It is considered good social networking etiquette–especially on Twitter–to warn your followers that you are posting a link to content on your own blog or company website.

I hereby reject this for the following reasons:

1. When I follow someone it’s because I think they, on the whole, produce content that I want to read vs. content that I find spammy, boring, or otherwise low-signal-to-noise. If this ever stops being the case, I will no longer follow, and I don’t care at all where that content comes from.
2. If you’re worried that the links I post might be “spam” then we already have a much more serious problem than a labeling issue.
3. The odds of my own content being significantly lower quality than the content I enjoy and share from other sources that you DO enjoy, is low.
4. If I don’t have to warn you before I tell you I am going to get a coffee at Starbucks, then I damn sure am not going to warn you before I refer you to a piece I wrote that I think you might find valuable.

In short, what it really means to warn people that you’re posting your own stuff is:

I wrote this, so it’s probably way lower quality than what I normally post.

But if that were the case, then you probably wouldn’t be following me in the first place.

The whole purpose of social media and networking is to put yourself out there–to share your life and ideas with others. There is simply no more pure way to do this than to show people what you’re thinking and writing about.

So no, I will not shield or obscure my own perception of what I find interesting in what amounts to a preemptively apology. If you like what I normally post then you should also like what I write about. From the follower perspective, you either trust me to post content that is somehow worth your time or you don’t. ::

Ok, just a few random thoughts; I’ll do a real post later on this once things are fleshed out more.

1. What are the variables among social networking tools?

I like to abstract everything before talking about implementation. What are the similarities between Twitter and FriendFeed and Facebook? What about them are the same, and what are different?

As many many know, I’ve been on a design kick for like…a couple of years now. It’s why the iPhone is dominating, and it’s likely why Facebook is as well. They just feel good.

That being said, you have to have some minimums before you can get there.

• photo sharing
• video sharing
• link sharing
• direct messaging
• micro-blogging (status)
• full articles/essays???
• incorporation of other network activity
• search (finding lost/new friends)
• games/fun
• what else?

…and most importantly…the EASE and FUN involved in doing these things.

So here’s the thing. Twitter is an input mostly. It’s something of a reader as well, i.e. you go there to read what people are saying of course, but at some point that’s going to be part of a true aggregator app. Why would you use ANY app that only reads one type of input?

Nobody will, unless that’s the only place to get it.

As the inputs continue to increase, and the need to consolidate increases, what we’re going to have is a battle of the aggregators. The big boy right now is Facebook. Why? It’s both an input system AND an aggregator, and it’s a very nice interface.

FriendFeed is the closest thing to Facebook out of the big players (except MySpace, but I don’t talk about them), but it isn’t as widespread or as approachable/intuitive.

So is the question really: when will Twitter become an aggregator? Can services like Twitter survive without becoming a central hub? I don’t think so. I don’t think people are going to have time to have multiple central hubs, and you can’t do with Twitter what you can do with Facebook, i.e. run your entire life from it.

So imagine a matrix of functionality on a giant, wall-sized whiteboard. Features on the x axis and services on the y axis. Every single service needs to be asking themselves what they have that others don’t, and then calculating how long before they get it, and what they’re going to do about it.

Right now I’m leaning toward Facebook as the winner in this game for a long time, with FriendFeed being a tech-elite supplement to it. But ultimately FriendFeed needs to be asking themselves, “Why can’t Facebook do what I’m doing?”

Endgame

Regardless of how we get there, the endgame is clear. Every service will be an aggregator and an input system, and it will work by finding and/or helping you find all of your friends (and people it thinks you SHOULD be friends with).

From there it’ll go get every service they are a part of, and integrate those inputs into your view of that person. Forget services–at this point you’re just tracking people and what they’re doing in their lives.

This is what FriendFeed is doing. They got there first, and that’s why I’m excited about them. But it’s only a matter of time before Facebook fixes their URL structure and starts doing this same exact thing.

The services will become abstracted. It’ll just be life events that you get when you use your FB or FF interface (which will be mobile or desktop or whatever).

So here are the features:

1. Find all your friends (and recommend more later)
2. Find everything they use online (FB, FF, Twitter, Blogs, Forums, Flikr, etc.)
3. Collect all that stuff together into a single “lifestream” for that person, and stream it into you in realtime.
4. Ultimately this allows one thing: people anywhere to connect into the raw experiences of those they care about, e.g. visual, auditory, textual, emotional, etc.

It’s just a race to get there, and right now the two big ones are Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed. ::

I heard recently on NPR that public school teachers all over the country are being discouraged from using social networking sites like Facebook. Many are actually prohibited from doing so with punishments being as severe as immediate termination.

I find this very strange.

Social networking isn’t some sort of fringe behavior that you can prohibit teachers from engaging in. I get the fact that students are supposed to see their teachers as authority figures, and not as “regular people”, and I also get that teachers often have lives outside of work that might not be something to set an example by. But these things are tiny in importance compared to the freedom of the teachers.

You can’t limit teachers from expressing themselves via a medium that’s going to be as normal as the mobile phone in a few years. There are other solutions. For one, it’s possible to maintain granular control over who you share various types of content with on these types of networks. So teachers could, in all fairness, be required to limit their more sensitive content to friends only (and hence, not students).

This is a fair compromise.

At that point schools could scan their teachers’ profiles and make sure there’s no images of naked drinking binges available to the public that that teachers’ students could see. But to fire a teacher for just having a Facebook account at all is demonstrative of how clueless people still are regarding the impact that social networking is going to have on society.

These types of networks aren’t going away, and everyone is going to be on them. We need to be figuring out ways to manage this fact rather than run around trying to take the pee out of the pool. ::

An interesting project — Hackers for Charity — started by Johnny Long.

Short summary: people in technology donate their time and skills to charity in return for 1) gratification from giving back, and 2) references from industry professionals.

Here’s a microcast with Johnny done by Martin Mckeay:

Links

[ Hackers for Charity | hackersforcharity.org ]
[ Hackers for Charity Microcast | mckeay.net ]

FriendFeed is a relatively new service designed to let you stay in contact with your friends in a more complete way than other services. Twitter is an excellent service because it allows one to microblog and push updates via sms, but this doesn’t show your friends everything you’re doing.

Someone wanting to follow your blog posts, your Twitter updates, Picasa/Flikr photos, or your Amazon wishlists would have to add those things separately.

FriendFeed solves this problem by consolidating updates from all these places (and many more) into a single interface. It’s basically a better way of doing what you’re already doing online, i.e. following the lives of your friends on the Internet.

Just go to FriendFeed, sign up, and add the services that you use, e.g. your blog, your FaceBook, your MySpace, your Twitter account, your Google Shared items, your Picasa/Flikr account, etc. Once you’ve added your accounts, you can continue using those various services like usual, but when update one of those services FriendFeed will update as well.

So there are really two steps to enhancing your connection to your friends via FriendFeed:

1. Get your friends to create FriendFeed accounts and add their various services to it. This way you can follow them.
2. Make your own FriendFeed account and add your services to it. This way they can follow you.

Example

Here are the services I have in my own FriendFeed:

• My Blog
• Twitter
• Google Shared Items (shared links)
• Google Picasa (photos)
• My Amazon Wish List

So all someone has to do to keep up with me is subscribe to my FriendFeed feed, not to all those different services. Not only that, but it also has a full vote-up and comment system where people can give input on the content you publish.

It’s an extremely powerful platform for staying in touch with friends regardless of what types of social networks they use. Have a go.

Links

[ FriendFeed ]
[ Twitter ]