Real Men Don’t Twitter
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on June 10, 2009 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009Is Twitter a vast nation of sheep led by a handful of loud-mouth marketers and celebrities?
Take any large group of people, say, a cocktail party. Inevitably, there will be one or two loudmouths that draw a circle of listeners, while most people wander and mingle, maybe forming small, more civil two-way conversations. In my view, this remains Twitter’s biggest obstacle to broader adoption: it’s a huge herd of sheep. 80 Percent Of Accounts Have Fewer Than 10 Followers, or as this Harvard Business blog puts it, Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets. The article also points out that Twitter reverses the usual social network pattern in which men mostly follow women they don’t know, and women follow women they do know. Additionally, since Twitter is mostly a one-way broadcast medium, it draws a tremendous number of multilevel marketing and tech guru types who spam the system. I’ve been saying for a while that Twitter would max out somewhere around the number of Blackberry users, who number around 21 million users as of May 2009. These numbers seem to indicate Twitter is at least leveling off, and guess what? It’s just under 20 million users. I chose this number a little arbitrarily based on the idea that Twitter is such a perfect fit for mobile device users. I personally have used Twitter as an MLM tool, as mentioned above, but otherwise would only find it useful if I worked with a large, mobile work force of some kind. For personal use, it just has little appeal. Don’t listen to me though, Twitter to your heart’s content. In fact, here are 10 tools to help you do it better. Do you use Twitter? I’d love to hear about how and why.
Is There Life After Facebook?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on May 29, 2009 by admin in Technology
Friday, May 29th, 2009And are you tragically un-hip if you keep using it? Don’t worry. We have ideas for you.
Well, apparently not, if you’re over 55. However, there are some interesting things going on out there. For one, Microsoft is launching Bing, their new “Decision Engine”. Make sure you understand the distinction, they’re worried that you’ll think it’s just another search engine. Nope, this one will make decisions for you. Finally. I’ve been waiting for something that does that. Although it’s easy to hate Microsoft, I’m personally looking forward to trying it. Google, for all its warm, fuzzy, Googliness, has become the bane of my existence when it comes to search. And what about Twitter? Well I and many people who are smarter than I am feel it’s already peaking. Which means, in a way, that it has a lot of life left in it, but some users will stay on board, many stop using it quickly, and most importantly, the hip people leave when the masses move in. Maybe the ability to search Tweets with tools like Topsy will broaden the interest. My bet? Back to the awesome Googliness. One of the main things that draws people and retains them with Facebook is the multitude of methods to interact easily. Unfortunately, Facebook fails rather miserably with things like chat functionality and a more versatile “inbox”, both of which should have been a no-brainer, in my opinion. A strong possible contender here is Google Wave, which, if they can bundle it all together flexibly with tools like Google Voice or PhoneVite would be a real winner. I would be ecstatic if a networking tool like Facebook allowed me to easily switch from a chat or inbox dialog to a cellphone voice or text dialog. So the questions arise. Am I pathetically uncool if I keep using Facebook? Where are you going after Facebook?
It’s Okay To Be A Twitter Quitter
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on May 3, 2009 by admin in Technology
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009The future of the social web? Real time search, recommendation tools, and better aggregation.
My head’s going to explode if one more person tells me why Twitter is the next big thing, or uses the term Google Killer or Facebook Killer. It’s just my opinion, of course, but anybody who claims to know where the web and social networks are headed on a granular level is just regurgitating what they read on tech blogs, or is someone you’d like to make friends with, because they will soon be very, very rich. All the same, this is a pretty interesting time for the web. The obvious trends right now are real time search, social networking, and recommendation tools. When someone makes the simplistic statement that Twitter’s the “next big thing” after Facebook, they’re missing three profoundly important points: 1.) The services are completely different in nature; one is a closed, user-defined network, the other is an outward-flowing stream of information available to anyone. 2.) An estimated 60% of users stop using twitter after one month, and 3). The “next big thing” is already happening. Most would agree that the next big thing is some version of the open web, and if you think about it, that’s what a lot of us are striving for: some kind of reintegration of all the services we’re using. That’s why one of the coolest short-term “Twitter Killers” is making such a splash right now; Seesmic Desktop just added Facebook feeds to the existing tools they had for Twitter. Between Seesmic Desktop and services like NutshellMail, you should at least be able to get your lifestreams under control. I’m personally considering a more effective alternative: unplugging
Are You A Facebook “Friend Whore”?
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on February 14, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Saturday, February 14th, 2009Or are you just REALLY popular?
I was picking on a friend recently about the fact that he had over 300 friends on Facebook. I asked him “Honestly, how many of those people could you or would you call for lunch this week?” He had to admit the number was a little lower than 300 people. Which got me thinking: what is a normal number of friends to have on Facebook? I’m reasonably well-networked in real life and have done a fair amount of events planning, so I’m acutely aware that a reasonably sociable person has less than ten close friends, and a range of acquaintances that typically extends to around 150 people. I’ve only used my Facebook account regularly for a few weeks, have around 60 “friends”, and am about to start adding and deleting with a little more focus. According to various small-scale studies, having an excessively large number of friends on Facebook suggests that one may have poor social judgment or be narcissistic. Any attempt to establish an optimal number of Facebook friends will have to factor in things like age, social class, and whether the person was an early user, when Facebook was college-only. These early users may have hundreds of friends, in spite of the fact that they rarely use the site. And then there are trophy friends to consider. How many friends do you have? What are they really worth? Well, according to this article, about 37 cents.
This Twit Won’t Twitter
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on February 5, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Thursday, February 5th, 2009I’ve created sample accounts on over thirty social networking sites as research for clients, which is why I’ve watched the recent explosion on Facebook of users over forty with considerable amusement*. I remember well the feeling I got when, as an 18-year-old, I went from being so far on the fringe of pop culture that [...]
I’ve created sample accounts on over thirty social networking sites as research for clients, which is why I’ve watched the recent explosion on Facebook of users over forty with considerable amusement*. I remember well the feeling I got when, as an 18-year-old, I went from being so far on the fringe of pop culture that there wasn’t a name for it, to suddenly being called “Punk” by “normal” people. Just about as soon as I got used to the idea that maybe I WAS punk, everyone suddenly started taking the worst aspects of whatever I was and basing whole music genres and movies on it. Before I knew it, my friends and I had gotten normal just to avoid the creepy older people that were mimicking us. This must be a little bit like what it feels like to be an 18-24 year old MySpace or FaceBook user the past few years. First they had to watch the oldsters creep in on MySpace, pimping out their pages like high-schoolers. Recently MySpace feels like 4am at a 30-year high school reunion; only the socially inept and drunk late-comers are still hanging around. Facebook should be suffering a similar fate by mid-year, leaving kids to Twitter desperately in a difficult economy. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see new text message pricing plans that gouge these users. I for one don’t see myself opening my mobile device up to this kind of shenanigans, causing the return of the nearly-extinct fail whale (pictured here). Maybe I’ll take up knitting and join Ravelry. Any suggestions for where to go with my social networking addiction?
*Confession: I’ve used Facebook addictively the last few weeks myself.