Stuff'n'nonsense #7

No blog yesterday. Did you miss me?

• OK, movies. Watched two documentaries, Food, Inc and Urban Explorers. Food, Inc didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know, but seeing it on screen really turned me off eating a lot of what's in the supermarkets. Urban Explorers was interesting, but could have done with being half an hour shorter. Still, well worth watching just for the pretty images of abandoned places. I just wanted to know who the hell simply walks away from a fully furnished castle and leaves it to rot?
• Here's one I may or may not see when it reaches Netflix. Atlas Shrugged could be fascinating, or could have me throwing things at the screen. This review intrigues me: A Movie This Demented Should Be Against The Law. I have to admit, I've tried to read it and failed. And Ayn Rand's philosophy pisses me off. But I'm prepared to give the movie a shot.
• Game footage is getting more and more like movies. Check out this latest Unreal demo. And remember, this is real-time in-game footage. This is not a cut-scene. This is not pre-rendered. This is gameplay.
  And while your jaw hits the floor, I'll just tell you that this is taking not one, not two, but three top of the range custom nVidia graphics cards to run it. So don't expect it to work on your laptop. Don't even expect it to work on your current generation super-duper video production PC. Figure on getting a whole new machine when this comes out in two years.

• I spent much of yesterday browsing Wonderland, a hugely entertaining blog that talks about games of all sorts. What initially caught my eye was this glorious Lego steampunk TIE Fighter. Neat, huh?

• Also from Wonderland, an excellent post on social mechanisms in games, based on a superb talk by Raph Koster, who I should follow more closely than I do. He "explained how societies work, how humans work, and how we interact as beings with each other, described as social mechanics and how they could be applied (and are sometimes applied) in social games. [Here's] his list of the 40 essential social mechanics that have ever existed, in order that game designers need never have to reinvent them again." Bloody brilliant stuff.
• It's a damn shame I missed the Muppet Art Show last night. Woulda liked to see that, and it looked like people had a lot of fun.
• Damn shame I missed the hillbilly burlesque last night too. Looking forward to the next Kitschy Kittens show.

I'm still wondering whether to continue with this long blog format. It doesn't generate anything like the responses I used to get with FB posts, and it doesn't feel like many people are actually reading these. I'm seriously considering whether to revert to just sharing things on FB or take a vow of social media silence and focus on writing proper stuff.

Last week I had to do some research into Twitter, and came up with some depressing facts.

• The average person on Twitter gets 2700 messages a day. A year ago, it was 400, and I thought that was a lot. Math: if it takes 5 seconds to read a tweet, it would take 3 hrs 45 minutes a day to read your Twitter feed.
• Most people log in once a day, and only read their direct messages, @messages, and whatever's been posted in the last 10-15 minutes. Math: most people only read 1% of their feed. In other words, if you post something on Twitter, there's a 99% chance that a given one of your followers won't see it.
• Click-through rates on Twitter links have dropped from 38% a year ago to 14% now. So given that hardly anyone is going to read your tweet, the number of people who will actually click on a link is near enough non-existent (o.14%). Math: if you have 500 followers, then maybe ONE of them will actually click through.
• Retweet rates have dropped from 25% in 2009 to 17% in 2010 and 11% now. Math: if you have 500 followers, maybe ONE will RT your post. And if he has 500 followers, maybe one will click through and/or RT it.

In other words, it's Babel out there. Everyone's talking, nobody's listening. It's not a conversation any more. It's no longer a viral way of spreading information as transmission rates are so poor. It's just noise, pretty much drowning out all the signal, and the only response people have is to turn up the noise. In December, I wondered what Twitter was for. Now, I'm none the wiser.

Well, that's not quite true. I am. In December, I had a hunch that Twitter was becoming useless. Now, I have the stats to prove my hunch.

