jennybee.net

And so the wonderful twitter updates from MarsPhoenix have come to an end.

The Mars lander sent her last message on 10 November with the binary for ‘triumph’:

01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3
http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix/status/999383469

I can’t help feeling a little sad.

The tone of the updates generated a genuine relationship between the lander and her followers. Her tweets were - in the truest sense of the word - delightful.

Using Twitter in this way was inspired. The audience was ideal and the tweets were perfectly pitched to be informative, geeky, funny and often very cute.

As I tweeted when I first started following her:

I HEART the @MarsPhoenix tweets.. imagining a little wide eyed robot scurrying over the surface pointing, jumping and squealing with glee
http://twitter.com/jennybee/statuses/827012873

Read more about the mission and the social media strategy here: Mars Phoenix Lander Runs Out of Juice.

Oh and in case you were wondering; ‘veni, vidi, fodi’ means ‘I came, I saw, I dug’.

I finally got round to reading that Wired article that everyone’s been talking about. The one where they said:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

And I agree. Sort of.

What the article identified is a shift towards seeing the web as offering myriad ways to communicate and participate.

I enjoy reading blogs and I like having the opportunity to comment. But for most of the blogs that I read, their authors also have a Twitter stream, their photos are on Flickr, they stream video to Qik (amongst other things). And this content is becoming more valuable to me than the stuff on their blogs. It’s valuable because it’s instant and it allows me to participate in a conversation much more easily.

Platforms

I was wondering the other day why it is I don’t religiously scan my Google Reader subscriptions every lunchtime anymore (see?). And I’ve come to realise it’s partly because I’m already getting updates and ideas and comments from the bloggers I’m subscribed to from their other web activity.

This is not to say that blogging is dead but we’re in an age of platforms now. Where we are no longer identified by our blog but by the sum of our web activity. It’s what FriendFeed attempts to facilitate - although it’s worth noting that the way FriendFeed is designed can make an entire feed of one person’s web activity appear overwhelming.

For me, I feel a redesign of this blog coming on to truly reflect my web activities on the platforms I currently describe as ‘Social habits’.