On March 13th, 20 years will have passed since Tim
Berners-Lee published "Information Management: A Proposal," which would become the blueprint for the World Wide Web. I thought I'd spend some time writing about social networking today to celebrate this momentous occasion, starting with microblogging.
Microblogging is that status update phenomena. Writing a short one-liner about what you're doing this moment, pushing it out to various services, and reading what others are doing this moment. It's easier to get into than blogging and it's quite trendy. And we couldn't do this before the web. Think about that -- can you imagine making conference calls to everyone you know every hour or so, informing people that you're having pizza for lunch?
At first, microblogging put me off. I would not have thought that I could have cared what someone was having for lunch, let alone overcome my self-consciousness enough to post what I'm having for lunch. However, I've come to see microblogging as one of the coolest innovations on the web. With microblogging, you receive breaking news on every level from the mundane (lunch) to the global (the fires in Australia). You also get personal content about news -- someone on a plane that caught fire on a runway in Denver tweets the entire experience, and we vicariously live that event through their tweets.
On 9/11/2001, I was working in an office in downtown San Francisco when we first heard rumours about the planes crashing into the World Trade Centers. We turned to the web before turning on the television to see if there were any breaking news... and there was some information, but it was limited. The TV and some phone calls to friends in NY (before the switchboards were jammed) provided the best information. I wonder how that event would have looked today, with the ability for people across the globe to contribute to the story via microblogging. It would have made the event even more personal -- we all look to each other to personalize great events: "Do you remember what you were doing on 9/11?"
Right now there are 3 ways I microblog, and I'm still trying to find the most salient one between Facebook, Plurk and Twitter. Ultimately, I use Plurk, because the conversations are threaded so it's easier to have conversations. However, my circle of friends on Plurk is small-- it hasn't really caught on with my usual social network, probably because of a few factors -- a limited API (so, other developers can't really hook into the service yet), a rather silly graphic interface (I think it adds charm), and this notion of karma, where you gain points for how much you plurk. But karma ends up being an annoyance, feeling like a punishment or encouraging you to plurk nonsense just to keep your karma up.
Twitter, is, of course, the de facto microblogging service. Twitter has a very extensive API, so developers can add all sorts of value to the service. I never liked Twitter much, despite most of my social network being on Twitter, since it's not threaded and hard to engage. Trying to have or follow a conversation frustrated me, so I only used it to see what others were up to -- not to tweet myself. That is, until I discovered TweetDeck. Now, it's easy to follow conversations on Twitter, and I'm using the service more.
I don't use Facebook status updates all that much, because Facebook annoys the hell out of me, but that's fodder for another post. What I do like about Facebook is that it's the new AOL; it's easy enough for anyone to get into, so everyone is there. People from high school are there. People from most moments in my life are there. Even my most technophobe of friends are there, so it's the best way to really keep track of what everyone I know is doing. Although, sometimes, that is more information than I ever really need.
Of course, the biggest gripe I have is keeping track of 3 different networks. It's easy enough to post to all of them centrally using ping.fm, but there is no one good central way to see the responses from all networks. That means being invested enough to check in frequently on all of them. I'm most likely to have Plurk up, since I'm the most comfortable there, but it's not optimal. In fact, since most people I know are not on Plurk, it's a bit exclusive. Then again, it's small enough that I have wonderful conversations without feeling oversaturated.
FriendFeed comes the closest to gathering everything up in one place. In fact, I really love using it. I can see my friend's various statuses on various networks all in one place, and that includes everything from their blogs, their Flickr photos, their tweets and plurks, Facebook, and a great many more services. I also like that you can engage right on FriendFeed by "liking" posts or making comments on them, or re-sharing them. I only wish that more people I know used the service. For now, I have "imaginary friends" there so that I can keep up with people who aren't using the service yet. But I can see that it provides the greatest depth of engagement of all the services out there, since it aggregates everything.
Next time, I'll write some about blogging. Until then, if you're on any of the above services, especially FriendFeed, hook up with me there.
