After repeatedly receiving connect requests from people I do not know or have only exchanged a handful of Tweets I find myself asking: is LinkedIn losing its impact, or is it just a symptom of a much larger problem?

As social networks of any kind become more popular it is inevitable that the noise, the chatter and unfortunately the spam, will increase.

Perform a search for “LinkedIn losing value” and you will find a number of complaints about people following others at random, increasing spam and more. Some blame the feature that suggests people to follow, some blame the site functionality and others just aren’t using LinkedIn as intended.

Focus

LinkedIn has a focus, a core purpose, but this seems to have been drifting and for quite a while. Many users seem to be treating the site more and more like Facebook – hardly surprising when both the UI and functionality becomes more ‘Facebook like’ over time.

A while back I asked if we as individuals are getting too social; now, is it a case that everything we do is getting too social? The impact of Facebook and Twitter is that everyone thinks they have to be completely social in order to succeed, to garner any interest on the modern web and beyond.

We are facing a catch 22 situation: it’s not just the users who are using sites like LinkedIn incorrectly but by doing so they are forcing these sites to change – to crowbar in social functionality which is not really relevant and which they don’t actually need – just to be ‘cool’ and appeal to the social generation.

Playing the game?

Twitter and Facebook are game changers but it is not a game that everyone should be playing.

It always polarises opinion when any service provides the ability to stream in your status updates from services such as Twitter. FriendFeed, Google Buzz and even Facebook itself have suffered with many choosing to un-follow those who pump their tweets in to their stream or using it as a basis for whether to follow someone in the first place.

Our status updates are frequently not work related and should not be included in a professional context so it is understandable that there should be a backlash against them being brought in to somewhere such as LinkedIn. We, therefore, come back to the matter of using LinkedIn as it is designed to be used.

Not just another social network

As I previously wrote:

Social media ‘friending’ has always been pretty incestuous – once we follow someone in one location we tend to seek them out on the new services that we join so that our following/follower lists become ever more similar across the board. While it is always nice to have a few familiar faces on a new service there is no guarantee that we will use it to interact with each other in the same way and this should be recognised, understood and accepted.

Social isn’t new, social ‘online’ isn’t new but many are still just getting in to it so, while the early adopters may say that it is not a fad, many are treating it as though it were and jumping on the social bandwagon – trying to find where social fits within their existing setup; sometimes it won’t.

Is being overly social reducing the value, and indeed the effectiveness of LinkedIn? Is it still seen as a reliable method of finding people based on skills, business connections and recommendations? Maybe if used correctly.

Image by Raymond Larose

Last week we saw that Google has finally integrated Social Search into our normal results but search is really only the beginning.

It transpired quite quickly that google.me as a platform was a red herring but Google is now playing with a much larger one: its whole search infrastructure. As such we should be aiming for both Search and Discovery: we may currently search but do we really find and discover great new things or people?

Google finally seems to be focusing on what they do best: search; but we still don’t have a very clear picture of where they are heading.

All about the profile?

Jeff Korhan indicates that the Google profile is making a comeback and will serve as “your home in regards to assembling your social graph for Google search”. I was a big advocate of the profile being your central hub for your online world (at least as far as Google services were concerned) but Google really missed the boat on this one.

Did Google not think the world was ready for its social profiles and integrated social search 2 years ago, or was it just Google that wasn’t ready? I’m inclined to believe it was the latter but you can’t escape a nagging feeling that Google thought it was smarter than the average social media user and knew what the people really wanted.

Consequently, there was a masive opportunity lost with Reader and Buzz. The links between the two services and the tie-in to Gmail gave Google an excellent platform to work on and expand; combined with an effective profile page (which could have essentially served like your Facebook Wall) there would have been a solid basis for a social ‘platform’ even though Google were not building their own social network.

So, what of my other predictions?

When I suggested three ways Google could use search to take on Facebook I was working on the assumption that they were working on their oft rumoured social network. Now that we know this not to be the case do those ideas still stack up?

Recommendation engine:
Including shares in search results just gives us explicit links – why not use the shares of our social circle, our own shares and our search history to give us recommended sites, blogs, people – all implicit. Placing recommended content within the normal search results would be too cluttered so, perhaps, it could be a separate option along with News, Shopping, Books etc.

Related content:
Again, building on social search, there is the opportunity to expand the results returned by suggesting related items that may not have been triggered by the search terms entered. Relevance is a massive, upcoming area within the social sphere and you only have to look at what My6Sense are doing is this space to see the potential. With such a large content index at their disposal Google could clean up in respect of relevance which goes beyond the initial search results.

Statistics:
The real power for Google comes in linking services and utilising the data you generate so another huge lost opportunity in the shape of goo.gl. Better integration of the URL shortener would make it more usable – why not wrap urls with goo.gl as Twitter does with t.co? Just as with Twitter, this could be presented as a “security feature” (protecting us from dodgy redirects) whilst – at the same time – providing Google with a wealth of click-through data.

Even though Google is implementing social aspects within its existing services rather than a separate social network the potential still exists to be a major player in the social web. Sergey Brin commented that Google had “only touched one percent” of where social search can go – so much more can be achieved but they just need to know which road to take.

On the right path we can not only search but truly discover.

Image by Wootang01

While I personally think that Twitter should not expand to beyond 140 characters I wanted to take a more balanced approach and take a wider look at the issue.

So, is it 140 or bust?

One thing is for certain, something that polarizes opinion can often be good as it generates interest and reopens discussion so that all avenues can be explored. One such thing is the debate over the 140 character limit in Twitter reignited by TweetDecks decision to launch the deck.ly platform.

