Dramatis Personae
There definitely seems to be a convergence of ideas happening in the social web space. The world went from blogging to MySpace profiles to Facebook wall posts and Twitter updates pretty quickly, until now it seems to be an equilibrium of features in most social websites. We can quibble on whether or not there should be a "dislike" button on Facebook akin to the "downvote" button on reddit, but really I think we recognize what social technology should offer us.
That is, at least, capability-wise. But that's just the "technology" part. The "social" part comes from the other people using the service. In economics jargon, it's the network effect, with the classic example being the invention of the telephone: it's only useful if other people have one as well. Here the 800 pound gorilla in the room is Facebook, where everyone from that dude I never talked to in high school to my sister's cat to my aunts and uncles in New England all have an account, making it very socially valuable to have a Facebook account.
Okay, obviously, not everybody is on Facebook. Notably, my wife anailia refuses to get on Facebook, as does my father who often and vehemently declares that he won't be caught dead on it. Also, it isn't as natural to use Facebook for some aspects of social technology, such as long-form blog articles like what I'm writing here. Finally, there's the understandable privacy and security concerns plaguing Facebook, but that will be true of any large scale social website.
Despite all this, it's still I believe a net positive to maintain a Facebook account. I also have a Twitter account since it provides almost as much value and I have friends there that won't use Facebook. I even have a LinkedIn account that I make a half-hearted attempt to keep updated so as to look professional and all.
And finally of course I have this LiveJournal account to do this kind of long-form blogging. But LiveJournal has been slow to adapt to much of the social web innovation going on. For instance, it's hard to see updates such as comments on my friends' posts without clicking through to each post. Furthermore, LiveJournal's corporate ownership has changed hands a number of times in the last few years, before ending up with a Russian company which I'm not sure how far to trust. Finally, and perhaps the worst offense, LiveJournal has rolled out these yucky, yucky Flash and JavaScript ads for us free users which, I believe, discourage many people from reading posts here.
And then, I have to manage all of these personal sites, independently. How laborious! twitterfeed has been useful to help automate this, but Twitter's own limitations become glaringly obvious since it can't show picture, video, or text snippets, making my Facebook stream look rather drab. And recently, I just found out that LoudTwitter, which I used in order to ship my Twitter updates to loud_psyllogism quietly went down earlier this month.
So for all of these reasons, I've been investigating what else is "out there". Tumblr emerged early on in my web searches as a viable, slick alternative. Very recently, Posterous popped up in discussions on reddit and I have to say I'm very intrigued. Bonus points: It will auto-post to my LiveJournal account so that anailia can continue to read my random ramblings and not have to switch websites!
But looking at the bevy of features offered by Posterous, I realized how there's room for even more. It seems to have the "export to other services" thing down pat, so I don't need to force my friends to join me there to see my stuff (thereby nixing some of the negative aspects that the network effect can have on startups). But now seeing that, I want to be able to "import other services" so that I don't have to login to LiveJournal, then Facebook, then Twitter, etc to see what all my friends are up to. Google Reader can almost do that, and has itself recently become more social. Friendfeed, however, seems to be the leader in this domain. Unfortunately, it also has the limitation that if you comment on an item in Friendfeed, that comment doesn't go back through to the linked service, so it's hard to have the conversation that the social web is supposed to facilitate. But certainly that's implementable. If only someone could do that, and somehow combine Google Reader or Friendfeed with Tumblr or Posterous, to give us the ability to read, post, comment, and share across ALL your social networks...
The best analysis I read is that the social web today is evolving like email did with the Internet before even "Web 1.0". Eventually, standards evolved such that anybody could send and receive emails to/from anybody and the world was a happy place. Hopefully the same thing can be done here towards the end of "Web 2.0".
While we're being imaginative, another analysis I read discusses how the social web is currently forcing people to have to adopt the same persona at home, work, family, and play. Everyone's heard of the teacher who was fired because they had some bad MySpace photo. So this ideal social web site would have to allow you to present your different personas to the world, so a potential employer can see your "work" persona while only your close friends can see those compromising photos from the other night, thus allowing you to effectively manage your dramatis personae
Possible? Desirable? What do you think?
