Less is more
I’ve been thinking - a lot - about the proliferation of networking and community based tools, lately. For a while it was exciting that so many great tools were being developed even if some were very specific in the purpose they served. Now, it seems that each day, a new tool appears that does everything else (or, at least, some of everything else) and 33% more. In short, we’re approaching social media critical mass.
The gathering places are popping up everywhere and the democratized are doing their best to keep up. It’s kind of like being invited to ten parties in the same night and trying to mingle at each one — sure you’ll meet a lot of people, and you may even go home with 189 business cards representing “my friends”, but you haven’t come to know anything more than 189 names (if you even remember any of them) and it’s more than likely you never will. Furthermore, you spent most of your night trying to get from place to place in a mad rush.
The time has come to achieve focus and pick your hang outs. I am going to start by focussing on three, my blog being one of them (I’m still considering the other two). That means that I can get value out of the tools - and the relationships I build using them - and I won’t burn out in the process.
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:19 pm
You are absolutely correct about this Mark. Another thing is, if you end up in every new place with the same 100 people, how is that really networking? Staying with the “old” (which could very well mean last week the way these places pop up!), gives new PEOPLE a chance to join and find you.
Less is more, quality vs. quantity. You hit it on the nose. :-)
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:06 pm
I hope podcasting is one of your other 2 choices :)
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Oh, of course. I mean limiting my adoption of a multitude of networking, community and communications tools like my own blog, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc… To paraphrase what Dani said, I want to focus on quality relationships, not an infinite number of disembodied links.
I will continue to produce my punishingly high number of Podcasts.
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:43 pm
And see, for me, Twitter is one of those good networking tools. I never would have thought to click over to your blog, and now I’ve subscribed to it. Same with Jay Moonah’s.
Quality. ;)
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:03 pm
“Social Media Fatigue Syndrome”…I can hear the afflicted masses and the psychoanalysts now. I either need to write a bestselling self-help book, or I need to create a new social website where people diagnosed with the disorder can congregate to discuss with and comfort one another…until next week when the conversations jumps over to another new startup.
Seriously, though, I completely understand what you mean, Mark. I think services that are focused on providing widgets, plugins and the like for your blog do a lot to help keep the conversation and the value centered on your blog.
One of the biggest challenges (speaking as a web developer now) of making this happen is the login/account required issue. So many of the cool features that can happen can only happen when people log in to something/somewhere. I am putting a tremendous amount of hope into OpenID, which I believe could significantly lessen, and in some cases even eliminate, the barriers to participation in cool new services. But there are challenges there as well.
I hope you explore this more in your discussions here. It’s definitely worth talking about.
Carter
CrowdAbout.us
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Dani… point taken. I am still working on my selections and will keep this in mind.
Carter… more great points. I’ll look into OpenId.
Social Media Fatigue Syndrome - I love it!
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Ah, but a blog is like your own little house. It’s the small parties you throw, but requires your guests to schlep over.
Twitter is just pings back and forth. Passing hallway conversations. The water bubbler dragged virtual.
Podcasting is what’s on the radio, and what’s on TV.
These social networking sites, if they get it right, are the concerts we used to attend. They’re the fan conventions. They’re the places where like-minded people gather.
Sure, kill a few party invites, but discover which matter for what reasons, and then use them accordingly. Twitter doesn’t replace a blog. Podcasting doesn’t replace LinkedIN. But maybe you choose between MySpace and LinkedIn. See?
Less is more, but better-tuned is pretty swell, too.
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:27 pm
I think it was the infamous Bob G. who pointed out that there would be money to be made for someone who was able to create applications that could “auto-magically” copy data from one place to another saving on the typing. ;-)
I think MySpace is dying a slow death in the hands of the teens and the predators persuing them. I like the “instantcy” and simplicity of Twitter. FaceBook, seems to be (and I’ve heard others refer to it as ) MySpace for adults. I never really liked LinkedIn and it’s get a friend to refer you idea..
I think those would be my 3…my blog, Twitter and FaceBook. sure I’ve invested time in the others but as Dani says, there’s no growth in keeping tabs on the same people.
With all that said…I’m off to OpenID..because I’m a Social Media Lemming.
Thanks for sharing this Mark.
Andy Bilodeau
http://andy.andycast.net
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:32 pm
I think the biggest challenges are sites like MySpace and Facebook which in many ways compete with your true online presence (say, a blog) if you have one. Besides duplicating (or triplicating) effort, they have their own infrastructure including internal email - just another place to go to stay on top of things. And because they’re not in real-time like Twitter, their value as a “concert venue” makes them less appealing (again, they’re duplicating what I already have). Of course, as a party-goer, going to Facebook means that you only have one house to go to and you can cruise the rooms.
