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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Seems like Facebook is teh new evil. The new Microsoft of the nerd epic. The biblical mark of the beast, the Windows-logo, has been replaced by Facebook’s like-button on a website.

But seriously. Facebook’s grab of their users is getting quite out of hand. Exposing more and more of stuff that could be argued to be personal information, pimping that stuff to other sites and companies… it’s not cool and it’s pretty dark in the grey area of abusing their users’ respect. The “evolution” of Facebook’s concept of privacy was best illustrated by Matt McKeon’s neat infographic.

You know these pics as lolcats, but majority of Facebookers just think they are cute.

If you look at the new things Facebook is developing it’s easy to start thinking what are the real benefits to users? It’s all just exploitation. But that’s just the business model for web 2.0 social. Companies are willing to pay a lot to know what their target demographics like and how they behave and lots of other metrics that supposedly make their marketing more effective. They also want to have “presence” on the “social”. I have no experience with marketing industry so I’ve no idea how well this works.

Many internet pioneers were against any first legislation involving Internet, because the Internet was somehow “different”. They felt that these laws would restrict the “freedom” of the whole Internet. Yet, it’s clear that at least our consumer protection and privacy laws are not good enough. The German Federal Minister of Consumer Protection sent a letter to Facebook where her threat was that she’d get out of Facebook if Zuckerberg and his company don’t start to respect users’ privacy more. Seriously, is this how toothless even European consumer protection agencies are against Facebook’s rampant power grab?

One of the weaknesses of Facebook is that they’re centralized. This is why Google, Yahoo et al are working hard on social web that’s distributed. The problem is that this is not a competition where the best technology wins. So what if “web industry leaders” are quitting Facebook? Most of the Facebook’s userbase don’t know who they are and don’t care.

The strength of Facebook at this point is that it’s what pretty much everyone and their parents know how to use on the web. Even otherwise computer illiterate people feel at home with Facebook, like the ReadWriteWeb’s article on Facebook that people ended up when they searched for “facebook login” on Google demonstrated. Whatever the pioneers, early adopters, or any other web power users do to create “anti-Facebooks” does not matter, especially on the short term.

The internet has always been a scary place for newbies and it’s a shame how easily scammers can use Facebook as an attack vector. All the groups and pages that advertise free Farmville cash or an iPad for just doing these simple steps that compromise the whole computer… The problem is that it is difficult to distinguish these from the marketing agencies’ competitions on who can create the most “liked” “viral” astroturfed page and also by the simple fact that people tend to trust their friends’ judgment so these scams can get easily spread through the “social”.

From the web power users’ viewpoint the future is either a more interactive web, or the wet dream of every SEO and internet marketing expert – a web that stinks and where its users are just a crop for marketing analytics. We are idealistic and tend to believe in the power of technology, but the web is a commercial venture. Google isn’t exactly our friend (not even using the web 2.0 definition of the word), but it looks it is in their best interest to push for the same cause – a more open web.

It’s not that Google and others are doing this out of kindness for web users. It just makes business sense for them, Google makes money when more people use the web. And it’s not like Facebook is inherently evil – the exploitation of their userbase is a natural progression for any social network business, especially because their users are not willing to pay for the service in any direct fashion.

We can’t bluff Facebook about quitting our accounts, because we are not going to hurt ourselves here and they know it. For its users, Facebook does add value. But, there are limits on how much they can exploit this fact. What Google and others are trying to do is make Facebook redundant, unnecessary – but they’re still far from this goal.

This is why I would expect more from the people we have appointed to take care of our personal information in the society, the different national and international data protection agencies. Not just empty threats like Mrs. Aigner’s.

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Have you ever noticed, the increasing interest of your old Aunts  in facebook or other social networking websites? Have you ever noticed, people updating their status messages (provoking conversations and chitchats). I have observed these kind of behavior and sometimes participated in these conversations as well. But where am I heading with all this? Letme ask you a question, How social are you?