Stuff'n'nonsense #6

I'm writing this one while watching First Orbit - the movie. It's a real time recreation of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering first orbit, shot entirely in space from on board the International Space Station. The film combines this new footage with Gagarin's original mission audio and a new musical score by composer Philip Sheppard. It's over 90 minutes long, and it's as close as you'll ever get to seeing that incredible historic moment when mankind first left this planet. Sit back, fire it up full screen on the biggest device you've got, and enjoy the incredible feeling of an entire space mission. Just imagine what it must have been like for Gagarin, up there for the first time, seeing things no human being had ever seen before.

They've disabled embedding, so you'll have to just click through. Oh hang on, wait, read the rest of my blog first!

• Today is a moment I've been waiting for for about six years. My friend Damien Valentine, announced that his new feature film, Chronicles of Humanity, will be released on April 26, and will have its theatrical debut at the Little Theatre Cinema in Bath. It's a sci-fi epic featuring several of my friends, and also Felicia Day, who you may recognise from The Guild, Dollhouse, Dr Horrible, and so on. That's pretty damn cool. What's even cooler is that he funded and made the whole film himself.
  And coolest of all, from my point of view, he did it with Moviestorm. When we started creating it, we said that one day, we wanted to see a Moviestorm movie in the cinema, and now it's finally happening. Damien - thanks, and congratulations!
  If you can't make it to the cinema, don't worry, you can watch Chronicles of Humanity online as a Web series.
• One of the films I'm most looking forward to is Luc Besson's The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec. Described as Indiana Jones crossed with The Mummy and Amelie, this looks right up my street. I love the close of this review: "I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending this film, I’m just not sure who to." Me, that's who! Looks like a perfect date movie for us.

• I stumbled across this book today after seeing a tweet about it. Oh My God What Happened And What Should I Do? It's a neat book about digital marketing, well-written, concise, and informative - well worth picking up. What's really clever is that you can buy it for money from Amazon, or buy it for free if you tweet about it. Err, no-brainer. I'll have it for nothing, thanks. And because I'm lazy, I'll leave their default tweet "This Book helps you to move into the Digital era of awesomeness. Download it for free: http://bit.ly/4R9rth" instead of writing "I haven't actually read this book yet but it looks cool and it's free if I write this tweet." Cunning, huh? And they've shifted 150,000 copies that way. Made no money, true, but they've built an audience very, very fast.
• Now this is something I like. Your Taxpayer Receipt, courtesy of the White House. Punch in some data on how much tax you paid, and it'll tell you where all the money is going; how much on defence, hospitals, schools, etc. More governments should do that.
• Did you know Newfoundland has its own time zone? They're an hour and a half ahead of Florida.
• Got writer's block? Deal with it.

I appear to have done something bad to my foot, which got slightly squished during the kitten-trapped-under-garage-door incident a few weeks ago. It feels much like it did when I fell off a motorcycle many years ago - not broken, but possibly a cracked bone, which hurts like hell and isn't going away. I've now got it bandaged up, and am trying to walk or stand on it as little as possible.

At least we have a mostly quiet weekend ahead of us: the main event is Ginger and Joe's Florida wedding reception on Saturday. They got married last weekend up north, and are having a second do down here this weekend.

We're also meeting with a bunch of people to kick around ideas for future art shows in Orlando. There's been a sudden resurgence of enthusiasm, mostly thanks to Ben Sawinski, and a whole load of new opportunities have started popping up.

Apart from that, I'm thinking I'll spend the weekend with my foot propped up, either catching up on movies, reading, or maybe even writing something at long last... Well, when I say writing, I mean other than my blog (6 articles this week), corporate stuff (28 articles) and emails (178 since Tuesday). I mean like maybe a story, or a script, or some lyrics.

Oh, and if you were wondering, we never made it to the Colombian restaurant. There's still a pile of paperwork on the office floor, so we haven't earned it yet. Damn.

Now you can go and watch Gagarin orbit the earth.

Twitter - what's it for?

