I asked in my last post if the “instant win” short form world of social networks is paradoxically harming conversation despite us “connecting” with more people on a more frequent basis.

How can we redress the balance so that our interactions are less throw-away and more meaningful?

1. Downsize

Downsizing covers a multitude of sins and aims to increase the signal-to-noise ratio by targeting those things most relevant to you.

If using RSS feeds we should periodically filter our list to ensure that it is up to date and still providing us the value we require. Perhaps certain sites have changed their focus and no longer match our own interests.

The debate as to whether subscribing to RSS feeds is dead rolls on with many abandoning them in favour of curated news and social discovery. The assumption is that news provided by our social circle is more relevant as we hand-pick our circle according to our interests.

We all know, however, that we can collect ‘friends’ on a whim with whom we may actually have little in common. Many of these may not reciprocate so don’t feel guilty about culling them from your list.

While we might like to keep on top of a range of topics we cannot hope to keep up quality interactions across too diverse a spread. It may, therefore, be prudent to choose those we are most interested in as our primary focus in order to devote more time to them without the additional distractions.

2. Choose your toolset

It may be fun to try every new service that comes along but we can’t hope to maintain an effective presence on them all – the key is not to spread yourself too thin.

Select a few key services that give a good return and stick predominantly to those in order to better develop visibility and relationships in those places.

3. Be open to new ideas

It might seem contradictory to choosing your toolset but we should always set some time apart to see what’s new, try something we’ve never used before. If it doesn’t work out or offer what’s needed then we need waste no more time on it. If, however, it fits our needs or workflow we can maybe swap it in for something else that is less effective.

We will never grow if we aren’t willing to put out heads above the parapet once in a while. We learn by doing and our mistakes and missteps can often teach us the most valuable lessons.

4. Don’t just hear, listen

There are three types of users on social networks: the deaf, the ignorant and the cognisant.

The deaf just shout into space and do not hear (or even acknowledge) others. The ignorant hear others but do not take heed of what they are saying. The cognisant, however, are truly mindful of the comments of others ensuring they fully understand.

To have quality interactions with our followers we need to ensure that we are that latter, the cognisant. Read, re-read, digest. Learn from others and from yourself never taking anything for granted.

5. Be human

To connect we must let our personality shine through. Sharing is important but being just be a ‘retweet machine’ with a feed full of nothing but links and re-shares of other people’s content achieves nothing and doesn’t enable anyone to get to know us.

Sharing without the context of our interests and reasons is almost worthless and just becomes a clone of any other news feed. We like the personal touch, we like to know ‘why’. When there are thousands of people all vying for friend requests we need to be able to differentiate ourselves from the masses; there is only one you so show it to the world.

Image by aithom2

Every once in a while we stumble upon a blog post or article that grabs hold of us and really makes us think; one such post recently came from Ian M Rountree entitled “What Happened to Blog Reactions?” Ian asks why we no longer see chains of blog posts with authors directly responding to the thoughts of others via “high caliber blog engagement actions“.

Perspective

In the past we had bulletin boards, IRC and forums – we talked to each other, meaningful threads of dialog going back and forth over and over every minutiae of the given topic.

Blogging gave a permanent home to our thoughts under our own control, a record where we could fully explore an idea at length. IRC became less popular and forums became fractured places – often full of aggressive confrontation rather than proper conversation – but little else existed. It was therefore not surprising to see blog conversations – long form reactions to a specific post

As I have said before: the social landscape is changing, but it’s gone way beyond just the social networks we use – it is the fact that we have the social networks as alternatives to our blogs.

Now, for all our protestations that we are social and more in touch with our “friends” than ever before the fact remains that true conversation has significantly reduced – many are looking at the quick win with short form networks; appearing to talk to many but actually saying very little.

The conversation

The discussion around changes to the global conversation have been ongoing for years and the ability to read posts elsewhere (RSS readers, social tools) negates the need to visit the originating site – this has had a massive impact on “in situ” comments. Where anyone is commenting these don’t necessarily get back to the originating author (Facebook, Google Buzz, etc.)

We now have access to far more information and it is quicker, and easier, to reply by short form messages such as tweets, Buzz posts and Facebook updates.

There seems less need to resort to long form responses due to the low barriers to entry to social networks but these options did not previously exist meaning your only options were via on site comments or your own full posts.

Quality

Short form responses are often throwaway one liners – immediate responses with little consideration.
It may be simple to publish a short form response but this is no guarantee of quality – just look at what Tim Berners Lee has to say about how twitter only amplifies the extreme points of view “the emotionally charged” as he puts it.

Often, reasoned debate is not something that tends to be noticed; we are becoming children of a sensationalist age – gossip junkies after a quick fix. Social networks run the risk of becoming the online equivalent of tabloid newspapers.

Change

It has been a common theme recently but change is inevitable. Our tools alter and develop, and our usage patterns adjust accordingly. The sheer quantity of information we are now exposed to pulls our attention in different directions; we are permanently distracted and, therefore, not always able to devote the time that we should to individual items.