Answer comes from a researcher Josh Bernoff who noted a “new behavior” in patterns of social technology usage by the people, and made a new category to describe such users: “conversationalists.” Bernoff defines conversationalists as “people who update their social network status to converse” on at least a weekly basis. According to Forrester surveys, the category is 56 percent female, more so than any other group, with 70 percent aged 30 and older. All of which fits quite nicely with my anecdotal evidence.

They take a close look at the social and demographic structure of the social web population ( To be more exhaustive and close to accurately model the user behavior, they analyzed the profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors).  The categorization of users is different than  Technorati’s statistics which mostly focus on raw blog growth numbers and structural features of the blogosphere.

P.S: Note that participation at one level may or may not overlap with the participation at other levels — so the ratios sum up to over 100%.

I am trying to explain as well as compare the increase and change in the user behavior for two years of their research. Results for previous year research can be found here.

Creators publish blogs, maintain Web pages, or upload videos to sites like YouTube at least once per month. Creators include just 24% of the adult online population. Creators are generally youngsters the average age of adult users is 39 — but are evenly split between men and women. This percent in year 2007 was just 13%.

Critics participate in either of two ways commenting on blogs or posting ratings and reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Critics represent 37% of all adult online consumers and on average are several years older than Creators. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Collectors create metadata that’s shared with the entire community, e.g. by saving URLs on a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or using RSS feeds on Bloglines. Collectors represent 20% of the adult online population and are the most male-dominated of all the Social Technographics groups. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Joiners use a social networking site like MySpace.com or Facebook. Joiners represent 59% of the adult online population and are the youngest of the Social Technographics groups. They are highly likely to engage in other Social Computing activities — 59% also read blogs, while 30% publish blogs. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Spectators represent 70% of the adult online population and are slightly more likely to be women and have the lowest household income of all the social Technographics groups. The most common activity for Spectators is reading blogs, with only a small overlap with users who watch peer-generated video on sites like YouTube. This percent in year 2007 was just 33%.

Inactives. Today, 17% of online adults do not participate at all in social computing activities. These Inactives have an average age of 50, are more likely to be women, and are much less likely to consider themselves leaders or tell their friends about products that interest them. This percent in year 2007 was 52%.

What we see from the above classification is a drastic change in behaviour of online users in last two years, most changes are directed towards the Inactives and Spectators. So now next time if you see your aunt updating her status message in Facebook, consider her among the new Joiners to the world of social networking.

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

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(Hi, it’s Cecil here. A french version of this post is available on Heavy Mental)

Bertrand Duperrin explains in a quite remarkable post the risk of backslash when using standard web 2.0 key words while presenting social networks to a new audience. The reason is : there could be some misunderstanding from the audience.

Among these key words : Conversation. Bertrand exposes the issue :

Just try to explain to a manager who has been struggling for years to reduce wasted time and productivity due to gossip, that time is now for team talk and conversation. And even worst : that his role is to stimulate this conversation. Then watch his face that slowly turns sour.

6 reasons to bring management and the enterprise conversation back together. And to use collaborative platforms to foster the latter. Read more »

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Continuing our short(!) screenshot-series on geeky innovations… Thank you, Skitch, for making it so easy!

I was really missing a collection of my Loved Tracks in Last.fm and it looks like the new version delivered. What we need next is a way for ratings in iTunes (and more specifically my iPod) to automatically register as “loved” in Last.fm, and for that to create a TheFilter-like service of creating custom playlists that I like.

*Sigh* why does interoperability of web-to-real-world-to-web have to be so complicated?

Vincent

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For a long time, Plaxo was to me just an address book on the web. So, I was really surprised when I decided to check out Plaxo’s Pulse. Plaxo Pulse could be summed up as hybrid of Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, but this comparison isn’t fair as Pulse seems to have taken the best features of each and quite successfully in a technical sense but as we’ll see later, hasn’t gathered the momentum these three have.