What role does Twitter play these days? A year or so ago, I twittered a lot. These days, I check the Moviestorm Twitter feed more often than I check my own, and most days I don't tweet at all. Facebook, for all its faults, seems to have completely supplanted Twitter in almost every respect.

There are two clear signs that Twitter is losing ground, not just in numbers, but in the way it's being used. Most obviously, it's no longer a place for conversations. In 2009, you could tweet a comment, and people would tweet back. To be sure, they were awkward, stilted conversations, but they happened. Nowadays, very few tweets elicit any reply at all. By contrast, almost every post I make on Facebook gets a response, and often several. It's not just what's being said, it's that Twitter simply isn't a good medium for conversation. If you look at those people who link their FB and Twitter feeds, you can quickly see the different reactions they get to the same posts on each. Twitter's not threaded, so you have to keep track of the conversations the old way. And there's no simple mechanism for replying to everyone who's interested in that thread; all your tweets are either completely public or directed at specific individuals. What's more, Twitter has no equivalent of the much derided "like" button. This simple interaction is a remarkably useful piece of social structure. It's the equivalent of a smile; a non-verbal way to show that you appreciate what's being said. It doesn't necessarily advance the conversation, but it does give people social standing and allow people to be involved in a passive, but overt way.

The second, less obvious symptom is the huge downturn in retweets and sharing on Twitter. I recently read a piece by Seth Godin in which he noted that only about 1 in 6 tweets gets retweeted. That was written in early 2010. Looking at my feed now, I'd say it was more like 1 in 30. Most of what gets put on Twitter goes no further. Most of what I see retweeted is from celebrities like Stephen Fry or Warren Ellis, which is strange when you think about it for a moment - they have millions of followers, and everyone who's interested in them follows them anyway, so who are these retweets aimed at?

A Twitter link: it's almost like reading code, and I have to open a browser to see what's at the other end.

Compare that with Facebook, where sharing is common. Again, it's not the content, it's the medium. Part of it is that Facebook is a much richer experience. If I want to link to a video, you can see a thumbnail, read a description, and then watch that video right in your browser. The same link in Twitter consists of a shortened URL (which tells you nothing) and a few words, then you have to go somewhere else to see what I'm showing you. Then, if you like it, go back to Twitter, find the post, and retweet, probably trimming 16 more characters off the description to allow room for RT @MattKelland: at the beginning. Tweets are almost like little ciphers, filled with strange hashes, disemvowelled words, bizarre characters, and geeky things that look like code. Facebook, by contrast, is more like the language we speak.

A Facebook link: useful information, immediate feeling of community from the likes and comments, easy ways to interact and share, and I can watch it right there.

It feels as if Twitter has outlived its usefulness. It went from the preserve of a few tech addicts to a vehicle for celebrities and brands to push out robotic marketing messages. Tweet about visiting a friend in Chandler's Ford, and you'll find yourself followed by Ford dealerships wanting to tell you about their special offers. Say you're moving your Web site to a new server, and you'll get bombarded by removal companies, software companies, and Web designers. Sure, it's a great way for the Governator to tell millions of people what he's doing, but everyone else is lost in the noise. And there's a lot of noise. Twitter never did have a very good signal to noise ratio, but it's gone from the gossip of a coffee shop to the hubbub of a giant mall.

There's a lot wrong with Facebook, but it seems to provide a far better communication medium than Twitter. And, of course, they have a proven, successful business model, which Twitter doesn't. I'll be interested to see whether Twitter turns into the MySpace of 2011.

Re yr msg

With the advent of the net and mobile phones, we're communicating more and more, but in the process we're having to learn whole new ways to transmit information effectively. Reducing messages to 140-character tweets or texts, or even 420-character Facebook updates, means that we're inventing ways to compress information further and further. At the same time, we're getting used to skimming information streams faster and faster, and extracting the relevant info from it with less and less effort. In the process, information is inevitably lost, and the result is miscommunication, usually without hilarious results.

