Digital Common Sense

I’ve been struggling a bit with simplification of my lifestream of information lately. Simplification is a very complex process as we all know. It’s not always easy.

I’ve begun weighing the merits of the many online touchpoints I have. Each represents some sort of implied obligation to update and share something.
This blog - Digital Common Sense
The Realtime Unified Communications Community
My VOX blog
Twitter
Jaiku
Facebook
Flickr
and others that are far less resource intensive.

Each represents and input and output touch-point, I put information in that I want to share, and I follow friends, colleagues, family and others to see what they’re up to.

The blogs are all handled. Posting here and the Unified Communications site is easily accomplished, most using ScribeFire (aka Performancing for Firefox). Vox posts are easily done via the web, or from any mobile device I happen to have at hand.

Flickr and I have a love/hate relationship. I nearly left when Yahoo forced the user name changes. If I could as easily manage photos anywhere, I’d bail on Flick in a hearbeat. But between web integration, upload tools and the Nokia phone integration, I’m staying with Flickr. And all you folks who use something else that you like, don’t tell me to come use yours. It doesn’t work for me. Trust me, I’ve tried them all and they don’t meet my needs. Not even close.

Then there’s the new breed - Twitter and Jaiku. I was a very early adopter of Twitter. Way before SXSW. Back when it was Twttr and the only interface we had was SMS. I like that. And I still like Twitter, but it’s been crushed by growth. Death by success? Not yet, but it doesn’t work adequately most of the time.

Jaiku is not a direct mirror of Twitter. Jaiku lets me feed input from all the other touchpoints as well. And when I read my friends on Jaiku, I can pick their touchpoints that I want to see. For example, if you share your last.fm info there, I can (and do) unsubscribe. I don’t care what you’re listening to, and I like being able to drop that feed.

In my case, Jaiku picks up all the above except Facebook. I like it as a lifestream aggregator. I like it a lot for its potential. But I’m frustrated with the speed at which it’s unfolding. They have a Nokia app that holds huge potential as a small “rich client” that bridges the gap between SMS and web interfaces. Again, moving slowly, but the potential is huge. Jaiku is working on funding, and I hope they get some great backers. I see real solid potential for something different.

Along comes Facebook. It’s been there all along, but not terribly vibrant. But they’ve been changing. Facebook Mobile and SMS integration really changed the model. Now they’ve begun really integrating applications to turn it into a platform (that’s marketing speak for we do lots of shit we can’t describe). I have mixed feelings about Facebook because they’re quickly gaining the “evil empire” feel. But the convenience, for now, offsets that a bit. Not entirely, but enough that I’m still there.

What I won’t do, is continue the geekish ADD continual updating of all of the above that so many of us seem trapped in. It reminds me of a description from Darin Barney’s book Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology. There’s a section in the book that describes how, in the information age, we are all simply inputs, feeding data into “the machine” that is the Net. And why we often think of Google as the machine that wants to own all our inputs, the machine is really a larger aggregation of all these sites and more.

I don’t mind sharing with the machine on my terms, but my social network isn’t the machine. The people on the other end are the ones that make up my social network.

And people, like insects, swarm. On the Net that’s probably a more apt analogy that at any other point in human history. We swarm to new things and follow the herd mentality. Don’t believe me? Take a look at what happened with Twitter during SXSW. That wasn’t people finding a new tool. For the most part that was a herd stampede jumping on because everyone else was jumping on. Many stayed. Many left. But the groundswell of popularity for Twitter has remained, hence the performance problems that leave the swarm buzzing in anger.

We also follow our friends. Or we make a conscious decision to move to a tool that they haven’t chosen. When we do that, our social network may shrink. I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit. Twitter has expanded my social network to some new friends I wouldn’t have found elsewhere. And to new ephemeral contacts who quickly disappeared from my social network. Jaiku has a less ephemeral feel, but only among my friends who use it effectively. And many of the friends I pay close attention to don’t.

At some point I’ll have to decide whether to abandon a tool and let my social network shrink, or perhaps marginalize one or more. Part of what led me to that phrasing was a comment Stuart made in response to my poser about Skype’s relevance. He said

Thus what Ken and Alec really allude to is their connections have
shifted. They are more available now on new connections and perhaps
less available on others. My guess is they don’t talk or message less.
Probably it is more than ever; without the shackles of cost.

And he’s right. Alec and I have chosen to marginalize Skype. I don’t think either would say it’s fully because of the reasons we gave. We marginalized Skype because our most valued contacts were either as easily, or more easily, connected through some other tool, or several tools.

So I’m just left thinking about all the touchpoints I have that call to me, softly calling out feed me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Some are going to get marginalized and fade into the past, like Skype is rapidly doing. I just haven’t decided which yet. When I do, you’ll only notice by my absence there, which means you may not even notice. That’s the danger of so many touchpoints. Absence of touch may go unnoticed.

And as much as I grumble about Jaiku’s slow advances, or Facebook’s potential to become the evil empire, they both lead the game because they easily aggregate the lifestream touchpoints that matter most to me.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, touchpoints, social networks. lifestream

Filed by Ken at 6:53 pm under Tech in General, Technology