Tag Archives: Twitter

Should Social Networking Work Like Email?

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Tim Hall

A few days ago, Jason Gorman tweeted that he thought social networks should work like email – a set of common standards that no one company owns and controls. It fits in with my thinking that the walled-garden approach taken by Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn is not a good thing. It may make it easier for those companies to monetise their services, but confining content and relationships to proprietary silos is a bad thing for the web as a whole. You risk ending up having to use the web equivalent of seven telephones.

I’d prefer to see an ecosystem of collaborative applications each of which focusses on doing one thing and doing it well, using open APIs and common standards like RSS. I’d love to see a separation between applications that focus on hosting content, be it micro-blogging, photo-sharing, discussion forums or friend list management, and those that aggregate, filter and display that content. Each can adopt whatever financial model makes sense for whatever it is they’re trying to do.

The irony is that’s how Twitter started out, encouraging a large number of third parties to build applications using their users’ data, then shutting down the APIs and killing off those apps once their user base reached critical mass.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Not quite sure to make of the fact that Reading’s local paper has “Twitter hashtag hijacked by Japanese cartoon fans” as the lead item on the front page. The #rdg hashtag is currently full of Tweets (in Japanese!) connected with the Anime show Red Data Girl. Does that really justify being front page news, or is it a very slow news week in Reading?

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Tim Hall | 3 Comments

A blog post by Steven Waddington uses the metaphor of Twitter being a kind of virtual pub where you can meet and chat with interesting people. By comparison, Facebook can be like an awkward family gathering where you have to avoid bringing up certain subjects because they’ll set off Great Uncle Kenneth…

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Tim Hall | Leave a comment

Is Twitter Pivoting?

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Tim Hall

Dalton Caldwell thinks Twitter is pivoting. This is what Twitter is now, at least to me:

The core user experience of Twitter is the sending and receiving of messages with other people. It’s a communications tool.

But that model is less effective at selling eyeballs to advertisers. So it may be turning into this:

the future of Twitter: a media company writing software that is optimized for mostly passive users interested in a media and entertainment filter.

Now, I love Twitter in it’s current form. It’s a great place for conversations and connecting with cool new people. Unlike some, I’m far less interested in following celebrities, especially those who aren’t interested in interacting with those who follow them. It may be premature to announce the death of Twitter, but it is a reminder that nothing last forever on the net.

Social networks come and go. When was the last time you logged on to MySpace? Or sent a message in last.fm?

I’ve been on the net long enough to remember when AOL killed off CompuServe. But I’m still in contact with some of the friends I made through that network. Never forget that the relationships with actual people are far more important that whatever social networks you communicate on.

And there is a reason I’m now posting more on this blog rather than on social networks.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Twitter turning into a walled garden?

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Tim Hall

Following on from Tumblr and Instrgram, IFTTT is the latest victim of Twitter’s API changes, which forbid syndication of Tweets to other cloud services. Twitter, rather than being a glue that held other parts of people’s online presence together is trying to become more of a walled garden, like Facebook. This is not a good thing.

The relationships we build and maintain through social networks are far more valuable to us than the networks themselves.

Twitter ignores this at their peril.

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Time to log out of Facebook?

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Tim Hall

I’ve recently taken an extended break from Facebook. I’d got fed up with the drama, vapidity, over-sharing and passive-aggressiveness. I’m know I’m probably guilty of some of those things myself; that and the fact can easily become a huge time-sink are reasons I felt I needed a time-out from the place. But it’s made me wonder if there is a better way.

I really detest Facebook’s walled-garden approach. The most valuable thing about any internet-based community site isn’t the site itself, it’s the relationships you build and maintain through it. I don’t want those relationships wholly owned and controlled by an increasingly creepy corporation that’s only interested in monetising our mutual personal data so they can sell it to advertisers. Facebook has sucked the life out of far too many forums and blogs, and while many forums have their own problems, that can’t be a good thing. With more and more external websites morphing into detestable Facebook ‘apps’, they’re now actively trying to eat the rest of the web.

