Today I got round to installing friendconnect on this blog. This means that everyone that has a gmail account can log in and become part of the community sprouting from this blog. You can also comment about things in general now. There’s a new layout now, as a result information is easier to find and the whole site should load quite a bit faster.
A lot of people love the re-tweet because they believe that it is a fast and effective way to tell both their followers on twitter as well as the person being retweeted that they are listening or that they thought this was a interesting point. This is true in a number of situations but this was not always the case. There was a time on twitter when people who liked what you linked to would comment on the topic and converstions would grow. It would take time, and involvment, and it would create noise, but it did provide one thing. Indications of friendship. You see friendship on twitter is a feature that you see less and less on twitter as the emphasis is on following, rather than conversing with people. Many of those I used t follow now follow thousands of people as a result of which they lose track of what they sad to who. Answering every tweet takes a lot of time, and time is a commodity people are rarely willing to give to others. I wasn’t willing to watch five minute videos on seesmic because I felt there were more effective ways of conversing. People feel the same way about conversation on twitter. They’ve given up on it and this is a shame. Twitter is all about the short form. The more short messages you send the more people will know about your likes and dislikes. If you retweet the short form loses some of that value. You are more succinct about why one point is more interesting than another by discussing the topic with the person. Every message contributes to the grand picture. If you want to show that you like a tweet, or like a link, don’t retweet it. Go to friendfeed and mark it as liked, share it. Write a little comment at the bottom. This provides so much more information to those that decided that what you have to say is of interest. No single network can do everything, so experiment and see which is best for which purpose. Your experience will be enriched by such a process.
One of the biggest ironies of the social media is that those whose profession it is to get brands and companies to set up a presence within the social media environment themselves see it as a waste of time, and no substitute for what most people would refer to as real life, real life being the life that you live in the physical world rather than sat behind a computer, or online. Almost everyone you ever talk to will tell you that communicating with people online is a waste of time, that everything is superficial and there is no gain to be had, on a personal and emotional level. Of course they’re right but not for the reasons they believe in. I was transcribing an interview of a 19 year old Belge girl speaking about how important her mobile phone was and how it helped her stay in contact with the world. In particular she was talking about the role of sms. When asked about facebook though she didn’t think that much of it. A lot of people think this way. They are happy with the SMS, a technology that is about twenty years old by now. As a result of this interview and many I have listened to in the past what I find most interesting is the tertiary role that computers and full social media websites have, as a role in how people interact socially with each other. Have you ever noticed how many pictures and videos are made available through facebook and youtube. Every time you go to a conference hundreds of pictures are uploaded, dozens of videos are shared but then there is one part that is never carried on. That part is the conversation. Where is the modern day pen writing? Where is the passion of communicating with friends you’ve met at an event but won’t meet again for months? Where is the ongoing dialogue? It’s as if once you’ve met someone in the real world you believe that to talk online is a sign of how pathetic your social life is. There must be something lacking if you need twitter to converse. There must be something lacking if you spend too much time on online forums. Facebook is a waste of time for so many people. How many people will take the time to read the comments you leave on a facebook item? How many of them feel that to respond is not a waste of time? Hundreds of thousands of people are on twitter, and hundreds of thousands of them are following strangers they will never take the time to converse with. Why are people on the web so passive? By being passive users of a technology like twitter you devalue it for those that take it seriously. Just yesterday one person said they saw no value in friendfeed because they received no answer to what they said. Of course they got no response. You’ve got to show that your active for people to know that there is a point in reacting to what has been said. You can’t expect people to respond to every new member of a community for everything they say. It just doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t work the other way either. To spend hundreds of hours online and commenting thousands of times does help build your profile and for people to notice you, but for how long. In the same way that I complain about how people no longer feel any passion for twitter so I see some of the earlier friendfeed users saying the same thing about that site. It seems to be a staple of many online communities that they grow and shrink. How many of your university friends do you have on facebook and how many of them do you find taking the time to keep in touch. The number is low. The only reason it was high as a student is that you were living a common experience as a result of which the bonds are stronger. That’s why I live with hope for how important the social media will one day become, once we see a shift in how people view the online lifestyle in relation to the social media. Film students don’t mind watching the same film five times in one week, series watchers don’t mind watching fiction on television. For them this is not a waste of time. So why are the social media not fashionable. Why are people so retiscent to create friendships on the web. Why do local communities spend so little time online. Why does the web work to organise events but not for actual conversations between relatively normal people. And don’t tell me it’s narcisism. The same thing happens offline but you’ve grown up with it so you don’t notice.
Something I would love to see on Seesmic, and which would encourage me to use it more is a “transcribe this” button for when I record certain videos. The logic is simple. Sometimes we discuss things that we would like to see discussed but not everyone wants to listen to us explain our idea. That’s why it would be a nice feature. As an add on you could then add that video to your blog, with a transcript for quick and practical reference.
Mark Douglass - 23rd Mar, 2009
I thought it was a joke at first as well, but I did see this coming.
Sounds like you’ve been pretty frustrated with Twitter lately. I followed your secondary account, but won’t be offended if you don’t follow back ;)
Best wishes,
Mark
warzabidul - 23rd of Mar, 2009
It’s no joke, I did delete that account. I have a backup of my last 3800 tweets on that account and thousands more are backed up on various portions of the web, either through tweetbackup, greader or others.
