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.

Dear Twitter-bots

Me ranting about strollers (their users, actually) doesn't indicate a predilection to buying a stroller

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."

The Fail-Whale rides again!

ok, so the Fail-whale has been on the freaking rampage, today. F-U twitter.