About a year ago I was planning to rewrite my site so that it would show my activity on different sites like Flickr, Twitter et al. by using their feeds. I’ve previosuly written on how in 2006 I thought feeds were the real meat of the web. Anyway, fortunately, I never spent any time on my site as Plaxo Pulse does all this for me and throws in a social network there too.

Many similar services where you can hook up your web 2.0 activity have popped up recently, but many of them are just a bit glorified RSS-aggregators. Here I have to say that I’ve not tried out FriendFeed, but what I gather it seems to be a close competitor to Plaxo’s Pulse. Anyway, Pulse is probably best summed up by my friend who originally invited me to join: “[It’s a] new social network, and it is more open and for more grown-up people than Facebook”.

There are some really good stuff in Pulse. Where Twitter’s nice feature is that connections aren’t necessarly mutual (and thank God for that), Pulse realizes that there are different levels of connections. You must choose if your contact is Family, Friend (here Pulse means real friends and “not social network ‘friends’”) or Business. In Pulse’s terminology each of these are mutually exclusive, but if you understand each as a level more closer or farther from you, it isn’t much of a problem. The function of this classification is that you can define which of your feeds are visible to whom. This also allows you to have different visible profiles for your friends (aka. “facebook” profile) and business (aka. “linkedin” profile), which is neat. You also get a neat public profile with a nice URL (f.e. kari.myplaxo.com), which shows exactly how much you want it show. Pulse’s public profile is the most likely last stab at pre-social network concept of “home page”, which MySpace was first to make irrelevant and Facebook gave the coup de grâce.

The problem with Plaxo Pulse is that initially it might seem there’s little reason to join it if you’re already using Linkedin, Twitter and/or Facebook as there’s not anything radically new. Ironically, its main audience is exactly the people using at least two out of the thre. Where Pulse shines, though, is execution. Some of the navigation is confusing at time, but otherwise the design of the site and workflows are quite natural and nicely done.

The other problem is that you and, more importantly, your friends need to be web 2.0 “active” for the site to function properly. Where Facebook seems to notify you whenever any of your “friends” as so much as log in, Pulse only publishes feeds your contacts have added and defined for you (as a friend or business contact) to see.

Unfortunately, all these features aren’t enough. As I wrote some time ago, I really liked Jaiku technically better than Twitter but it never gained any significant momentum. I’m afraid this is the fate of Pulse as well. It is a shame really, because the people behind Pulse have really embraced all the new and hot web 2.0 technologies (OpenSocial, OpenID, FOAF, …) making it a showcase what a more semantic web could offer.

I guess this is the dilemma when a social network tries to plays nice and not lock you in its own services. Pulse, for example, doesn’t force you to use its own status update service if you happen to use Twitter already, but is ready to use your Twitter status as Pulse status, making its status update just a front-end for your twittering. It’s really nice that a social network is willing not to reinvent a more successful wheel, but unfortunately it might not pay off in any business sense.

Unlike some other glorified RSS-aggregators, Pulse really goes to lengths in integrating your feeds into its system, as the Twitter example shows. It does the same with your Flickr photos by showing them as an album in your Pulse photo album section. This, again, is really nice, as you don’t need to duplicate everything as seems to be the norm with other networks.

The only glitch that I find annoying is that del.icio.us feeds seem not to work, but Pulse warns you about this and hopefully they are working on it. The workaround is to subscribe to your del.icio.us feed through f.e. Jaiku and your del.icio.us links will pop-up to Pulse as Jaiku items.

Of course, the old Plaxo is still there and integrates rather nicely with Pulse. You can set up a shared calendar and address book and sync them with, among others, Google, Yahoo, and your PC/Mac. There’s also a nice Address Book / Pulse Notifier -software to keep you up with your contacts’ address and status updates. All around nice stuff, which integrates nicely at least with Mac.

