Tech IT Easy » social media

Overpopulation in Facebook

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 09:44:02 +0000

To fill my quota of social media posts for the year, here’s a post about Facebook’s user base and real-world statistics.

I was inspired by a post in a Finnish blog on social media about how the Facebook’s penetration rate in certain Finnish age groups is way over 100%. From its comments, I found that similar analysis was already done for UK and US with same results and with some explanation for the reasons. However, with the amazing Eurostat and Socialbakers‘ Facebook data, we can do this stuff for many other countries with interesting results! (To save time, I used Socialbakers data which is grouped by age and so doesn’t give as accurate results as going manually through Facebook’s advertisement tool would.)

The interesting bit is that there are big differences between the European countries. The Nordics are similar to UK and US, but that’s about it.

Facebook penetration rates by age group in Europe (click to enlarge)

(You can download the Excel sheet from here)

To solve the problem of above 100% coverage in age groups, there are two explanations that first come to mind and were explored in the both previous blog posts. The first one is Facebook’s age limit, which does not allow people below 13 to join Facebook. The obvious workaround is to round your age up to get in. The other explanation are the people hitting mid-life crisis and rounding their age down. I’m quite the combination of these two explains most of the bulge in the 18-24 age group.

At a glance, it would seem that the 18-24 bulge depends on the overall penetration rate. It seems that once the penetration goes high enough (say, 30%), it basically means that your older siblings’ got their Facebook profiles as well as pretty much everyone else in your real-life social network who’s above 13, and naturally you want it too. Doesn’t take long before someone figures out that the age check is easy to bypass, and like everything that’s age-restricted at that age (like 18+ movies and games) it becomes cool and once it gathers some critical mass, the social norm becomes to fake your age so that you can be on Facebook with your classmates and so on. However, why isn’t this phenomenon more global but just restricted to countries with high penetration rate? There are advertisements in pretty much all media telling how this and that is on Facebook and almost every new electronic device can access Facebook … and yet you, at 12, are forbidden from where everyone else apparently is.

As for other reasons for these age groups going over 100%, there are many. One cause is plain and simple fake profiles (for fun or spam), but I would have assumed young people are equally dorks all around Europe. One of the bigger reasons is business accounts. Then there are the duplicate profiles some people have for the multiple identities they have and want to keep separate. Also, as a pet owner I know some people made profiles for their pets but this can’t really explain the discrepancy at all. The need for sepearate accounts is now alleviated by the (not so) new Pages, which are much more suitable for some of the use cases which previously “required” a duplicate account (against Facebook’s terms of service). However, none of these can explain the tens of thousands of mis-aged accounts, but explain why Facebook has been pushing for people to use Pages instead (and why your interactions with a Page are almost at par with an another Account).

However, it would much interesting to know what explains the differences between the countries. My hypothesis is that the bulge at 18-24 correlates with high overall penetration rate (ie. <13 year olds feel the social pressure to join, faking their age) and high mobile usage in teen age groups. This overcoverage seems to happen when the overall penetration rate is over 30%. One explanation might be that in countries where broadband / mobile phones / social networks are more of a norm, people have started to have fun with Facebook whereas in places where internet usage is scarce, people take it more seriously.

I would have expected the Dutch to be similar to the Nordics, because they do share many other demographical features. Like many other countries, there’s a national Facebook equivalent in the Netherlands, Hyves. I’ve beent old it was very popular in the past, but a lot of Dutch people are migrating to Facebook, the one true social network. This happened in Finland as well, where IRC-galleria has been declining in the recent past due to the “old” generation of teen users “upgrading” to Facebook and the “new” potential teen population jumping directly to Facebook. Another question mark to me is Estonia, where I would have imagined to see similar results as in the Nordics.

On the other hand, both the German- and Russian-speaking world seem to have quite strong “local” social networks. The idea that the language is the biggest barrier between social networks is quite interesting, but I don’t have any evidence for it. The guys at Xiha probably know better. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the near future Facebook borrows ideas from Xiha in their quest to world domination; today Facebook is still very much a product of American culture.

