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The community is the best and worst thing about FriendFeed - VERY tight knit, like family. Especially since the founders / empolyees engage with the community. And because the community feels so close to the service, we evangelize.
That said, because the community feels so close to the service, they are also extremely protective. I couldn't believe how Brazell and Arrington were mobbed, just because they expressed their opinions.
Oh well. At least the services are increasing customization so we have more filtering options now.
I feel like you deserve more than a simple acknowledgement of this post. It's only fair.
I do accept your apology on a professional level. I do believe you're sincere. However, this is more than just about FriendFeed, Facebook or Twitter. It's about a common respect for people and their right to choose.
When I left FriendFeed, you not only attacked my decision based on platform, you attacked me personally. And you continued to do so on Twitter and the other social networks. You were not content to let me make a decision for myself. You come from a world where people make decisions based on others wishes.
That's fine. I'm a small l libertarian though. Live and let live. You do your thing and I'll do mine. The only time I'm going to push back on anyone elses decisions is when they go to war with me. If you read my blog, you know I don't attack people. I can count a handful of times in the past 5 years of Technosailor.com where I went to war with someone personally. It's not my style. I'll go to war with ideas. I'll go to war with companies. I won't go to war with people. You chose to go to war with me. Whatever.
Also, if you read my blog or my Twitter or anywhere else where I have a presence online, you will see a very distinct pattern in my behavior. On the surface it may be erratic. I may be less than your corporate drone mixing personal and professional without thinking of it. Chaos theory. Out of chaos comes order. The pattern that exists and is distinct everywhere is that I am a filter for my audience. I use services, products or engage with people based on actual value to my community - a community that is largely made up of small business owners and, more recently, gov and journalism types.
I am not a SV boy nor do I cater to SV. I cater to a specific group of people who are looking for a voice to help them navigate the web and help them do business better. I am not just a geek who lives and breathes the Internet.
That voice that I bring is highly important and valuable to that community and as such, I make decisions like dropping FriendFeed because... it's just not valuable to them. That's my choice, not yours. You went to war with me. I did not go to war with you until you challenged my position and role in this matter.
I accept your apology, Robert. I'm glad to see that you are making a distinction between old Robert and new Robert though, to be fair, I don't see a difference yet. What is changed? You're moving around on services like a child with ADD. You're evangelizing products. It's all the same. Now, Arrington and I are namedropped to accent yet another move by you. No harm, no foul but... new Robert?
This is not about FriendFeed. This is about respect and until I see a pattern of that, I don't know if a new Robert exists yet. I accept your apology and you may not care what I have to say here. I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on this level but it will take a lot more than a post to convince me long term.
Cheers.
You and I also have the same sin. Right now the FriendFeed community is just as pissed with me as I was with you back when you announced you were leaving. When we get tired with something we let everyone know. That makes people feel bad. I'm cool with that, it's part of the cost of being an evangelist. If you're spending your time doing X that defacto means you are NOT doing it on Y. That makes everyone on Y pissed because they see their community is dwindling (and their investment in such looks lame -- which is one reason I lashed out at you).
As for new Robert, well, I see I was wrong to attack you when I am now following a similar path a few months later. That said, I'm still pissed you deleted your account because it deleted my comments too, which I spent a lot of time adding to your content. Even here you said that I was not a valuable member of your community. And I'm supposed to be happy with that? I accept you don't want me in your community and you don't like me. That's the risks of being online. If you are doing interesting stuff you'll piss SOMEONE off.
Anyway, onward.
What's funny is that you say you don't attack people personally. But when you say that I'm not part of THAT community (IE, yours) well, you just attacked me personally. It's certainly not an inclusive attitude. But I understand that, because I'm in a similar mood lately. Which is why I'm apologizing to you because I took it too personally and should have listened deeper.
I hope you get value out of stuff I do and write, but you're not the target nor should you be. You're in a different world than me and have a different set of people you cater to. Your community is very much a tech heavy community that is early adopter-ish. Mine is a very conservative (not-political) group that is trying to get up to speed with the lowest impact to their business. Simple. Not the same community. If you take that as offensive, then that's on you.
FriendFeed used to be a good Twitter client for me. That's why I was pissed at you. You took away an opportunity to use the Twitter client I wanted to use.
Now that is moot because I've seen that FriendFeed isn't the best Twitter client anymore. Anyway, onward.