All of these discussion points are making me think carefully about how I want to manage my online time. I think that’s the biggest issue here; it’s easy to dive in and not figure out what the goals are and the time allocation to achieve them is.
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:43 pm
I’d say we create some sort of “open social network”. People can read about you on your blog, see your photos on flickr, see what you’re up to in twitter, email you to your actual email account and chat with you on your IM account. No need to have duplicates of all those. Just put a badge with a single feed to all those.
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:47 pm
That’s brilliant, Nico. Can you have that ready by the end of the week?
Oh yeah, I want Crowd About in there, too. :)
April 3rd, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Why, that almost sounds like Mugshot! LOL!
http://mugshot.org/person?who=1XcFMZS5ccX8cV
Almost. If they tweaked a few things.. it would be a one-stop networking place.
April 4th, 2007 at 3:07 am
That’s funny, Karen and I were having a conversation about this very thing just the other day. She was going on about Twitter and how much overkill it is, which I agree with. Text is ineffective communication, cutting it to a limited character space is communication suicide.
Anyone ever hear of an instant message, an email, chat room, a Skype call? Or even better, turning the computer off and making an old-fashioned telephone call? Or reading a book written on paper? At some point you need to step back and live your life off-line or at the least more effectively on-line, not by just adding more text to a blog or some site.
“Social networking” is fine if that’s what gets you off but what do you expect to get out of it that you aren’t already achieving or cannot achieve using other more effective and personable means?
Regarding the comment:
“These social networking sites, if they get it right, are the concerts we used to attend. They’re the fan conventions. They’re the places where like-minded people gather.”
Wouldn’t you rather attend the concert than go to a website? Do you want to see the Police in Second Life or in your real life? Can you imagine if PAB was a “fan convention” in Second Life as opposed to real life, then what would attendance be, what would the social vibe in the “room” be? [I assume now that I've floated the idea out there that PAB 2007 be in Second Life it will be mulled over making it even less compelling an event to attend in person because I could attend in avatar format].
Let’s be honest, these social networking sites are nothing more than people trying to make it rich in a “Web 2.0″ world. The value their products hold are irrelevant since they are almost all free to the end-user and therefore incredibly easy to sell. The moment Google charges for Blogger, Gmail, YouTube…MySpace charges for it’s site, the moment that podcasts and videocasts are subject to FCC fees passed on to the listener…the moment Twitter charges for it’s service, that’s when it all starts going downhill.
Second Life will die a (not-)slow(-enough) death as the novelty wears off. How much virtual land can one buy and sell before they have to buy and sell actual land because you can’t physically live in Second Life?
Just put out the damn podcast and give us an email address or forum of some sort to interact with, that’s all we need. One simple way to grow a community will suffice, not 10 competing new methods popping up every day in hopes of success in the 2.0 tech bubble because that will burst too one day.
April 4th, 2007 at 7:22 am
Ross, you are a wise wise man.
April 4th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Since everybody has already claimed the good points of this conversation I will just add that isn’t Web 2.0 about making connections? Does it matter what tools we use for making those connections?
-Charles
April 4th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Web 2.0 is not about making connections, it is a marketing terms someone made up to help them sell their products and re-build the value of technology and technology stocks. It’s about money.
Life is about making connections and if you want to use Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Mugshot, Live Journal, Blogger, Wordpress, MSN, instant messaging, podcamps, Skype, podcasts, videocasts, email, telephones, YouTube, BitTorrent, movies, Wikipedia, Time magazine, Second Life, LinkedIn, text messaging, RSS, Flixster, Friendster, Dogster, Catster, Hamsterster, Lobsterster, or whatever else there is….good luck is all I can say.
At some point you will eventually spread yourself out so much that people will give up on trying to catch up and the inevitable will occur, the bubble will burst again leaving the same tried-and-true web tools in it’s wake: search, email, and http. Oh, and maybe Napster will re-invent itself again…
April 4th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
So I post a comment and Web 2.0 blocks my post, it doesn’t show up on the blog? What gives? I’ll try it again:
Quick research because I didn’t know for a fact (excuse me if you knew this already, thank me if I’m doing your homework for you):
O’Reilly (book publishers) coined and trademarked the term “Web 2.0″ to drum up interest in a series of conferences they were holding.
it@cork, an Irish *non-profit* group that supports businesses that depend on Information Technology in the Cork region of Ireland), announced it would use the Web 2.0 moniker for a conference of theirs a while back.
