11 Dec 08 Auto-Follow? Why?
I guess for some folks it’s only natural to look to see how many people are following them. After all, it’s nice to feel wanted, to be popular.
I have to admit, though that I rarely look, and even now, without switching tabs and checking , I can’t tell you how many followers I have on any of the Social Media Services to which I subscribe. Rightly or wrongly I seldom look.
But auto-following? Why?
Firstly, I really don’t care who follows me. Well, that’s not quite true. I, like everyone else, like to see friends, family, and those of influence checking into what I have to say. Heck, I might even be able to have some influence myself too, one day, then!
But why do I want to blindly follow you without checking out your content first?
On services such as Twitter and Friendfeed, I get email notifications of new followers. Now, I fully realize that the ‘A’ list members probably couldn’t handle the amount of emails that this generates. However, I am happy to get a couple of dozen or so emails a day with such notifications, and I can go and check them out accordingly.
If you’re posting stuff that I’m interested in, then it’s fine – I’ll follow you. However, if you’re postings consist mainly of links to 13th century Tibetan poetry, then, I’m not interested. (I am not knocking Tibetan poetry here, but it’s an example of something I wouldn’t personally be particularly interested in).
Worse of course, is following those who post nothing but endless self-promotional links. If I meet those kind of people face-to-face would their only conversation be all about their own business, all about themselves, and nothing else? Much as I want to network on a business level as well as a social one, to continually talk about one thing all the time, quickly gets old.
Worse still of course, are the spammers. So far, my own experiences in Social Media Networking have led me to conclude there is a relatively low level of spamming activity. However, and this is my strongest point against auto-following – every time someone has auto-follow set, and they follow a spammer, it gives the spammer more fuel to carry on with their activity. If we were all to NOT auto-follow, then there would be a lot of Spammers, for example on Twitter, that would see their efforts are futile, and would be more likely to give up.
Also, with services like Twitter, following allows Direct Messaging, which gives the spam vermin yet another avenue from which to bug me.
I’d be interested to hear opposing views on this, but until I’ve been convinced otherwise, auto-following on all my services stays firmly off.
Tags: auto-follow, followers, friendfeed, photos, social media networking, tabs, tt, twitter
08 Dec 08 In The Year 2525 If Man Is Still Alive
Blogging has, for the majority of us, moved past the personal diary stage. You don’t really want to know what cereal I had for breakfast, when I showered, or the color of my socks do you? OK, you do – email me afterward then.
So Why blog?
I’ve heard this question many times.
I’ve heard a number of answers too. Some say that services such as Twitter or Friendfeed largely eliminate the need for blogging, as we can all interact in these services without setting up and maintaining a blog.
Now there are only so many minutes in a day (yes I know it’s 1440). I know I’ve been blogging less lately, as I’ve been spending more of my time in Friendfeed. Too much time, sometimes. However, it’s not wasted time, by and large, as there are many good links posted in there, and I learn new things all the time (as we all do).
Whoa! Hang on a minute…..
If there are links posted in there, that means they’re coming from a web site, and some of those links are blogs, right? Yes of course. Many links are to YouTube videos or mp3s at last.fm perhaps, yes, but there are many links I get to news sites, and blogs too.
My take on it is that if you wish to write longer articles, opinions, share news or a hobby, a blog is still the best place to do this. You can write what you want to, about what you like, and then share it on the social media networks with those you think might be interested in reading your diatribe.
Of course, if you’ve nothing to say, then blogging is perhaps not for you, but there’s few people that truly have nothing to comment on at all.
I’m not much of a science fiction fan, but one thing that does fascinate me, and it’s this. If we look back 500 years or so, communication was still basic, and storage of communications even more so. Only the rich could read, and write, afford to buy books, and so much history is based around the elite or ruling classes.
However, if we were in 2525 looking back to now, what a rich library we would already have to look through to see how the common person lived an every day life. How interesting it will be to see what we all got up to, and how we lived back here and now.
On second thoughts then, perhaps I should blog about my breakfast cereal and my socks after all. Even if you’re not interested in the minutiae of my life my great-great-great-great grandchildren might well be.
Tags: audience, blog, blogging, cereal, diatribe, followers, information business, media networks, mixture, mp3, news sites, personal diary, share news, snippets, socks, twitter, Zager And Evans
07 Jul 08 Do You Tweet?
I’ve seen a number of debates recently about the pros and cons of social media services. Twitter has been high on the list of services under the spotlight – mostly due to it’s sporadic up time of late.
I do sometimes wonder what kind of business model these services have. No obvious advertising, and no fees to pay, how do they make money? How do they make enough money to run the service, let alone make a profit from their endeavors. Ok, I know in the largely open source world profit can sometimes be a dirty world, along with charges, fees and subscriptions, but at the end of the day, however much you’re developing a service or application, you’ve got to eat.
Anyway, I digress.
The point of this article is to make a response to the many comparisons I’ve seen between some of the services.
Twitter is often compared to Plurk. I use both, but I see them as completely different services. Twitter is great in that you can start a conversation on the computer, and seamlessly move to the cellphone, and back. As for the noise, well, there is always going to be a signal to noise ratio. We all post stuff that we think interesting to some of our followers or friends, but which in fact, isn’t.
Here’s a personal example. I’m not interested in getting an iPhone, for a number of reasons that I won’t go into right now. Much as I like to read up on new gadgets, and have done so on the iPhone, it was a screaming noise on Twitter when the first phone came out, and there were a multitude of messages from people giving a running commentary on their status in the line outside the store to get theirs.
However, I didn’t un-follow all these people. I knew they were as excited about their new gadget as I wasn’t. I knew they’d get over it and move on. They did. I’m sure I’ll be equally boring to some when I get a new Blackberry Curve.
I enjoy Plurk sometimes, but it’s much more time consuming. and I find it harder to re-trace earlier conversations at times. It’s all over the place compared to Twitter, and as yet, I can’t use it via SMS, although there is a mobile page.
A different animal to Twitter though, and I don’t see why each cannot co-exist.
The last service I’d like to look at is FriendFeed. I’ve recently joined this, and I wish I’d joined a lot earlier. It’s really like a feed agregator, but I find it useful for snippets of information that I didn’t know about, and while I can get much of the same stuff in Google Reader, FriendFeed focuses it for me. I also like the daily email summary feature. Takes a few seconds to scan down the list, and chose stuff I think I’d like to read. With Google Reader, I tend to subcribe to interesting feeds, and then don’t get the time to read them. With FriendFeed I can at least read some I’d bypass due to time constraints.
Tags: blackberry curve, business model, cellphone, different services, dirty world, endeavors, enough money, followers, friendfeed, gadget, iphone, more time consuming, multitude, new gadgets, open source world, personal example, plurk, pros and cons, signal to noise, signal to noise ratio, twitter, world profit
