Others will post more profound observations about Google+, but for me it has provoked one fundamental question: what are my rules for adding friends, followers, people into circles etc. on the different social networks I use? Oddly, thinking about this has actually led to a rationalisation of my Facebook use – more on that below.
Anyway here are – now – my rules for who I’ll add where.
There’s a story on The Telegraph website today entitled Twitter ‘elite’ send most tweets. That’s not quite a fair representation of the story itself – the most important parts of the story are these:
Fifty per cent of all tweets read and shared on Twitter are generated by only 20,000 ‘elite’ users, despite there being more than 200 million registered accounts on the service.
[...]
Information flows have not become egalitarian by any means
The researchers also found that individuals on Twitter follow back far less than they’re followed, making it a less ‘social’ platform than the likes of Facebook.
The research that informs the article is from Yahoo Research, and there is a much more detailed and nuanced review of it from Nieman Journalism Lab here.
EU justice Commissioner (and, very incidentally, Commissioner responsible for communications) Viviane Reding yesterday gave a speech entitled “Your data, your rights: Safeguarding your privacy in a connected world”. You can read the speech here, and there are articles from The Guardian, The Register and The Telegraph.
I’m actually surprised – the way Reding fleshes out the principles for the policy are better than I had hoped.
The speech outlines 4 pillars on which future EU data protection policy relating to social networks is going to be based. These are the “right to be forgotten”, “transparency”, “privacy by default” and “protection regardless of data location”.
I get lots of work done due to systems to improve my efficiency. My mail is meticulously filtered with mail rules. Server data is neatly arranged. RSS feeds for the blogs I read are ruthlessly ordered in Netvibes. I’m hence reasonably good at getting the news I want from the sources I want in a format that suits me and – importantly – it’s a system where how much information I get, and whether to go back over old posts, is determined by me.
I’m also active on Facebook and Twitter, and the surprising things those networks turn up are the equivalent of browsing the pages of a newspaper – something catches your eye. Discovering this piece on Twitter’s great pretenders, thanks to a tweet from Evan Harris, was a highlight of the past week. I saw this because I happened to notice that tweet at that time – 2 minutes earlier or later and I would have missed it. Same – in reverse – for anything I ever tweet or post on Facebook and friends who read those. How do I know if what I write, and when, fits the systems, the everyday habits, of my audience? For social media (especially Facebook and its algorithms to determine what’s in a home feed) is serendipitous and opaque to understand at best.
Where is the balance between the two approaches? And what does all of this mean for trust and networking on the web?
It’s a simple question: do people read Facebook messages and signup for events in the way they used to?
The last fortnight has – in my personal case – given me a resounding answer: no.
I’ve tried to organise 2 personal events via Facebook – 16 friends in Oslo invited for a beer at Justisen, and 3 friends in Copenhagen invited for lunch there – and both have failed miserably. This could be because I don’t see the people in these cities very often, or it could be that I’m a sad case with no friends, but – I think – it’s more to do with people now routinely ignoring Facebook communications.
For the Oslo event 2 people replied ‘Yes’ and both came. 1 replied ‘No’ and told me why. 3 replied ‘Maybe’ and did not show up. But importantly 10 did not reply at all. I had sent a message to all the people a month before the event, and sent out the event details a week before.
The Copenhagen issue is even more interesting. Of the 3 invited for lunch one replied to the message immediately with a ‘I’ll get back to you’ which then became a ‘no’, yet from the others there was nothing for more than week. I then decided to mail both – using the e-mail addresses listed on their Facebook profiles – and both responded in a matter of hours, and hence the lunch is on.
I’m aware that it’s dangerous to draw a conclusion from such a small sample but these two events have focussed my mind and underlined what I have been feeling for some time – that Facebook communications are not as efficient as they were. I’m not aware of any stats to prove my hunch here, and Googling around doesn’t help… can anyone help me in the comments?
A question was posed at today’s Campaign Clinic at the eCampaigning Forum about niche social networks that I felt did not receive an adequate answer at the time. Now with a few hours to reflect on it, I’ve distilled my thoughts. There are 2 essentials to a good social network online – social norms, and a critical mass. Without both things won’t work.