I left FriendFeed for very legitimate reasons and offered those very legitimate reasons. What happens after that is up to you and other people in the community. Agree or disagree but do so respectfully.
Like you said, onward.
One could approach the argument differently to say that you should ask friendfeed to provide a second copy of all your comments somewhere so that they still 'exist' for you.
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Scoble, to the larger point you make in your article, it is well put on the noise factor, though I think the flaws/problems on other mediums definitely have an opportunity for smart people to improve the experience.
The network you choose to share in at a particular time is a function of what role you play. Are you playing the Innovator? The Connector? The Collector? The Publisher? The Stress-tester?
To what degree are you influenced by what others are doing?
To what degree is your success in exploring a space dependent on being "first" to a concept?
A couple of years ago, Old Robert would have said that he wanted as many inputs from smart people as possible, so he could find the new cool shinies and share them with a wide audience. Old Robert's utility for many was linked to our proximity. If Robert stands to be among the first to know, we stand to be tied for second.
However, there is only so much Connecting a person can do. Granted, you did it for a VERY long time. But there is a need to create, and develop ideas in their own linear path without all the branching and kibitzing and commenting that goes along with being the Great Nexus.
Besides... sitting in the middle of that maelstrom dulls the hearing, if not the thinking. I wonder how many decent ideas you had, how many epiphanies you stumbled through at the collision of comments left by others... ideas and epiphanies that left your mind before you could even record them.
Frustrates the hell out of me when it happens in my head.
Add in the fact that a lot of the people getting most active with you at FriendFeed were ALSO Connectors. Being a node among nodes is fun, as long as there is still juice flowing through the brain.
All of that to say this? Why make a public issue out of "walking away?" Why not simply say that you are eager to find a different way to use FriendFeed, and integrate it with your other online presences and services in a manner that reflects a change in your priorities? "I need to be more focused and linear, and not as random and scattered." A simple declaration.
Steve Rubel did this without drama - but then I see his role as far different than yours. Steve spends a lot of time tinkering and toying with networks, to see what is possible from an individual's workload standpoint. You (traditionally) have been more of the Stress Test bellwether. So why not try something different?
I can't tell you what that is... but I can guess that it will involve getting out of the center of the galaxy and out to the fringes of a spiral arm. I hear there is life out there...
You can't have it both ways. You publicly stated over and over that FriendFeed is dead so people listened to you and left. Now you're complaining about FF having no value because they're gone?
FWIW, you can turn off all the people others "drag in" on FriendFeed. In fact, I'd demonstrate it with your feed but I already have turned off all the other folks you drag in (short answer: Hide all the entries liked by or commented on by friends of Louis Gray or even by Louis himself).
So that made it pretty hard to keep investing a ton of time into FF. Heck, I had started modifying some Greasemonkey scripts to customize FF, hoping that FF would eventually launch those features natively. Now pretty much all new development on FF has ceased. That's no way to keep people around in earnest.
And parallel to the "death throes" of FF, everybody after a few weeks of shock has gotten way more emo than is good for everyday consumption.
But it leads to a form of entropy born of a type of social inbreeding. It's what I call the Groups problem. You start a group and it has a bunch of people you like and respect. It's invite only and it starts off swimmingly.
Then a few begin to dominate the conversation and others fall off. The activity on your list goes down and it becomes a self-reinforcing echo chamber with little new thought or it strays from the topic and chases those remaining few off.
No, the future is in non-linear learning and constantly getting new, relevant inputs to challenge and shape your thinking and world view.
The good thing is the tools are available at FriendFeed. FoaF is at the heart of the best discovery engine on the web. But with great power comes great responsibility. FoaF is powerful. It supercharges your network.
You can't overload it. My main feed in FriendFeed is Dunbar's number compliant and I use other tools such as hide to shape it even further. FoaF is a way to select experts as your filters. I've written a bit about this here: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/soylent-green-i...
You're a great technology filter. So is Rob Diana. Louis Gray is great for tech and social media. There's also Michael Fruchter and Mahendra and Atul Aurora. These people bring me new and interesting content through FoaF.
Really and truly. I think this has more to do with an inflexibility to change and adapt. FriendFeed *has* changed. Usage is different. The DATA is different. So - of course - you have to change the filters you have in place to turn that data into information. You just haven't changed your filters (even though all the tools are there) and instead of sought out the purported greener grass.
See, Aaron, this is the new Scoble. Sigh.
And will you really get value out of those additional people given the tools Twitter provides to translate the data into information?