Basic compression works

I'm not actually talking about the way that we're compressing words. That's actually relatively easy to process. Hebrew elides vowels naturally, and that's quite comprehensible. German portmanteau words are easy to break down and pass into normal speech. We're nearly all comfortable with expressions like LOL, BRB or WTF these days, and we're quite happy with some shortened forms of words.

cu 4 drnks tonite?

is, I think you'll agree, perfectly legible as

See you for drinks tonight?

It's 18 characters instead of 27, which saves you 9 characters - about 33% shorter for no loss of information.

When punctuation gets omitted, that can be harder to parse, but still unlikely to result in major miscommunication. Yes, there are the obvious "Let's eat, grandpa," jokes, where the comma is obviously significant, but those are comparatively rare.

WTF?

The real problem is when messages are so compressed that they are meaningless. Or when they have several meanings, which comes to the same thing. Here's a real example from texts.

Me: meeting @ yr house, mine, or cin?

Reply: y

"Y"? What the hell does that mean? Is he asking me why I want to know, or what the hell I'm talking about, or does it stand for y[ours]? So the exchange continues.

Me: ?

Reply: def

Well, I've been waiting for ten minutes for each reply, so after 20 minutes I'm still no wiser as to where we're meeting. So I phone my friend, ask the same question, and get the answer, "My place, see you at 7." Ah, so "y" meant "yes", and my friend only actually read the first four words before answering. In 15 seconds of actual conversation, we transmitted more useful information, more accurately, than we did via text. Of course, it would have worked fine if we'd actually sent the following texts, but we didn't. We were too busy "saving time" and sending compressed messages, and the end result was it took longer and was less efficient.

Me: are we meeting @ your house, mine, or the cinema? and what time?

Reply: mine at 7

Sorry, I thought you meant me!

The other problem with this kind of compressed communication is that it's often cryptic and untargeted. Let's take an example like this (fictionalised) status update:

Fred is getting fed up of ppl who make stupid & unreasonable requests they could perfectly well take care of themselves

That may be a perfectly reasonable expression of how Fred is feeling, but it's not good communication. Who's he talking about? What are these unreasonable requests? Does he mean me asking if I can borrow his DVD of Star Trek IV? Did I piss him off? Should I apologise and find someone else to get it from? Or is he, in fact, referring to the fact that his sister just called and asked him to drive 200 miles to help her move some trash from the back yard, even though last weekend he had to drive over to help her pick out a new TV? I honestly can't tell - especially if I know nothing about the sister or her trash.

What inevitably happens is the sort of comedy of errors beloved of playwrights and scriptwriters. I'll get huffy because I think Fred's being rude about me, our respective friends will weigh in on one side or the other or play peacemaker, and eventually, when tempers have flared, we'll find out he wasn't talking about me at all. End result: an evening of unnecessary tension and aggravation for all concerned.

Oh, was that a joke?

To make it worse, humour and irony are often lost completely. It can be hard enough to write humour in long form, as most writers can attest. In brief messages, these can be really hard to convey, and simply adding (jk) or ;) doesn't always have the desired effect. We pick up humour from body language and nuances of inflection, none of which comes through in prose. The emoticon is a great attempt to bring that back in, but it doesn't always work. Here's one I posted the other day:

I don't see why people are being so hard on the English football team: they're just as good as the US.

The responses ranged from LOLs to fury, from both English and American friends. Frankly, I couldn't give a toss about football, and I was just having a friendly dig at soccer fans of both nations, but that's not how it came across to some people.

I never got yr msg

Of course, the biggest assumption we all make is that when we've sent a message, that means the other person has actually received it. I've had days when I'm getting literally hundreds of emails, thousands of tweets, and God only knows what else coming through skype, FB and text. So yeah, I miss messages.

Or else I'm away, don't have Net access, and won't get your message until get back. Or maybe I'm in the air or driving, or my electric is out, or I'm recording VO and have everything switched off, or I'm asleep or sick. There are a hundred reasons why I might not have got your message yet, or may have skipped over it.

