• the opportunity to contribute – easy sharing of information
• the opportunity to comment – your chance to have your say
• the opportunity to collaborate – work with anyone, anywhere to achieve a common goal
• the opportunity of conversation – getting involved in discussions with others
• the opportunity of community – building relationships online

I expanded on how each of the C’s formed a part of the online social experience at the time and the ideas were well received, this post can now be found here.

Whilst being a good base form which to start describing the ideas behind social media the phrase was primarily a headline, an attention bringer so – in that regard – was a throw away; useful at the time but not retained or revisited.

It, therefore, makes it more interesting to find that the phrase appears to have taken on a life of it’s own. The phrase has been adopted, repeated, altered and adapted but, regardless of how it is wrapped up, as one blog post put it:

“amongst the social media circles it is nearly universally agreed, the elements of a good social media strategy consist of the 5 C’s: conversation, community, collaboration, contribution and commenting.”

The Sixth C

Back in June 2008 social media was still primarily reserved for the geeks and the early adopters; the holy grail for any social media service was to achieve ubiquity, to enter the mainstream. Then, around 6 months ago, things changed. In one month Twitter saw over 1300% growth with celebrities and the mainstream media trying to claim social media as their own. Whether you are listening to local radio or national sports coverage or watching TV everyone is now talking about Twitter. It has truly entered the public consciousness in a way that not even Facebook with it’s millions of users has managed to do.

People are now using short status updates as a matter of course, supplementing and even, in some cases, bypassing other forms of communication. I believe we have reached the point where social media can honestly be described as an extension of our normal behaviour and it is still growing.

The importance of the social network in our society is finally starting to fulfil it’s potential and, with more and more companies interacting with their customers in this setting, it is rapidly becoming just another way to do business.

My original suggestion for The Sixth C can, therefore, finally be adopted: culture.

The emergence of Facebook Lite shortly after the aquisition of Friendfeed seems more than a coincidence but, according to TechCrunch it is designed for use in areas where download speeds are slow so we should not get over excited at present.

Potential

Whether or not Facebook Lite develops beyond a low bandwidth version of the site or becomes the frameowrk for something else remains to be seen. If it is kept free from all the clutter that plagues the normal version, then it could be the perfect vehicle for Friendfeed integration. If you add in additional import functionality then Lite has the potential to essentially become a Friendfeed clone – Facebook as it used to be: just for sharing info.

We don’t need to be told who has achieved what on Farmville, or poked, or invited to play Mafia Wars – this was the joy of the Friendfeed service and what really caught the imagination: a place to share, connect and discuss without the limitations of 140 characters.

Regardless of any change in functionality or version, however, a primary sticking point between the methods of operation of Facebook and Friendfeed is the actual friending behaviour. Facebook requires mutual friending but on Friendfeed (just like Twitter and other services) friending can be unilateral or not even required at all in order to interact with another user.

If Facebook could release a version without the need for mutual friending that includes full, real time search then we could be on to a winner.

The facts are that Facebook and Friendfeed are aimed at two disparate audiences for two disparate purposes with two completely distinct operating models. Facebook may have been “borrowing” some of the best ideas that Friendfeed had to offer and Friendfeed, in turn, may have been redesigned their interface to make it more familiar to users of other services but they (currently) remain at almost opposite ends of the social media spectrum.

Do we read between the lines from the announcement on the Friendfeed blog when it says that “Friendfeed will continue to operate normally for the time being” – does this mean that it will eventually be devoured by the Facebook monster and no longer exist as we know it? Most likely, but at present it is all speculation.

Cross-breeding functionality may well enhance both but the acquisition must be handled extremely carefully or the same cross breed could ruin both services and alienate both sets of users.

Community

Unfortunately, social media is a living paradox. It strives for openness and flexibility with accessibility from as many platforms as possible but, despite this surface flexibility, we are tied to the same back end. The constant battle between technological freedom and system dependence. We may be able to connect from anywhere but we are always connecting to the same thing.

