Social media is a feature not a product.....
So Chris Anderson has given me my new favorite quote of the week.
I spend a lot of time wrestling with both the power of Social Media and with the inane time-wasting most of it encourages.. I sense there's something powerful there, but wrestle with Wisdom of Crowds, vampire-kiss-of-facebook-uselessness. Jury is still out on what/why this is important long-term. We all know I agree with him on the long tail niche content theme - won't belabor it here.
One interesting stat lately. In looking at the behaviors of our younger demo at the BBC, we've noticed that email is primarily the domain of old people (i.e. +25) employed, higher earning and retired.
Young people use IM, facebook/myspace. They think email is quaint.. and useless. Maybe this is an age thing? maybe Facebook is the new eudora ?
BTW I'm relatively intrigued by Twhirl - which I use in conjunction with Twitter & Friend Feed. It's rapidly making me like FF more - especially as I integrate it everywhere else - facebook, here, etc.
I'm with Michael Arrington - I want unity of my messaging & social networks. But with Avatar control... like personalities. Just like a human, I want to have different expressions of myself while unifying my control of those selves and selective publishing of their content.. My facebook, myspace, blog, linkedin & even a few others you might not know about selectively share pieces of me with groups of my associates/friends/acquaintances and random people I don't even know. I think that's wonderful and I wouldn't change the different aspects of me I share with them:
- Linkedin says highly successful serial tech entrepreneur with a big Rolodex
- Facebook says adventure sports loving father of two
- Myspace says .com filmmaker possibly confused about age appropriate content/behavior ( I haven't touched it since my last sabbatical)
None of these is problematic until you try and link my myspace to my linkedin with no filters or controls. there's lots of people messing about with solutions to this headache, but many of them miss the point. the issues are:
- I want to enter my data once. (cue open id)
- I want to update once and change everywhere (ibid, maybe)
- I want to control where and when I publish my data.. (creative commons?)
- and to whom
Lots of partials, no full solution. Feels like a start up for somebody, but not me - I have a big British website that needs lots of sorting out and thinking about.