A huge amount of aggravation is caused by sitting there, angrily thinking "the bastard never got back to me" or "shit, I need this info right now, when's he going to respond". I've done it. So have you. For all you know, the other person is blithely unaware of this and is sitting on the beach with a pina colada.

All we have to do is keep talking

I'm not advocating that we all stick with proper English, and that modern communications all suck. Far from it. We're developing a powerful and effective new language and new way of communicating emotions and information to a wide audience.

However, as was drummed into me at school, in the cadets, at university, and in business, communication is not about telling people things. Communication is about making sure they understand correctly what you want them to know. Clarity, not brevity, is the essential component of successful communication.

Sometimes, it's better to pick up a phone and speak directly to someone, or go and see them and deal with the issue face to face. It's often quicker in the long run, and there's less risk of miscommunication. (Though, as I've found many times, emails before and after confirming what was said can be invaluable.)

Sometimes, it's better to spend the extra few seconds typing a message in full instead of abbreviating it to the point of ambiguity.

And sometimes, it's better to spend the time and explain what you actually mean, rather than try to squeeze too much into a few sentences. There's still a role for lengthy blog posts in a world dominated by short status updates.

Then again, maybe all I needed to say was:

socmed comms r often poor way 2 get yr meaning across? twitter/fb/txt FAIL :)

Autistic media

My birthday, 2009, at House of Blues in Orlando.

A case of unmistaken identities

For the last eighteen months or so, I've been trying an experiment. Being myself online. Not Matt the Mongoose, or some enigmatic avatar, just me. Here on my blog, on twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on MySpace, and everywhere else where I need to appear on the Internet, I've been plain old Matt Kelland. I've recorded and broadcast pretty much everything as it happened: work, thoughts, events, from the trivial to the life-changing. The world and his bot has been able to follow along as I got divorced, fell in love, got remarried, emigrated, underwent surgery, watched a bunch of movies, ate all sorts of food, promoted Moviestorm, became increasingly disenchanted with the British political system, and babbled inanely in my insomnia.

It's been interesting. I've met a lot of new people that way, and in the process, learned a lot about myself, a lot about other people, and a lot about modern society. As an anthropologist, it's fascinating to observe how we are becoming increasingly used to seeing each other in different contexts, and trying to understand how social structures change once you have a large-scale society with widespread intimate communication. We now have a level of knowledge about each others' lives that's perfectly normal for mediaeval village life, but completely unprecedented on a global scale. I know some people on the other side of the world more closely than I know anyone in this street. Hell, I know them better than I know anyone else in this city outside my household, even though I've never met them in person.

Conversely, of course, they know me rather well.

My birthday, 2009, at home in bed, hatless. Too intimate for public consumption?

Too well, I've decided.

It may be the way the younger generation is doing it, but, on reflection, I'm not comfortable with it. It's not that I have anything to hide, it's more that trying to present all sides of myself to everyone just doesn't work. It's even not a matter of privacy. It's just that I naturally adopt different personas in different contexts, and you can't do that when everyone sees exactly the same thing.

So-called social media can't distinguish between different categories of friends, and it has no inherent sense of time and place, let alone what's appropriate when. Effectively, it's become autistic media. We find ourselves behaving in ways that may be acceptable in some circumstances, but without any real sense of what the circumstances actually are for the reader and the appropriate etiquette.

Communication, as I keep reminding myself every day, isn't about the person communicating. It's about how what they say is received by the audience. When I use social media, the audience in my mind consists of the people I converse with most often - those who reply to me, and those who I follow. I don't really take time to consider the 80% of people who just lurk and read. That's a complete contrast to when I write professionally, when the first thing I think about is who's actually going to read what I'm writing.

At work, speaking in public.