But that is what social media is about. We have a choice of networks but a service is only as good as the people who use it, your friends and your community. I may use Twitter, you may use Plurk but without interaction they are meaningless. The choice exists but unless we get all of our friends, our community, to choose the same way we are talking to ourselves.

For all of the flexibility we crave we are governed, out of necessity, by the herd mentality and this is what has a lot of people running scared about the Friendfeed acquisition. If Friendfeed does get absorbed and cease to function as a separate entity what will the resulting offspring be like? Which features will come from either parent? Will we get a genetically perfect super child or end up with a Frankenstein’s monster and, ultimately, will we be able to persuade our community to migrate with us.

Fear of change

As a rule we fear change – at least BIG change – but change can be an extremely effective catalyst prompting new ideas and ways of achieving our goals. Whilst this fear may sometimes be justified it is, at the base level, often unfounded as the likes of Friendfeed are subject to constant change as the service evolves and grows over time. Perhaps the acquisition by Facebook is required for the next evolutionary jump to occur or, just as equally, it may cause an evolutionary dead end – the social media Neanderthal.

All we know is that the winds of change are blowing, their direction remains to be seen so we should all reserve judgement until the storm hits.

Sometimes we need to leave our comfort zones.

More recently, Allen Stern stated on FriendFeed “i think sharing on google reader is finished – the value for so many sharers has continued to drop from my perspective” which garnered a number of contrary responses.

The real issue as I see it is that the value offered by various services has not been lessened rather it has been altered since the emergence of mashups with data from multiple services all feeding in to each other.

Isolation

Prior to aggregation services such as FriendFeed we looked at other services in isolation and everything had a set perceived value; you knew exactly what you were getting from your RSS reader or your social networking service.

Now we have aggregation and lifestreaming and it is becoming less clear where the boundaries of any function begin and end.

Distinctions

Lifestreaming is an over used term and is often employed when we really mean aggregation. Lifestreaming is traditionally more a Truman Show type experience (literally your life streamed) rather than aggregation which is the collection of your actions on different services in to one location, but what exactly is our stuff? Is our stream a record of our actions or a share of the content of others?

Are there now distinctions between sharing, aggregation, social bookmarking and the like or have they all merged in to one process? When are you just bookmarking as opposed to sharing? As Alexander said: it’s about your intention but, with the way services like FriendFeed operate, is intention enough?

The social contract

I discussed before about the implied social contract of blogging which has caused a number of arguments over exactly what bloggers owe their audiences and perhaps we should be asking if an implied social contract should extend to the way we utilise sharing and aggregation services.

One aspect of FriendFeed, as an example, causes a big divide in opinion and that is the way in which it handles multiple instances of the same item.

Consider the following scenario:

• User A has their Google Reader and Delicious streams fed in to FriendFeed
• User B has their StumbleUpon and Social Median streams fed in to FriendFeed
• User A shares a specific item in Google Reader and also bookmarks that item in Delicious
• User B stumbles the same item and also clips it on Social Median

Two users have between them now created four instances of the same item within FriendFeed and other users will create further duplication upon sharing the same item.

Is this enabling a wider audience to discuss the same item leading to wider ranges of opinion or is it leading to a fragmentation of the conversation and cluttering peoples streams with useless duplicates?

Intention

With isolated services out intention was clear – we would bookmark something for our own reference or share an item to our link blog but now just about any action we perform becomes a ’share’ if we have our online activities aggregated. This leads to a number of new questions:

• do we share things differently based on where we know the share will be seen?
• does our potential audience affect the actions we take on our subscribed services?
• should we be tailoring our behaviour to our online environment and the community that we are a part of?

Prevously, a single action would have one consequence but with aggregation thrown in to the mix we set off a chain of events. A bookmark or a Digg is no longer just that, it also becomes a share which contributes to the duplication on our aggregation services so should we be asking ourselves whether we need to perform the initial act based on our environment or whether we actually need to have these streams aggregated in the first place?

If a number of our ‘friends’ have shared an item and it already has multiple conversation threads do we hold back so as not to muddy the waters or do we go ahead with the share to boost the item up the rankings of a particular service (ReadBurner for Google Reader shares for example) but at the risk of clogging up our streams with further duplicates?