Ian mentions that we are in a “rush for personal authority” and I would argue that, for some, the act of curation is a means to achieve this. By continually sharing relevant, interesting news the aim is to build a community around the feed but there must be balance – if we are all curating the news then no-one is really reading it, taking the time to digest it and react.

It is argued that having our news curated for us saves us the time and trouble of finding it ourselves but we are often presented with so much that it is, in fact, counter-productive. We skim through longer posts and how often do we see “DRTL” in the comments – if we are too time constrained to even read blogs how are we to expect ourselves to reply?

Downsizing?

Perhaps we all need to rein ourselves in, follow fewer people, subscribe to fewer feeds and start focusing on the quality of our interactions rather than the quantity. We cannot possibly hope to keep up to speed with everything so must focus on what is most important in order become less distracted.

Perhaps by downsizing we can all devote more time to high calibre blog engagements and, once again, get the conversation going. Alternatively, have we reached the tipping point and web culture has changed such that blog conversations are no longer deemed relevant or necessary?

What are your thoughts?

Image by Emanuele Rosso

Standing at the crossroads, world spinning round and round
Know which way I’m going, you can’t bring me down - Ozzy Osbourne 

Change is inevitable in order for things to progress. We have an irrational fear of change but must accept it, often realising the benefits once it has happened. We are creatures of habit and anything that disrupts the status quo is unsettling – we need, however, to upset the apple cart and shake things up in order to move on rather than getting stuck in a rut.

A recent theme has emerged: that Twitter needs a new vision, a new direction.

From the outside it seems as though Twitter is standing at the crossroads wondering which way to turn, what changes to make for the best and who it is going to upset on the way.

Rob Diana asked Twitter what it wants to be when it grows up arguing that if needs to focus on product development and work out where it wants to go in order to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Mathew Ingram, over at GigaOm, goes a step further suggesting that Twitter needs “a consistent and tangible vision” under the leadership of a Steve Jobs character.

Competition

We have had the rumours that UberMedia is going to build a competitor – possibly using its stable of client applications as leverage – and the new TweetDeck web service (still in beta) is being seen as a rival to #newtwitter but Twitter needs to improve its experience in order to progress, even without the threat of competition.

It has been said UberMedia’s network will focus on some of Twitter’s failings and gaps in usability to gain traction and I go along with the need to recognise how people are using a service in order to greater facilitate this use.

Twitter has done it before, taking on board the ideas of hashtags and retweets, but it needs to get more creative and take a few risks.

Back to basics

A couple of days ago I had a “Wow!” moment listening to the radio in the car. During an interview, historian Neil Oliver was asked how you could sum up Stonehenge in a sentence or two. His answer: forget the stones, (what?) instead think about why people considered the site to be important enough to want to keep coming back and permanently mark it in this way. Why is the site important?

How does this apply to Twitter? Forget the tools, forget specific functionality, think about why people are using the service – why do they think it is important.

It’s almost like it has been ripped straight from the intro to the Cluetrain Manifesto:

“What if the real attraction of the Internet is not its cutting-edge bells and whistles, its jazzy interface or any of the advanced technology that underlies its pipes and wires? What if, instead, the attraction is an atavistic throwback to the prehistoric human fascination with telling tales?”

“In sharp contrast to the alienation wrought by homogenized broadcast media, sterilized mass “culture,” and the enforced anonymity of bureaucratic organizations, the Internet connected people to each other and provided a space in which the human voice would be rapidly rediscovered.”

Read Twitter for “the internet” in these paragraphs and you have a good basis for realising the attraction for what is, essentially, a very basic service.

If Twitter is going to look at how we use it then a few trends may be instantly identified but it has to prove it is listening.

Dog eat dog

There is obviously a willingness to eat in to the ecosystem when it suits, and to undercut developers, but Twitter needs to start doing it better than the third parties rather than doing just enough to get by.

The beauty of Twitter, however, is in its simplicity – change the game too drastically and you run the risk of losing what you’ve got. It’s hard to think what Twitter could do that would be big enough to be a game changer again but without destroying the success achieved so far.

The question then becomes does Twitter know which way it’s going? Will it slip up allowing others to bring it down? Or, perhaps, it will take the time to rethink its direction to ensure it is on the right path.

Image by Lori Greig

There has been a recent flood of posts regarding how Google is going to make its social strategy work and the general thread seems to be concentrating on the Google v Facebook aspect.

I have said before that Google and Facebook are more alike than we normally think, the parallels between their offerings are considerable even if Facebook has them gathered in one place, but this doesn’t mean the two are – or should be – in direct competition.

It’s undeniable that Facebook could have a good stab at launching an advertising service outside of its own boundaries with the wealth of Likes data they have collected but would they really want to? As Jesse Stay says “Google is not Facebook and vice versa”

Facebook’s success is in its walled garden approach. By locking you in they ensure they control the data and by then, providing a multitude of distractions like social gaming, keeping you there.

It’s like shopping: a shop will periodically move items about between shelves so that you are forced to browse for what you want meaning that you have to walk past other stuff to get to it, consequently you are more likely to impulse buy things that you would not have previously considered.

