Open Letter To Google:

I get that there are and should be standards for public posts on sites like Plus. I don't have a problem with that, beyond the ones of how uneven and seemingly arbitrary the enforcement of standars is. That said, Google does provide mechanisms for private- or limited-sharing. The presumption of such a system is that, so long as everyone in those closed-circles/groups are in agreement on the "rules" of what's appropriate to share, Google really shouldn't insert themselves as the no-no police (obvious exceptions for material that is, in fact, illegal in the jurisdictions that the material is shared to).

That Google appears to want to insert themselves into semi-private communications and make determinations as to what should be allowed in those private communications is, at best, "troubling". It leaves a tremendously bad taste in ones mouth. For all its failings, FaceBook (and other social media that offer private communications options) doesn't seem to have inappropriate editorial actions as one of their problems. Frankly, logging in this morning and seeing delete actions against non-public posts where the people shared with/to have all agreed on content rules, was both a touch unsettling and rage-inducing.

I know that Google's reported active Plus-use numbers are going up. So, perhaps they feel secure in their place with Google Plus. Perhaps that feeling of security it making them feel like they have a freer hand. I dunno, but it's definitely making me reconsider my place on Plus.

So, if I drop off of Plus, it's because I have decided that Plus is no longer a suitable home for me. There's too many other options, out there, where I don't have to worry about what I say or to whom I say it.

Who knows: maybe it's less Google in this instance than it is other posters on Plus acting dickishly or simply carelessly (resharing private or even semi-private things publicly is "careless" at best). I really don't want to consider that one as betrayal of trust makes things decidedly not worth sticking around for.

Engineering Priorities

I know that Plus is probably more geek-oriented than other social networks, but the fact that the NHL playoffs don't really seem to be "trending" in any meaningful way is kinda ridiculous. It probably doesn't help that most of the NHL teams that have a social media presence have that presence almost exclusively on Twitter and/or Facebook (and, seems, most frequently, FaceBook by way connecting their official FB account to their Twitter account).

But why is it that entitities like the NHL concentrate their efforts almost exclusively on sites like Twitter and/or FaceBook? For starters,  FaceBook, Twitter and other networks make it dead-easy to post once and get your message out to a number of sites at once. Google's Plus? Not so much. Crap like this is why Google really needs to work on their cross-platform sharing APIs (have they even published anything meaningful, yet??).

For me, this lack of being able to see updates via Plus is the second biggest reason (behind friends' not being willing to move off FB) that I still need to log into FB and/or Twitter. I come to Plus because I want to. I have absolutely nothing I could (correctly or incorrectly) conflate with a need to login to Plus.

Self Documentation

I think people underestimate the potential longevity of "social media". The fail to see the forest for the trees. They see that specific sites have popularity lifecycles (e.g. LiveJournal and MySpace) but fail to see the overall trends or place them within the larger historical context. Simply put, people have a compulsion to document their lives. People have a compulsion to be social. All that FaceBook, BlogSpot, Twitter and the like are is an extension of these compulsions.

Our primitive ancestors drew pictograms and glyphs on cavewalls.

Clans, tribes and communities sat around communal fires telling stories of their daily exploits and of their ancestors epics and sagas.

People who have had the capability of recording their thoughts in writing have kept journals, exchanged letters or otherwise recorded their lives and their thoughts for themselves and, in some cases, posterity. How many history shows or articles have you seen that have centered around uncovering the lost journals, letters, etc. of the famous, infamous and the "Average Joe"?

Granted, the mid/late 20th century saw a wane in personal writing. It saw the beginning of the decline of the personal letter and the diary. But, it also saw a proliferation of camera ownership. "Regular people" had anything from big, fancy, professional rigs down through Polaroids and disposable cameras. These days, though film seems to be dying, it's replaced by digital cameras with ever more MegaPixels - and cameras are ubiquitous on converged devices like cell phones.

