This weekend I made the decision to switch things up and reboot my Twitter following list. On Sunday night, with a little help from Jesse over at SocialToo, I ran a script that unfollowed almost 12,000 people. This week, for the first time since the summer of 2007, I’m back to following just over 200.
In this post I’ll discuss why I decided to reboot my list and how I’m planning on changing my approach to using Twitter moving forward. I’ll also show you some data, bust a few social media myths and tell you a few things that those “social media gurus” with large Twitter followings don’t want you to know. Ready to rock and roll? Buckle up… Read More
100K Google Wave invites went out today and there are a lot of people wondering what it is, what it’s for and what it can do. Here’s an 8 minute video from the Google team that answers those questions and provides some visual walkthroughs of the main features. I haven’t gotten on this thing yet, but I find it *super interesting* that the team highlights the Twitter extension that effectively turns wave into a full on Twitter client in the demo. That ought to shake things up quite a bit.
Couldn’t make the Gov 2.0 summit or Expo this year? No sweat. O’Reilly has posted 76 videos from the event on YouTube, and they’re free as free can be. How much do you love the social web?! Seriously.
In these videos you’ll find brilliant people discussing remarkable new possibilities and business models for reshaping our political culture, our economy and our government. The emerging themes across all of the Gov 2.0 topics this year focus around principles of participation, collaboration, transparency, and efficiency to address the challenges facing our country and the world. I hope the video channel embedded below will wet your appetite and encourage you to open up to new ideas and new ways of thinking about how government works and how we can make it better. If you really want to dive in with both feet first (and why wouldn’t you?), head over to gov2summit.com and drink from the firehose.
- Kollocks’ 4 Motivations for Contributing: Reciprocity, reputation, increased sense of efficacy and attachment to an need of a group
- B=f(P+E) – Behavior is a function of a Person and his Environment
- The importance of the esteem layer in Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs
- The AOF Method – Defining your Activity, Identifying your Social Objects and Choosing your Features
- Communicating Identity & Commanders Intent
- The Power Law Of Participation
The Facebook team put this visualization together with their internal data and posted it today. Watch how Facebook has grown to 250 million users around the world starting starting in Boston, MA. If you’re read “Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook – A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal”, the visualization of the growth to 50 million puts the second half of the book in pretty sharp perspective.
Along with the shocking number of Mafia Wars invites I get on Facebook, I continue to get daily friend requests from people I have never met or had any contact with. Almost all of these invites have a similar personalized message attached…
“We’re already friends on [some other social network]“… so let’s be Facebook Friends!”
If you’ve sent me a connection request in the past and you’ve never gotten that “Steffan has accepted your friend request” notification back, please don’t take it personally. If I don’t know you well, you’ll have to settle for Twitter, FriendFeed, my Youtube or Vimeo account, my blog or (gasp!) email…I’m keeping Facebook a friends-only affair. Here’s the logic behind my “True Friends Only” rule for Facebook…
Keeping Interaction Meaningful and Personal
I’ll admit that I’m a promiscuous linker on most public social networks. I auto-follow back anyone who wants to follow me on Twitter (so I can DM) and follow large targeted groups of people on FriendFeed to listen to industry news etc, but Facebook is the only place where every single person I’m connected to, I know well. The fact that I have a personal connection to every face I see when I log on to Facebook makes the experience much more interesting and meaningful. I’ve got around 700 people from my life I’m connected to on Facebook – all my family members, hundreds of people I went to school or worked with, friends I’ve had experiences with, people whose blogs I’ve been following and commenting on for years – these are deep relationships I’ve developed over time, and so news, photos and thoughts I read from these people have personal significance to me. Having a place where I can maintain those relationships and keep the interaction meaningful keeps my time in Facebook fun, personal and interesting – and that’s what separates it from all the other platforms out there for me.
Public-ness vs. Private-ness: How Safe Space Changes What We Share And How We Behave
I wrote a lengthy post back in March called Status Culture – Public vs Private and Why It Matters where I go into detail about the differences between how relationships are structured on Twitter vs. Facebook and how it changes interaction patterns and norms. If you’re interested in the technical aspects of community building and interaction you may enjoy the post – it’s one of the most popular articles on this blog. For the rest of you – here are the main arguments from the post that relate to this discussion -
Having (the perception of) private space changes the game, no question. Creating “trusted space” is not just about you, it’s about the perception your entire community has about the shared space (your wall, tagged photos etc). Having a place where my family and friends feel ok to be themselves and share personal elements of their lives is important. They don’t want random people I met on the internet being able to join in their discussions on my wall, or see photos I’ve tagged of them at a private event etc. Many of them wouldn’t dare use Twitter for it’s public-ness for that very reason, but they’re hyperactive Facebook users. The point is, when everyone assumes you’re actively controlling who sees what, the perception of what’s acceptable changes for your community, and with that shift in perception, who interacts and how often the do etc. changes in significant ways. By limiting my connections to just people I know, I create a space where the people I care about can share themselves without fear of the unwanted gaze of unfamiliar third parties.
Lest Ye Not Forget The Spam Problem
This one’s a no brainer. Most of the unknowns who solicit you for connections on Facebook (or any other social platform for that matter) care more about pushing their content on you than getting to know you better. Getting you to accept their friend request is just another way for them to promote themselves. Don’t let em’ in, and you’ll never have to roll your eyes when you start getting spammy messages from Johnny Life Coach.
The Accessibility and Portability Of Your True Social Graph Will Become Increasingly Important
This is a biggie. It’s crucial to realize where the social web is heading and how your social experiences are going to be stitched together in the future. Being choosy about your relationships doesn’t matter as much now as it will. Social networking is still in its infancy and many analysts believe that in just a few years, we’ll be carrying our social graphs with us wherever we go on the web (your graph, your data, everything). Social colonization (the next phase of the social web) is already starting to surface with technologies like open ID, and Facebook is priming itself to be a hub with Facebook Connect. There will likely be a day when you’ll be glad you were discerning about the way you created your relationships on social platforms like Facebook because they will define you and shape your experience more and more as the technology evolves.
Discussion Time…
Now that I’ve provided my thoughts, I’d like to hear yours. I know a lot of my friends and many successful bloggers do exactly the opposite to what I’m doing, and they have their reasons. I’m curious to hear other points of view on any of this. How important is protecting your true social graph to you?
This Building43 video is a goodie. Robert Scoble does a quick 2 minute interview with Isaac Mogannam, the owner of Phat Philly Cheessteaks in the Mission District in San Francisco, CA. If you’re a restaurant or small business owner trying to figure out how to make the web work for you in your local area, this short video is worth your time.
According to Isaac, since opening a little less than a year ago, Phat Philly Cheesesteaks has gotten around 275 mostly positive reviews on Yelp and he says that it’s had a major impact on his business. He estimates that around 40-60% of his new business is driven by Yelp (woah!), and because of the size and popularity of the site, people searching for food in their local area usually find his restaurant (and everyone’s reviews) on Yelp before they find the restaurants website. That’s an important insight for any small local business – people are using the web to find out what’s good in their area and, because of the way search works, their first interaction with your brand online is often NOT your website. Instead it’ll be the popular social sites where all the chatter is happening, so you can’t afford to ignore what people are saying about you online. Because people’s first impression of you happens where the chatter is, ignoring the conversation is a big mistake.
In this interview, Isaac talks about how he’s embraced Yelp, started listening, joined the conversation and used it to his advantage to quickly build a local (and loyal) customer base. Not surprisingly, he says he did it “one customer at a time”.
This video was originally posted on Building43.
