General
Critical Mass of Redundancy in Social Media
We need to seriously knock this off.
I logged into SocialThing and saw that a friend posted a link about a neat architectural concept. I was about to reply, until I saw that I couldn’t. What I would have been replying to, was his Facebook status, which was really, a Twitter post, piped over to Facebook, and slurped into SocialThing.
We can’t help ourselves being accidentally spammy, either. In FriendFeed, I choose NOT to include BOTH of my flickr accounts (one flickr account is for normal things, the other is for video game things only). Unlike Jaiku, you can’t clearly tell that you can unsubscribe to a *part* of me. So I’ve just skipped it entirely.
And what happens when I post a link on Twitter to the photo because I think it might have more importance to people, and I have no knowledge of who follows me where and with what service? My aggrepublishlatform will display it all. (Try it, unsubscribe to Scoble completely, and you will still get his content in triplicate, heh.)
It has gotten out of control.
And we keep feeding the machine of erratic software design with our erratic behavior. For all that we’ve hoped to achieve with becoming “We the Media”, some of us have not even figured out HOW to publish.
The software companies (read: people who make little free web apps) are perpetuating our own lack of social (media) skills.
I tend to like aggregator sites like FriendFeed and SocialThing because I think of their use by me as a way to be considerate to people who want to read/follow me. You can be sure that everything I feel that is important to me, will be in a FriendFeed, without shoving a cluttered blog with fifty million ‘Share This!’ links, icons, and whatnot in the sidebar. To be a cultural snob against MySpace for a moment: just because we have white backgrounds and reflect-y logos, doesn’t make us better than MySpacers. We’re just as informationally schizo.
If there’s ever a reason to appreciate the pseudo-coherency of older capital “B” Big Media, this would be it. True, they don’t make it easy to get content on every social network that captures our attention in the last seven minutes. Who knows, they’d probably have to shove more advertising down our throats to offset the work it takes to manage this.
And even then, we’d see the same content over and over and over again.
The state of social media is horrid and we are too blind and stubborn to see it and believe it. We are hyper-redundant users and developers seem to be building features for features’ sake (does invite-only Qik need to talk to invite-only Seesmic, while BOTH providing ways to ping Twitter? Seriously.) And the most appalling of all of this? For all the empowerment we’ve been given, our own lack of organizational and publishing skills doesn’t help the critical mass.
How do we fix this?
Update: Some supporting pictures of the weirdness:
http://flickr.com/photos/ericrice/2360877028/
http://flickr.com/photos/ericrice/2359951767/
http://flickr.com/photos/ericrice/2359290441/
Update 2: Since my blog is piped through Jaiku and Friendfeed, and people have the ability to comment THERE as well, I have to either a) traipse around looking for the comments, or b) assume that those comments/conversation won’t be part of comments/conversation HERE. Whose job is this anyway? Heh.
Discussion
10 comments for “Critical Mass of Redundancy in Social Media”
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By decentralising all that function into wordpress plugins?
[…] My Infocalypse ยป Critical Mass of Redundancy in Social Media He’s right, and I shouldn’t take any pleasure in anything he says about the one advantage Newspapers Etc. have: knowing _how_ to publish. (tags: newspapers media blogging online social socialnetworking yasns) […]
Should everyone still be pushed to centralise around a personal website? Making all these social ‘add-ons’ - Twitter etc, a bit like RSS feeds - extras to ‘help’ you see updates from a central source, rather than a place in themselves?
It all works IF all our tweets, Pownce, Tumblrs etc, all still point to a central, personal location such as a website.
What we should do is then import everything into that website - esp Flickr so that the website remains the last stop for visitors - like RSS given in summary form so that you are still driven to the ‘main’ place.
As is always the problem, services always try and grow to something more - I hope Twitter will hold it’s ground as it is and not try and become more like Tumblr.