Is this a conflict of interests? Should we help an item gain more exposure or should we accede to the implied social contract and not clutter the streams of those subscribed to our updates?

Social dilemma or over-analysing?

What do you think?

Related Posts

• Who is our audience and what do we owe them?

Image by Andy Woo.

We have gone beyond just having an opinion and have all become armchair experts in just about everything – it’s no longer just reserved for sports fans thinking they can manage their team better than the “incompetent muppet” standing on the sidelines.

We feel that we can design things and suggest features better than those getting paid to do the job. In some cases users do have valid points and companies have used customer suggestions to improve their products but we should never lose sight of the fact that we are just one person and the designers and developers are catering for the needs of millions. What might be right for you may not be right for some (hmm, wasn’t that in the Different Strokes theme song?)

So, when a new product gets released in beta when does helpful, constructive criticism go too far and border of the realms of being over demanding?

Take Google Chrome for example.

Now I’m not going to remark on the feature set or the pros and cons of the fledgling browser as many others have already done that and better than I could (although I must admit that I like where Google are coming from) but I would like to comment on the reactions and expectations that are being thrown around the web.

Yes, this is Google and we should expect big things – in some respects I think we already have them, but we must never lose sight of the fact that Chrome is just a first beta; it’s an artists sketch before committing to getting the brushes dirty.

The first beta of Chrome has laid the foundations and put down some very good groundwork which will be fleshed out and perfected over the course of development so statements like “Chrome Not Ready For Enterprise” are pointless.

Of course it’s not and no-one should be suggesting otherwise.

Chrome will not be ready for enterprise for quite a while and will not be considered for enterprise use for even longer – at least in any enterprise with any integrity and a decent IT infrastructure. There are many more factors at play that just the features built in to the browser.

An enterprise environment will have procedures in place to test and approve any new software prior to deployment – beta software will never be considered. Not only do you have potential security or data corruption issues but you must also consider the reputation of your company. How would it look if you were connecting to third party services to access and manipulate sensitive data using an incomplete product? Not only would you tarnish your reputation but you would most likely be kicked off the service.

All we are saying…

Give Chrome a chance. Give any new product or service that comes out as beta a chance and stop making ridiculous demands of something which is, by definition, just a work in progress. This is what beta is all about regardless of who is behind it.

First look reviews and constructive criticism should be encouraged but outlandish statements and ridiculous demands get us nowhere.

A public beta is just the external face of a project and there will be a lot more going on behind the scenes both in terms of advancements of the technology involved and where the project is heading. As I have mentioned in the past, just because a company hasn’t said they will be doing X, Y or Z doesn’t mean it isn’t already on the table; you don’t want to give away all your secrets too early. You may not be able to deliver on all your promises (remember the Longhorn saga) so under promise and over deliver but, more importantly, you don’t want to give too much of a heads up to the competition.

I had an occasional glance at FriendFeed but only very rarely and Google Reader went begging – there are thousands of unread items I need to wade through/mark as read and a number of feeds that I will most likely unsubscribe from.

Before I start anything here I’d first like to say thanks to Mark and Hutch for thinking of me while I was away, it’s always nice to know that out of site isn’t always out of mind.

Have I learnt any lessons from my time away or is it all really common sense? Let’s have a look.

Who needs social media?

What did we do before we had what we currently think of as social media? We found other things to occupy ourselves, and that’s exactly what I did during last month.

As a family we have started playing World of Warcraft so that’s good to eat up a few hours and it also helped that the UK domestic football (soccer) season has started again so that provides something else to keep me occupied.

Do I need social media? No, and to be honest I haven’t really been missing it as I have been spending more time with my family in the ‘real’ world.

Social media, just like anything else, is habit forming – we can create our own addictions by getting, and wanting to stay, involved. Conversely, distancing ourselves from something for long enough reduces the craving until you can quit. Will power is needed and having a distraction is very beneficial.

Common sense. The above can apply to just about anything and not just social media.

Who needs blogging?