I simply don't think adding more and more people is an effective strategy to getting the right content. That's really where we agree to disagree. As an example, I'm very happy to be on one list in particular. Here's a snapshot of that list: http://ff.im/aQouI
Without looking at my profile, what's the list about?
Still a fan Robert. And I'll be interested to see your opinion of lists after the halo effect has worn off.
1. Fortunately for Facebook, the vast majority of its users do use it for fun and are not there to find experts.
2. I think you Valley types have a peculiar problem in that the majority of your real friends are also techies. I expect that for most people who follow tech but live outside the valley, like me, the distinction between twitter and facebook is quite clear. I post business and geeky stuff to Twitter but use Facebook to share fun and personal photos, videos and thoughts with my real friends and family.
3. I think the point about your friend's tragic loss of a friend is misplaced here - are you suggesting that Facebook can't be used for that sort of thing? I actually find that Facebook is much better for expressing such sentiment. A friend lost his younger brother recently and I lost an aunt. Facebook enabled far more condolence sharing than had ever been possible before and because most people only connect with real friends there, they are unlikely to get the inappropriate comments etc to which you refer.
4. I suspect that you got bored of FriendFeed like you did of GoogleReader and that you are not liking Facebook much because, well, it isn't Twitter. That's okay but ...
5. I think it is unfair on these services that you try to use them like your new favourite thing Twitter and then trash them when you get bored. I suppose in the case of Facebook, it is kind of their fault because they keep trying to be like Twitter when they ought to stick to what sets them apart from everyone else - or if they must copy Twitter, they should launch a distinct product or feature-set for it.
It was a different scene Robert and it was way smaller. Of course there are always newbies but i think the technical and intellectual level was just higher cause this wasn't a mass-phenomena.
Today everyone can join a community with a mouseclick. no need to search for numbers of some cool new BBSs, no need to get involved into the scene and to gain some reputation until any freak is sending you the number and password to his personal BBS with lotsa cool info on it.
We shared information on a different level at that time, now it's everywhere and everyone can join. This is causing the noise and information overflow
For good short or long term discussions with rooms by topic and simple x messages, I'd say the DOC style BBS is _still_ my favorite discussion interface. Twitter is great in that it solves the moderation problem, but it's still .. ephemeral in a way that BBS discussions are not.
As a side note, my brain keeps trying to map Google Waves as sort of hybrid BBS rooms, but somehow less organized and more chaotic. Not sure, still trying to work that one out.
I'm nervous about Twitter - at the moment it's a really great source of new ideas and great connections, but as more and more features get tacked on I wonder if what made it special will dilute it. I mean, they are one or two badly designed features away from accidentally turning Twitter into a forum and importing all of those problems that Robert lists. I mean, trending topics became a useless morass of noise months ago. The new re-tweet feature, if done badly, will be very, very bad.
Meanwhile, IRC has become a forgotten near-dead communication tool, but those of us still using it, like it just fine.
The NY Times has an article today that is relevant to the conversation. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/business/09li... Geolocation is soon to be added to Twitter and may help filter some messages by context. The article also mentioned the open-source project Ushahidi. The software has text messages mapped by time and location.
You'll recall that Facebook already saw the "delete" scenario and attempted to prevent it before the backlash you outline (Feb 2009). Yeah. That went well.
This highlights two things: 1) perception 2) prevention
Perception of the meta, the commentary, the extras, the interaction, the flow, the dare I say.... wave. Who owns the flow? If you added a brick to the wall, does it become your wall? Pick any flawed analogy and start taking notes.
Prevention of the orphaned meta commentary becoming orphaned or all derivatives or resultant items surrounding some corpus of unique content (assuming no edits) or the GUID that pins all things back together.... this is the folly of our software development decisions. Again, playback, and control of the everliving asset with full revision control might be the wave people want but don't know it yet... or might change their minds.
I've been around on Slashdot and Livejournal enough to see this play out a few times. Here's the thing... you don't see Slashdot and Livejournal come up a lot these days? Why? They are the BBS of their times... there is always going to be another one.
What we as users/members/etc of any such BBS must always endure? The learning curve of the software developers that are either just starting or have stolen all the best ideas or refined them.
The nuclear option is to "delete" and it is as old as any angsty teen saying they won't go somewhere or leave their room to interact with others. Would you deny this option?