Eric,
FriendFeed heard you
http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/03/post-your-friendfeed-comments-back-to.html
This is why I still prefer importing all my data from external sites into my personal site. It’s easier to manage, doesn’t affect my ability to interact with people and provides a central (and verified) location for tracking me.
eric - i’m tending to like services like friendfeed because of the self aggregation online stream of “me” & my “friends” aspect - the redundancy part seems to be left over from services that allow cross-posting…
i noticed this a short time ago in friendfeed and removed my jaiku and pownce accts because i wasn’t actively posting to them, they are simply cross-posting echos - rarely net new “stuff” by me…
some folks are literally all over the place, and it is nice to have a way to check-in on them via tools like friendfeed - not supporting them over another - just say’n
The ANSWER is SIMPLE: build these services to discover duplicate entries and not show them. I don’t view the situation anywhere as complicatedly and as “horrid.” For instance, picture how I “publish” status updates:
-publish them with hellotxt.com
-use friendfeed.com to track all my conversations and to respond back on them. Fortunately, I’m in the tech web 2.0 space, so the conversation can continue in Friend Feed since most of my target audience and community also now uses Friend Feed. The issue though is that for every site besides twitter, these responses/comments will not appear back on them–they will only appear for other Friend Feed people to use. I would love to be able to comment to flickr, youtube, facebook, digg, etc all from friend feed. What would also be cool would be if Friend Feed had the write once read everywhere feature that hellotxt.com has but for all features. The problem with this two-way interactivity obviously is that most sites don’t have APIs to do this. I’m actually VP of marketing for a company that does take this one-way friendfeed approach and makes it two way: faceyspacey.com/services (it’s called Lukup).
But, anyway, u get the point. I’m not too worried, but I view things from a totally different perspective: problems = $. So, if there really is a problem here, believe me, someone is going to monetize it, and funnily enough the reason I got involved in Lukup.com is because I want to be one of those people. Regarding this article though, I think it barely begins to talk about the issue (no offense at all man). The answer to this problem is building a new in all these items that uniquely identifies it. This would have to be an amendment to the current RSS formating. But, when added would facilitate social aggregators like Friend Feed showing one status update and showing the icons of the several different places that the user posted it all at once. Imagine an icon for Jaiku, Twitter and Pownce all sitting next to the title of this status update. Friend Feed could already do this with an analyzing algorithm that sees whether other items have the exact same content, and then does the above process manually.
ONE LAST THING: What I thought this article was going to be about when I first so the title was the redundancy of social networks and web services that all do the same thing (e.g. microblogging: Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku; video: Youtube, Metacafe, Veoh, Viddler; News: Digg, Reddit, Mixx, and all the other services you can plug into Friend Feed). I’m definitely not the first to point that out. But what would be cool would be if God could step down and give us an exact chart of equilibrium here. This chart would show how many companies will fail in the long-run, how many are needed in terms of features, how much room the market actually has for redundant social networks and web 2.0 services, etc. I want to see a comprehensive redundancy report of what sites and services the market can actually support while offering unique monetizeable features to end-users without useless fledgleing clones. This would obviously be very hard to produce, but an article that compares a bunch of sites in a given market by their traffic amount (provided by compete, alexa, etc), their revenue (guessed somehow), and a rating and description of their unique features (if they actually have them).
James
from
http://faceyspacey.com - “The Startup Incubator”
http://friendfeed.com/faceyspacey
Oh what friendfeed could be with some customizable columns and color coding!
The downfall is not the mass of info, it’s the lack of sorting it; and yet that is also the basis of the whole concept: feed.
When will we get the MyYahoo/FriendFeed/GoogleReader/InstantMessenging hybrid?
RE: how best to triage comments, I have been bumping up against that quite a bit myself. It seems like it would be ideal for any service that allows commenting on things from other sources to use some form of trackback ping so that the originator could at least have a cohesive list.
Anyway, that’s a dream, and there is a TON of duplicity, especially for people such as yourself with a finger in every widget and feed there is… the ecosystem needs a kind of holistic design. Right now, it’s really like a social media junk drawer.
This problem was exactly why I did my social media information flow map (http://hq.andrewshuttleworth.com/hq/2008/02/social-media-on.html) - to try to get a grip on the complexity and reduce the redundancy. I’m still updating the map and working out how new services fit into my life and will post an update at some point.
It’s difficult to see how this problem is going to be solved at the moment, but it looks like services like FriendFeed and SocialThing are in a good position to help. I see a time though when all these information streams will become a key part of our main online communication interface … our email client. So it’s only a matter of time before Google, Yahoo! and Hotmail get in on the act. Who will buy who? (Google will probably do their own thing and Hotmail and Yahoo! will probably buy one of the above companies or Profilactic. Maybe Plaxo will get lucky as well).
Andrew