Tag Archives: Facebook

Only connect…

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Buzz and Wave and e-mail, oh my!

How do we communicate when? There are no hard and fast rules, but these are the guidelines in the back of my mind:

Blogs are a great medium to go on at length about a given topic (whether it’s yourself or an arcane area of expertise) without targeting specific people and without expecting a reply. I suspect that with the rising popularity of social networking sites, there is less of a tendency than before for blogs to contain the minutiæ of everyday life.

E-mail is great for conveying any amount of information deliberately and reflectively, without a great sense of urgency. You can craft your message carefully, including all relevant points and making any needed arguments. I use this when I have a lot to say and I can wait for the reply.

Wave is ideal for collaborating on documents. Unlike e-mail, where replies are sequential, with wave you can comment inline and even edit the original post. I think this is great for giving feedback or co-authoring, but it has not yet taken off as a replacement for e-mail in my social and work circles.

Chat (instant messaging) is for those times when you need to interact with someone right now for something time-sensitive (which may be as important as “tell me how to restart the servers” or as trivial as “watcha doin’?”). Chat, by its nature, demands more attention than e-mail, but it is less intrusive than telephoning: your respondents can still ignore you, deal with other things simultaneously, and have their hands comfortably free to keep typing.

Chat status starts getting into social networking. You can advertise information that is not targeted towards a single recipient and for which you do not expect a response. I use it as an FYI to display what I’m doing or feeling or to point out something generally interesting.

Facebook allows you to keep “lightly in touch” with a large number of people. You make available your status or any other information you wish, and do not necessarily expect a reply. Likewise, you can see what other people have published and respond if you like. I use it to get a flavor for what’s going on in my “friends’” lives, and to let them know about mine. Interestingly, the meaning of “friend” has become diluted by this medium, as people that you may superfically know, or know not at all in real life, ask to join your network. You’re still somewhat curious about them (and I think it’s good, on both pragmatic and idealistic grounds, to interact with a broader range of people), and so they become your quote-friends.

LinkedIn is like Facebook, but geared more towards explicitly building a network of professional contacts. As with Facebook, I find pressure to dilute the meaning of a professional contact to someone I know only socially, but since this is a secondary social networking site for me, I have been able to keep my network pure.

Google Buzz, just released this week, is a new social networking medium whose biggest selling points, in my mind, are that it integrates with other Google services like Mail and Maps, and can more easily syndicate content from some other sources like Google Reader and Talk. I use it as I use my chat status, to give a general status message, but also to publish interesting or valuable information and see what replies I get. Buzz also lets you control who sees each Buzz, which is handy at times. At work, it is proving a good forum to non-invasively solicit cooperation and feedback from others.

Of course, the boundaries among these use cases are porous: Facebook has email, you can have your IMs waiting in people’s inboxes, and you can have a conversation with someone using blog comments. Still, I like to have clarity as to what tool I should be using, so I don’t have to think about it every single time.

Winnowing the blogosphere

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A friend recently announced that her online presence would shift from her blog to Facebook. That got me thinking. Could it be that the plethora of social networking tools and self-publishing options might actually increase rather than decrease the quality of the blogosphere? All along, I’ve assumed and observed that with so many ways for people to write about themselves, and the insatiable need for 15 minutes of fame, so many blog entries would be about life’s minutiae, of interest only to those close to the poster, if that. But consider this: Facebook is well-suited for keeping lightly in touch with others since it encourages frequent, short updates and it is a place where everyone can post. I, for one, put minor life updates there, and am certainly blogging more meatier posts here (when I have time to post). Or consider Google Reader: first I used to email interesting links to friends, then I used to post them on my blog, but now I just share them on Reader; the result, once again, is that my blog now consists more of my own content.

Thus, if people buy into the ease of these tools and migrate their minor updates and shared links to social networking-enabled sites like Facebook and Reader, there will be fewer blog posts that are self-centered or only contain links to other information. Only the more interesting, content-containing blogs will persist. That’s one theory, anyway.

I think a metaphor with transportation is apt here: like the automobile, blogs were all the rage at first and everyone aspired to have one. Now, as we become more conscious about money, exercise, and the environment/time, community, and ease-of-use, some people, at least, are migrating to public transportation/social networking sites.

Of course, for all I know, the interesting people who have interesting lives, like my friend, might be the ones migrating, and the people who blather on and on might choose to take up residence both in Facebook and the blogosphere. Luckily, I don’t have to read them.

Facebook

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Over the winter holidays, I finally gave in and signed up for Facebook. I’d been resisting, since I figured I didn’t need another time suck in my life. But then I got to thinking about all my dear Boston friends that I hardly keep in touch with anymore, and how when you re-initiate contact you’re catching people up with the same basics every time before you get to the interesting parts (“I’m coming over!”) and so…I took the plunge.

My first impression: the interface was really bad! There’s no help that I could find, and no one bothers to define what the difference is between a profile and a “wall,” nor why your home page is not your own wall. There are things called “applications” that come with dire disclaimers that they access your personal data. The whole wall metaphor itself is weird—it makes me feel like I’m doing graffiti when I write my friends. And the metaphor breaks down when a one-on-one public conversation is called, not a tête-à-tête, but rather a “wall-to-wall.” Huh?

About those friends. It is fascinating and addictive to dig through your past and find people you knew once, long ago, and see how they’re doing now. Some look just like they did, many look older; some are doing what you would have guessed, some are off the beaten path. My personal chuckle is that I got back in touch with my best friend from the fifth grade, whom I hadn’t been in touch with since the fifth grade. Fun!

But who is a friend? People seem to be wrestling with this more lately, as talk of un-friending becomes more prevalent. People I can’t place at all? Not my friends. People I was friends with and we lost touch? Definitely friends. People I knew but wasn’t friends with and still appear to have nothing in common with? That’s the hard one. In the interest of fostering community, building bridges, and getting myself out of my comfort zone, I tend to err on the side of accepting these folks as friends. (Incidentally, these conundra get far worse on LinkedIn, where the assumption is that you know people profesionally. How do you respond to those with whom you’ve had little, if any, work interaction? How professional can you keep your network there when other people are looser in their standards?)

I like how the various social networks seek to appeal to users by emphasizing their interoperability with social apps (though not with direct competitors: I don’t see LinkedIn or MySpace on Facebook). I’ve set up Facebook to automatically pick up my Google Reader shared items and my Picasa pictures—and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t make me feel more responsible for putting up good content more regularly. I’ve also tried to make Facebook pick up my blog entries, but it seems to suck the content in and manage comments locally, whereas I’d like there to be a link to my blog entry instead.

After my initial infatuation, I am now falling into the pattern where I’ll check Facebook roughly daily. The home page, which is supposed to have a feed of all my friends’ activities, remains confusing: things are not quite in chronological order, and there are more entries than can be easily navigated. Luckily, by setting up automatic emails and an RSS feed, I can more easily scan my network. As for putting out information about myself, Facebook revives my old internal debate as to where to draw the lines between public and private lives. In the end, I post enough to convey a taste of what my life is like, but not enough so I feel like I’m on a talk show airing my dirty laundry.

On that note, now that I’ve reached the end of this blog entry, excuse me while I go update my status.