The best elements of LiveJournal, Slashdot, Digg, DISQUS, and the publishing ease of FriendFeed and Twitter might collapse into something one day... and it seems that Facebook is about trying to get there. Maybe.
This is what happens when you force kids to read The Fountainhead and "pick sides".
I'm sure I am wrong, though, and that this won't happen. It is hard to see how the flow of communities will go in the future, there's a lot of ways it can go, I just hope that someone leaves the door open for well-meaning newcomers.
Anyone who quits a service publicly does so for attention.
Frendfeed is a great service for pulling all our feeds into one place, we just gotta find a better way to capitalize on this service
Twitter, yes, lists are amazingly useful for people who follow too many people. Now we can finally segregate them into groups that we can refer to depending on mood/need/whatever.
And you're right about the noise: Twitter is the carpeted café where you can chat to just the people you want. Facebook is the house party. Friendfeed is like trying to have a work dinner in a huge restaurant with echoing acoustics.
That said, I don't see why anyone would "quit" Friendfeed. I don't think there's anything wrong with maintaining a presence there even if you're not actively involved in discussion. Just say that in the bio! The fact that your presence is there means that other people can still follow your feed and discuss the points you raise while you're elsewhere online. It's performing a service to those that do use Friendfeed.
I just wish they integrated better with newer Web 2.0 websites.
But you are right -- pure-form egalitarianism in social media doesn't give you increasingly interesting content, or at least not at a very high rate (there is still the Flynn effect). Still, at the same time, I couldn't have guessed who would generate the most interesting stuff for me on facebook in advance -- some of them were on the margins of my social network, but that's why they bring in such an interesting perspective. They are the small number of people who are smart, use web 2.0 well, and are in different professional or cultural communities than I am.
Thanks for the thoughtful post. My quick way of summarizing the problem to people is to say that if in a system the creation of spam (and I mean that in a very general sense - read "stuff you don't want to look at") also gets the spam in people's faces, then you've got, or will have, real problems. The real problem are a) that you've set the scene for a biological arms race, b) that the system will devolve, and c) that you'll need a police force. OTOH, if you can manage to cut the link between the creation of spam and the getting it in people's faces, then you may stand a chance of not being destroyed by your own success.
You can look at many offline and online services from this perspective. With physical spam mail, the act of creating it (putting in into the postal service) automatically gets it in front of peoples faces. Problem. On Facebook the act of commenting on something gets it into others' faces. Problem. With Google, the act of making a link gets it into the mix of PageRank and so if you make enough of them (e.g., Church of Scientology), you've got a problem (and Google has a police force to fight that arms race). If there's a popular #hashtag on Twitter or a trending topic, there's a problem - people hitch-hike on it immediately. That's why those particular things on Twitter can only be useful in the small: they create forums, as you put it, so if they come to wider attention they automatically devolve. Look at an open tagging system where anyone can tag anything - once a tag is popular/useful, it devolves (people tag things incorrectly in order to immediately get their content in front of faces).
I think to a decent extent Twitter does not suffer from this problem. It's not entirely absent (anyone can @scobleizer you). Anyone can follow you, but they can't make you go look at their page, follow their about link, etc. So in that regard the creation of spam (i.e., adding yourself as an unknown and possibly unwanted follower to someone) is not concomitant with getting yourself in front of the target's face. And of course if someone's bugging you, you can just block them.
I've thought about all this a lot in the context of FluidDB. Because FluidDB objects don't have owners, anyone can add to them. But what they cannot do is get their additions in front of anyone. So while I could freely add a terry/opinion to the FluidDB object for Scoble, I couldn't make you or anyone else look at it. Of course if you did look at it and found value there, then it's not spam - it has a fitness (in a biological sense) and has a first foothold in the FluidDB ecology. You might even pass on a recommendation that others look at the terry/opinion tags on objects. And because we have identity, it's impossible for anyone else to put terry/opinion tags onto objects (unless I give them permission to).
A summary of all this thinking is that the link between spam creation & getting it in people's faces is vitally important. You have to find a way to cut that link. And second, if you're going to design a system, cutting that link is part of setting it up so that its evolution can follow a useful path. Because it will evolve (perhaps devolve). You want something that allows for the evolution of reputation and trust (of people, of data, of apps). I think those ingredients are very important if you want to build something of lasting value - something whose success doesn't also carry within itself the seeds of its own inevitable devolution.
