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Social Media: who gets it, and why or why not?
Jun 23This morning a colleague on the Graphic Designers of Canada mail list posted an article from the Tyee on Social Media, which prompted me to write the following mini-essay. My headline? Just because you tried FaceBook for a week does not make you an expert in Social Media, or qualified to judge the usefulness of the class of applications, or any one instance of a social media application.
I think Shannon is not really giving the technology-mediated social evolution enough attention, or a fair try.
I didn’t give FaceBook much of a go before surrendering to the(what seemed to me) continuous barrage of Vampire vs. Zombie vs. Werewolf Shannon writes about. That may have more to do with having a 13-year old daughter as a “friend” than the inherent silliness of the apps FaceBook allows. Poking, nudging, or otherwise trying to grab my attention with things I will not be interested in IS a major distraction, and due to the UI of FaceBook, and I daresay it’s overall architecture and the vision for commercializing it, makes it a non-starter for anyone NOT interested in a site that supports play, rather than communication. Which is not to say that communication DOESN’T happen while playing, but it’s not my cup of tea, or, I’m guessing, Ms. Rupp’s.
Twitter, on the other hand, seems to allow users to tailor their “Twitterience” for how they want to interact. Yes, there are celeb-followers. Yes, there are spambots, and “get rich quick” systems morons, who probably believe—for a day or two, anyway—that Twitter will make them rich. How, I’ve never gleaned from looking at the market-spiel sites, but other than as a study in human gullibility, I don’t care.
Twitter, for what it’s worth, is simple. You can embed a URL for more info. You can follow people you like, or work with, or are curious about. You can unfollow people when you find their tweets are not interesting to you. You can block people (or bots) that follow you. In the few weeks since I have been on Twitter, I have found:
- I have access to information, whether just personal curiosity or objectively important to me, I would not have for days (or longer) otherwise. This is important to ME.
- It does not eat up nearly as much time as anything else I’ve tried.
- It seems to produce real dialogue between members, which (unlike real time IM clients like Skype) does not require me to learn new, awkward ways to end a dialogue or get out of a conversation.
- Has a really simple interface, few bells and whistles, but allows the user to customize to a point of uniqueness, yet preserves the key components’ use and location.
The folks who created Twitter have done something right, at least from my perspective. Like predictive text entry on cell phones, it does require you do relax, try it out for a while, then decide if it works for you or not. But I think it’s a game changer.
Your comments are welcome.
4 Responses to “Social Media: who gets it, and why or why not?”
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There’s a lot to be said for low barriers to entry. That changes who will be on it, what kind of connections you make and what relevance they have to the world outside of technology.
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admin said on June 24th, 2009 at 12:13 am
I like what Fredrick Pohl and Arther C Clarke quoted in a book I read recently. Something about the best mathematician in the world would have been in a paddy harvesting rice if the barriers to entry (for him, to education) hadn’t been as low as the government of India had made them.
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I think that book is likely Outliers and it’s rice paddies in China that they were referring to. I’m still reading that part and waiting for Gladwell to tie the rice paddies together with the asian numbering system. There is something about 3000 hours a year as well. Imagine being able to do 1 thing for 3000 hours a year? You BETTER be good at it by the end of that!
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PS: You need an avatar!
