The Anti-Social Media

If there is one noun that I hate to see used with online communities, it’s tribes.

All I know is that this got started somewhere with Seth Godin, and other people latched on. By mentioning a real book, they looked smart and like they read a real book by an author who had books before a blog.

Ugh. Good for them. Suck ups.

When I think of a tribe, I don’t think of a sophisticated group of people in an online setting working towards shared goals and values. Instead, I think of a bunch of sophisticated individuals who are behind the technology curve and are going to get smashed by a bunch of idiotic settlers who crave more crap.

Also, because I’m a terrible person who stereotypes, I also think of a bunch of people in traditional Native American outfits. I know, I suck.

I don’t think of my Twitter followers as a tribe. I don’t think of Facebook fans as a tribe. I respect them and realize I am not leading them into war with another tribe or asking them for a blood sacrifice.I’ve got better things to do, like watch cat videos.

So fuck tribes. Online, we act like stupid, uncivilized and unenlightened jerks. But we’re at least better than the word “tribes.” Sheesh.

What are you hating on this week? What aspect of online life do you want to give a “Fuck you!” to?

Video blogging also requires a completely different skill set that what most of us learn in school. I don’t know about you, but they didn’t teach me proper lighting, sound capture, film makeup, and video editing in school to the amount they taught me how to write.

I see this as another failure of the education system to support social media. Don’t they know we have crappy video clips to make with our cats?

Still, what drives me most is how people look on camera when video blogging. It’s like they never even watch their own video of themselves after they spout off  into their web cam.

This is how you think you look on your video blog:

This is how you actually look video blogging:

See the difference?

Please, for the love of all that’s holy, look at yourself objectively on camera. If you look like a hobo in poorly lit room, I don’t care how good your content is. At that point, I’m worried that you have a body hidden somewhere in the shadows where you’re filming. You need to look presentable (not good, presentable), if you want people to pay attention.

Otherwise, you’ll start building a personal brand as an ax murderer.

Because I write a social media blog, every crappy PR “professional” who covers the technology beat sends me press releases. These are things that are usually not even halfway related to social media, but I guess they figure, “Hey! He’s a blogger and people tweet him! Maybe he can make our client money!”

Sigh.

It’s annoying at best and a sad state of affairs for PR professionals who actually know what the hell they are doing. But this post isn’t about that.

This post is about new social networks. I often read about new social networks through pitch emails like those and on social media news sites. People make new social networks all the time, because for one reason or another, they think they’ve made something new just because you can have a profile, post updates, and see what your friends have posted.

And 99% of the time, they describe the new network as “It’s like this, but that.”

Guess what, if the best way to describe your service is “It’s like this, but that.” I don’t give a shit. I’ll probably keep using whatever this is. Why?

• I’ve already established a network on this.
• I don’t want to learn the nuances of that.
• Why do I even care about that?
• Won’t this implement that anyways?

You need to give me a compelling reason to build a new profile and new network. Adding one “but” feature will not be enough. Any competitor can come along and create something similar. Google’s recent success with Google+ adoption is not because their social network is particularly impressive yet, but rather because they’re Google and no one wants to get screwed in their search results.

Social media developers - think about what you can do differently. Think past a news feed, or one killer feature you wish another social network had. If you want to make a new network I will pay attention to, it needs to have something truly new and compelling, not just “but” features.

Since the dawn of social media, what do you think is the single biggest change?

I’d argue the biggest change in social media came in 2006, with the debut of Twitter and its stream of updates. This format was adopted by Facebook soon after, and the news feed was born. The news feed, that ever updating scroll of text, photos and videos has been the biggest revolution in social networks since someone decided you could make a profile and connect that profile with other profiles and list yourself as single.

Five years later, every other copycat social network has their own crappy version of the news feed. LinkedIn has a news feed. Tumblr has the dashboard. Google+ has the stream. These are all the same thing with a different name to avoid trademark infringement.Every one presents the latest updates in a reverse-chronological order so the most recent update is first.

But does the newsfeed provide the most relevant information? Sure, it can be useful to have the latest information and updates, but information is useless without analysis. You can tell me that my cat smells, but does she smell like flowers or shit? There’s a huge difference in what action I’d take based on how she smells.

Additionally, even with systems such as Facebook’s Edgerank, how do we know what is relevant? Can we really trust a computer to determine what is relevant to individuals based on browser cookies and the actions of other people?

Worse - systems such as Edgerank can be gamed. Facebook marketers now spend their time creating updates that will reach the most potential people based on the posts Edgerank. Who cares about making meaningful updates and impacts when you can just manipulate an algorithm for the max results for your business?

The next great social network will be the one that figures out what comes after the news feed.  There has to be a way of presenting relevant, timely updates from users in a different way that is even more addictive and will make more money off of users than what we have now. I don’t know what that is yet, but I’m excited to spend even more time alone in front of my computer and smartphone.