I wake up every morning wanting to read and communicate back with experts in the Digital/Tech field, I've found that Twitter and Blogs ( of established smart minded people, especially using Twitter Lists ) is making this easier for me and my team everyday......Passion to Crush It.
Those good ol'BBS msg rooms with BBS Sysops and passionate geeks were always so insightful in the 90s, even on those green terminal screens (w/o images or video).....as well as no SPAM :)
Digital apps/tools have been sooooo aggressively built lately, it's been hard to realize and establish what tools will continue to valuable over time, as well if they be available the next day.
But I'm afraid that this won't last for very long. Already noticed that spammers put you on a fake list, you check why, and voila you were exposed to their product. The next step, I am afraid, is that spammers will make fake bio's just to get listed in employee lists. They will more tricks that I can't think of right now. All what is good on the web is fragile...
It's such a stupid trick. Would you buy from a shopkeeper who glues you to his cash register?
So the feature that can fix the problem kept you from seeing the problem? Isn't that the point of the feature? This problem isn't one that can be cured with a vaccine. And you're right that with sufficient control you can engineer it out of your site, but on a public forum you can't be friendfeed.
Sounds to me like you want a large private friendfeed room, but you can't get everyone over there so you're just giving up and going back to twitter where they are (mostly).
On a fan Page (and I argue you had the same control on FF), while anyone can comment, you have full control over deleting any controversial comment. I personally don't have a problem with that - it's the same control I have on my blog. The advantage to Facebook is you don't have to mix business with personal. Twitter it's all or nothing.
I think my other frustration is that I don't want to live in a Twitter-centric world. I hate relying on third-party services for my content. I want, as a developer, to find ways to take people off Twitter, bring their social graphs to their own sites, and communicate with their friends, find news, etc. all using the open web and their own hosted communities. The more I focus on Twitter, the more a monopoly that gives them and I just see so much danger in that! Watch for some more Wordpress plugins from me, along with other things that bring 3rd-party content all into open technologies (e-mail, rss, blog, etc.).
of time - use your fan Page like you used FriendFeed. Then post your more
personal stuff (aka what you had for lunch) on your personal profile. Set
up some lists in Facebook. Subscribe to some good fan Pages. Adjust your
privacy settings for your personal profile. Facebook has improved
magnitudes faster than Twitter has over the years, and they're still
improving as we speak. Right now I'm finding value out of both, but I see
*huge* value in what Facebook has to offer - those I'm working with and that
I have talked to on my fan Page are all saying while numbers may not be as
high they get much, much more engagement from a fan Page than they do
Twitter. You've got to try it and seriously spend some time with it before
you'll know that though.
BTW, your fan Page posts are permalinked - you can do your "discuss here"
posts to Twitter from Facebook just like you did FriendFeed.
list. The advantage there is you can control who in that list sees - you
can't do that on Twitter. They both have their advantages. I have use for
both right now - can't go all Twitter, I can *almost* go all Facebook. I'm
betting most of those in your list have a Facebook Page (I can confirm I'm a
fan of quite a few of those on Facebook actually). If they don't, what are
they thinking?
Also, what do you think of 2-way friend relationship Vs 1-way follow ? could that have made a difference?
How one views/uses FB, Twitter, BBSs, other social network/media services/tools all depends upon what one is trying to get out of them (e.g., Why are they being used in the first place?).
As I've watched & read your posts/tweets during the past several years, Robert, it's clear to me that for the most part you're NOT writing for the masses: you're writing for your friends and for yourself -- which is totally fine. But no wonder most people don't get what you're writing about (or why).
After seeing MySpace devolve into a haven for pickup artists (and wannabes), along with skanks & porn stars, I resisted the pull of Facebook until its total user base surpassed 175MM and became too large to ignore. (Well...that plus the fact that major legit corporations we're joining FB and launching Fan Pages.) Now FB is past 300MM users worldwide and on its way to more than half a billion users; but again, this is a mass market, which means it's VERY NOISY and very disjointed.
In engineering speak, the greater the noise to signal ratio of any marketplace, the less likely very focused (nee specialized) individuals will find such markets of lasting use -- UNLESS filtering tools are available to minimize extraneous noise.
Hence, Twitter is a great tool for you (and for many others). Ditto for your blog (and the blogs of your friends).
Conversely, FB doesn't work for you; neither does FriendFeed anymore.
Question: What about Ning, or something like it? Just wondering.
