RobNeville.net

Was this website trying to tell me something??

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The same social dynamic that happens in high school lunch rooms across the US is paralleled in social media.

Maybe you were one of the cool kids. I wasn’t. I was one of the faceless masses. The inane social order of the High School lunch room lives on through the internet. There was the cool kids table. You know what I’m talking about. For whatever reason, there was less than 5% of your school’s population that were revered as demi-gods. Usually, the reasons were not entirely understood - maybe they were football stars. Maybe they came from wealthy families. Maybe they just were good looking and knew it.

You then huddled with some other social group - maybe jocks…maybe the smart kids…maybe the stoners.

Here’s the kicker…most of the people that were in the “cool” crowd were a-holes. Not all of them, but most of them. They could do nothing wrong. Hell, their crap smelled like roses as far as they were concerned. These people were almost never all that smart either (with a few exceptions). In fact, most were C students at best (probably due to the prolific genocide of brain cells that would ensue on the weekends).

Most of the truly interesting people I knew where decidedly NOT in the “in” crowd. Yet, most people didn’t get to know them. They were lost as people clamored for the attention of the lunch room equivalent of Web 2.0 A-Listers. Looking back, I’m thankful that I woke up and stopped giving a rat’s arse what the cool kids did or thought.

The problem is that blogs are a model for the the high school lunch room. There are a-listers that have this entrenched position with everybody trying to break into that crowd. Everybody wants the spotlight on them. Because the a-lister content consistently gets seen, dug, stumbled, reposted, commented simply because it came from an a-lister, everybody else is drowned out as noise. That’s not to say that everything everybody is saying on their blogs deserves your attention, but I can guarantee that there’s high quality, relevant writing happening right now that you’ll never read or hear about.

I’m on a mission. I’m going to start trying to find these voices that I haven’t heard - the long tail of good bloggers. I want to find good bloggers that few people have heard of that deserve to be. I’m going to stop trying to impress or grab the attention of a-listers. I’m going to stop trying to emulate them too. Why? Because looking back, I had better friends in high school than the cool kids did and I had more of them. Who then was truly cool?

There are two reasons I haven’t pulled the trigger on a 3G iPhone. The new phone is almost perfect. The first reason has to do with a lack of support for an external keyboard of any kind. I believe that this phone could replace taking a laptop 90% of the time for me with the addition of a keyboard. I believe apple did this on purpose to avoid cannibalizing sales of MacBook Air.

The bigger reason though has to do with the epic failure of Mobile Me to live up to the promise. And no, I’m not referring to the dismal performance of the service (did the Twitter guys write this thing?). No, when I first read about it, I looked at pictures like the one to the left and descriptions of what the service was supposed to achieve and I made a very basic assumption about how it was going to work. That assumption has proved to be very wrong.

When I read the descriptions and look at that diagram what I see is that Mobile Me is supposed to be an aggregator. In other words, it should pull data from MS Exchange servers, my mac at home, my iPhone, whatever and then push it out to everything else. But in reality, Mobile Me is a node, a repository, not an aggregator. It passively waits for someone to push data to it. This is wrong. Why do I need a program running on my windows desktop to poll the exchange server for data and push it to mobile me? If my iTouch can connect directly to my exchange server, then why can’t mobile me connect directly to my exchange server? The connectivity to different data stores whether they be calendars, lotus notes servers, exhange servers, or pop email servers should all be happening from within mobile me. Then, mobile me needs to be the publisher of this information to my devices that want to subscribe.

Oh well. Maybe next version.

On a side note, I also find it amusing that I’ve never been able to get Mail.app to successfully connect to my corporate Exhange server. However, with the latest iPhone/iTouch software…my iTouch DOES connect to my company exchange server. What the heck is up with that??