The only reason I’ve got a Facebook account at all is because there are people who have no significant online presence outside it, and I don’t want to lose all contact with them. I’d much rather a few more people who want to contact me follow me on Twitter, or comment on my blog. Or just use old-fashioned email.

It’s been said that Facebook was created by people with Aspergers syndrome. Whether this is true or not, it does appear to have belief in the geek social fallacies written all over it, especially #4 in that list. That does seem to be a root cause of a lot of the site’s problems.

In an ideal world, a combination of Twitter and blogging does everything I want out social networking. But blogging in particular is quite hard work if you want to build an audience. Facebook’s greatest strength is that it provides a ready-made audience for those who don’t have an awful lot to say. Unfortunately that’s also it’s greatest weakness, hence the vapidity and over-sharing. I always feel bad when I have to mute, unfollow or in the worse cases block people because they’re friends-of-friends in real life. Just because we like the same music doesn’t necessarily mean we have anything else in common.

So what to do? Should I hold my nose and use Facebook sparingly, just to keep in touch with those who are active nowhere else? Or should I try to encourage more people who actively want to interact with me online to follow me on Twitter or read my blog? Should I be spending more of my online time on existing communities like RMWeb and Dreamlyrics? Or should I put my faith in alternatives such as Google+ or even Diaspora?

You should be asking yourselves the same questions.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Does Blogging Still Have A Future?

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Tim Hall

Has blogging had it’s day, or does it still have a place in the world of social networking?

Yesterday was not a typical day for this blog. I posted an opinionated and provocative rant that aimed a broadside at the cynicism of the record industry and the conservatism of some so-called progressive rock fans. It got picked up by a couple of very high-profile people on Facebook and Twitter, and my hit counter went through the roof.

But normally, when I’ve spent hours writing something like a detailed album review, the sort of readership I get is a fraction the number of people who’d read a pithy one-line status update on Facebook. Given my annual hosting bill for this site, sometimes I wonder if it’s an effective use of my time and money any more.

Social networking has already killed off all but the highest traffic web forums just as web forums killed most internet mailing lists before them. Is it now killing blogging as well?

Twitter has certainly killed off link blogging. There is no point maintaining a real-time stream of topical links using a blogging platform any more; Twitter just does that so much better. But for longer opinion pieces?

One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m often getting little in the way of discussion in the comments section, although I often get a lot of intelligent and civilised discussion on my Facebook page when I link to a blog post here. That might be down to my curating of an intelligent and civilised friends list, when I only accept requests from people I know and trust, and am not shy of defriending someone who turns out to be disruptive or offensive on a regular basis. Meanwhile my blog gets a disproportionate number of drive-by trolls like the “You are a moron” guy on my Wishbone Ash review. Maybe my Facebook friends are unwilling to expose their opinions outside Facebook’s walled garden. Maybe they find the drive-by trolls make the atmosphere too unpleasant. I don’t know.

The big weakness of blog comments is a lack of identity management, which is one thing social networks do well. I’ve often heard it said that anonymity is one of the causes of bad behaviour on the internet, and trolls will go away if only you force everyone to use their real names all the time. This is only half right; what’s actually needed is some form of trusted identity, for which your public posts across multiple sites are searchable. On high-traffic sites which allow that sort of thing it’s surprising how few of someone’s posts you need to read before you get quite a good picture of where they’re coming from. You can usually tell if they’re drive-by troublemakers, or people with a passion who occasionally let their enthusiasm get the better of them. Whether you use a real name or not, a strong online reputation does take a lot of effort to built.

I wonder if it’s possible to create some sort of decentralised equivalent of social network built around the RSS feeds of existing blogs with some kind of trusted identity management for commenters? Or is the march of the social networks unstoppable, and blogs need to find a way to exist in the cracks between then?

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , , | 6 Comments