Facebook, Twitter and 2008 data portability questions still chapping my ass
Monday, March 9, 2009 at 6:14PM The question is no longer Myspace or Facebook. It is now Facebook or Twitter. Those two sentences are enough to get anyone to close a browser window. But wait! Up until now the resounding, and easy answer, has been "BOTH!" Unfortunately that question is about to get a lot harder to answer as Facebook prepares the launch of their new homepage. Which is essentially a play to become more Twitter like. With Anderson Cooper and everyone else blabbing about Twitter, and the Twitter experience being adopted rapidly by a more mainstream audience I can't blame Facebook at all. It is the right move. And I gotta say, I am excited about their new design. As the above Read/Write Web post describes, FB will start to look more and feel more like a stream of tweets or other aggregate sites like FriendFeed. The focus is now even more on "the feed." It's what a lot of people don't know they want yet, and FB is just showing them the way. The irony is that this new tweak to the FB experience will coach and prepare users to take the plunge to the stripped down purist (better?) approach of Twitter.
I already struggle with when to update my status on FB verus when to just post to Twitter. What is beautiful about Twitter is that it boils down the cultural shift that has happened with communication and technology into it's essence. A simple, reductive scaffolding for no rules, many to many communication from which endless amounts of interesting things can be built. Thats the opposite of Facebook, a lumbering monolith. Yet FB has come about as close as you can get to nailing profile centric social networking, and I love it. What Facebook has realized is that being profile centric (myspace) is no longer relevant. Being feed centric is 2009. Neither site will ever replace the other because of how meaty FB is and how stripped down twitter will remain (hopefully!). Oh god here we go again... back to 07/08 and the multi-profile fragmented/fractured nature of our lives on the social web. THE HUMANITY!
Cranking up my wambulance for some whining here. As FB and Twitter rolled up a lot of momentum recently a whole horde of music people I dig started popping up on both sites. If you know me or check out the occasional DJ mix I post to my podcast you know the cast of characters I speak of. This has been a blast. I forgot how geek dominated the landscape of the social web, or at least my corner of it has been for the past 3 years. So many lulz and good info came along with these new found friends on twitter. But with all those new tweets came the need to filter. I have ranted about filters and findability on here before.
So I am sitting here staring at Tweetdeck and the various columns of different sets of friends that Tweetdeck so nicely allows me to create. Ive got a list of famous people, a list of SF party folks, music/DJ types, super nerds, serious bros, the list goes on... But what really chaps my ass is that when FB relaunches their new homepage I am going to want the same exact filters / lists on there as well. And I am going to have to MANUALLY re-create them. Wouldnt it be great to be able to sync or import/export these filters. What happened to the great data portability movement of 07/08. Is the summer of love over? When do the users get to reap the benefits? It seems as though we are still in the early land-rush stages of the social web. Its unfortunate but I think some of these common sense elements of the social web experience that don't exist now could be years off. We have got some leveling off to do. Maybe its generational? Good old http://www.brianoberkirch.com planted this seed in my head a few months back. Zucky is of my generation. But he stands amongst some old Karl Rove like characters in the forest of tech. It will be interesting to see what happens.. to say the least.
As my friend Rey Flemmings likes to say - Its ALL about filters. The problem is filters are increasingly becoming important on the social web. Not being able to get them in and out of various sites is going to make situations like rabidly using twitter and facebook a total pain.
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Reader Comments (3)
1) I think the two services/products do feel similar, but their entry points are very different. With Twitter the average user goes into knowing it's a stream of updates, and only that. Facebook's result is that the updates are a byproduct of the widespread hive of activity, not an end in themselves. I would guess a lot of the non evangelist type of users don't even know that their every activity is part of a massive feed pool, whereas Twitter is singularly focused in that regard. Fodder for the next man-date.
2) The celebrity presence on Twitter is the new fan mail address. I've seen countless people reply to celebrities who have 100k+ followers, which is the same as them receiving 1,000 fan letters a day, but shorter, and with less content in most cases.
3) I do think it's all leading up to the anti-data revolution of 2015.