The Conversational Web -- Microblogging part 2
In the early days of the web, much of the race was to bring content online. For the most part, that content was static. Web 2.0 is making the web much more conversational. Instead of going to sites and taking in what is there, people can now contribute content. Sites that foster direct communication and online networking are exploding in popularity. Mashable, for example lists 350+ social networking sites.
Today, access to information is not the challenge — its all there, online. What has gotten harder is accessing the information you want. For early adopters and those who rely on the web to inform them about news, trends and what their friends are up to, cutting through the clutter can be a real challenge.
Blogs, for example, can be a great source of highly timely information, interesting tidbits and insightful commentary. In fact, blogs have become the new publishing in many ways. Journalists at traditional media companies like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and countless others have become as influential or more-so online. There are, of course, also countless blogs containing nothing but drivel. Sorting through all of that can be challenging.
On Mashable’s list of 350+ social networking sites are popular destinations and services like Jaiku, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, Google Reader, Twitter and FriendFeed. These are all social networks of varying degrees. Social networks, as the classification indicates, let the user connect with friends in various ways. Some are very direct connections requiring both parties to agree to the connection (example, LinkedIn, Facebook). Others are more loose. With the looser networks, one party needs only to choose to follow another person (example, Twitter, FriendFeed).
Via all of the examples above, one can enter a short message to let one’s contacts on the networking site know what one is up to, where one is, or share an interesting piece of news.
This ability to post short messages to all of one’s contacts very easily has spawned a new classification of communication, dubbed microblogging. Mircoblogging is still a very much in the formative state. I’ve written specifically about Microblogging and key players in the space here, here and here.
One of the challenges with microblogging, just like macroblogging is knowing your audience. For example, if my microblog followers are my family, then the news of the day they are going to want to know about is what my girls are up to and not so much about emerging web technology. The challenge, however, is most social networks are a blend of family, close friends, colleagues, business acquaintances and – in the case of the looser networks – people you don’t know, but who follow you because they see you as interesting in some way.
Of course, the reverse is true too. I follow (am contacts with) my siblings, friends, colleagues, etc. Filtering through the “just sat down to dinner” posts so I can get to the “Apple just released the new iPhone” post can be challenging.
Jeremiah Owyang, senior social computing analyst at Forrester Research, posted a thoughtful piece last week after visiting Friendfeed. One point in the worthwhile read was that in the future, information on the social — or conversational – web needs to be sorted around people, not content.
I disagree.
My thinking. Jeremiah is a smart and interesting guy. I follow him on Twitter and FriendFeed, but I’m not really interested in what he ate for breakfast (not that he necessarily posts that sort of thing). That said, when he writes about the social web, I want to know about it.
Seems to me a better way to sort information on the conversational web is by topic. I want to hear from Jeremiah on certain topics, but not all topics he writes on. Where parsing and filtering of information really needs to go is to a topic- and network-centric model. That is, I want to be able to choose the topics I’m interested in and also choose who I want to hear about that topic from.
This would be a huge step in cutting through the clutter. Clutter that is only going to increase as more conversations make their way to the social web. Just think, I could still stay up to date on the social web and the new iPhone without having to wade through all the stuff I don’t care about while still hearing from my siblings about how their night went.
