone?

There was a lot of excitement at that time about new services and whenever new services were announced we all went and signed up for it. Did you sign up to Plurk and so on?

These services were so popular that in the end the only way that they could work sometimes was by restricting access to invite only.

Google Wave for me was a turning point, a really great idea, that everyone wanted to be part of…. however it didn’t quite turn out as expected.

It was invite only and as a result, individuals got access and not communities, so even though it took me a while to get an invite for Wave when I did, very few people I knew had access. You can’t really use Wave on your own, so I didn’t use it, by the time access was opened, it was too late, people like me had moved on, well more moved back to Twitter.

I felt at this point that the constant excitement of the new was over. We had moved from a time of “churning” or flux to a time of consolidation. It was now less about finding new, more about using what we had.

That’s not to say new services don’t come along, I for example am really liking Instagram. But the rush for the new is no longer the driver. For some though they are still churning, they are still looking for the new. I just don’t think it’s there.

We may in the future go through another churning phase, but until that time, it’s now the time to use the services for stuff, rather than the time of finding new services.