Social Tech Animal

With the rapid development of technology in our country in the recent years and the improvement of data services by service providers, we can now enjoy internet access at the palms of our hands without necessarily milking our pockets dry. The mobile phone industries are the front-runners in this revolution to make the Kenyan youth a part of the global village as they continue to churn out amazing gadgets tailor-made for them at affordable prices. Well, a phone is no longer considered worthy if it does not have internet access, you might as well be using a calculator! No one cares for such anymore.

In as much as this revolution has proven to be very useful especially to the average college-going Kenyan youth, one cannot fail to notice its downsides; the first being that every Tom, Dick and Harry can now access the internet, the social media to be specific, and get away with virtually anything. These are the people who make life in the social media (Twitter and Facebook ) a pain the backside. Well, I am not as bold and brutal as Blogger Y but I will make subtle pointers and Subaru’s your way. If the shoe fits, wear it.

1.     The Braggarts

These are by far the most annoying tweeps IMO, their tweets and posts all reek of flossing. All they ever tweet about is how tweet about how their Kenyan Airways flight got delayed and how they got crappy services. They will banter endlessly about how they have gotten tired of their iPhones and need to get a galaxy SIII. They will dutifully inform us about the meal they just had at the Norfolk or any other high ended joint and attach evidence in the form of Instagram pics. These folks will not stop there, they have to make the whole world aware of the new iPad they just purchased and will go on and on, even to the extent of making known to us the amount of cash they pay for a haircut. Well, dear Braggarts, we simply don’t care! So what if we ain’t as privileged as you are? So what if the only encounter we’ve had with a plane is the field trip to the airport we had in primary school… so what if we know Serena hotel because we happen to pass there on our way to Uhuru Park? That definitely does not give you the license to torture the rest of us with your childish antiques. I most definitely did not hustle for bundles and free Wi-Fi to be subjected to nonsense. If you must make the world know about your status, then by all means outshine the Middle-Eastern royal families in terms of flamboyance then we shall all start giving you some credit.

 2.     The Political psychos and wannabe analysts.

Boy, am I glad that the election period is over. These tweeps can make you hurl your phone at the wall in utter frustration. Their poison-laced opinions about politicians and their predictions will fill your timeline. These tweeps assume that their opinions are the only true ones and everyone must abide by them. Woe unto the person who dares to oppose them, they will be subjected to insults that have no relation whatsoever to the subject at hand. Their bile seems to boil over when one mentions anything conflicting about the political allegiances they pledge to. They will unleash their wrath on innocent tweeps who find escape and refuge in the social media. Dear wannabe TL analysts, if you want respect, get paid for airing your opinion, let us see you write credible articles on the papers and see you get invited to do the same on talk shows. For now, chill out; don’t shove your opinions down our throats.

 3.     The Avi-Critics cum Bullies

I tend to think that tweeps in this category tend to have LSE syndrome and issues that can only be salvaged if they seek help from counselors. They are by far the idlest and a major characteristic is that they possess cartoon avis, quite ironic, huh? One must not confuse tweeps in this category with those who point out features in a person in a light hearted manner and are just out to have innocent fun. These bullies derive pleasure in calling other tweeps ugly and in taunting people based on their looks. They will rant and rave about how person X is ugly AF and how person Y needs plastic surgery. Well, last time I checked, none of us created ourselves. We have no option but to be happy and content with what we have. And if at all you were to judge others on the basis of their looks, let us see you crowned as the next Mr. /Miss Universe(if that exists i.e)

 4.     The Foul Mouths

‘’Childish” is what I would use to describe tweeps in this category. Someone needs to do us all a favour and take them all back to kindergarten. They will insult people over petty issues and are known for causing drama all over. These tweeps are usually the main characters in most tweefs and their signature sign is name-calling with ‘whore’ and ‘kihii’ being on the top-ten of their insult list. I honestly think this tweeps need to develop their cognitive skills and do a little bit of growing up before we can waste time talking about them

 5.     The Druggies

So you enjoy a few drinks now and then, so you take a joint of your favorite stash once in a while. Well and good, but pray please we don’t want to know about your escapades, neither do we want our eyes to be subjected to pictures of drunk females nor want to see the drink you are poisoning your beloved  liver(RIP) with. There are far important issues in our lives like LOLing to Droid’s memes. Please do not air your dirty linen in public, we don’t want to know just how messed up your life is. The least we can do is pray for you, and pity the people you will marry or get married to. For now we can only hope that one day the Jehovah witnesses will finally make you see the light. And FYI drugs are not good for you, unless of course you’re on auto-pilot to the grave and you simply don’t care.