Jesse suggests that Google should do more to partner with social networks, including Facebook, to integrate the experience but I cannot envisage the latter wanting any of this. Facebook doesn’t want its content indexed and for you to go right to what you need, it wants you to “step in to the store” and browse a while hoping that you may do more while you are there.

As I discussed previously, Google must accept the fact that no-one will come in and beat Facebook at its own game. Facebook OWNS social, period!

Me v Us

Mike Melanson talks about Google’s +1 and asks “what’s in it for me?” He argues that sharing is a matter of “Me” versus the greater good and that using +1 to like search results doesn’t return him any direct value. So, let’s have a look at what +1 actually offers – currently I feel there are the following benefits:

• +1 assists sites with rankings, shows popularity just like Facebook Likes
• +1 assists Google by providing preference data to increase advertising relevance
• as it stands +1 becomes a social bookmarking service of sorts

Beyond the “joy of sharing” +1 provides a basic bookmarking service that sits within our google profile when the +1 tab is enabled – thus providing some “Me” value. Additional desired functionality would also include search and categorization.

If used sensibly we can employ it to retain links to things we find interesting or useful and from which we feel our social circle may derive benefit.

Why Google?

Jesse and Mike both state that when sharing a link they will generally do so via Facebook or Twitter why would they use +1? One reason could be that social bookmarking element. It is something you can’t easily get with the others. You could, for example, get a list of your tweets which contain links via the API but it would not be a quick, easy process for the average user.

But this doesn’t go far enough.

I agree with others when they say there needs to be a more social aspect to Google +1s including, as I see it:

• Buzz integration as a minimum, ideally share to at least Twitter as well
• options for private v public: all +1′s will affect page rank but do we want to share them all?
• the +1 tab within Google Profiles should show comments via buzz – we could choose to view a simple list or expanded option to view this discussion

As mentioned, clicking +1 for any site currently provides very little at face value and users will be expecting some form of social interaction as with Facebook Likes but the widely accepted notion of ‘social’ does not naturally dove-tail into Google’s world. The problem with Google is that, traditionally, it is a stepping stone NOT a destination. This must be rectified.

You Tube is a destination but only because it exists outside the normal Google business model. It was purchased and left to run as a semi-autonomous entity. But how many people actually care that it is owned by Google? How many actually don’t even know that it is owned by Google?

As Robert Scoble says, Google does not understand that ‘social’ is about wasting time; instead it is task oriented, it is about getting things done – get the information you need in order to do something else. This is inherent in search and always will be unless it is completely redesigned (which probably isn’t going to happen). We go to Google to search, to find other things; it is not a content site – it is not an end point.

If Google wants to become ‘sticky’ it needs something else, a destination which gives compelling reasons for use to stay. It has to be by building on Profiles – there is nothing else suitable.

Profiles, however, have a long way to go to become a desirable destination; they are currently a reference point for others and need a hook, something to ensnare us and keep us on site; something we as the profile holder can use.

When social layers were first announced I envisioned that they would combine our actions across Google’s various services – perhaps Profiles need an aggregated timeline which includes our Buzz stream, what our friends have been up to on Picasa, our You Tube subscriptions etc. Google Buzz originally tried to populate itself with our email contacts (the cause of the original privacy outcry) so why not have an option to include emails from chosen contacts fed in to the timeline (just a thought).

Google Profiles should have a public and private view – the private being our destination; our reason for visiting and sticking around.

Until, Google finds a mainstream, standalone destination it will only be a social bit-part player.

Image by Mike Brown

The Twitter news is now coming thick and fast with the company seemingly eager to show it is developing its approach so, I just wanted to share a couple of immediate thoughts.

As I mentioned yesterday, Twitter needs to provide sufficient value to encourage both new users to join and for existing users to stick around.

The news that it is to offer ‘Facebook like’ business pages may not be universally liked but could potentially be a good move.

Big business

Part of what has made social media so effective is the ability for business to use it as an additional support stream; a social presence gives customers direct access to a voice in the company. Enhancing this relationship could be a good thing for the company itself, their customers and for Twitter.

If companies are making it easier for customers to contact them then this may be a selling point for Twitter itself, people may be persuaded to sign up in order to take advantage of these new pages. There could be concerns that this approach is too different from the normal timeline-based site operation but it need not interfere with that.

My ideas for focused conversations outside of the public timeline follow almost identical lines: companies could pay to brand their profile in order to provide greater control and an additional revenue stream for Twitter. Combining these profile pages with my idea for hashcodes could be a major coup.

Value and discovery

Everything that can be done to enhance the user experience is vital. If accounts are not being used or dumped after, perhaps, being created on a whim Twitter needs to take steps to reverse the trend. Providing a way for new users to more easily find other users or useful, relevant information is vital.

The announcement of more intuitive searches and the advanced search page can help.

The sign up process is now significantly better than it used to be but I would suggest advanced search needs to be advertised at this point to show all the ways to find content which will make your stay more enjoyable.

Those actively using Twitter on a regular basis would now not be without it – that feeling now needs to be instilled in millions more.