Social Media
On the lighter side…
Apr 16th
Photo by: Noël Zia Lee http://www.flickr.com/photos/noelzialee
I can’t help but think that perhaps I was wrong about twitter, it does have a use. Having said that I still struggle with how to tame the useless information that comes across the platform.
Okay, so my turnaround on Twitter was driven mainly by the newly updated Adobe Air app TweetDeck. What I’ve learned to love about this product is that not only can I see my friend’s stream but I can set-up searches for keywords and it’ll provide the Tweets that fit my searches. I’ve set up multiple columns to track things I’m interested in and I’ve found it’s given me a leg up on knowing what’s new and being able to react to specific issues. The big feature I’d love for them to add is some NLP type stuff to aggregate the tweets into buckets so I don’t see 30 tweets that match my search where 25 of them are RTs.
I’ve also come to love the integration with TweetScoop which is a meme tracker that allows me to see in a tag cloud type format the memes that are active on Twitter. Any breaking news always ends up as a meme and I consider it my early alert system.
Ironically these features are features I could probably enjoy without ever having my own Twitter account. The thing is, these features do what I need them to do: they take the fire hose of data coming through the system and distill it down to what I’m interested in.
I can’t say the same for my own friend list. I’ve recently had to un-follow a bunch of people because they’re living their life through Twitter. It’s one thing to point out interesting articles, comment on other people’s tweets, or even comment on your own situation, but there has to be a limit. At one point a friend of mine was tweeting verbatim comments from a marketing conference every 5 minutes. I mean come on! That’s the activity of someone who doesn’t try and read his friend feed, someone who doesn’t realize what he’s asking his followers to wade through. And for us on the other end it’s maddeningly annoying. I don’t mind when people tweet often, but every 5-10 minutes? No one’s that interesting. If you have that much to say, do a webinar, call a friend, write an email/blog entry, but above all remember Twitter only at 140 characters for a reason.
It’s like I’ve found a new affection for Twitter only to realize I have to put up with the frustrations of reading through inane messages from "friends". Listen it’s not that I don’t care about y’all but sometimes your messages wear thin. Cliche time: It’s always great to have visitors come to visit, and it’s also good to see them go when they’ve overstayed their welcome. And to that end I’ve decided I’m being ruthless with my friend list. If you’re a 2 second tweeter then you’re dropped.
The big failure of social media is the corruption of the word ‘friend’. Social networks set themselves up to encourage you to accumulate friends, followers, contacts, and that’s taken the platforms and turned them into forums for acquaintances and colleagues to keep abreast of each other. At the same time it’s reduced the value of the platform for interaction with true friends, people hold back because there are too many pseudo-friends that they have on Facebook, or they ignore the friend feed because they honestly don’t concern themselves with the lives of their social network ‘friends’. I’d love for these services to call out the reality of the situation. Some friends are more important than others, some are family, some are childhood buddies, and some are people you worked with 5 years ago and haven’t spoken to in 3 years other than through status updates.
Oh what fun to dare to dream…
Why does the media think Twitter is the second coming?
Mar 7th
Even though the show is a mainly a ramble of random discussion amongst the participants, I’ve become a pretty regular listener of This Week in Tech . What makes the show great is the disparate cast of characters that Leo Laporte is able to cobble together for each show. Listening to the most recent TWiT episode I found myself mesmerized by an in-depth discussion on the topic of Twitter vs. Pownce that raised some interesting questions about the best platform for this type of service. Dave Winer had the most opinionated position on Twitter as a platform, suggesting that the incumbent Pownce offers a much better API.
One thing I agree with that was highlighted in the discussion is that the short message limit keeps the content digestible. We’ve seen a surge in the mantra that short form content is king, and Twitter caters quite well to that demand. Given this I do see the possibilities for Twitter to be a platform for crowdsourcing news and communications. Yet, having looked around the tools available today I’d have to say we’re a long way off from realizing the reality of those possibilities. In order for Twitter to get to the point where it’s a contender for surfacing news and information the signal to noise ratio needs to be addressed. There are tools emerging that’ll help but we have a long way to go before we’ve made enough progress for Twitter to be a must have. While the platform figures itself out the question I can get out of my head is will Twitter grow fast enough to avoid the fate of many web applications (Pointcast, anyone).
One observation that most fanatics miss when talking about Twitter is the niche it fills. If you take a step back and look at the most successful of Web 2.0 companies you’ll find a cadre of sites and applications that do well amongst a younger generation. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and others all developed notoriety amongst a young online audience. The one thing today’s youth have no problems with is communication, and when an idea like Facebook takes hold, it spreads like wildfire. On the other hand Twitter is a tool that seems to be popular not within youth markets but among the digerati and pundits who analyze these things. With the likes of Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte, Veronica Belmont, Guy Kawasaki, Merlin Mann and Chris Brogan, the top Twits on Tweeterboard or Twitterholic reads like a who’s who to the blogging and start-up community for Web 2.0 companies. I can’t help but wonder if Twitter will be a ghost town with everyone at SXSW this weekend.
Being a researcher I had to look at some numbers to convince myself that I’m not just guessing at a trend. According to my rough guesstimates, after 1 year Twitter.com had a site reach of approximately 0.12% of users, Facebook 0.8%, and YouTube? 7%. The Facebook numbers are even handicapped by the fact that for three quarters of their first year you had to be a student to join. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this is a little bit of an apples to oranges comparison given that Twitter relies heavily on an API and distributed use, but I still believe that the numbers show that there has been too much excitement built up around a social platform that quite frankly seems to cater to social media pundits.
I can’t help but think back to a focus group about blogs that I did in 2006 with a teen audience. When asked what they thought of Blogs one teen turned to me and said, “that’s something my uncle would do”. The message here is that the social generation, the ones that made YouTube, Facebook and MySpace famous, they’re not looking at a micro-blogging platform as sexy. I think social media developers need to spend less time developing apps for themselves and think more about what they need to do to offer tools for the social generation.