Facebook works for some things for me. My wife is addicted to it. But, she only uses it in very small groups with very close friends. So it all works for her and she doesn't care about the little noise that seeps in from the edges. Me? I want to use it for business networking, which means thousands of contacts. Different use and I'm far more adverse to noise.
Facebook for business is an interesting animal. Within a month of "joining" Facebook I had 4 new business leads, just from Wall-to-Wall posts and connecting with people. However, I'm still not convinced that it's the best B2B social network; personally, I lean more towards LinkedIn (with it's 50MM members today).
It doesn't appear that you're on LinkedIn. Any reason why not? (Mostly curious, and you can tell me it's none of my business too.)
FriendFeed brought phpBB back to the table with threaded conversations, and honestly - I've looked at it about .1% of anything else I use. The saturation of quality vs. crap is just a tad bit too high; and the more popular the site gets, the worse it will get.
Sorry to say, most people will agree, but the "general population" isn't profound often enough, but they still enjoy being heard. In fact, if the general pop. was profound, it wouldn't be profound/intelligent then... would it?
Twitter is a fundamental form of communication with very precise functions. Exploitation is still available to spammers, but blocking is king in that regard, I reckon.
People talk(ed) on FriendFeed. They started meaningful discussions, and participated in meaningful discussions. And that was interesting.
But FriendFeed is also very much a lifestream platform. Which means that when viewing my FF stream, I could see these bits that people put their mind to ( = posted with the intent of posting them to FF), but also lots of automatic bits, that FF was kind enough to collect from their various other online "places" - Flickr photos, Delicious links, etc.
These bits were created without an *intent*, and are therefore boring. They are mostly noise.
As a person who consumes a lot of information during the day, this is useful. I get a quick summary of what's going on without having to go places. But being useful is not the same as being interesting. FF was useful, but it wasn't very interesting.
Contrast that with Twitter. Most of the tweets are posted with intent. People intend to say something. Hence, the stream is interesting.
Facebook suffers from the same problem.
The same problem though is slowly creeping into Twitter, with automatic tweets from authenticated apps like FourSquare, Spymaster and friends. It's great for you that you just unlocked the explorer-whatever at wherever, but obviously, it is not very interesting.
I wish Twitter would acquire apps to always present the tweets they tweet on behalf of a person to the person, in edit mode, before they get posted. That would make it an intentional act, and IMO would prevent the boring-automatic-noise issue.
Lifestream is useful for us mass-information-consumers, but it's boring. Plus, most of the people are not multi-service mass-information-consumers, they just want to engage. With other people. In a meaningful way.
But for now, ruthlessly unfollowing people whose noise to signal ratio has climbed too high has helped me keep Twitter excellent.
We are rushing through the empowerment of the Individual, collecting powers that are becoming joined forces.
Look where we are today - years of evolution brought us to the capitalist society governed by government. In the this-mosphere is happening at light speed. Power corrupts corrupts power.
And, there is the this-mosphere and the world outside of here.
Where are we heading, what are we creating here ...
Now I'm wondering (with the launch of Twitter Lists), if I should/will be abandoning all but one personal Twitter account and then tracking/following ppl through Twitter Lists and participating in the the various conversations in the same way.
Thoughts?
What if FF offered a Ning-style private labeling? It would be sort of like moderating a forum, but you'd be moderating the functionality that attracted you into FF in the first place, right? Perhaps the open source community should replicate FF's conversation functionality?
Beyond that, what about a private-label FF , as I mentioned in above?
I do rather wonder where we all go next. I've actually been using Facebook way more than I used to, strictly because Twitter has gotten more broadcast than conversational of late with the influx of people. I've also taken to reading more blogs than I used to because of the desire for finding information that interests me rather than (as you put it) 'cat pictures'.
I suspect you're not quite as enamored of 'controlled' conversations as you posit here though Robert... as it is the unplanned encounter that changes our viewpoint best. Still - we all have our threshholds. Sometimes you just need to walk away from some places, scale back on others, and ramp up others.
I think you're finding your balance. :)
The only reason you don't like this stuff is because you're bad at it.
After all, it helps people make new connections and hence speeds the growth of the community.
At least in the short term.
And in the short term it works - so the companies (not realizing the toxicity of the 'features') go on and start drinking the cool aid.
I can absolutely see how this happens time and again: Try something. measure. It works. Do it more.
Thanks for pointing out the long term effects. It may save our emerging community :)
"On Facebook? No. Louis Gray’s feed drags in tons of others (even though you need to be “friended” by Louis to see his feed there)."
