Greetings from Las Vegas
We did a panel yesterday on user-identity. Today is the social networking panel.
Not quite qure why they have Evan Williams on the panel - I guess I’ll have to ask him about the Groups and Personal Pages features of Twitter.
But this is gonna be one fun panel.
I received clarification from a Facebook coder (Ari) that in fact Facebook’s onerous TOS have been mis-interpreted and that in fact - Facebook deos allow their users to do anything they want with their profile and content data. This is big news.
Cause if you read the onerous TOS attached to the Facebook APIs - most anyone would discern that in fact we were limited in what we could do with that data. But lo and behold the clariciation was made clear in our identity panel yesterday.
Now we need the Facebook lawyers to correct their TOS.
UPDATE: My friend and partner Paolo Valdemarin chastised me that Twitter is social networking and that it’s important new trend. I humbly disagree because of these reasons:
- to be called social networking - I believe you have to have personal pages and groups. Twitter DOES have these public pages, but they’re pretty limited - which is of course what Twitter is all about - limited funtionality. And presence management.
- so where does that put the rest of us? The panel today is on a two-way conversation. Is that between people, between other social networks or between end-users and vendors? Hmmmmmmm
- gateways ot IM and blogging, tie in’s into social networking plaforms and portals - display modules - Twittervision - these are all possible with Twitter
- but to my old grizzled eyes Twietter is SMS with presence and (amybe) they’ll spawn off the notion of Groups - but I don’t see it now.
- what Twitter is is social media - not social networking IMHO
- it might seem like quibbling, but that’s what terms are for - to be concise and articulate
IMHO
May 1st, 2007 at 9:54 am
Marc,
I think you are missing the groups that are created ad-hoc (and in my opinion in a much more useful manner for me than on most “social networking” sites) by twitter.
i.e. I’m part of a group of people who are following LaughingSquid (Scott Beale) via twitter. Not infrequently this means Scott posts a twitter about an event, and a dozen to a few dozen people show up somewhere. If getting a group together to drink is not social networking - then you and I have very different definitions of “social”
My issue with most “social networks” and the groups therein is that they make it hard to know where to look for people and content - and then when you have an event or content to share, where to share it. i.e. which “group” does it belong in (or conversely for sites where you can add it to more than one group - ala flickr - remembering/knowing about all of the groups where you should be sharing it) For me at least this is a very very high burden - and often as not results in me entirely ignoring all of the group capabilities (and usually I leave networks websites when they start rolling out lots of groups - the utility for me goes down almost immediately when I no longer know where to share what)
In contrast Twitter’s “groups” just happen naturally as a result of common clusters - i.e. there are groups of us who all share a bunch of the same people as friends & followers on Twitter - this means that for our “group” it is then very easy to learn about group activities - and participate in them. But critically this did not require selecting or filtering into a different group as a group - rather it arises naturally out of our friends and/or people who we learn are on twitter and choose to follow.
I actually hope Twitter does not “spawn off the notion of groups”.
my couple of cents,
Shannon
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Marc, Twitter is like anything else — you have to use it to understand it.
Your criticisms only tell us why you aren’t using it, they don’t reveal anything about the service.
You did this with the web too, it took you years to stop looking down your nose at it, and just use it. In those years, if you had been using it you would have been able to influence its development.
Twitter is like that. The thing that makes it interesting is that a lot of people are using it. I wish you would too. Then we’d figure it out that much faster. Listen to Paolo, listen to me. Get off your butt and start using.
May 3rd, 2007 at 5:52 am
I find that Twitter is much more about social networking than almost anything else on the web. If you build up a personal web page like in MySpace, you are showing people what you want them to see of you. By telling people what you are doing, you are giving people a much more human insight into your true nature. This greater emotional honesty causes clustering based in social coherence rather than on artificial icons like which band you think you should say you like.
For me, I love twitter, does it show
AJ