Of course, comparing Facebook’s data against population demographics does not give you any indication what the actual penetration rate is. A much better approach, which was used in the Finnish study was to compare the Facebook penetration rates toh a national survey on social media use by age groups (in Finnish, but here’s a summary in English). The results of this number-crunching was that there can be as many as 200 to 300 thousand accounts with a “wrong” age. Or put another way, that’s more than 10% of Finnish Facebook users.

For further study, Eurostat does offer figures on many internet-related demographics, including “Individuals using the Internet for uploading self-created content to any website to be shared” and “Individuals regularly using the Internet” but these seemed not to be grouped by age, but could be used to better assess the situation. But so what? As baekdal put it in his analysis, age is just a number and “if a person who is really 34 is indicating that she is only 24, you must threat her as a 24 your old person. That’s how old she feels, and that is the only thing you need to know.”

Naturally, the empricial evidence of his users’ behavior goes a bit against Zuckerberg’s idea of your Facebook identity being your only one. As the old saying goes, on the internet, no-one knows you’re a dog.

What’s social, anyway?

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 08:19:04 +0000

The social networks are the latest Flash intro animations, the new tag clouds. They are everywhere. However, what is actually social about all these services? It’s a really valid question, because apparently everything is social these days.

One aspect to this is to consider the available social objects in the service and what interactions are available. As a simple rule, a social object is something that usually has an URL and is often serialized as an entry in an RSS feed. Also, often the actor who created these social objects is also a social object.

I just love this picture.

Let’s take Twitter, for example. It’s as “social network” as they come if you asked anyone. But once you start to think about it, it offers very few social objects and even fewer interactions with them. Basically there’s just two, the social objects are the tweets themselves or an off-linked thing in them. On Twitter itself you couldn’t really interact with the latter directly until recently with the new user interface that let’s you see some of the linked content on twitter.com, but that’s still hardly interacting with them. At least with the tweets you have two interactions: reply (discuss) or retweet (like).

In contrast, Facebook offers way more social objects and allows users to push many more into Facebook. However, the available interactions are often limited to textual interactions (discussing) and liking. Of course, the web is mostly a textual medium so it’s not a surprise that our interaction through it is mostly textual. However, the services and the technology and design in them really limit our interactions with social objects. You’re bound to fail if you just try to replicate Facebook and not think how people have traditionally acted in social contexts.

I would not count services where the only social objects are the users themselves as social networks. Because what you then have is essentially a contact list and e-mail and IM have been already done. In this way, I really liked Google Wave as it made the whatever the people were working on the main social object. It just wasn’t really good at it. Some of the “social” games qualify, only because they add a high score next to names in that contact list.

Another aspect is to consider the value to the user. It really isn’t enough just to depend on critical mass and then let Metcalfe’s Law do the rest, because Facebook already did it. This is probably the only reason LinkedIn is still alive – their value proposition is that being part of the network increases your chances with your career. Another example is last.fm, which promises better music recommendations. Ideally, the social network should allow the user to accomplish something regarding the social objects in a better way.

This aspect is also the one that is easy to get backwards. Adding a “social network” to a service doesn’t automatically add value to the service. It depends on the social objects and if the social network adds any value to them and the users. (As a sidenote, isn’t it a misnomer to say to “add” a social network, isn’t the social aspect always there, but you just “utilize” it?) Many of the various Twitter and Facebook integrations haven’t really increased a services value to me. For example, Spotify’s Facebook integration just lets me see somewhat useless information about what they listen to (unlike, say, last.fm). Also that the major Finnish newspaper shows on its front page what articles my friends have “liked” via Facebook has been less than useful for me so far (it just distracts). On the other hand, adding social features to a service like Nike+ sounds like it could improve a user’s motivation for running – there’s nothing like pure social pressure.