Yes, you see things other people have posted (and I really wish there was a way to prohibit people from posting certain stuff -- like videos or ads, which I never want on my wall), but you can also filter to "Just Louis."
With the filters for your news feed and mini-feed (and the you can already create lists of your own friends on Facebook for news feed filtering and privacy purposes), Facebook is no noisier than Twitter.
They're certainly different cultures... and your points about forums and chat rooms are well taken (and match up mostly with my observations over 15 years of doing the community thing), but I think if your Facebook is getting noisier than your Twitter, that's because you're not filtering and you're not curating (i.e., just like you unsubscribe from blogs or unfollow tweeps, remove or filter out noisy friends).
http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Especially his principles of building barriers to participation and protecting groups from scale.
Don't you think?
In FriendFeed you still have the power to block a user that you don't want to see or comment your stream. But thinking this way I guess you are restricting your Social activity to a bunch of people, because not everybody thinks about a search engine to find information on a Social Network, at least not yet.
Twitter is etilist as you said, try to think to a "Mr. No-one", he is new in this "Social thing" an he is trying to emerge. I think it's impossible just with the use of Twitter.
It's like GMail. They say that you don't have no more spam within your mailbox, but it's just a matter of good filtering, not of avoiding spam. If you check your spam folder is still full indeed.
It's already happening, by the way: someone present on two of your lists will statistically be sending tweets that are off topic at least 50% of the time.
Hashtag lists would create much more focused content since people who write can specify what list their Tweet should go to.
Let's see in six months from now (but I'm betting the smart folks at Twitter will have found a better way to solve this problem).
I think the Blogs are where it's at, and even while I continue to use some Twitter, Friendfeed and some Google Reader social features, the Blog is where quality conversation will remain!
Now, lets figure out how to grow Blogs, Disqus is a step in the right direction, but not it. I think MovableType has something up their sleeve on real-time conversation around blog posts, and hopefully Wordpress will have something also (since that's my platform of choice right now).
Digg attempts to do the same, by default showing comments with higher diggs or whatever, but in doing so completely destroys the threading. The default view now leaves all comments without context and instead of a logical discussion is just a bunch of noise.
It's a shame that the Slashdot model isn't more common, but it really requires a critical mass of comments and moderators for its emergent properties to work.
Disqus brings some reputation to the system, and does let you follow people's comments, but it doesn't seem to have much impact on the visibility of comments at the source. (I haven't used Disqus as a publisher so I don't know all of its features.) Maybe Disqus, or something like it, is the place for a site-spanning slash moderation system that gives that power of crowds to sites that don't otherwise have the necessary traffic? Just a thought. Visibility could even be based on the average reputation, perhaps excluding outliers so "heavy hitters" don't completely overshadow others. And now I'm rambling...
You summed it up with
"As long as you only have your really close personal friends in Facebook, this is NOT a problem at all."
Which for the mear mortal out there, is usually all we have!! even with my extended network from the tech startup scene, I do not create enough noise on any medium!
This is a Blog entry for the special followers you have/ and information explaining what and why you do things for for the rest of us.!
Don't get me wrong, keep it up. Its of interest, its informative, and it covers real issues in my scene of interest.
on a side note! you mentioned the "list of people who have started companies" and still I havn't made it onto the list.. I know my pitch to you in cambridge was short, and while you were on the way to a pub!! but a founder I am!
Would love to hear your thoughts.
The only thing we all need to choose is the Web. If it doesn't work well enough, we'll have to improve it...
First off, any service that lets me choose is great. Let the social pipeline be the sum of all the noise and all the signal. Then let each user artistically craft their own input stream from the flood.
User curated communities are pretty common now (HackerNews, reddit, friendfeed). Personalized views of a flood of data, not so much.
I rarely see anything I don't want to on my super human filters list on friendfeed. It's a group with a dozen or so people and I'm always happy to check it out.
I think you or spot on rergarding Twitter. Lists have turned my internet activities rightside up again.
But that is also why my Twitter is almost entirely people I don't know face to face, while on Facebook I pretty much consider everyone I have on my list to be a friend in the face to face.
http://www.os2site.com/sw/magazine/dsp/slime.txt
I wonder if this 'sort by space' idea could apply to forums. My next project was going to be a 'message tower' in which people could place new messages near similar ones on a giant list of messages, so we could have all the messages in the world and still be able to find and create them spacially.