The Meat and Potatoes
Sharing and Communicating on the Interwebs
We’re currently in what can be described as a social gold rush. Services come and go fast enough to make your head spin. The hardest part for me has been trying to create logical structure and organization in my mind for how all these services are arranged in my life. I tend to need to add rules and logic to anything that I adopt. Every in its place. I thought it would be interesting to analyze how I use a few of my core services (this is just a fraction of the apps I use) and how they all fit into the grand tapestry that is my social landscape. I’ll break each service down into how I use them, and my “rule sets” for forming relationships within them. For some this will be obvious, but hopefully it will provide a little guidance for those trying to make sense of the whole social movement.
I use Facebook as an aggregator for all my other social services. I think of it as my social dashboard. Many of the social applications I frequent revolve around specific social objects. YouTube has video, Dopplr has travel, Flickr has photos. With Facebook, your friends (and all their activities on a macro level) ARE the social objects. As such, I use Platform to feed in the information from all the other services. I used to hate how all my social objects were spread out over multiple social networks, many of which were very obscure to my non-geek friends. Now that Facebook is so pervasive, I can expose this information to everyone as long as they have a Facebook account.
Who do I add as a friend?
- Anyone I’ve met personally (online or off) for whom I have a desire to create a richer relationship
Twitter serves two very powerful purposes for me that I didn’t acknowledge early on. First, it serves as peripheral vision as to what is going on within the industry and with my friends in general. On a more granular level, I’ll often search for people that are attending the same event as me to gain a more local peripheral vision. This proves invaluable at someplace like SXSW and its numerous parties. At any given time you have a social radar of what’s hot and what to avoid. Second, it provides me with a non-invasive way of finding opportunities to connect with someone I’d like to start a relationship with. I can follow them and lurk in the conversation connecting (via @) when the opportunity presents itself. Brilliant!
Who do I follow?
- Anyone local
- Those I want to kick off a relationship with
- Those who serve as a pulse for certain industries
- Anyone interesting
As a side note, I recently stopped reciprocally following people. With the @ replies showing up regardless of if I am following you, I don’t really deem it necessary. I don’t understand when people follow 5000+ people. They may be following them, but are they really paying attention? Some feel it is a gesture of goodwill. Honestly I get a lot more satisfaction getting a follow from some one I admire that I know does NOT auto-follow, than from some one who I know auto-follows *cough*. It actually has the opposite effect of what they are trying to achieve.
Instant Messenger
I don’t need to go into much detail here, but I added it to the list for a reason. I currently use Twitterific to interact with Twitter. It has a feature that updates my Adium status with each tweet. This is extremely valuable to me as it serves as another link from my geek world to my non-geek world. You’d be amazed at how much of your “geeky” information sparks interest in your non-geeky friends via your IM status (which I believe is where Twitter actually spawned from).
Who do I add?
- Those I want to have direct access to me regardless of what I am doing, this could be anyone but I am very selective.
Blog
My blog serves three purposes for me. First, it serves as a place for me to publicly define my views and opinions. Anyone that might want to collaborate with me will be able to get a very rich sense of who I am, and how I work by reading my blog. Second, it serves as a thought archive. It’s very satisfying to have a thought and publish it into history. My memory is rather weak, and capturing something in writing ensures that the subtle nuances of the thought don’t evaporate over time. And finally, my blog serves as a way for me to flesh out my thoughts. I’ve found that the best way for me to explore and expand on a small idea, is by writing about it.
Flickr
Flickr is the visual complement to my words. It’s a more literal window into my world. When used in conjunction with other services it really takes everything to place greater than the sum of its parts.
Who do I add as a contact?
- Anyone with interesting pictures, regardless of a pre-existing relationship
The Future
With XFN gaining steam it will be interesting to see how my current paradigm changes. I have a few ideas on how this might take form, but overall I imagine it will model the above paradigm with a “mothership” profile/aggregator being fed by niche streams. It is already starting to happen with services like FriendFeed, although I’m not a big fan of their execution. Plus the key to the “mothership” is pervasiveness and another geeky niche site is going to have a hard time becoming that hub. In any case, its an exciting time to be in the industry and I am excited to see where it heads.
Great read on the current state of social networks and how we’ve come to utilize them to define our online presence. I utilized Facebook for the very same reasons mentioned. In fact, one of the advantages this social service has over MySpace is easy integration of other services like Twitter, Flickr, etc.
I just wanted to say that I agree with you about the reciprocal follows at Twitter. I look at other people’s numbers and thought it was strange that people would be able to follow that many people at one time. We use it at work to let each other know what we are up to next, but in the summer when there is no work…I don’t use it much except to say something pleasant occasionally.
BTW - love your music at Scrapblog…Please add some more of those upbeat generic tunes.