For a while now I’ve been trying to find the magic-bullet in Social Networking: how to combine all my different feeds into a coherent whole, while maintaining individual usability. What do I mean by “individual usability?” Not all networks are created equal – they each have their target audience, as well as their target “feel” for how they present information – or even what information they focus on. There is much overlap, I know, but I feel it is also important to maintain these differences as well, as they are what help separate some services from one another.
For example: Facebook and Twitter are not the same thing; they focus on different aspects of their users lives; they had different target audiences to begin with (though I am willing to admit, evolution and popularity have merged what once was separate, to a great extent). Because of this, it is not only inappropriate to use them the same way, but down right insulting. Are there times when your Facebook status is going to be the same as your latest tweet? Sure, of course… but does that mean it should *always* be the same? No. Linking your Twitter account directly to your Facebook account, so that every tweet becomes your Facebook status, is not only a misuse of the two services, but also information overload for people who don’t care.
This is how I view some of the services available. I’m sure others will disagree with me, but … here ya go:
Services like Twitter, Identi.ca, Plurk, and YouAre: Life Streaming – that is, a round by round answer to the question, “what are you doing / What’s going on right now?”
Services like Facebook, Tumblr, and LiveJournal: Life Highlighting – that is, general overviews, points of interest, Micro-blogging, or virtual scrapbooking.
Services like BrightKite, Foursquare, Gowalla: Life Tracking – that is, answering the question of, “where are you, where have you been, and what do you think about those places?” There is some overlap here with Life Highlighting, and even Life Streaming of course, but generally one way: Life Tracking moves into the others, but rarely do the others move into Life Tracking.
Services like Plaxo and LinkedIn: Contact Manipulation – that is, work and/or personal contact listing. I’m not sure why either of these even offer the streaming of anything else (such as Twitter or Facebook feeds) as it seems, to me, to be highly inappropriate.
This is not a comprehensive list of course, just a random sampling of some of the services I use. When I use Ping.fm to send updates, everything in Life Streaming generally all gets the same information. Even though I put Facebook and Tumblr in the same category, I separate out micro-blogging from scrapbooking. Facebook will post news of what I post in Tumblr, as a scrapbook entry, but then you go to Tumblr to actually read the post.
I dunno… maybe I’m over-thinking everything, or just making a big deal out of nothing.
Maybe I should prune this all back to just two or three services and leave it at that.
Perhaps I should just mind my own business and let people use different services however they want to – in what ever way works for them. Those of you who know me, however, will know I just can’t do that … as a judgmental absolutist, for any given “thing” there is a “correct way” to do it (real or imagined .. and I’m quite willing to admit, sometimes it’s more of the latter than the former).