Naturally, people are asking is it time for Twitter to dispense with the 140 character limit or should the cornerstone of the microblogging service remain sacrosanct?

Twitter was originally designed for use via sms so, allowing for the space taken up by the username, the character limit was a necessity. Things have moved on apace with the service being accessed via the web and host of third party clients. While mobile usage has rocketed only a fraction of that would be in the form of messages sent via SMS.

So, how many use SMS for twitter? I use it for notifications about a couple of accounts I follow and for mentions/dm’s but how many still use it for tweeting or consuming tweets? Probably not many in the grand scheme of things but the chances are that those who do aren’t using Smartphones or don’t have decent data plans such as ‘Pay As You Go’ customers.

Nothing new

We have had the ability to tweet more than 140 characters for quite some time thanks to services such as TwitLonger but, while its advocates have been calling for its support in just about every third party Twitter client going, the truth is that tweeting more than 140 characters has been viewed largely as a fringe activity despite being supported by many Twitter clients. That is until a major client, TweetDeck, has now decided to launch its own integrated platform for the same ends.

Although TweetDeck (on certain platforms) can natively view items from Deck.ly, the thing all longer tweeting platforms have in common, by necessity, is that the excess characters must be viewed externally from Twitter by following a link as there is no one size fits all solution – fine for those of us on a fixed connection or a smartphone but not for those on a dumbphone who aren’t able to follow those links.

Some think it is inevitable that Twitter will have to go beyond the 140 character limit  in order to further evolve and grow but it seems to have been doing a good enough job already with the limitation in place. The argument that “there’s no reason for Twitter to be constrained anymore” would cut out a whole section of users in one fell swoop and Twitter have always maintained that retaining SMS support is a priority. The cause is, however, helped when the official Twitter app for iPhone (which used to be Tweetie) includes TwitLonger support.

Options

#newtwitter gave us the right hand pane for the inline viewing of images and videos amongst other things so, as suggested by Dave Winer, the only way to go would be for the likes of TwitLonger and Deck.ly to open up with APIs that allow the longer posts to be consumed elsewhere. This would allow Twitter to display the full tweet in the media pane whilst retaining the short version in the timeline but, as TweetDeck admit, they are competing with Twitter – both the web site and their own apps – so would it be wise to give Twitter direct access to this data, especially as Deck.ly is also viewed as a platform for generating ad revenue?

With the banning of UberTwitter (now UberSocial) and Twidroyd for various policy violations Twitter has shown that it can play hard ball when it comes to policing its service and ecosystem but removing the ability to post tweets longer than 140 characters would upset a lot more people than temporarily blocking a couple of applications. Twitter itself has set a precedent with the continued support for TwitLonger making it harder to remove the functionality without being completely hypocritical.

Compromise

It is not inevitable for Twitter to support long tweets but it may be inevitable for the site to support those tweets should the services that allow their creation open up to the mother ship. Twitter has come a long way from its simple beginnings and at the outset many would not have thought that the ecosystem surrounding it would not have grown to its current size and even those that rebelled against the likes of Twitpic.

Linking to various external media such as images and videos has become the norm and Twitter is supporting it directly within its site and own clients. Linking to text longer than 140 characters can be viewed the same as linking to an image or a blog post. To call for those making tweets longer than 140 characters to “say it elsewhere” is not realistic as anything beyond 140 characters is already external to Twitter.

Denying the ability to link to text longer than Twitters inbuilt limit is unrealistic but what is realistic is for us to realise that Twitter cannot include the ability to natively create long tweets without completely losing its sense of identity.

The joy of Twitter is in its simplicity and this is what resonates with the public. 140 characters forces us to think about what we are saying and there are other places for longer text such as Facebook and blogs. Occasionally, people may want to say just a little extra to their followers without resorting to full blog post but this does not mean that they will be persistently making long tweets on a regular basis.

To be fair to TwitLonger their site even asks you not to “get lazy with Twitter” and if your Tweet runs to 150 characters “you can almost certainly reword it to get it to fit”. We just have to be sensible.

Image by tporter

By now, you’ve no doubt seen that Google are rolling out the integration of social search into normal results and the way they are doing it is strikingly familiar.

Back in August I argued that Google should integrate social search immediately in order to retain some kind of relevance in the social space as we still had no indication as to what direction they were going to take. The existing of Google.me as a service was staunchly denied by the company and the concept of social layers became the reality: adding a social layer to their existing products. As I said at the time “by extending existing products Google is able to drip feed its users with social functionality in the applications they already use”.

By combining a normal search result with the social aspects from Reader and Buzz I suggested that integrated social search could look something like this:

Googles actual integrated search looks like this:

Not too dissimilar I think you’ll agree.

Social Circle

My ideas for integrating results from your social circle and including them based on relevance and I even raised the issue of privacy with regards to sharing options. Google have mentioned that normal ranking may apply but the social search element may change a page’s ranking — making it appear higher than “normal.” They are also giving the options to privately connect your social profiles to your account but, as I wrote previously, I think that this could go further and would need to should social search be extended beyond the reach of your own circle – which it should.

It is reassuring to know that I was on the right track with regards to how this should go and I look forward to seeing where they take it in future. Using social search combined with Googles massive search index you have the ability to create an extremely powerful recommendation engine and a useful means of discovering related content.

While I would have liked to have seen Google push the boat out a lot sooner it is pleasing to see integrated social search finally with us. Where will it go next? We will have to wait and see but, hopefully, the wait won’t be as long.