Archive | April, 2010

Students Denied Social Media Go Through Withdrawal:

This article is creepy.  Apparently, we all are or will be addicted to social media in the near future.

I’m going to go slowly rock myself while cradling my iPhone.

I thought this trend died somewhere in early 2008, when we all realized Twitter was more about conversing rather than how much wit we could continually pack into 140 characters over the course of a day.  But no, I’m seeing more and more blog posts that pack a persons tweets into one digest that crosses my RSS feed.

I will say these posts appear on personal blogs, and these posts might serve as some kind of personal archive of sorts.  However, as a reader, they don’t make any sense to me. The conversations are cleaved into strange pieces that are unintelligible without any context.  This is an example of what I will see:

• Goodnight Y’all!
• @JayDolan OMG ur so funny!
• @JohnSmith777 Thanks!
• @JaneDoe555 My cat does that too!  LOL!
• What’s the best way to capture a piglet?
• @SomeoneElse111 I hate when that happens!
• @TheAntiMedia: I love Foursquare!
• Aren’t they? RT BobJohnston222: Kids are smelly.
• Good Morning coffee!  Good Morning everyone!
• @CoffeeZombie123 I can’t exist until I feast on delicious coffee.
• I won the coffee badge on Foursquare!
• I’m at Dunkin Donuts!
• I won’t say good morning until I get some coffee.

Beyond the short narrative about wanting and getting coffee, half of that is like reading a James Joyce novel.  It just goes where ever the hell it wants to without giving any sense of context or significance to the reader.

Now try reading three or four of those posts daily.  Keep in mind, I follow many of these people on Twitter, so I’m reading the same thing twice now.  Now I’m reading redundant bits of a chopped up conversation.

If you want to save your tweets for later, I say go ahead, do it, but don’t make your readers have to try and follow your conversations they weren’t a part of.

Facebook thinks it can fool you and other smart users.  This screenshot is from Sunday.  Look at the option on the very bottom.

Notice how the new features were then called Instant Personalization.  Pretty simple and self-explanatory.  Check out what that called today.

How did it go from simply “Instant Personalization” to “Instant Personalization Pilot Program?”  If it was a pilot program from the start, why not say so?  Regardless, Facebook’s willingness to change the name of this feature reminds me of Orwell’s Animal Farm.  I can already hear Facebook saying “All profiles are equal, but some profiles are more equal than others.”

Marco.org: The ad delusion:

Have you ever met any of those brainwashed advertising people who believe that regular people like their ads and see them as content and are dying to see more?

Whoever added these arrows to AdSense is one of those people.

Someone involved with this truly believed that enough people want to…

Marco usually writes about technology, but this article is a really good break down of why so many Google and Facebook features are opt-out.

Maybe you think I’m nuts with my theory that LinkedIn has carved a niche for online identity.  I can’t blame you.  If you’ve been reading here for a while, or had the misfortune of meeting me in real life, you know I can be a psychopath strange person at times, and that theory just adds to my oddities.

However, there is another reason I believe Facebook will not win online identity:

Email.

An email address is the one thing you need before you set up a Facebook account, and as of right now, Facebook doesn’t provide those.  You have to go to Google or Yahoo or whomever to get one, then come back to Facebook.  Because of that requirement, Facebook not providing email is a stunning design flaw.  It instantly fractures your online identity.

It would be genius for Facebook to provide email.  Genius in the evil, mad scientist way, but genius nonetheless. Think how easy it would be to build an address book of friends. The current messaging system almost approaches an email system, and I bet there is little stopping them from converting it into a far more capable system.

Scarily, a Facebook email system has been talked about for some time, and will probably be coming before we know it. When it happens, it’s going to drop like a hydrogen bomb, and who knows what will be left standing afterward.

This is not social media news, Mashable.

If I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again.  James Cameron is not social media.  Avatar has nothing to do with social media.  If I see one more awful story about this or any other James Cameron movie, I might organize a boobquake protest.

There are many reasons why I believe Facebook will never win the war to control your online life and identity.  Today I present the strongest reason I believe Facebook will never fully control your online identity:

LinkedIn.

Yes, THAT LinkedIn.

Why?

Most adults can’t take Facebook seriously.  Sure, it’s great for keeping up with the Joneses, but beyond that what is there? Awkward wall posts? Pictures of you in college no one should ever revisit? Farmville? Give me a break.

LinkedIn provides everything it says it does, and does it very simply.  It lets you set up a profile of your professional life, and then connect with colleagues, classmates, and whoever you think can build your professional network. If you asked for more, you’d be crazy.

Also, LinkedIn doesn’t change.  The features of your profile stay the same.  The layout stays the same.  Even the most recent change, linking to articles, is pretty much just an enhancement of the status update ability they already had.  You don’t read about LinkedIn groups rallying about the layout changes or changing the User Terms, because they don’t.

As more and more people grow up with a Facebook profile, documenting them from middle school through adulthood, why wouldn’t they want another profile where they can remake their personal brand in a professional manner, not whatever wall posts and pictures their friends have tagged throughout the horrors of their teenage life?

Sure, LinkedIn only has 65 million users worldwide compared to Facebooks 400+ million.  But as the digital age spreads, think how many more professionals and students will start building their profiles on there to get a job or build their network without a history of unflattering content following them.  That number will only continue to grow.

I think LinkedIn has found a niche Facebook will have a hard time competing with.  Zuckerburg may have his online party, but the rest of us need to put a suit on in the morning.

Am I wrong?  Let me know what you think in the comments.

If you’ve been patiently waiting for over a month to watch my Ignite Raleigh speech on Anti-Social Media, wait no longer!  You can finally view it in convenient YouTube format.  Feel free to share it with your friends, family, and enemies as necessary.