Why Shout from Home?

Because I’m supposed to be testing.
If I’m not out and about so much lately, I’ll do a shout from home when i want to test some particular nuance.

I do it mostly so people don’t think I’m at work or the Green Dragon ALL the time. (:

I shout from home partly from habit, but I also serendipitously discovered that my friend Doug Coleman lived 3.5 miles away through Shizzow (and keep in mind that by “away” I mean “at the Portland–Gresham border.”) Now I’m also on the lookout for that. Definitely not to Leave a Place, though.

I don’t shout a lot from home, but the idea that comes to mind when I’m tempted is that I’m done for the day — see you all tomorrow. So it’s sort of a “left the last place and don’t expect to hear from me for a while” thing. Or, the converse — “Good morning and hope to shout at you later from somewhere more interesting.”

Well, I was indeed shouting from “Home” in order to indicate I was no longer at work our out drinking. So I’ve stopped doing that now.

If I lived a bit closer in (or knew some of my neighbors better), I might shout when I felt like inviting people to drop by if they were in the neighborhood. I also have played with seeing who is nearby (so far, no-one).

Also, when I go to the Shizzow home page, it asks me “where are you now?” and I have this syndrome where I feel the need to answer questions.

Three reasons come to mind:

For me it has to do with how my (and probably most people’s) online social network works. By that I mean how we actually like to engage and communicate with each other online. We use Twitter for much more than just the site creators’ intent of “What are you doing?”. We use Facebook in ways other than originally imagined. I think our use of Shizzow also reflects that mind set. Despite the fact that you might have imagined we’ll use the site merely to find people around us away from home, we will use it to keep in touch, let folks know what we’re up to in a manner that is natural to us, even if it falls a bit outside the bounds of the site’s explicit intended “purpose”.

Secondly, Shizzow is unique in that it is by nature very local. So all my friends on Shizzow are mostly closer (in proximity and closer friendships) than other online social networks such as Twitter where I may follow a few celebrities or interesting folks I don’t really know and likely will never meet. So whereas I would not likely broadcast that “I’m at home” on more dispersed social platforms, it seems much more relevant to the more intimate local network of friends on Shizzow.

Last, part of the fun of Shizzow is not just finding your friends to meet them but following them, and being followed, as we move from work to social settings to home etc. It’s a bit of mutual geo-voyeurism, I suppose.

Initially it was to leave a place. Wouldn’t want folks to think I spent the night at some bar

Now, it’s more habit. Because the “Leave” function requires extra clicks away from my homepage in order to leave. (Read that as +1 for moving the “Leave” button to the homepage).

If someone was nearby, that’d be nice as well to know that. I’ve discovered a couple of my tweeps are within a couple miles of my house.

Often times, home is where I work from. I shout from there to establish my whereabouts and to see who’s nearby. I also agree with Verso…I’d rather people not think I’m at Bailey’s Taproom 16hrs a day.

I used to shout from home because I saw the cool kids doing it (including Ms. Shizzow and Mr. Rich Corinthian Leather), and also because there was no Leave.

I don’t always do it, though; I just noticed that I’ve apparently been at Urban Grind for the last 8 hours, and it’s almost 12:30am.