The third, and these days the most prevalent aspect is the value to the network’s owner. Of course, in the ideal world the network would be owned by the users, but we do live in a capitalistic system. The most blatant example of this has to be Apple’s Ping, which is essentially a social network to sell more songs on iTunes. The social objects are the songs, albums and artists on iTunes, which the users can interact to make them visible to their friends. And they can follow products (the artists). It’s just as sociopathic as you would expect from Mr. Jobs. One could argue that Ping is the “naked” social network, cutting all the happy-happy-joy-joy bullshit.

In addition to encouraging your users to pimp your stuff in hope of new business (like Ping and Zynga), the other value in the network is the value you get from an exit. Thanks to Metcalfe’s Law, your company is more valuable the more users you have – but you can also try to do something the others haven’t been able. No doubt many founders of the new, smaller social networks hope to have a feature that makes them the next YouTube, Friendfeed or Groupon. The danger here is of course fragmentation and the current players developing the features in-house (see Foursquare, Brightkite and others whose only magic component was location).

The most curious thing is that most “social” networks are forums where you limit the interaction of the social objects to a list of “friends”. The only way iTunes’ Ping really differs from Amazon’s venerable Listmania is that the latter is visible to all. Is it really social to narrow your world-view to just what your friends or companies who manufacture your favorite products share with you? Also, doesn’t it really bother you that these services are designed to let us socialize using their objects (products)?

Consider this blog post, for example. If this was a Facebook note, or a Buzz write-up, it would be mostly visible to just to people that I consider friends by each network’s definition of a friend. Even worse, the only people able to comment on this would be the aforementioned friends. It’s a brave new world.

The Annual Kari Silvennoinen is out!

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 07:21:16 +0000

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.

URL as a metric for social object’s value (Weekend rambling)

Kari Silvennoinen — Sun, 30 May 2010 07:13:13 +0000

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.

RSS is far from dead, long live web feeds

Kari Silvennoinen — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:51:09 +0000

Recently another round of discussion has started on the web about how RSS is riding to the sunset. I think there is some irony that most of us were alerted to these posts either from our feed reader or other aggregation site like Techmeme.

Your newspaper doesn't show unread count, so why does your feed reader?

This time the debate originate from a blog post at ZDNet. And I think that as long as the title of the post was that RSS readers are becoming meaningless, the post makes some sense. And it’s true, there’s not much innovation in RSS readers these days and some of the design mistakes were listed here. The idea that a user imports a RSS document and reads just it, that’s dead. We’re still far from what’s possible when computers work on feeds.

Another thing this means is that as feeds become more and more part of the web’s infrastructure (see for example Google’s GData), it’s not really interesting for end-users. This in turn means that there just isn’t any money in it. For certain websites, this of course equals to that tech being dead.

One of the blunders in feeds was the dichotomy between RSS and Atom standards. While the former is used today as an umbrella term for feeds in general, it’s really, really inferior to the latter. The problem with Atom is that it came late to the game and while it can be as simple as RSS, but it can also be used for many other things than just blog posts and most RSS readers couldn’t be bothered. This is why the RSS format is dead in the water. The Atom format is much more flexible and is used in many other ways than just one-way polling (see above-mentioned GData for example).

Feeds are here to stay, they are not Web 1.0 stuff, but an integral part of Web 3.0. They just can be so much more than “seeing what’s new”. A site like Techmeme could not exist without feeds. It’s just that we haven’t unlocked the potential. It’s not sexy and it might negatively affect web ad revenues. This is why I think Techmeme shines, just like Friendfeed; they follow the “River of news” approach to new items that was proposed early on. Other readers, like most desktop apps and Google Reader, put new items into an inbox, pretending that each new item has an equal value to us.

Feeds are really immature technology, we’re still unsure about formats and how to consume feeds. And, on top of it all, how could we use this technology the improve the experience of having a discussion on the web. I propose we take a look to ancient computer history.