CMP Media, who sponsored the O’Reilly events in part, responded in kind with a cease-and-desist letter regarding the usage of “Web 2.0″ in conjunction with any conferences. It seems they own the “Web 2.0″ trademark and want to protect it.
Interesting reads:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/controversy_about_our_web_20_s.html
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/more_on_our_web_20_service_mar.html
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/08/web_20_trademark_redux.html
And one really long boring well-crafted response:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/web_20_service_mark_controvers.html
The bottom line is that basically “Web 2.0″ is about business and lawsuits. Social connections are a byproduct of that, they are what Tim O’Reilly and CMP will be mocking all the way to the bank, some geeks twittering their lunch.
April 4th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
Hey Ross!
Your post was automatically moderated because there were more than two links in it. I’ve approved it.
Thanks a million for your great input and insight!
Mark
April 5th, 2007 at 12:09 am
You make great points Ross, and let me put your mind at ease, PAB will not exist in Second Life.
PAB is all about real people in real life, plain and simple.
When I want to see Avatars hang around together I’ll..ummm. .wait… I don’t want to see Avatars hang around together..
April 6th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
I have been on the net since 1986. Then I made friends in the virtual world, primarily through USENET newsgroups. I remember buying a 3.5 inch drive for my Amiga from a guy that posted on comp.sys.amiga. I met several people from rec.sport.hockey (it turned out they too were psych grad students) and met a good buddy through rec.crafts.brewing. The tools are easier to use now.
Ross you are correct, Web 2.0 is a trademarked name, I remember this dispute. I think the ease of use is a big factor nowadays though, RSS feeds, AJAX etc make everything old new again.
I iuse MSn and facebook to talk to my students a lot, they find it helpful. I really do not care if anyone makes money on it though, it is a useful tool for us.
I am beginning to lose my train of thought….
April 7th, 2007 at 1:38 am
I’m not denying the value of the internet. My single most important relationship in life is a result of a list-serv (I know, it’s soooo “Web 1.0″). And yes, things like RSS are improvements and this is good. But these improvements are evolutionary, not revolutionary.
I’m honestly not very familiar with Facebook so I can’t comment on it with any confidence (though I do question it’s validity, there were generations upon generations before us succesfull in communicating in higher education without so much as even a Texas Instrument calculator). I do use MSN and AOL to chat with my coworkers (in place of picking up a telephone…or even worse, getting up from my desk and walking 20 feet to theirs). I wouldn’t say the chat tools make getting my job done any easier but I would say that it makes my anti-social behaviour easier to maintain.
Anyway, I too am beginning to lose my train of though which is part of my original point: Text is a poor means of communication. And thanks to the internet it is completely acceptable to misplace commas, parenthetical marks, and other general typos which I previously made that no one mentioned or questioned my credibility as a result of (which I would hope one would - the least I could do is proof my writing before I express my thoughts in a non-editable format, potentially online forever in a public forum).
Had Mark stated “I’m going to hold a talk about this topic on such-and-such date, we’ll have follow-up discussions on such-and-such dates, and the discussions will take place on Skype. Everyone is free to attend as if it were a party. The one rule is you show respect to the other people on the call”…it would have been a much more effective means of communicating other people’s opinions and sharing information. As it is we’re discussing the 236 words that Mark originally posted days ago, turning it into a 2451 word “discussion” in the comment section (counting this post) - more than 10 times the content he originally blogged, and the only valid points I think anyone has made are that there are even more new tools/sites out there, Dave noted I am a wise wise man, and I’m resistant to accept these new sites and tools unless they prove truly useful as I know they will be ruined by Wall Street in due time.
And I still have yet to get to the point that at some point even if it’s a truly enjoyable hobby all of this “social media” becomes a job with little to no benefit for the vast majority of those participating with Second Lives, MySpaces, Facebooks, Frapprs, Flickrs, World of Warcrafts, comments to moderate, Diggs, Delicious tags,Stumbles, and all those “Web 2.0″ things that one must do to keep up with the times….I’ll save that for some other post, I guess. Or maybe I can Twitter that once I sign on.
April 13th, 2007 at 10:25 am
I think it’s interesting that this conversation got side-tracked over terminology and that everybody is saying the same thing: No matter what web-based tools you use, they are great for making and keeping up with relationships. I would never have met you Canadians without them.
April 3rd, 2008 at 5:21 am
[...] last year at this time and was struck by a coincidence. On April 3, 2007 I wrote a post titled Less is more in which I discussed scaling back the number of social media/social networking tools I was engaged [...]