I’ve been on the road recently with very spotty wifi access and that’s when Twitter really breaks down. You’re left without context because most tweets aren’t self-standing but a link to a URL shortener giving no idea what’s going on. If you’re not knee deep in the “social”, Twitter seems like a mish-mash of ideas and links and bot posts. Then again, that what the web is: links to other places. However, how we use it and what we link to seems to have changed.

Yo dawg, I heard you like news aggregation so I put a news aggregator in your news aggregator so you can read social media while you read social media.

People are using services that make Twitter a duct-taped-together activity stream. I prefer to hear people’s ideas instead of being carpet bombed with bot notifications from the social media service du jour. But this isn’t exclusive to Twitter, Facebook took this further with web-wide likes and Facebook Connect. Your activity on the web is a feature on Facebook and they encourage you to dump everything there. Fortunately I can’t control what other people do, but a little bit of the Web dies every time someone publishes that stuff. That’s how I feel, but that’s the beauty of the Web: It’s a playground for experimentation. Too bad it feels like there’s not that much experimentation going on except on the business case side of the Web.

I rarely cross-post what I share/do on the various services. I don’t assume you’re stupid, if you want to know what links I find interesting, don’t expect them on my Twitter feed but on my Google Reader. If you want to know about my runs, I’m on Nike+. If you’re interested in what I read, or something else – well, there’s an app that isn’t Twitter for that. Sure, that’s more work for you if you want to know about everything I do but I don’t expect you to be. I don’t have to promote myself on the web – I have a nice day job and as a Finn I’m quite introverted anyway.

Also, if you guys haven’t yet figured it out – Google’s social network is the Web. And it will fail on your usual Web 2.0 metrics, because people don’t want platforms – they want applications. This is what happened with Google Buzz.

I ran a mile! Then I spent two hours promoting it on the web.

As I alluded previosuly, people use Twitter and Facebook as a make-shift Activity Streams because they just work well enough. Google Buzz was an early attempt to the next gen, but it failed miserably. It was complex, it was a platform and no one got the point. It offered advantages over Facebook and Twitter only on infrastructure level, not for the user. I’m quite certain that Google continues on this path, because there’s no reason to make a yet another Orkut when it seems that the future of Facebook and Twitter are activity updates. Better to control those updates than the services where they are published. Also, most of that stuff is just noise. In the future, the real business is filtering and exploiting those little snippets of information, not just dumbly showing them.

This hopefully could also mark the end of the dark age of “social media”, where we ignored the complexities of human social behavior and assuming that before “social media” everything was asocial. When someone can go and say that the end of social gaming is near because all gaming will be social – are you fucking kidding me? At what point in time were games missing a social aspect? Or did these guys only play Solitaire and Minesweeper? The Internet is after all a tool. It’s a delusion to believe we have required social enlightenment through Facebook when a compelling case can be made be against it. Repeat after me: you are not how many friends you have on Facebook, you’re not your LinkedIn profile, you’re not your fucking tweets, …

For example, Facebook gives us just one identity. This is by design and Mark Zuckerberg believes this is the right way to go forward. He and Facebook prefers that identity is our most low common denominator identity, probably so that they can sell more eyeballs to “targeted” ads. That might be reason why Facebook is boring, everyone is just showing their most bland identity they are willing to show to strangers.

On the web, people don’t always want to be “themselves” – or even social. Play some multiplayer games, preferably a FPS on a console – like Call of Duty: MW on PS3 – and you’ll quickly see the dark side of human psyche, also known as Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Blizzard tried to solve the problem as an engineering problem and attempted to force people to use their real names, this was very quickly shot down by users. On the internet, some of us want to be DeathSpank, the Orc slayer.

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A part in the series of just writing out an idea and rambling on it on this blog.

One of the core architectural big ideas of the web is that each resource, or web page has an URL or a link, and other pages can link to them. However, in the “social media” reiteration, these links are called “permalinks” in a strange doublespeak way as the ordinary Web 0.1 links were meant to be permanent as well and, instead, “link rot” seems to be more prevalent as ever with short-url services and other strange URL schemes.

I am of the opinion that we make a great injustice to discussion on the web by calling those things that hang on the bottom of web pages (and hence do have URLs) “comments” and, as non-entities of the web, only rarely have URLs of their own (even of the hash-variety). This is the second injustice. It is often that in these “comments” there are real gems, but you can’t refer to them with any direct link.

The worst offender, unsurprisingly, is Facebook, which from a cultural-historical viewpoint is going to be a huge black hole. It is in a stark constrat to Twitter, where each tweet has an URL. There are many social “objects” on Facebook that are completely inactionable and this is completely against the very nature of the Web. Technically, with stuff like Activity Streams, it’s possible to “like” a “like” and so on, but this isn’t possible from most social network tools’ user interface.

From the Web point of view, having URL for each tweet might be one reason why Twitter is gaining more steam and Facebook is struggling. Twitter is actively becoming a part of the Web, while Facebook is actively trying to turn the Web into Facebook (see Open Graph and Wikipedia-entry Pages) – this walled garden -strategy has always failed on the web, but it hasn’t stopped businesses from trying.

My thinking might be biased because I’m a firm believer in the open web and the idea that the web promotes openness and sharing of ideas, but not in the way Facebook has recently tried to open its users’ identities and “life streams” to the world. I believe the web is a great platform for collaboration and it’s a shame that while (as Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out) there is no shortage of URLs, we don’t give them out to all objects that live on the web.

However, the one exception that I’m willing to make are YouTube comments, which in number exceed the amount of information (with a loose definition of “information) in the library of Alexandria, but loss of which absolutely no-one would cry over.

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