Autistic media

Let me put it like this. The people who read my blog, Facebook or Twitter feed include: my family, my kids, my mum, my ex-wife, my boss, my investors, my colleagues, my customers, my potential customers, old school friends & colleagues I've lost touch with, new friends, people who share interests with me, and friends of friends I barely know. Some of those people are extremely close to me, others are passing acquaintances. In any given day, I could find myself talking about work, movies, food, travel, books, writing, games, music, art, politics, history, science, technology, anthropology, psychology, the occult, mythology, sport, airships, motorbikes, local events, my social & personal life, or just passing on dumb jokes & links.

In the autistic media world, I'm talking about all of those things to all of those people. Most of them, of course, aren't interested in most of those things. (And if the truth be told, I'm not interested in all of those things all of the time either.)

In the real world, I'd address that by choosing the right contexts and the right groups of people for the different subjects, and adjust my attitudes, speech and behaviour accordingly. If I were talking about last weekend's rugby, for example, I'd have a whole different conversation with the guys from my rugby club, my friends in Orlando, and my stepdad. There are some subjects I'd prefer to avoid entirely in front of my mum or my kids. And when my readers include people I know professionally, it feels like I'm at work and on show all the time.

Effectively, autistic media can't distinguish between the office and the pub, between an afternoon with your closest friends and a school reunion, or between a interest and an obsession. Your drunken weekend escapades make their way to your workplace, and your hobbyist friends have to put up with the minutiae of your work. You bombard your casual acquaintances with things they really don't need to know, and then your other friends drop you right in the shit with their comments about things that were funny at the time but which you'd rather stayed within that group.

Dressed up for a party.

General vs special relatives

In the old days, blogs were much more focused, which provided a social context. If I wrote a machinima blog, that would be my identity. Who I "really am" wouldn't matter. What you'd be interested in would be purely my opinions and what I had to say on that one subject. It's also an asymmetric relationship. I write, you read, you may comment if you wish, and I may choose to respond. I would engage my interests with a set of special-purpose relationships: a number of forums or mailing lists to chat about my hobbies, blogs to write about my interests, and a protected journal to share with those closest to me. In fact, most of the blogs I read these days are still special-interest blogs. It's not that the authors are necessarily monomaniacs, they just choose not to share the rest of themselves with the likes of me.

The generalised nature of sites like Facebook, though, changes that. By centralising all of those specialised things, it makes it much easier to communicate more, and it becomes trivial to transfer information between groups. Twitter crossposts to MySpace, my blog crossposts to Facebook and Google, Facebook feeds everything and slurps everything back out again. I have absolutely no idea where you're reading this. I don't have to cut'n'paste a link from my steampunk mailing list to the airships blog, I just hit share or retweet, and all my airship-loving friends can see the whateveritis. I don't have to tell ten different groups why I liked Avatar, I just post it once, and it goes to everyone. My readers know "who I am", and they're not getting some manufactured authorial personality, they can see the "real me", just as if they were my closest friends. In fact, they're all my friends now, aren't they?

It seems like a great idea, but imagine this. There's a huge room, and it's filled with every single one of your followers. (In my case, that's a bit under a thousand people.) Now, every time you say something, just shout into this megaphone, and it'll get blasted out on a PA to all of them. And if that wasn't crazy enough, every one of them has their own megaphone and their own PA, and they're yelling too.

That's just dumb.

That's all our social conventions shot to hell and replaced with a Tower of Babel. We're all talking, and nobody's listening.

Is this the real me? Is this just fantasy?

Will the real Matt please stand up?

So, I'm pretty much thinking that my "integrated personality" is something that doesn't need to exist online. I'd be much better off as a set of disconnected identities, each tailored for different social contexts, just as I am in real life. In those contexts, I can speak as I choose, indulge my interests as I choose, and without risk of upsetting or boring anyone else.

At the end of the day, there are only so many people I can cope with. It's about 150, which you may recognise as Dunbar's number. Interestingly, Dunbar's in the middle of a study on Facebook friends, and is likely to conclude that however many "friends" we have, we only interact with about 150 of them.

