Social Notworking - Digital Refugees

The recent troubles over at Twitter have created a mass of confusion in what previously looked like a self-organizing social networking system.  As in the real world, it takes time to settle into a new neighborhood and to discover how you fit into a community.  However, Twitter's lack of ability to scale to its ever-expanding user base has resulted in an explosion of digital refugees who are now wandering through cyberspace in search of new homes.  

Recent networks d' jour have included Plurk, which offers a new graphic spin on microblogging; identi.ca, which is gaining popularity due to its open source origins, and Ping has also entered the arena as a solution to centralize users' updates from a single location.  On the flipside, FriendFeed is there to collect everything that you've been doing on multiple blogs, and to tie it all up in a neat little... mess.  Of course, aggregating feeds is nothing new, and aside from standard RSS readers, other sites like Suprglu and Multiply  have been doing this for quite a while, but adoption rates seem to be sluggish.

Therefore, we have tools to take a single message and to amplify it and reproduce it so that it colonize a series of locations across the web, and we also have tools to distill our scattered thoughts into a single point of convergence.  We have the ability to broadcast a virtual presence to many sites, however, we are still lacking tools to maintain our connections and conversations within these communities.  

We can discover past contacts within emergent social networking communities, but then we can just as easily lose them as they migrate due to the push-pull factors that exist within physical cities.  We've taken a physically global community that is already transient, and we've created a hyper-global layer on top of it, where people exist in and shift between virtual spaces. 

As we move towards increased choice (and let's face it, we've been ramping up to this for centuries - this is not a new phenomenon), how are we going to identify and select the best options as individuals?  There is always the potential for engineers to write new scripts so that we can simplify complex networking choices, but is it more logical to just simplify and take calculated risks to begin with?  

Social Networking Blues

Here's another article in the current wave of not particularly insightful but interesting nonetheless articles on social networking: Facebook, MySpace Reveal Hidden Messages.

The thing that bothers me about this kind of journalism is that it's once again stating the obvious,  i.e. if you constantly change your Facebook/MySpace status then you're probably doing some attention-seeking.  Do we really need a journalist to point this out to us?

People do all sorts of things to get attention:  they dress and style themselves, they surround themselves with 'defining' possessions like cell phones and cars, and if you watch truly gifted networkers at a mixer, then they don't hesitate to approach someone new out of the blue with some sort of an "opener."  Chatty people chat.  Twitterers tweet.  Status updaters update their status.  So what.

I think it's fairly obvious that we're exposing ourselves emotionally over social networks - this isn't necessarily a bad thing.  The only thing I'm really worried about is whether more advanced data analysis is going to scour my online emotional trail one day to create some sort of semantic-emotional graph.  A potential employer might not need to analyze my biological DNA if they have access to the emotional 'strands' that I've left online as behavioral fingerprints.

Twitter - Frivolous by name, not by nature

I recently sat through an edition of Cnet's Buzz Out Loud podcast during which senior editor Molly Wood decried the concept of individuals pumping up their egos by documenting their lives on blogs, or by using tools such as Twitter. Unfortunately, this seems to be a common misconception - that Twitter is basically just like a 'frequent flyer' version of a Facebook status update. Little do they know that the suggested question, "What are you doing?" is largely ignored by vast networks of professionals who use Twitter as online knowledge laboratories.

Within my own (rather small) Twitter network I can easily step into live conversations between scores of teachers, largely from the edublogging community, as they participate in perpetually evolving conversations about pedagogy. Colleagues across the world drop hints and tips about resources, leading to extremely dynamic sharing. I am also connected to the thoughts and processes of members of the software development community, so it's possible for me to observe the construction of the software infrastructure on which our thoughts travel and our collective knowledge is managed. Utilities such as Twitter and Jaiku enable increased connectivity for personal and professional networks, and fuse the functionality of instant messaging, chat rooms, and forums.

The power of Twitter lies within its simplicity and its dynamism: unlike previous generations of forums, topics are set on the fly and they don't dwell in linear pathways. The cap of 140 characters per 'Tweet' enforces brevity and encourages prolific spontaneity. Conversations within Twitter could be construed as 'messy,' consisting of fragments of dialogue between people in your network and gaps, but this can encourage users to focus on the individuals that they're 'following,' and to open up contact and possibilities to expand your personal learning network.

The lesson here is that new tools offer new possibilities, and that end-users will frequently ignore the suggested use of a tool in order to explore how far they can exploit it (ie. get practical use out of it). Twitter is the closest technology to telepathy that we have right now. It seems strange that even people in the technology industry fail to grasp its potential.

Always On

This blog begins just before dawn. I've been lying in bed wondering about how technologies are changing us as human beings, and how the recent jolt of 'always on' culture has altered us as a species forever.

We now have an exhilarating level of connectivity, but we've also lost our privacy in so many ways. I'd like to explore this space further - from the impact that it has on us socially and emotionally, and to also investigate methods and techniques that can be employed so that we can control our technologies (not vice versa).

As a child I knew that there was a limited window of access to the information and entertainment I could get from my TV. Television stations would start broadcasting in the morning, and then they'd stop broadcasting around midnight. The remainder of the time I could look at my TV, but all I'd see was a test pattern. A letter could take weeks to deliver. I had to wait for the latest albums to arrive at the record store. People went from door to door selling encyclopedias. Telephones were attached to cords, which were attached to walls. It all sounds positively archaic now.

But now I can wake in the middle of the night and access vast libraries while streaming video and chatting to someone I've never met. I can explore a virtual world surrounded by characters which are the manifestations of real people. I could participate in an online war with a mass of other live participants. There are so many benefits, but there are also side-effects.

Blackberrys and phones that interupt dinner or steal attention away from physical interactions. Status messages in our email clients or social networking sites that reveal our presence to others. Personalized ring tones that transform public spaces into impersonal cacophonies. Private phone calls that are blurted out into the 'publicsphere' without an regard for the verbal and psychological assault on others. An Internet that's always on, so that I can wake up in the middle of the night and start a recursive blog about it as I am right now, with the possibility of you stumbling across it and reading it, even though you and I have probably never met, and probably never will.

Our new 'always on' culture is as much about evolution as it is about revolution. These new superpowers we've been endowed with are both incredible and complex. Previously we were told, "The pen is mightier than the sword," but now the pen is online and it's on steroids.

Image by Egvvnd. Some Rights Reserved.