Paul W. Swansen - Mar 6, 2009
My first impressions were that the new FaceBook looks a lot like FriendFeed. I’m also noticing some other things in the new Facebook layout that apparently were not fully thought out prior to the new launch.
I do like the features of FaceBook and Friendfeed where I can actually have a discussion/conversation in more than 140 characters.
Facebook is now a mixture between friendfeed and twitter. You get videos, photographs, status messages and more from all your Real life friends networks. One of the most powerful new features is that by using the group feature we can now see our friends according to a number of settings. If I want to look for Uni friends I click on that list of friends. If I want twitter friends I press on that list. If I want Geneva friends and their status I’d press that and get the required information. Now we’ll see a decline in facebook user time due to them not understanding it and not having the time to figure it out but within the next week or two they will use it more and more. The real time view also means that conversation will now be emphasised and help people in different geographic regions stay connected. As my distaste for the way people use twitter grows ever stronger so the new facebook layout encourages me to engage with more of my real life friends there. It’s a big “see what you missed out on” to the twitter owners and their poor website implementation and innovation cycle. I was struggling to see a reason for being on twitter. That has just become stronger.
Lifestreaming is not something the mainstream understand yet. they’re still getting to grips with the idea of lost anonimity on a place like facebook. This is visible through the creation of the facebook group to cry about the new facebook. I’m an early adopter and I love new ways of connecting with people and that’s why I’m sitting in an appartment in Paris after spending a fun night with 20 friends from seesmic (or so). They’re all friends I met through social media. In particular I met them through Seesmic. Imagine posting a video that anyone and everyone can see. I like to describe it as video instant messaging. Record a video of yourself talking about something and wait for your friends to answer in video form There area number of features on the new facebook that are similar to those of jaiku. These are rss integration, status updates (as in twitter) and commenting. They’re all things that I’ve been playing with for months now. It’s part of my daily life. I understand and embrace this change. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for those I met in the physical world to start tweeting and seesmicing or using jaiku. Will it be a year or two? They did take a year to finally get to facebook after all.
Nicole - Mar 3, 2008
hey! my avatar was that color before any team stole it. i’m just sayin.
I did not know it was a colour war, I just noticed I am followed by Aqua whatever, and then I followed back. Thanks for clearing it, I was totally clueless about the whole thing.
I joined my team of choice of a humorous whim - it was under my nose when I logged in and it appealed to my sense of whimsy. Then the socio-political rumblings started and certain people were using their colours as an excuse to snipe… and I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. If we’re REALLY building something here, then let’s be bigger people, shall we? Nice one :)
As if zombie slaying, vampire biting and sheep throwing weren’t enough the facebook lunacy has reached Twitter via Zefrank and the stupid colour wars. As if the conversation was not interesting and fulfilling enough for twitter users there is now a movement to create a colour war encouraging people to split into groups. I dislike this movement for a number of reasons. For a start it’s a complete waste of time because it does not require people to do anything in the physical world. Just change your avatar and you’ve participated. That’s similar to the zombie wars. As a second point it’s encouraging people to break into smaller clusters and groups, which although fun in certain situations where groups are too big is pointless on twitter. In particular I saw that for one colour the point was not to tweet but rather be tweeted at. Now why would you ask for people to remain silent when the whole reason behind twitter is status updates, firstly and conversations as a side effect of the first. When few people used hotmail it was clean and e-mails were worth reading but as chain letters arrived so the usability went down. When geocities became popular so pages became flooded with junk, same with myspace and later facebook. I really don’t want to see this junk making its way into the twitter stream. I spend too much time there to appreciate it. That’s why I won’t participate.