I will not include those tweeps who say NKT, LOL, OMG and LMAO out loud in this list because I believe they need a special reservation in Mathare Hospital. Such behavior can only be exhibited by a person who is on their path to complete mental retardation… and thus I rest my case.

Facebook today announced that it is bringing hashtags to its service, letting users add context to a post, indicate that it is part of a larger discussion, as well as discover shared interests. The company says hashtags have become “a vital part of popular culture” and since it has seen users using them on the social network organically, it has decided to actually implement the feature.

While you could always technically create a hashtag on Facebook (just put a # before any word), they will now be clickable, taking you to a feed of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic. On hashtag pages, you will naturally only be able to see the posts that you would normally see elsewhere on the social network: those that your friends have shared with you as well as those shared as Public.

The new feature means Facebook users can now:

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the hashtag is a word or a phrase prefixed with the symbol #. Facebook mentions other services that use hashtags, putting Instagram first on its list, and then noting competitors Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest, but notably excluding Google+. Although Twitter does not own the concept of the hashtag, the company has popularized it to the point most people associate the phrase with the social network – nowadays it’s difficult to find a Twitter feed without multiple hashtags, and many tweets have arguably too many.

Facebook and Twitter regularly grab features from each other as use cases for the two social networks continue to overlap. Many users nowadays have both Facebook and Twitter accounts, although the former service is still significantly larger than the latter.

Recently, Facebook changed the name of its “Subscribe” button to “Follow” and also renamed subscribers to followers. This tweak came after Facebook built its own button similar to Twitter’s Follow button.

A rumor suggesting Facebook could soon be adding hashtag support first surfaced in March. Given that Facebook last year acquired Instagram, which uses hashtags mainly to let users sort through photos, we noted at the time that hashtags could be a way for the company to bring the two services closer together, but right now that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Facebook is presumably adopting the hashtag for the same reasons as Twitter: to let its users organize and filter messages around a single topic or theme. This offers yet another way to browse the social network, in addition to manually going to people’s Timeline profiles and of course visiting the News Feed.

In fact, the company hints that hashtags “are just the first step” in a series of features that will bring conversations about public events, people, and topics on the social network to “the forefront of people’s Facebook experience.” Some of these include trending hashtags and deeper insights, slated to arrive “in the coming weeks and months,” but Facebook wouldn’t share more.

Snapchat, the application which allows you send photos and videos that automatically erase themselves has had a major update today which gives users a whole new GUI and some new features.

The most noticeable changes of this latest version, dubbed ”Banquo” includes:

Whilst many speculate Snapchat is mainly used for ‘sexting’, the service is now sending over 150 million snaps a day - making this interface refresh useful for the growing user-base.

What I have also noticed, which I am not sure if a bug or a new design – the Snapchat icon now has a blank white face.

However the official Snapchat website still has the full faced logo and no mention of a change. Sometimes app developers have icon issues when uploading a new update to the App Store (which may be corrected with a subsequent update).

Is the net effect of the internet on the Earth’s environment positive or negative?

That’s the million dollar question that a group of about 100 people, including Vice President Al Gore and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, tackled at a Google event this week. It’s also the question that I’ve spent about six years thinking about as I’ve written about the evolution of cleantech innovation and how digital technologies can drive efficiency.

The rub of the internet is that it is a collection of data centers filled with computing gear, networks that weave across continents, and a growing amount of battery-powered devices; all of these things need energy to operate. The disturbing part is that the energy consumption of the internet will only grow as the population hits 9 billion in 2050, and all of these people get connected to the internet.

But on the flip side of that energy suck is the idea that the internet can make processes and systems significantly more energy efficient, from transportation to shopping to the electricity network itself. Sustainability wonks call that dematerialization, or replacing atoms with bits. A study called Climate 2020 found that information and communications technology could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from other sectors of the economy, below business-as-usual growth, by 15 percent.