Cell phones, themselves, are just another extension of this desire to record and share. How many people walking down the street, absorbed in their phones, are doing anything more than sharing their lives with the people on the other end of the line. Yes, they were originally marketed towards business people needing to make work-related calls, but that's such a small portion of what they're used for any more.

So, while Vox may die and while MySpace, LiveJournal, etc. may all lose popularity, the underlying need will continue. So long as there is someone or something to fulfill that need in a way that's relevant to the consumers of that time period, there will be successful providers of those outlets.

So, yeah, FaceBook may be a passing fad, but the larger trend is unlikely to fade while humans have the time, capability and inclination to share. Until such point as the fundamental nature of humans change (i.e., we evolve to be non-social beings or simply die off), there will be a place for some equivalent to "social media".

Shoulda Been Using UNIX...

So, pretty much ever third time I click a link on the Microsoft Live/Hotmail/WhatTheFuckEver site, I get a page similar to the below:

 

This page is temporarily unavailable

We're sorry, there was a problem showing this page. We experienced some technical difficulties retrieving the content.

Please try this page again in a few minutes.

 

© 2010 Microsoft Terms Privacy Advertise

Help Center Feedback English

I mean, I never use the damned site. I have it because of my Xbox and MSN-chat. That's it. And, the only reason I was going there, today, in the first damned place was to tweak my privacy settings to cut down on all the damned "friend" invites from all the bots that run rampant on the service. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK. I mean, even if I was thinking of actually using it for more than the bare minimum I'm currently using it for, this would be enough to put that straight out of my mind. Bigtime FAIL, Microsoft. 

Not Social

It is my assertion that Twitter shouldn't be considered "social media". What's social about tweets? If anything, Twitter is anti-social. I mean, what's social about bleating about random shit happening in your day - if there's no conversational component to it. Twitter ain't conversational.

Broken, or Just Pointless

So, C|Net has implemented Echo to help foster the social aspects of their site. Now, I can understand wanting to get in on the FaceBook-esque dollars. I can even understand the Twitter love affair, to a degree. What I don't understand is, "what is the value add of Echo when all it's doing is listing pages of re-Tweets?" I mean, re-Tweets add nothing to "the conversation". Re-Tweets are garbage, from a conversational standpoint. When you're doing something akin to just saying "yeah", it doesn't really foster conversation. Echo, as implemented on C|Net just seems to be a way for them to display, "see, people think our stuff's good". If that's all they're gonna do, shouldn't they just put the old 1990's style hit-counters on their pages?

Rule 34 of Search (Twitter)

I imagine this works on any given social media site. But, today, I really noticed it for the first time. I was writing about Red Dwarf. As far as I know, this is a show that isn't currently on the air. So, shouldn't have a lot in the way of immediately relevant conversation. Surprisingly, when I punched "Red Dwarf" into Twitter's search box, I got back more than a page worth of Tweets made inside of eight hours. This seemed kind of odd. So, I decided to run a few test things - trying to get progressively more obscure (yet still within the realm of possibility). My discovery? It seems you can put a lot of really random shit in the search box and invariably, someone's recently posted about it. Some searches, the fact that they get results, at all, makes you think, "W.T.F."

How Much Social Media Do You Need

Ok. Perhaps I've gone a touch "overboard". However, I'm the kind of guys that, if there's a setting, a dial or a check-box, I gotta mess with it. Such is the same when it comes to meta-posters offering to link me to different posting sites, even sites I previously never knew of or had no use for. At any rate, I initially went to ping.FM to set up meta-posting (primarily) for FaceBook and Twitter. Prior to ping.fm was also (infrequently) using things like BlogSpot/Blogger, LiveJournal and Tumblr. For better or worse, ping.fm lets you link to a LOT of sites. So, "because they were there," I also set it up to post to:

