Each week this summer like clockwork I navigate my phone to download Foursquare. And every time the grey download bar begins to twirl my hand twitches, leaps out and abruptly hits CANCEL. I look around awkwardly to see if I’ve been caught. Because I don’t like Foursquare very much.

“What do you think is the next big thing?” I was asked at an interview in August. I should probably have talked at length about my curiosity over Scvngr – albeit a slightly shit app, it’s a nice location-based treasure-hunt idea that interests me – but I did not. I had a think and stared at a tree.

“Well, I can’t see any of my friends getting into Twitter or Foursquare,” said I, thinking of Aidan who is buying an HTC Desire because it is new and swish. I meanwhile got it because I do, in short, want to tweet on my every whim and be a geek about it all. My housemates like raves and funny videos, and do not much care about social media beyond Facebook. I mentioned Foursquare in Wagamamas once and saw their eyes glaze over as a little barrier went up. They sipped saki and nodded.

In this clever visual metaphor, I am the dinosaur

But then I thought hard, because I am not used to waxing lyrical about the next big thing or predicting the future. I can – if anything – see my housemates checking in for burger deals over 140 character microblogs any day. That said, they’re not about to join in a shoe-chasing game or leap on Nike’s latest effort of physical exertion, but that is because they fit their stereotype of people who like raves and funny videos, and neither of the above. But give them a drinks deal through foursquare and twitter, and foursquare’d win.

And this surprised me, because apparently I get excited about what’s hip and wow for early-adopter types, and I don’t believe this post is a brilliant new idea of any kind (I still want to think and keep thinking, about the original question itself) but I realised I forget to get excited about what’s new for people who aren’t early-adopters: i.e. what’s big for Average Man (‘Dave’ I’ve heard him called), which is something I’d never noticed. Hopefully some day it’ll be more like “foursquare good, twitter better!” though, and I can continue a tirade of Animal Farm puns.

I meanwhile, in some vague personal triumph over my grumpy will, have finally downloaded Foursquare because I subscribe to the idea that if you work in social media you need to be active in social media. Maybe next time I’ll get over my grievances and hop on the bandwagon quicker. It’s a pity though, that I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s not much keeping people coming back to use the service (argue of that what you will).

That said, I’ve unlocked the Overshare badge already. I could kick myself.

Part of me dies when the word Twitter comes up in conversation, regardless of how much I like it. This spoof of the Facebook film is very good though. I’m going to stomp around office cubicles bellowing “HASHTAGS!” now, so excuse me.

I’m working on my digital media project today (It really needs a snappier name than this). In theory we’re experimenting around our ideas rather than making them (because we’re a theory course, a notion I find very strange) and my proposal comes out something like the stopmotion below. It’s in HD so choose this function if you’re a fan of legibility. There’s more about it here, joining the trend that one day we will exist solely in a world of blogs.

“A stop motion visualisation of my digital media project. Will scan a twitter feed for tweets talking about Windows 7, pick out keywords grouped into 6 major emotions categories and display one of six video (will be 10 seconds) depending on the most popular emotion at that point in time. Video will display emotions acted out by a PC man of Mac vs PC adverts fame – acted out by my dear friend Liam, who will be rotoscoped.”

I’m currently rotoscoping scenes of a friend vibrantly acting out the role of PC, beautifully displaying the six emotions of “disgust, happiness, anger, neutrality, sadness and surprise”. For ‘sadness’ we decided drinking and weeping was a good way to portray this, so he drank cold coffee (for the colour, and to avoid doing shots) for a couple of takes out of a whiskey bottle. The disgust was authentic.

We have a strange culture with crash screens, and i forget how important they are, especially with the right touches. Google Wave has its “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” firefly references which makes fans of tech and sci-fi melt a little inside. This site doesn’t have one because I am arrogant and lazy.

As Rory Sutherland says about the Eurostar, money would be better spent on people’s enjoyment of the journey rather than the speed. He prescribes that the several million pounds spent on increasing the speed on the journey by half an hour should have been spent on scantily clad supermodels serving drinks. Who would be the more satisfied customer?

It’s a TED talk that I’m a massive fan of.

Twitter’s worked on that, making their graphics cuter over time from altered LOLCats to more carefully crafted home-made images, and a gallery’s sprung up under the name of Tweeterr.

On the other hand Windows don’t really have this down – an angry customer has created a Microsoft equivalent of the Fail Whale gallery with twelve pages of examples.

It’s not just operating systems. Mankind seems to have a strange obsession with taking photos of broken systems. For example, this website, full of photoed fails. I’m not exempt. Everyone seems to have a failwhale photo lurking around on their computer. If laptop screens had a fail whale, they should all look like this.

I am enjoying illustrated tweets today. Lovely and peculiar illustrations by Katie Vernon of tweets plucked from the public timeline. Of particular note are the father-like hairy legged animals; my father is made of 90% beard and had some glasses exactly like these in the 80s. (He was a trend setter, and is still rocking the look today.) Anyway these are ace.