Other than that seminal report, there’s been a trickle of research that has reached conclusions along the lines of the notion that buying digital music online is a lot more energy efficient than driving to the store and buying a CD. Data center energy guru Jonathan Koomey, who’s a research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance and Stanford University, has led a bunch of this research, particularly around how the trend toward cloud computing has increased the energy efficiency of the internet. The web sharing economy is another much talked about trend that is indirectly making the use of goods (like cars and apartments) more efficient.

But all of this research is so new, and these issues are so complex, that answering that question — is the internet green or not? — is a very difficult one. After the day long Google event called How green is the internet? I have a lot more questions than answers.

Throughout the day of Google’s event it became clear that there are significant gaps in knowledge and in research. One of the problems for researchers has been getting access to really detailed industry data. The leaders of the internet industry have only just started to think about these issues, and are slowly warming up to the idea of giving their energy data to third party researchers. Google only revealed its total electricity use publicly a year and a half ago.

But if you ask that direct question — does the internet have a more positive or negative effect on the environment — there’s some researchers who are already leaning toward the positive camp. Koomey said at the Google event that he thought the preoccupation with the electricity use of the internet was misplaced. The overall system effects are more important than the direct electricity use, said Koomey, noting “Moving bits not atoms can have a major effect on efficiency.”

A research fellow from the Center for Industrial Ecology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, Vlad Coroama, echoed those thoughts at the Google event: “Sending bits is usually much more efficient than sending atoms.” Carnegie Mellon Professor Scott Matthews, who’s done research showing how e-commerce is more energy efficient than shopping at physical retail outlets, wondered if the introduction of digital goods and e-commerce could have such a large impact that it could reduce carbon emissions and energy use compared to the current physical processes by a factor of ten.

But the complexity of the internet as a system, and how it effects people’s behavior, makes calculating numbers around this very difficult. For example, the process of driving to the store to buy a physical book is clearly more energy intensive than hitting a button to buy a Kindle single on your Kindle. But then you also have to take into account more complex questions like the embodied energy of making the Kindle, and the idea that when consumption is so easy and efficient, you might buy and download exponentially more e-books.

Throughout the day at Google, many noted, like Google’s Urs Hoelzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure, that problems and opportunities need to be looked at from an entire systems perspective. Looking at just one aspect of the equation doesn’t give the entire picture. A couple people at the event also noted to me that one of the universities or research centers should be acting as more of a research hub for this type of data.

Even some of the data that is out there is difficult to prove. Professor Coroama’s number — that it takes an average of 0.2 kWh/GB to send data across the internet — was head-scratching to some, and several people noted to me that the number seemed high.

Then there’s the soft effects of the internet on the planet that don’t have to do with energy consumption at all. The high level visionary speakers — both Gore and Schmidt — focused more on the internet’s ability to open up access to information and organize people, which could be used for environmental, and climate-fighting, causes. Gore said that the digital revolution and the explosion of data are some of the most powerful tools that can be used to help solve the climate crisis. It’s hard to quantify such soft effects, but they could still be very powerful.

The main issue now will be as internet access grows, mobile phones connected to the web proliferate and internet companies build ever more data centers, how does the industry maintain sustainable growth so that the equation doesn’t flip, and so that the internet doesn’t start to have a negative effect on the environment? There’s going to be 9 billion people on the planet by 2050 that could have a handful of connected devices each, and some of them will  be spending their lives immersed in digital data 24/7.

That’s exactly why I thought Google’s Summit was so important: As a way to shine a spotlight on the issue, address its complexity, and see how the problem can be solved as the internet grows. Essentially designing the growth of the internet with sustainability in mind. Google can be one of the leaders of this discussion, as can other internet companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook in addition to hardware companies like Cisco, IBM, and Intel.

Going forward, I’d like to see a hub grow at a university or research center that can act as a collection point to draw together this type of research, and also to help validate it. I’d also like to see more mainstream attention on this topic of the intersection of the Internet and the environment. At the Google event, it was invite-only and had about 100 people that had been thinking about these topics for years. This topic is important enough that is needs more mainstream attention and discussion.