What could save Pulse is that there is value in you using it even if not that many of your friends don’t. The problem with Jaiku was and still is that it doesn’t make any sense to write your updates there if most of your friends use Twitter. One thing is that if Linkedin continues to get more complex and starts to “suck”, I could see many people switching to Plaxo. It is a good alternative to Linkedin and seems to be designed its users in mind, but on other fronts it is not as perfect substitute and merely overlaps. With any luck, Pulse could find its niche.

All in all, maybe I just root for the underdogs, but I really like Pulse (and Jaiku) on some level. It’s really sad that they seem to be set as also-rans against technically less magnificient competitors. Unfortunately, these aspects aren’t at all important for most of social network users. Maybe these sites just show how important the lock-in effect is. It is the tragedy of commons in the information age.

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Bangalore based startup wants to build social networking site for the poor. babajob.com and babalife.com are both the brainchild of Sean Blagsvedt.  Sean is originally from the US, worked for Microsoft in Redmond and then in Bangalore India.  He got the idea for starting a social networking site for the poor when he heard from the noted Duke University economist Anirudh Krishna, who found that many poor Indians stay poor not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to discover better jobs.  In a poor nation like India where majority of people, who live in an informal economy, get the temporary jobs by word of mouth i.e. their existing network. 

babajob.com (Sean calls it LinkedIn for the Villages!) and babalife.com (which is like Facebook for the poor) can be successfully used to help expand the network of millions of cooks, maids, construction workers, drivers, and others. How can one create a social network for the target audience where very few are literate let alone computer savvy? That’s the challenge that Babajob faces.  But, their model — pay people who help the poor find jobs, looks promising.  This is a perfect confluence of Altruism and Capitalism and can be successfully used to alleviate poverty at a faster rate.  The same model can be applied to other countries in South Asia as well as Africa and Latin America.  Currently babajob.com and babalife.org offer services only to the surrounding areas of Bangalore.  The plan is to eventually expand to the rest of India soon and then to the entire world.

Read more at International Herald Tribune’s article Internet revolution reaches India’s poor.

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After writing about noise of web 2.0, I began to think more about the amount of noise in my everayday web experience. In comments of that post, Cecil pointed me to Nat Torkington and Linda Stone and their concept of continuous partial attention. The stuff is from 2005, but the CPA is even more real today. And then I realised something…Why is my IM list empty?

After talking to couple of my friends, I started to recognize a trend. More and more people were starting to take advantage of “Appear as invisible”-setting. On of the major reasons was that “when I’m online, I don’t want to be constantly harassed by people sending me IM.”, some went so far as telling “I don’t want to send IMs, if people want to talk to me, they can call me”. These findings seem to offer an explanation to why the only people visible in my IM client were those who didn’t live nearby – people who didn’t have many real-life connections to their friends.

I confess, my default setting on Live Messenger and others was Away until couple of weeks ago. Maybe I didn’t want other people to think how much time I spend online. Maybe I didn’t want other people to send me messages. I don’t know. It took me a while to realize all this, but now my default is Online/Available again. Because, when you start to think about it, what’s the use of using IM if you’re using it to show other people that you’re busy? What’s the use to be invisible? Ironically one new feature in Live Messenger seems to have accelerated this behavior: “Offline messages”. A standard feature in all other messaging protocols, this feature arrived just recently to Live Messenger. Now you don’t have to worry about people being invisible or offline as the message gets still sent. A feature which was supposed to enable us to connect better with our friends in fact enables people to hide themselves and making IM seem like… e-mail. No availability information and no knowledge has recipient received your message. With this realization in mind I started to look at how sites like Facebook operate messaging. What Facebook et al do, is that they maintain a image of sorts of our social network until we login again …just like e-mail. You receive messages when you want to. Of course, the problem with this approach is that people create a habit to check their e-mail or login to Facebook every 5 mins. A problem instant messaging was invented to solve in the first place. Are we looking for refuge from cell phones and IM? Don’t people want to be online? This is actually a very important question. The whole premise of web 2.0 is ubiquitous social online presence. Is the reality that this only still appeals to the geeks?

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