February 2010
10 posts
Single-purpose streams.
When I explained that linking your feeds is hurting your friends, I flippantly suggested people who aren’t following you on that other service are probably ignoring you for a reason. While I’m still ready to argue that this is generally true, I don’t want to claim that it’s always true.
Somewhere among the horde of people who aren’t following you because they...
Google Buzz. The slurriest of everything boxes.
Let me tell you about my Buzz inbox. This morning I logged in to find 34 unread items. Here’s the inventory:
12 republished tweets that I’d already read on Twitter (many with @Twitter #syntax).
9 republished Google Reader items from people I want to be following in Google Reader.
5 republished Google Reader items from people I don’t want to be following in Google Reader.
3...
Nuance. Is there a Twitter exception?
Over at his blog, Alexis Madrigal wonders if Twitter should be an exception:
Twitter has no memory, though. It’s the goldfish service, forever forgetting where it was just a few moments ago. (Perhaps that accounts for the irrepresibly happy tone of Tweets. “Wow” is probably the most common descriptor for a link.)
But what if you want to have a conversation — or just a feed — that is preserved?...
A Manifesto.
Listen. You need to unlink your feeds. I understand why you did it. I’ve made the same mistake myself. But it’s hurting your friends, it’s hurting you, and it’s hurting the Internet. You need to stop. You need to stop automatically dumping your feeds from one account into another. Look, I know it’s tempting. New service, not sure how you’ll keep up with the ever...
It's hurting your friends.
Look at this from the perspective of your friends/followers. Say you start importing your feed from service B to service A. The people who are following you on service A can be divided into two groups. 1: Those who also follow you on service B. 2: Those who don’t follow you on service B. The people following you on service B are already reading your messages. Now, you’re forcing them...
It's hurting you.
Listen. This is bad for your reputation. Each social networking site has a slightly different culture, with a slightly different grammar and set of conventions. When you dump your feed from one into the other, it can be jarring. It sends a message about your respect for the mores of the site that’s receiving the feed. It tells us that you don’t really care. It tells us that you...
It's hurting the Internet.
It’s hurting the Internet There are a lot of pages on the Internet. More than a thousand! A lack of content is not the problem. And if it was, Demand Media is going to take care of that right quick. The real problem is finding the good stuff. No, the best stuff. That stuff can be pretty hard to find. The thing is that there’s so much stuff out there and we all have so little time to...
There's a better way.
I have a vision of a new social networking paradigm. Handcrafted social networks. I imagine a world where people take each network for what it is and participate (or not) on those terms. Instead of a firehose slurry of everything buckets, I imagine separate streams of purified whatever-it-is-each-service-does. I envision users that post when they’re inspired and don’t mind skipping a...
Format for your medium.
The case I’m making for why you need to unlink your feeds is based in part around the importance of context. A message that works on one social network is often garbage in another. I’d like to walk you through an example of what I mean.
Consider this tweet by @Wired. Here it is on Twitter, full of rich microsyntactical information and metadata.
The RT and @names place the post in a...
I already follow you on that other service.
Dear friend/colleague/attractive person,
This is just a quick note to say thank you for being my friend on this social networking service. I really value our time together and appreciate the many pokes, @s, and invites that we’ve shared over the weeks/months/years. The last thing I’d want to do is sour our relationship in any way, but there is one small thing that I wanted to talk to...