More On Social Networking

Over the last few days on an email thread for Public Information Officers for Amateur Radio clubs, we were talking about implementing social media (Facebook, Twitter etc.) into our bag of tricks for getting the word out.

As Bill Pasternack pointed out:

The figures for growth in Twitter will amaze you: From Jan 08 to Jan 09, Worldpress Research reported Twitters membership grew by 1,227% and Facebook by 256%. The numbers for Jan 2009 to Jan 2010 are expected to be over 5 times or more greater. Or, if you want to put it in raw numbers, 5 in every 8 humans world wide are likely on Twitter and 2 in every humans world wide on Facebook by 2015.

Now those are pretty impressive numbers, taken as they are. But if you peel back a little, you find a different story. For example, the increase in numbers do not take into account multiple squatter accounts, set up by companies for marketing purposes (or those hoping for a quick buck), nor do they differentiate multiple personal identities (heck, I have three accounts). It also does not show how many people have abandoned Twitter.

Huffington Post reports:

A new study, released April 2010, examines Twitter usage in the United States, finding that although most Americans are aware of Twitter, few are using it.

To me, social media is more like AOL than it is like the Internet. Yes, there are a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon, but after a while, you have to wonder what is keeping them there. For example, here is a sampling of tweets from about 7 AM this morning from the main timeline:

• mrmarkmillar Please don't force Nolan to direct Batman in 3d, Warner Bros. REAL LIFE is 3D. It's not a novelty anymore.
• IAmSteveHarvey Good Morning everybody. Put your trust and hope into a relationship that is fail proof... Put it in God.
• Carine_Roitfeld Trying and Doing are two different things. When you try, you hope. When you do, you succeed.
• DaveGorman My must watch TV for tonight. John Sweeney. Panorama. The Truth About Scientology. http://bbc.in/dbXbz3 2 hours ago
• BestFilmQuotes "Sometimes, fantasies are better than reality." -A Cinderella Story (2004) *rptd
• USGS Seeing many tweets on quake prediction. Folks, let's set the record straight...no one can predict quakes...no one http://go.usa.gov/xA9
• starnewslive Delhi: labourers steal brass fittings worth 18 lakhs from water hydrants in CWG village
• mrchrisaddison Kim Jong-Il's been unanimously re-elected. Bit of an upset, that. My money was on his brother, David Jong-Il

Simply thrilling stuff right? Actually, the article from the USGS has a bit of interest to me, but if I had not read it, I would not be losing any sleep.

And as I have said about Facebook a number of times, I do not see the point. When I abandoned Facebook, my timeline was more a wash of game updates than useful information from my friends. Maybe I need more exciting friends but most only updated their status daily at best and the updates were interesting one time out of ten, if that.

So why is social media such a big deal? Why is it attracting so many people? Why is it so popular that people will buy credits to play games? And by people, I do not mean the usual suspects, but people that would otherwise have nothing to do with the computer.

If I could answer that question, then perhaps I could understand how to better use the technology, but I do not understand, and I guess, until I do, I will be on the outside looking in. But not very hard. After all, I did not understand AOL either, and it never really seemed to be that much of a negative either.

Social Media, take one.

For me, the great social media experiment is pretty much done. Be it MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, I have decided that there is little point to them, and even less point in continuing to use them.

My latest disillusionment is with Facebook. Ever since the denial of service attack, the holes in the service have become more glaring, knocking the already fading bloom off of the rose, and leaving the rather painful thorns, in the form of clunky interfaces. What is tragic is that these interfaces exist in much more mature forms elsewhere.

Maybe it is because I spend all day fighting with poorly coded apps that I have lost patience with ajax and database errors wiping out my content.

Maybe it is because I already have a number of perfectly good email and IM interfaces and Facebook is yet one more place I have to check in an already busy day because their email and IM interfaces are closed - and pretty rickety.

Maybe it is because of the poor third party apps that tend to go stale long before I have finished using the send more, get more hook because I have spent more time resetting the security. And that is on those apps I don't abandon outright because they look like they were coded with a random text generator.

Maybe it is because, like every tool before it back to the beginning, I am getting more junk - call it spam, call it marketing - than I am getting useful updates from friends, and even some of my friends have begun direct marketing things at me...or should I say ex-friends.

Maybe it is the generally siloed nature of the data sink that seems to consume increasingly more time to sort through that vexes me.

In reality, it is, at any one time, a combination of all of these things. I have watched the general decline in posts from my circle of friends, even those I consider good friends and watched their updates move back towards more traditional methods, like email, IM, on-line photo sites and just not posting. This is not a knock against my friends, rather, I think it highlights that I am not the only one who has come to this conclusion.

So I am going to return to the old ways. I will leave my profile up, but if you really want me to know what is going on, drop me a note. My email address is there and I am on all the major IM channels.

In the meantime, I have mission-critical apps to deal with.

Oh look...more rules...

Maybe I have been on the Internet too long. For example, I remember when Mosaic was launched. I remember reading about this great new protocol called http and a markup language called html. Heck, I remember using Archie, Veronica, gopher, and WAIS long before anyone had even considered using the term search engine much less Google.

Back then, it was pretty simple. Email was restricted to straight ASCII text and it was assumed that your signature would be no more than four lines long and you would, out of courtesy, delete it if your message was less than that. In those days, bandwidth, what there was of it, was slow, expensive and in some cases unstable. People would gently chide you if you TALKED IN ALL CAPITALS in your email or if you made some other faux pas. Occasionally the chiding was not so gentle and more than a few of the experts would occasionally suggest your RTFM before you sent or did something stupid again.

Fast forward to today. I received, via Twitter a link to yet another etiquette maven, this one on the topic of the same twitter. You know you are in for a lecture when it starts out like this:

Look, I don’t want to tell anyone how Twitter should be used

To be fair, the author is telling you the rules under which the author will drop you from the author's august list of followers. However, given the way Twitter works, it begs the question - if the individual you are following violates your rules, why are you following them in the first place?

To me, it seems very silly to have a set of guidelines that you are going to enforce when you can simply choose not to follow the individual in the first place. I do it all the time. I have a number of people that follow my feeds that I do not in turn follow because I do not see the value in following them. It really is pretty simple and would have saved you hours in coming up with your list.

The key here is this. Twitter rules, like IM rules and email rules are, for the most part, balderdash. And at the end of the day, if you do not like it, you can always unplug. All of this great technology can be turned off.