I avoided Twitter as long as humanly possible, but of course one can only hold off on participating in the tech trends for so long without turning into some kind of geek prude.  It started just about a month ago when I was bored on a train ride out to D.C… and there it was… Twitter.

I created my profile and eased into the whole process of pushing out itty-bits of chars to define the otherwise frenetic moments of a working day.  Trends, projects and articles whiz by in twitter time and suddenly one is propelled into a world of conversations that, as it turns out, the entire world is listening in on.

Recently the library of congress announced they would “archive” every tweet that passed through the twitter gates, an archive of our global manic need to be heard (or read as it were) – which makes being a part of Twitter feel like impending immortality!

Big Brother Is Reading!

On a more sinister note, I recently felt the true power of  ”The Twitter” as I innocently complained about my Time Warner Cable service and it’s shoddy delivery.  Instantly a “Tweet” came my way from Time Warner Cable:

@nicomclane Both of these issues may be related to signal interference. Would you like me to take a look at your equipment? ^BP

Not for nothing, I was impressed that they are in fact “tuning in” to what end users are saying about their service/products… and then it happened again!  I had started playing the ole’ FourSquare game and “Checked In” to a PCRichards on a working shop trip and next thing I know, I get a Tweet from PCRichards:

@NicoMcLane Thanks for checking in! Were you able to find what you were looking for?

In and of itself, if Twitter does nothing more than act as an agent of  Global eavesdropping, one can only hope it leads to better service, instant solutions and a brighter future!  Of course this means one must be much more careful about what we “Tweet”, in a strange way it is reassuring to know someone is always listening… and again, it tells us Big Brother is Reading!

I really have come to loathe the quality of Time Warner Cable service in NYC – they deny any knowledge publicly of the constant packet dropping, jitter, channel freezing and the spontaneous ”reboot” of their STB’s – of course ignoring a problem doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.  In search of better service, I am doing a little comparison shopping for TWC vs. DirectTV.  I am a New York gal, born, bred and buttered in this land of love & fine dining… I need NY1 to kick off my work day… Direct TV does not carry NY1 and that is a big turn off.  As I am trying to find out what service providers do carry NY1 that are NOT TWC, I couldn’t find the provider list on the NY1 website, but what I did find was a whole lot of DirectTV ads.  Who was the brainiac who came up with that media buy??

What are your thoughts, if I have to leave Time Warner Cable and want to keep my NY1, where should I turn???

Direct TV media buy on NY1 - irony or bad choice?

For years, the most aggravating argument against the virtue of streaming media on the web versus “television” has been consistency of the user experience; however, for the last three [3] days I have been waiting for MTV on Time Warner Cable to figure out that their NYC TWC “guide” has been totally off…

Right now, the schedule dictates I should be watching a program called ” The Girls of Hedsor Hall” – but what is actually on is the program  “TI’s Redemption” -

This may seem minor, except for that the programming on the TWC “guide” has been off track for 3 days and no one has picked this up as an issue nor has anyone they corrected it.  There are plenty of other issues, like On Demand videos that simply don’t play, the guide gets stuck constantly and I always have to reboot the box.

I am also pretty pissed off at Time Warner since I went and ordered new STB’s for my home, they sent over a thrid party contractor – who was a bit of an idiot actually… and all the STB’s were refurbished.  And now, TWC is advertising the “Start over” feature that simply doesn’t work on my STB’s.

Yet more examples of end-user frustration and confusion that will hurt us all in the end.

If TWC can’t ge it right, they should at least have someone on their internal teams watching their own channels to ensure that we are getting the “end user experience” they promise …

I have to say, it’s been 4 days now since their “TWC guide has been out of sync with their programing, and it is critically disjointing…

Hey, TIME WARNER CABLE –  I feel let down, you are supposed to be the best of the best…

My parents love new gadgets – anything “hi-tech”, shiny and expensive.  When they brought home their first  SONY BRAVIA HD TV, they were so excited to see those 4:3 channels stretched out to 16:9 – they actually like to see the image stretched out because it is bigger and as we all know, bigger is better!!

When I convinced them that they weren’t actually watching HD because they had an old cable box, they insisted that Time Warner Cable install the newer digital set-top box so they could experience the luxury of true HD…

Alas, TWC installed the new boxes and NBC on channel 2 looked the same; It was not easy trying to explain to them that NBC was in fact available in HD but that they would need to turn to an HD channel.

When my parents accepted the fact that there could possibly be channels that are not HD versus channels that are, they were completely confused when they turned to channel 704 (700′s are HD in NYC on TWC) – and the program that was airing at the moment was not shot in HD and displayed 4:3 on their shiny, big tv.

My Dad interrogated the TWC technician as to why TWC was sending crap to his bran new, shiny HD tv.  Although I had already explained that it was within the control of the Network, NBC in this case, not TWC – the technician patiently tried to reinforce this argument.

On one level it can be very frustrating for new generation transition thinking to sink in on the legacy minds of analogue channel surfers; However, I come from a place where I don’t like to force new experiences onto people until the methodology has been refined and the real-world expectation set.

The Digital transition is one thing, but HD is not the standard yet and for the average user, my parents, they don’t really need to know why “sometimes” Channel 702 is full screen and other times it is 4:3 with black curtains, why some commercials are HD and others are not…

I think it is still too soon to sell the world on HD as the standard – it should be treated as the exception until the major networks replace all their legacy transmission components to HD and we don’t see anything on broadcast channels in SD.  You try to explain that to my parents, good luck!

Frankly, I am more excited about Netflix live services than the fancy HD programming – but that is just me