That is, at least, capability-wise. But that's just the "technology" part. The "social" part comes from the other people using the service. In economics jargon, it's the network effect, with the classic example being the invention of the telephone: it's only useful if other people have one as well. Here the 800 pound gorilla in the room is Facebook, where everyone from that dude I never talked to in high school to my sister's cat to my aunts and uncles in New England all have an account, making it very socially valuable to have a Facebook account.
Okay, obviously, not everybody is on Facebook. Notably, my wife anailia refuses to get on Facebook, as does my father who often and vehemently declares that he won't be caught dead on it. Also, it isn't as natural to use Facebook for some aspects of social technology, such as long-form blog articles like what I'm writing here. Finally, there's the understandable privacy and security concerns plaguing Facebook, but that will be true of any large scale social website.
Despite all this, it's still I believe a net positive to maintain a Facebook account. I also have a Twitter account since it provides almost as much value and I have friends there that won't use Facebook. I even have a LinkedIn account that I make a half-hearted attempt to keep updated so as to look professional and all.
And finally of course I have this LiveJournal account to do this kind of long-form blogging. But LiveJournal has been slow to adapt to much of the social web innovation going on. For instance, it's hard to see updates such as comments on my friends' posts without clicking through to each post. Furthermore, LiveJournal's corporate ownership has changed hands a number of times in the last few years, before ending up with a Russian company which I'm not sure how far to trust. Finally, and perhaps the worst offense, LiveJournal has rolled out these yucky, yucky Flash and JavaScript ads for us free users which, I believe, discourage many people from reading posts here.
And then, I have to manage all of these personal sites, independently. How laborious! twitterfeed has been useful to help automate this, but Twitter's own limitations become glaringly obvious since it can't show picture, video, or text snippets, making my Facebook stream look rather drab. And recently, I just found out that LoudTwitter, which I used in order to ship my Twitter updates to loud_psyllogism quietly went down earlier this month.
So for all of these reasons, I've been investigating what else is "out there". Tumblr emerged early on in my web searches as a viable, slick alternative. Very recently, Posterous popped up in discussions on reddit and I have to say I'm very intrigued. Bonus points: It will auto-post to my LiveJournal account so that anailia can continue to read my random ramblings and not have to switch websites!
But looking at the bevy of features offered by Posterous, I realized how there's room for even more. It seems to have the "export to other services" thing down pat, so I don't need to force my friends to join me there to see my stuff (thereby nixing some of the negative aspects that the network effect can have on startups). But now seeing that, I want to be able to "import other services" so that I don't have to login to LiveJournal, then Facebook, then Twitter, etc to see what all my friends are up to. Google Reader can almost do that, and has itself recently become more social. Friendfeed, however, seems to be the leader in this domain. Unfortunately, it also has the limitation that if you comment on an item in Friendfeed, that comment doesn't go back through to the linked service, so it's hard to have the conversation that the social web is supposed to facilitate. But certainly that's implementable. If only someone could do that, and somehow combine Google Reader or Friendfeed with Tumblr or Posterous, to give us the ability to read, post, comment, and share across ALL your social networks...
The best analysis I read is that the social web today is evolving like email did with the Internet before even "Web 1.0". Eventually, standards evolved such that anybody could send and receive emails to/from anybody and the world was a happy place. Hopefully the same thing can be done here towards the end of "Web 2.0".
While we're being imaginative, another analysis I read discusses how the social web is currently forcing people to have to adopt the same persona at home, work, family, and play. Everyone's heard of the teacher who was fired because they had some bad MySpace photo. So this ideal social web site would have to allow you to present your different personas to the world, so a potential employer can see your "work" persona while only your close friends can see those compromising photos from the other night, thus allowing you to effectively manage your dramatis personae
Possible? Desirable? What do you think?