I have had no inclination to blog during my time away and have had to force myself to write this; do I feel I owe it to myself to summarise what happened, or owe it to you the reader? Why should we owe anyone anything?

Blogging is a tough mistress and we often put undue pressure on ourselves. Whether it is because we feel that our readers have invested their trust in us by subscribing to the feeds so we feel compelled to explain ourselves I don’t know but we are always our own worst critics when. let’s face it, most others couldn’t care less. For every social media blogger who disappears there are dozens more to take up the mantle – this is not an area that will dry up anytime soon.

Hutch remarked that if you are having problems blogging then you should return to what interests you but it can be worse than that: what do you do when the blogging process itself doesn’t interest you? You just have to step back like I did and wait for the enthusiam to return. I think I’ll be waiting for a little while longer yet.

Addiction

I’m the kind of person who becomes addicted to things very easily but I also have a very low boredom threshold. If I’m not kept interested then even the strongest addiction doesn’t stand a chance (alcohol and gambling in my past can attest to this) so I need to keep myself challenged in order to thrive.

We’ll have to see what happens over the coming weeks.

The question now for anyone who agrees with any of what I said is: what can we do about it, or is it now beyond our control? Should we even try?

You are most likely reading this because you have an interest in some aspect of social media so, to keep you going while I’m away, I thought I’d share my list of those bloggers I have turned to for intelligent discussion in this area. I tend to mainly clear of the larger blogging networks and stick to those who, while they might not be the biggest names on the web, I consider to have the most to say – and not just about social media.

In no particular order:

Louis Gray
Mark Dykeman
Steven Hodson
Hutch Carpenter
Alexander van Elsas
Daryl Tay
Eric Berlin
Rob Diana
Ryan Brymer

I’m sure they’ll take good care of you.

I completely agree with her.

It’s not just that the technology has plateaued, it’s not just that the conversation stalled but, somehow, that the social web has lost its spark.

We moan about the echo chamber and dream of social media ubiquity but once things get more ‘mainstream’ our precious corner of the web seems to become less relevant. We seek out friends who are not talking about the same old stuff but end up with a screen full of items we have no interest in.

I’ve spoken about balance on many occasions but it appears that a balance is almost impossible to achieve. Do we embrace the noise or just stop lying to ourselves and admit that the echo chamber is where we belong and is what brought us here in the first place?

We demand a wider scope of interest but get bogged down in the inevitable banality that accompanies it.

Mark mentioned that we can welcome the late adopter if we can be willing to go over old ground but we have already been recycling the same things over and over amongst ourselves even without the late adopter exacerbating the problem; it is hard to stay positive and focused amongst the endless repetition.

I have had post ideas but have not been able to complete them, is that burnout or just apathy? Perhaps a bit of both.

Social media can be tremendously addictive and I’ll admit to getting addicted – wanting to miss a trick and having the desire to be involved in every conversation. Now, however, I am like the addict in therapy going through the withdrawal looking for a less potent substitute to wean me from these stuff.

I had a post in the works about the causes and nature of addiction as it related to social media and the web as a whole (is there a better or worse type of addiction) but lost the flow. I also know many would not read it all as they do not like long posts so there developed an element of ‘why bother’.

There is a lot of rubbish spouted in the name of web 2.0, SEO, blogging and social media – a lot of what gets rolled out as trade secrets is really just common sense and breaking the so called golden rules is really normally more effective.

Who created these rules anyway?

Do we really want a web full of generic content because a few individuals show us the ways to be a success? Of course not and if you flood the market with an army of clones then nobody wins as there is only so much ’success’ to go round.

What was special about the social web has been swallowed up in our quest to educate the masses.

Looking back over recent posts I suppose that that has been coming for a while; I have spoken about the need to do something different and to change the record so that is what I am going to do.

I am going to take a break from blogging and even the social web itself. Perhaps after some time away I will be able to return refreshed and maybe, just maybe, the conversation will have moved on. I have a couple of short breaks coming up so this seems the ideal time to get away for a while.

In the meantime please feel free to get in touch by email as I’ll at least always have that to hand on my phone.

