The Twitter Revolution

...Or yet another post about why The Twitter Effect is confusing the most active of participants to the Social Media rebellion. There's serious concern (and controversy) as to whether it will, in fact, be the social media event of the year (as opposed to blogging in 2006 and social networking in 2007 - Facebook, most notably). At first I thought it would be something more general, namely microblogging, but what seemed to be Twitter's toughest competition - Jaiku - turned out to lose too much ground by closing new user sign-ups right after the Google acquisition.

As many have realized, blog posts pop up in our feed readers rarer and rarer, 'new comment' e-mail alerts aren't as annoying as they used to be (because it isn't that often anymore that you subscribe to one and then regret doing so because it's literally spamming your inbox), and more and more people become your followers each and every day.

And if you're still not convinced, just look at all of the desktop clients (Twitterrific, twhirl - not that you specifically need one, as you can just do it all from your web browser or any IM app) or all of its related websites - which you can just find on Twitterholics. And then check out all of the web services out there which have developed ties to it (Facebook apps, reminder websites, and so on). Then the meetups. The concept was first witnessed with bloggers, and quickly expanded here as well. Just search Upcoming for them, or for related events. We even had one in Romania at the beginning of this month, and it turned out great.

I think that the effect is mainly due to its mobility features. Even though there's a sturdy, fully-functional SMS interface, mobile apps (and webapps) are coming out every day - which means that anyone can react instantly, which might even lead up to saving lives. When's the last time you blogged from your mobile?

Let's just sit and watch where it will all eventually go.

[pic via]

Eco-friendly In Traffic

In the age in which everyone is morally against the pollution contributing to global warming (but no one really does anything about it), I'm actually about to explore taking one step further in being "eco-friendly". Not that I'm very fond of the term itself.

'One step further' because a few weeks ago, the bloke who sold me my car was trying to tell me something about it being 82% ecological (in terms of the materials it was built with) - even the brake pads. Take that, top polluters!

So out of my love for Mother Earth, my concern for the well-being of my future children, and, of course, for the fact that I won't be legally allowed to drive for the next 3 months, I've decided to adopt a method of urban transportation very similar to that of the citizens of Rome - namely, a scooter. And not just any scooter, but one from the brand which pretty much invented the notion, namely Vespa. Handy in traffic, classy, and it gets about 80 miles to the gallon.

Now all I have to do is to convince everyone else to try two-wheelers. (For me) to stay healthy, that is.

This week's most important city of the world?

Yes, 24 presidents and 26 prime ministers (or something of the sort) - supposedly the most powerful men and women in the world - are cooking up a lot of stuff these days in Bucharest, at the unbelievably secure NATO summit.

Now, at a +30 million euro event, you'd expect everything to go perfectly smooth, wouldn't you? There's even a VIP lane, restricted to anything non-related-to-the-summit, which basically cuts the city in half.

And out of the ~3500 journalists accredited for the event, the summit staff picked a very bad bunch to disturb, namely Reuters. And here's what they had to say about their very first experience with the event:

Journalists arriving for a conference of the 26-nation defense alliance in this recently joined ex-communist nation got their first shock at Otopeni Airport on Tuesday when they found there were no cabs to take them into the centre of Bucharest.

Reporters were invited to take an official shuttle bus and told it would be allowed to use the cleared VIP lanes on the highway into the city. It was not.

After crawling through traffic jams for 90 minutes, some journalists were barred from entering the summit press centre because crashed computers could not print accreditation badges.

Others were told their applications were still being checked by security.

"Come back in two hours," a Reuters reporter was told. Some journalists were still without a badge on Wednesday, a day after their arrival, and were denied entry to the summit.

Once inside the cavernous 3,000-room Parliament Palace, built as the "House of the People" by late Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, journalists discovered a new snag.

U.S. President George W. Bush's lips moved silently as he delivered a keynote speech at a venue elsewhere in town. The audio link was not working and headphones had not arrived.

The rest of the article is here. As I don't exactly know how they didn't get to use the VIP lane - and how that was ultimately inconvenient (because there's hardly any traffic in Bucharest these days), I'll have to admit that the registration and the sound during Bush's speech are disasters.

Does it make NATO look bad? Or the summit's host country? I'll let the story's opening line answer that: No taxis, no badges, no sound -- welcome to Romania, host of the 2008 NATO summit.