I’m active on more social networks than I have time to go through in a day and that’s where Socialthing comes in. It allows me to follow news from facebook, twitter, pownce, tumblr, flickr, vimeo and livejournal. What I like about this site is how easy it is to see everything that goes on. Whereas friendfeed is nothing more than a few lines of text this version of a social feed aggregator is the visual aspect. At a glance I can see which social network is giving the content and I can post accordingly. If I see a status update on facebook for example I can view the profile and add a comment. There’s that option with twitter too. I can see everyone’s tweet and I can reply to any friend’s post quickly and easily. As a positive sidenote I can follow what’s going on on pownce without logging in. I’ve often felt that the limitations of that site is the lack of people outside of California using it. At least this way I may find my interest growing. If I’m in a rush or there’s an important message to get out I can simply select to “post” a message to all these social networks at once. That saves a lot of time although as expected this should not be used too frequently as it adds a lot of “noise”. I’m looking forward to more services being included
Twitter is one of those places that takes some time to get the hang of but once you do it’s going to suck you in and won’t spit you out till you’re exhausted. It’s a little bit like seesmic except that in this case you don’t look like you’re so in love with your computer that you’re talking to it. In reality twitter is just the surface of our interaction with the groups of friends we have met and made through this network. Twitter is first and foremost about short messages to say what you’re doing right now. Over time though it’s become much more. As more and more people started to use it so the want to comment on what people are doing increased. Overtime as more and more comments were made so conversations occured. These conversations are a little more complex than you may think. Initially conversations via instant messaging services like ICQ, Skype, Yahoo and others are about one to one communication. Twitter is about the overheard conversation. In other words as I’m talking to one person another person overhears what I’m saying and they want to join. Over time a community forms. Some call it the twitterverse, others the twittosphere, and some call us the twitterati. The result is the same. It’s a community of people based around twitter. They are for the most part involved in the social media although a growing number of people are “tourists”, in other words they’re looking at this social networking system or tool and seeing how they can apply it to their own lives and business practices. There’s another dimension. The invisible conversations that are taking place. With some people I have exchanged hundreds of messages in private, via direct messages. With other people it’s via google talk and in other cases via the skype chatrooms. In other words it’s a dynamic conversation across a number of instant messaging services. There are a number of uses. In some cases some conversations are too personal to have out in the open, with others the conversations are very focused and the community is a community through a skype chatroom or conference call. As a result there is a strong feel of belonging within certain communities. Seesmic is one website and over time a community that has profited greatly from twitter, and I mean in terms of the members of the community rather than the wealth generated. As people created videos so a link with the video title would appear. As the “Seesmic” tag appeared more and more so a buzz was generated to create interest. As more people were invited through friends using twitter so more interest grew. It was also a two channel conversation. One channel being twitter where short messages could be exchanged easily and the second channel video where opinions could be exchanged through visual means. Quite a few parties took place then. Many questions are also asked by those that use twitter. Some of these questions are easy to answer within 140 characters and a list of responses is left as a blog entry. It’s a quick method of getting a number of points of view efficiently. Occasionaly entire conversations come to life about a number of topics and multiple people talk to multiple people and after three or four hours results and conclusions are drawn up and a comprehensive blog post covering a range of issues can be written up. Twitter is a simple way of keeping in touch with what friends are doing but it also creates links with people we would find very hard to get hold of using more contemporary methods such as facebook, e-mails and other. This is a glimpse of what the future of communication will hold. Skype, seesmic, gtalk, facebook are all there to add depth to the twitter conversations.
Mark McGuinness - Jan 0, 2008
Hi Richard, good to meet you too. I think the site I meant was New Music Strategies, lots of food for thought about music, copyright and the online environment: http://newmusicstrategies.com/ You might also be interested in this page I put together about intellectual property: http://www.wishfulthinking.co.uk/blog/books-and-links-intellectual-property/
Two nights ago whilst having a conversation about technology with Fooz on twitter I got a message from Jamie about the Likemind coffee morning in Central London that she thought might be of interest to me. I decided that I would go and it was worth the effort. From what I gather it’s held once a month. It’s a meeting that started around 0830 and continued till 1030 where a few people from various backgrounds in the media came to talk about a variety of topics. It ranged from Facebook and those that influence discussions to Qik, twitter and seesmic. Of course other topics were also discussed. I talked to Mark of Wishful Thinking who wrote the e-book Time Management for Creative People. He has some interesting ideas and his blog can be found here. Whilst talking to him he touched on a number of interestin topics of which i would like to find out more. One was copyright and music for example, recommending a blog or two I should read and from the conversation I am interested in seeing what he’s been writing about. If I’m not mistaken (and I did meet quite a few people) I also talked with Lauralynne about the challenges of finding work but also about twitter, a subject I know well. Arriving at almost 400 tweets she has a very different to the whole twitter thing. When talking to people many of them are not sure what it’s about yet and that’s why talking to her about it was good. I talked to her about how society is changing. Previously when you met people you would meet them in person, be friends with them for a few weeks or months and one of the two would move to another country or another city and so the link would be lost, hence the utility for something like facebook. It then progressed onto a conversation about twitter. I explained my view that twitter is not just about saying what you’re doing. Another person who was listening in asked us to define twitter. I defined it as a multiplatform chatroom that you can take with you. I talked about the key difference between IM and twitter. With instant messaging you chat with someone and you’re telling them about things as if you’re talking and you expect an answer. With twitter it’s about the day to day life. Through following your stream they’re going to come through a lot of noise depending on how often you tweet. That noise is what makes conversations easy when you meet twitter friends. You’ve got three topics ready because you know about the good and bad things currently going on in their life. It means you’re friends offline. Live in a city like London and you meet these people and a physical world friendship can occur. The motivation behind this point was the notion that technologies are helping to seperate people and I wanted to refute that argument with the points made above. If you go through some of my previous posts you can follow the progression of these ideas further. I heard Mark Iddon talk about his blog about multiplatform content and it sounds interesting although I have not yet had the opportunity to visit the site. Another person I came across was Damiano whose blog Nitmesh sounds interesting. It is described as : “A comment on the imploding chaos of the convergence that hopefully entertains, enlightens, educate, reminds and shares ideas that might stand out and make a remarkable difference”. Overall the meeting was good, productive. I arrived feeling both inspired and shattered. Normal, I got to sleep at 4am and got up at 630 because I enjoyed the thought of being able to have more conversations in person rather than via twitter or seesmic.
Lewis - Jan 5, 2008
Would love to see how filling your social life with London network events would go.