We have the ability to communicate with many interesting people from all over the world in the easiest ways we have ever had available to us. The flow of information and responses is incredibly engaging and is making the world ever smaller – even if governments still have their differences, the citizens of the world are rapidly becoming citizens of the one global village.

On the other hand, however, social media can be a huge time-sink if not managed correctly and the danger exists that we become too engrossed so that other areas of our lives start to suffer. As I have said before: it is about finding a balance that works for us.

Different strokes

We all use social media differently, we have different goals and objectives, different reasons for using one service over another. Bloggers will use services to expand their audience and make items available to a wider cross section of the web thus enhancing their exposure. Nowhere, however, is is written that we must engage on all fronts and, as such, should not be criticised for not doing so.

We all have our favourite services and social networks; we may have accounts on dozens but we invariably use a core set of tools to get us through our daily lives be they Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed etc. We have our followers across the web and can choose where we interact with them – our choices do not have to match and the variety in social media is what makes it interesting.

Echo?

We complain about the echo chamber and call for users of social media to broaden their horizons and use social media in different ways but, it seems, when certain individuals do this they are criticised for not being accessible or interactive.

A while back, Phil over at Scribkin called out Steve Gillmor among others for signing up to FriendFeed, importing their streams and not returning deeming those individuals Posers. Now, Tad questions how many of those “well known outside of FF” actively engage on the service (fftogo link)

Forgive me if I’m wrong here, but FriendFeed is an aggregation service that just happens to let you discuss items in situ. There is no obligation that the conversation must take place in any given location or even that a conversation should take place at all. Why is it then, that someone using a service for one purpose (aggregation) should de facto be using it in the same way as others? Doesn’t this go against our call for variety?

Following blindly

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.

It is our choice who we follow on any given network but if they don’t use it in the same way we do then so what? As Robert Scoble commented “God forbid somebody actually try to do something other than hang out in FriendFeed all day”.

“It has seemed obvious to me for a while that an ideal aspect of a business plan for a social networking service such as Twitter would be to charge partners for premium access to the API, but once you have started down the free path, is it possible, or wise, to backtrack and start charging?”

You can read the full post over at Louis’ blog here.

I was a bit worried about this post as it could have been a potential banana skin; instead it garnered some good responses both in the comments and on FriendFeed so I wanted to follow up on a few issues raised as a result.

“The route to success is recognising that Twitter’s power is as a service”

Jeff Sonstein raised the above point that a successful way forward would be for other services to aggregate the data from Twitter for their own users – much as FriendFeed is doing. Jesse Stay argues that developers may not be willing to pay and go elsewhere such as identi.ca and that, instead, Twitter should consider premium features that they can offer their users for a fee.

As I mentioned in my post, services like FriendFeed are just as guilty as having no clearly defined business plan; the social web is running on venture capital but how close are we to running on empty? It is unlikely that many services will be willing or able to pay for API access and, although, both users and developers may move to a free alternative how then will thatservice support itself – we will enter into a vicious cycle.

Sudha Jamthe suggested that Twitter could “go to traditional media companies to build new services upon their API, similar to what Sphere did with NY Times” but I don’t see the potential for the same kind of relationship here. Admittedly, Twitter has a large body of data but a lot of that is quite frankly useless and banal – even some relatively interesting content is worthless when taken out of it’s original context.

Trend analysis

Perhaps the main use for the bulk of Twitter data is in trend analysis which could, in turn, be used to plan advertising campaigns or for targeted marketing. Is this why Twitter bought the best search tool and has limited the API requests for all the rest? Could they make money by selling their analysis results or by charging for full access to enable companies to perform their own?

The folks at Twitter have never completely ruled out advertising so full trend analysis of your conversations and your friends could provide the only way to effectively target you as an individual and provide ads that you are actually likely to act upon.

Whatever the future brings I feel it will be quite different from the way we are operating now. Users may still get free access and developers might only be charged a small amount (perhaps an initial one off fee to get a licence to use the API) but advertising or data analysis is probably the way way to get most bang for the Twitter buck.