Before the Internet, on the dial-up BBS services it was a common due to the call costs to download all the new discussions on that box’s forums to your “offline reader” and disconnect. One could then peacefully go through and answer to any threads that were interesting and upload these back to the BBS. But it wasn’t limited to just one board, an offline reader was one inbox for all your discussion on all your BBS boxes. The Usenet newsgroups could be “consumed” using a similar logic. But, today, as Diaz says, our “sources of for reading material are scattered across the Web” and this approach doesn’t work right now. But it could in the future.

I’m not sure that we can stop and concentrate on discussion anymore, because Facebook and Twitter have made “discussions” move so quickly that concentrating on just one is impossible. But if we could go back to those more peaceful times, I’d like to have these “offline readers” back. Of course, they wouldn’t need to be offline today, but real-time.

Discussion on the web is not in good health. It’s scattered and disjointed. I’m not calling for a centralized solution, I’m looking for a standardized solution – something that’s already possible with Atom. We subscribe to blog posts, but we don’t subscribe to the comments. It’s a hassle even if the blog you read happens to use WordPress’ e-mail subscriptions or Disqus, Intense Debate or some other solution.

There are some major obstacles, one of them being that the income of sites are tied to ad impressions. The other huge problem is that we need to lay down the infrastructure first. Pretty much all sites support the one-way RSS today, but only a handful support Atom Publishing Protocol (which is a different thing from the simple feed itself). Also, none of the forum software, as far as I know, support anything like this. Instead of using the web interface, it would be possible to access the discussions using another, more suitable interface. Most of blogging tools are APP aware, though.

We don’t listen to music by going to individual bands’ websites, we have collected our music to a single source (be it iTunes, Spotify, Winamp or something else). I don’t know about Google Reader’s long term roadmap, but it wouldn’t surprise me if something like participating to comments is there. Yes, you can “like”, “share” and “comment” the posts there, just like in Friendfeed et al., but you can’t participate to the discussion on the original site.

We can rebuild discussions on the web. We have the technology.

Image by FastIcon.com

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Theory: Why No One Cares about Video on the Internet

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:51:51 +0000

I’ve long been an anti-fanboy of online video, for some reasons that I already mentioned. As such, I did not expect a strong response on my recent request for collaborative video recording ideas. Similarly, other efforts at discussing online video production, a topic that I personally find interesting, on Friendfeed and with friends, have been met with little enthusiasm.

So, I have come to the personal conclusion that online video is something that people simply don’t care about (very much). Here are a few reasons why:

No success-story on the web: Youtube was acquired by Google, which does not prove its business-model; Loic LeMeur (yes, that LeWeb ’08 guy) abandoned his video-idea, pretty much; The promising Stage6 by the DivX people was abandoned due to, I believe, excessive illegal content being posted on it, etc. etc. OK, the French Dailymotion is no. 1 on Techcrunch’s new Ranking of European hot startups, but even that service isn’t what I would call the perfect implementation of a video service. As a matter of fact, the only thing that seems to work out is television, Hulu (basically television and US only), and Piracy.
Bandwidth: even though bandwidth is clearly increasing, it is still, for any business that wants to set up its own video service, a dramatic weight to carry, at least compared to other content on the web. And what if you want to upload your own video? Prepare to have to wait for a while.
Does not speak our language: as I mentioned in my previous “hate-post”, the web is largely text-based and the often non-indexability of video means that it does not interoperate with the most-used web-application: Search.
Unforgivingly immersive: I listen to audio-podcasts and music all the time, because it’s compatible with the rest of my lifestyle, e.g. travelling/communiting or doing exercise. You have to give all your attention to video, which I consider a barrier to entry for our A.D.D.-infested society.
Expensive to produce video (?): a question-mark there because obviously hardware-costs are falling. But still expensive, as it’s complicated and requires both expensive (in terms of time and money) training, patience (a time-cost) while editing, and the ability to work with specialised (and often expensive) video-editing software.
Unforgivingly intrusive: It took me a long time to adopt a webcam, until it was basically built into my laptop. I still don’t like to have to dress (up) and make up my hair just to have a conversation, and all that, even though now I will rarely Skype without it. But I am a, tongue in cheek, modern man, which I can’t say for many of my peers.