I guess the upshot is that I plan to make some major changes to my online personae. I'll probably create separate personal and professional twitter feeds & facebook accounts. I'll have a really hard think about what I want to say online, and who I want to say it to, and which of those factors is dominant. Do I select my audience to be receptive to what I want to say, or do I tailor my postings to match my audience? Probably the former, personally, and the latter, professionally. I may set up some different blogs for niche interests, and think about posting there rather than onto the more general feeds. I'm certainly planning to post a lot less until I feel like I know who's actually listening to me.

One day, autistic media will become truly social, in that it will understand social contexts and allow us to present ourselves appropriately in each. There's a lot to learn. After all, we're trying to replicate tens of thousands of years of social evolution with technology that's only a few decades old. It's a big task.

Goofin' around.

Mornington Crescent

One of my roles in life is clearly to subvert any telecommunications system and turn it into a platform for playing games.

We've done twiku. Now it's Mornington Crescent on twitter.


You know it makes sense.

If you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, you should consult NF Stovold’s Mornington Crescent: Rules and Origins, which makes everything clear. Don't get the Graeme Garden edition, it's been substantially rewritten. Get hold of an earlier edition if you can.

The haiku of twitter

Twitter is addictive. Not because it's a way of babbling at all and sundry about the most banal and/or enigmatic things, but because it's a real challenge. Twitter messages, or tweets are limited to just 140 characters, and it becomes a game trying to fit as much as you can into such a short space. What I realised recently is that I find myself treating it like a game of blackjack, where the aim is to get as close as possible to the magic 140 without going over it, and these days, I do it almost without thinking. Sometimes I end up wasting, oooh, minutes trying to squeeze everything in. And it's obvious I'm not the only one. Warren Ellis is particularly good at it.

It's such a contrast to blogging, where I can just let the words pour out, and not have to worry about the page count. My early years were spent as a journalist and sub-editor, and word counts ruled my life. I would spend hours cutting articles down to size, and it was a point of pride with me that I always hit my exact word count when writing. (Which makes it much harder for an editor to change what you wrote originally, so you usually get your piece printed verbatim.)

Working within such a limited format is akin to writing haiku, the short Japanese poetry form. In the West, we usually think of a haiku as having 17 syllables, broken up as three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables each. It ain't actually strictly so in Japan, but what we developed over here was a game of working within those rules, usually . Like these.

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

A crash reduces
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.

Five men in a room.
Signing paper makes it so,
Never mind the facts.

(Plenty more here.)

Twitter offers some equally elegant models of succinct prose. Here's a selection of 140-character epigrams, some written by me, some by others.

Eat, sleep, edit movie, make bread, practice violin, play Final Fantasy, watch Assassination of Jesse James, not necessarily in that order.

"My war expertise is eating rats & getting cornholed by water snakes in a flooded paddy field for five years, but here's the plan, boys..."

Today I will make a movie showcasing new #moviestorm. I will. I will. Until my eyeballs bleed. Caffeine, chocolate and nicotine required.

When they started getting the middle-aged men to join in the bellydancing, we spotted our cue to make a hasty exit. The rest is silence.

There's nothing showing at the local cinema that I'd watch even if the only alternative was having Don Rickles' balls rubbed into my eyes.

Note to really pedantic pedants: Yes, the sun is always moving. And yes, it's not strictly "burning" my retina. And it's not slow. Happy now?

A proverb for our time. "Thou shalt not ninja thy guildie's loot." Or is that an aphorism? Who cares? It's beautifully eloquent.

The human spirit is diminished every time Coldplay release a record. Soon, we will all have the souls of slugs, and it will be their fault.

Please feel free to add your own examples of twitter haiku. Minimum 135 characters; fewer just doesn't cut it, I'm afraid.

You can follow me on twitter as MattMongoose.