• Google Buzz  (more a placeholder, since it self-aggregates from other sources)
• GTalk (more of a record-holder/reminder, because updating my IM status seems silly)
• AIM (more of a record-holder/reminder, because updating my IM status seems silly)
• LinkedIn (more of a record-holder/reminder, because I don't really post to professional-networking sites)
• Tumblr
• Identi.ca
• Brightkite
• Plurk
• FriendFeed (more a placeholder, since it self-aggregates from other sources)
• Jaiku
• Blogger
• Plaxo Pulse (more of a record-holder/reminder, because I don't really post to professional-networking sites)
• Bebo (this already existed because of my AIM account, so, "why not link it")
• hi5
• WordPress.com
• Delicious
• Koornk
• YouAre
• Multiply
• Flickr
• StatusNet
• Vox
• TypePad
• StreetMavens
• Posterous
• Photobucket
• Yahoo Profiles
• Yahoo Meme

Also ended up finding some other ones due to relationships the above ones have (e.g., Fire Eagle - a Yahoo Property - because of signing up for BrightKite). Speaking of which, it seems like Yahoo and Google are both trying (or have tried but never did away with) other social media sites. I'm guessing some were small buys or indirect acquisitions.

Prior to writing this post, I'd never really found where the "Yahoo Profiles" was going to. I mean, I don't really see a link to it off my Yahoo dashboard. I know that profiles.yahoo.com mutated to Yahoo360, but that had seemed to die. Turns out, though, that profiles.yahoo.com still exists. (/me shrugs)

A number of these sites seem to be a niche looking for occupants (e.g. StreetMavens). Some don't seem well-suited to linking via Ping.FM because Ping.FM's media uploader is rubbish. So, even though I can link Flickr, Multiply, Photobucket, etc., I can't really use Ping.FM to post media to them. So, they're more "placeholders".

On the plus side, without Ping.FM, I wouldn't have known that there was an "Open Status" project acting as an OSS version of Twitter. Ping.FM explicitly lists StatusNet and Identi.Ca for this service.

Because Ping.FM's posting interface is such rubbish - but mostly did what I was looking for - I sought out alternatives with better posting interfaces. That's how I ended up on Posterous. Unfortunately, Posterous: doesn't link to nearly so many networks; while it has a much better web-posting interface, the site navigation is rubbish - they really want you to use the email submission engine. That engine's pretty cool, but a little rough around the edges. Their mail parsers frequently get things a little wrong (such that, if you want your Blogger/BlogSpot, WordPress and Tumblr to all look the same, you frequently have to go to each site and "fix" things). The data's all there, just the presentation isn't consistent or spot-on. Oh well, emerging technology. They show a lot of promise. And, if they can get their recent performance issues out of the way, I can foresee considering one of the premium offerings they hope to put together.

Neither Ping.FM nor Posterous yet supports some of the more fringe services, yet (FourSquare, HotPotato, GoWalla, etc.). But, a number of those services seem to be more in the vein of hangers-on than free-standing services. They seem to mostly leverage Twitter and/or FaceBook for their readership.

/me shrugs

Been an interesting experience. Getting to see a lot of different approaches to social media. And, it's helped me avoid "putting all my eggs in one basket". Given that social-media has really replaced diary-keeping, it seemed prudent to spread things out. Damned few of these sites seem to have what look to be good, long-term business plans to assure their long-term existence. Worse, even fewer seem to have a way of getting your data back out. I've already had sites die and take my data with them (e.g., wis.dm). I don't want whole chunks of my journaled-life to simply evaporate each time a company goes out of business, has data-integrity issues, etc. 

Yeah, I could host my own - and, in the past, I did - but that removes most of the "social" aspect from things. While most of what I write is for my own consumption, I do also like being linked to other people enough that I can see and comment on what they're doing.

What Happened to My Outlets?

Two days in a row of Fail Whale.

FB's been having issues, today.

Tumblr's been slow for the past several days.

Posterous was being DOS'ed, the other day, as well.

WTF??

Dear LinkedIn:

I get it - you're a "professional" social networking site. But, all the posts about "social media strategies" really gotta go.