These and more reasons is why I suspect that Online Video is not a hot topic and might perhaps never be. If you’re in the midst of an online video startup, I don’t know what to tell you, except I hope it radically improves on what has come before.

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of The Guardian)

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The Future of Television, Facebook it isn’t.

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:31:57 +0000

I don’t know if anyone of you caught the CNN+Facebook stunt two days ago, where the, I guess burial (?) of Micheal Jackson was shown live on CNN.com, next to a stream of Facebook status updates on the same screen. If I say “Micheal, we LOVE you,” I think you get the general idea of how that went. The CNN-part was beautiful, don’t get me wrong, Stevie Wonder was singing and he rocked. But somehow those two, Social Media with Old Media, didn’t seem to mix at all.

In the Netherlands, when I grew up, we had a TV-station, called The Box (later bought up by MTV, which now has a Music-TV-monopoly in the Netherlands), which allowed people to sms in and request songs. That later evolved to a system, that still exists, I think, of sending messages via sms to the channel, which would play while a song was playing. If I say “Dutch boy or girl, I LOVE you,” I think you get the general idea of how that went.

I can see the attraction. It must be incredibly addictive to try and get your message on the air, to get your 140 characters of fame. And it felt exactly the same with the Facebook+CNN thing, where it seemed more like Facebookers were competing for air-time with themselves and with the unforgiving flow of the live-video station.

As a TV-sceptic—I’ve stopped owning a TV as an adult, and switched to the more geeky (I know…) XBMCs and the internet—I would be more than happy to see this medium go, but I also understand that this 79 year old tradition of sitting absolutely still with a TV-dinner will not go without a fight. The Micheal Jackson + TMZ scoop aside, Big Media still has a higher budget to be quicker and (maybe!) more relevant than small & new Media alternatives are.

Is the Internet the direction to take, however? I think I just made a case that the, still addictive quality of a few seconds of fame (Twitter is the perfect example that we haven’t evolved passed that yet), makes for a somewhat effective marketing strategy for Big Media.

I think that TV is also relentless and monotonous. It does not allow you to switch contexts, it’s a non-stop flow of information, and it doesn’t care about making you waste 15 min. of each hour with senseless advertising. In that sense, it is the complete anti-thesis of the Internet, which has already delivered on the promise of complete user-control (compared to the Old status quo, at least). TV doesn’t care about you, except for your continued presence in front of the tube, and while Internet companies really want the same, we at least have found ways to get around that.

In that sense, I think that anyone with some sense of wanting to keep control over their own life, will continue to turn away from TV. I like watching it, don’t get me wrong, but on my own time and without commercials. The future of Television will either to stay unchanged, reserved for the traditional folk too tired to want to think / interact, or it will be a mash-up of video (e.g. I have 3 min. to waste, I want Stevie Wonder only, without the MJ burial thanks, and on my watch television.)

End musing.
Vincent (can’t stop signing my name, sorry, (my) blogging feels more like writing a letter than anything else.)

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Is it time for a more responsible internet?

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:39:35 +0000

On Friendfeed, we were discussing the hate that Micheal Arrington has been receiving and what caused it all. My stance was that, while I really have nothing against Arrington and think he’s an intelligent human being, the fact that he writes often opinionated posts on Techcrunch, one of the most well-read blogs on the internet, means that he will be exposed to much criticism.

I called it “many little needles can make for a sharp object,” and it made me wonder about whether it is even possible to avoid doing this to people. Some of use have gotten used to posting much of our thoughts and opinions online, so much so that we may eventually and unconsciously be provoking a powerful reaction that we are not expecting.

In a way, it’s very easy to distance yourself from other people online. On Twitter, you can unsubscribe from people who tweet too much or the wrong content. Same on other social networks. On blogs, you can easily insult other bloggers, or post an insulting comment anonymously. People are, by their nature imperfect, but to manage information overload (my excuse) we seek to find the perfect individual, who will only post interesting content. No such person exists, except maybe as an organisation, but those are few and far between.