Dear twitter friends I have deleted my main account due to tired I am with twitter and it’s poor performance. I am in other places. I’ll catch you there.
Paul W. Swansen - Mar 4, 2009
Adapting Tim Ferris’s 4 hr work week approach.
For two years I’ve been using twitter and during that time I have spent far too much time on the site. As a result I built many friendships. Always paying attention to twitter, even when mobile was a great way of using twitter in the past, but due to people having less time every day to tweet I am adopting a new twitter usage model. I am now scheduling when I will be active on twitter. If you want to find me and chat on twitter then there are three time slots during the day when I will be monitoring the site. These times are: 0930-1000 1030-1040 and 1930-2000 Central European time (CET). Now to wait and see whether this promotes more conversation. My twitter account will not come back to life until they allow for the restoring of accounts.
kyle - Mar 2, 2009
Great article, although I think one piece has been neglected. Specific social networks that cater to certain groups of people are gaining ground. For instance, www.affluence.org is a gathering of the world’s most wealthy people and www.divebuddy.com connects scuba divers.
That’s because those are niche websites. There’s a chance I may find a use for the scuba diving one though.
Facebook and friendfeed are now the same thing. They both provide exactly the same thing but for different audiences. Facebook is a network of real friends, where you share everything with those that count on you as a friend. That’s where you get party pictures, relationship statuses and more. Friendfeed is where you go to get world news, current affairs and industry information from people you have yet to meet. Both of them now allow you to filter your information by groups or lists. I for one have two twitter lists in Facebook, twitter friends I’ve already met and had a good time with, and a second twitter stream where it’s twitter friends I have yet to meet. That’s where I can follow those of you whom I have unfollowed on the real twitter, for lack of proper interaction. On friendfeed I have a twitter stream as well, but this is raw, I can still react to your twitter stream by selecting to comment straight into the twitter stream or by proxy through comments in friendfeed. In part this evolves according to how willing you are to adopt the friendfeed lifestyle. I’ve been thinking of friendfeed and how friends in news could use it. I spent four hours at work, off the clock, chatting with someone that works in news, but doesn’t use google reader and speaking about how we, as individuals filter our news. Everyone does it, but most people are happy jumping from one site to another to get the information. The website that person looked at does have RSS feeds which could be aggregated into google reader and feedly. That’s an important advantage. It means that when you’re off work, in between shifts you can still get all the news coming to you, but without using the professional systems. It means that you shape the information flow, as well as it’s speed. The more sources you add to your reader, the faster information comes in and overwhelms you, if the right filters are not in place. Look at the social media landscape now and it’s not that busy if you’re looking for hard news but that will change as people grow more accustomed to the way the current social media types use it. We need to shift away from the social media types to the lifestylers. I use this term to describe everyone that uses the social media, not as a promotional tool for their activities and their blog posts, but instead for the content created by others with society at large as a source of information gatherers and sharers. How would friendfeed look if the film and television industry used it. How much more conversational would the WEF Davos room on friendfeed have been if those participating in the conference conversed here, as much as at the events. A lot of conversation is invisible because those who talk about it do so with those in the industry. What if part of that discourse came online? Look at the BBC website for example, and how it provides three top stories today, Madagascar and the new president, Russia and it’s rearmement plan and Fritzl. If the news editors for the News agencies met on friendfeed and discussed the top three international stories how much richer would the dialogue be? How many more related stories would we find? We can get a taste for this from Google’s news page, according to country. You can see which stories are the most written about and see how the dialogue is advancing but that’s an algorithm. It requires little time or involvement to exist. As a result recommendations may not be that interesting, or that well selected. Imagine a top three international stories room on Friendfeed and how that would progress, as news agencies provide items for national news bulletins. You could have sub sets to that room according to regions according to treaty alliances. There could be a room where NATO encourage Europt to work closer, making Europe as an entity more powerful. You see that with recent discussions from various recent Nato events. I watched and listened to plenary sessions taking place in Africa during the changes-challenges.org when live streams were being made available by the event organisers for greater transparency. Some sessions were on the front page of the website. As a result even if you were not invited to the event there was a certain degree of transparency, the same was true of the World Economic Forum. As part of my work I have been streaming such events and I have tried listening in, to see what people were saying. What is a shame is that at the moment there is no diversity in these online communities. Only the earliest of the technologically adopters are participating. the conversation, as a result is boring for anyone but those hyper-engaged within these communities. I use the term hyper-engaged because in reality there is a lot of information coming in. All of that information takes time to ingest. The best way to absorb all of that information is for us to watch it in real time. Facebook have that option now, the real time view, if I remember the term correctly, and that will help to introduce a large portion of people to what is called the “Real time web”. The real time web is best demonstrated by the real-time view on friendfeed. People are finding new sites, commenting on links and more n real time. As soon as something is added to the stream you see it. If you’ve got two or more screens then you can monitor all of this in real time. There are apps to help with the assimilation of all this information. Of course we’re not there yet, at the moment the geekiest of the geeks are playing with it, and some have more time than others to be invested in this. It’s just that it’s so well adapted to all professions that it will be interesting to see how Friendfeed and Facebook revolutionise the way we get our information and how we react to it. What I love most is that because facebook brings that to over three hundred of my university, school and work friends we, social media types have an easier job of driving adoption to the masses.