On the other side of the fence, I wonder about Arrington’s words today, where he notes that people are starting to become more open about their insults, using their own name (ironic, since his own post could be construed as such). And how a few well-placed insults can quickly lead to a mob-like movement.

Will we eventually reach a threshold? Will something drastic happen that will make us all just shut up? Will the “social” internet implode at some point because someone got fired, or worse, dies? Who is watching the watchmen—the watchmen being you and me, who are supposedly, by our clicks, diggs, comments, and “voices,” regulating who is being read or not; is someone regulating us?

OK, enough insidious posting for one evening, which is, incidentally, not my style at all. I kind of fear getting an answer to these questions.
Vincent

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What I'd like: a spoiler-and annoyance-free web

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:06:14 +0000

I seem to have made some people upset by a comment thread I started on Friendfeed yesterday. My stance was as follows:

The reason being that Friendfeed has become very forum-like with people forming relationships, writing how Friendfeed changed their life, how they just had triplets, etc. etc.… all stuff an a**h*le like me doesn’t care about.

Other “thoughts” were about the super-spammy #spymaster tag…

Apparently this spymaster is the new hot techcrunch-worthy thing on the internet…

…and about the problem of avoiding spoilers about movies when the inter-continental release-date are so drastically different:

I hate, hate, hate it when people spoil movies or books or anything really.

What all of these problems have in common that the web is a fairly unfiltered mess of vocal thoughts, opinions, and of course spam. With user-generated content far surpassing regulated media (you know, the kind where you need a degree and sources to write an article…), it’s nearly impossible not to come across something annoying.

What I’d like:
Simply: an extension for Firefox (I guess…) that prevents you from seeing things that you put on a block-list. It has to be a little intelligent. For instance, if before seeing the Star Trek movie, I’d like to not read about it, it should be able to identify whole paragraphs or blog posts that deal with this topic.

More simply, banning any tweet that mentions the #spymaster tag or otherwise, etc. etc. And more complex, the ability to ban content about babies and all things that evil people like me don’t want polluting their rss-feeds.

Too much to ask? I don’t know. Too rude to ask? Probably… Logical? Definitely.

Vincent

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If you're following me on Twitter and I'm not following you, it's because…

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 20 May 2009 08:31:27 +0000

…We haven’t exchanged a single word with each other. I’m trying a new thing and my inspiration for this is a picture I took from the latest Wired “Mystery” edition.

Apart from it being a smart picture, what I found more interesting is how the effect was achieved. Note the amount of people that Mr. sampotts is following, ca. 50. Having previously followed over 200 (now shrunk down to ca. 35), it was impossible for me to “listen” to a single word people were saying. My only two pieces of salvation were if you @vincentvw’d me (in which case an rss-feed would catch it) or if I added you to Friendfeed, where you can set up friendlists and place (imaginary) friends from Twitter inside.

Twitter is badly designed for this kind of collaborative effort, unless you minimise the amount of people you follow or find workarounds. Even so, those workarounds mean that you cheat 80% of your “friends” as you just push them into a corner where you listen to them less or not at all. E.g. on Friendfeed, I “follow” ca. 300 people, but really only read about 5. I’m sure 90% of Friendfeed users do the same.

My method, for now, is to restrict myself to people whose blog I read or with whom I chat (hopefully) on a regular basis. In the future, perhaps I’ll add a few people that I want to talk to, we’ll see. But the ultimate aim is to get the same effect that sampotts has, that I can ask a question and get answers from the hive mind.

If you remember, that was my vision of Twitter the first time I wrote about it on Tech IT Easy, nearly two years ago. I hope I can regain some of that innocent utopian vision.

For now, the best way to get me to follow you, is to say (smart) things to me, via Twitter, mail, this blog, or in real life!

Vincent

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