The Perfect Social Tool
(Hint: It's Not FriendFeed)
Robert Scoble just admitted to spending 7 hours per day in FriendFeed. It's easy to see why. The more you explore that service, the more you find, and the deeper you fall down into the rabbit hole that is the social web. It's probably one of the most interesting and powerful social sties that we've seen develop over the past year. Yet it, like many other of today's social web services, seems to be a somewhat incomplete vision of what a real social web could be.
Let me explain.
I've just spent the past hour and a half finding new people to subscribe to on FriendFeed. As I clicked into their life streams, I also found a ton of articles which I spent time a long time reading. However, I hesitate to share my FriendFeed stats as openly as, say, Louis Gray does. Why? Because they wouldn't be accurate.
The problem with FriendFeed is that I tend to be a more passive consumer of the information that flows by on the service. Who I "find interesting," according to FriendFeed, has less to do with who I actually find interesting and more to do with who I remembered to "like" through a click of a button. In fact, the items that get "liked" are more often the items that didn't require a long investment of my time in order to absorb. In my stream of "likes," you're probably going to find a lot of funny photos, cool web apps, tweeted quips, and so on. However, the articles that I spent time reading, like this analysis of the Twitter network or this expose of a government employee caught using a cut-rate diploma or even this review of Burger King's social media efforts, are nowhere to be found in my "likes and discussions" tab. The reason? I didn't know I liked them until I clicked through and read the articles.
Yes, I know what you're going to say: I could have hit the "back" button when I finished my reading and then clicked "like" to show that I enjoyed the articles. But the problem, you see, is that would require me to be a much more organized web citizen than I currently am. Instead, I had haphazardly opened these articles in tabs at some point during the day because I thought I might like to read them later. (Yes, sadly, try as I might, my "Read Later" system always reverts back to being open tabs in Firefox.) After opening these tabs, I had then proceeded to interact with FriendFeed as usual. Thanks to the constant flow of content and updates from FriendFeed's fire hose, the original shares and sources of my discovery were lost to me.
Yet, if anything, I liked these items more than the ones I marked with a "like."
It's Not Just FriendFeed...
It's not just FriendFeed that has this issue - every action we take on the social web requires some sort of user input - we have to "like," "share," "bookmark," "update," every little thing we do...and sometimes, it just doesn't feel that natural. On the flip side, there are tools like the semantically-powered Glue, for instance, that quietly shares our behavior with friends. When we visit Wikipedia, search for a new book, CD, or movie, research local restaurants, discover new wines, and more, Glue makes a note of that action which our friends can later review.
Unfortunately, there's no "Glue" for the social web. There's also no happy medium between what it does - quietly observe, record, and share all your actions - and the control you have with a single, manual "like" on FriendFeed. The ideal social tool would be something in the middle. Not entirely passive, but also not requiring you to click, click, click all the time to register your opinions. What this may be, I can't even imagine, but it would have to be something that ties the social web all together. If I read an article in Google Reader, it could get liked on FriendFeed automatically. With one click, I could then Digg it, bookmark it, Twitter it, etc. Oh, and the starting point shouldn't have to be Google Reader. A great tool would provide that same workflow, no matter where you first saw the content.
Clearly, the perfect social tool has not been invented yet, and - who knows? - we could be years away from even seeing anything like it (although I hope not). But it needs to exist because I need to use it. Not next year, not tomorrow, but now. Won't someone please build this, the perfect social tool?
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My vote for perfect social tool would go to TWITTER. It set the trend, rest everybody are just building extensions of it...
-Anita CM
http://www.vantrix.net
With my social media advertising ideas and your social media platform ideas, we could create the most useful social media product the world has ever seen! Mwahahaha...
(No, really, great post - this is the kind of stuff I just lay down on my couch to think about, and then hopefully start)
Happy Holidays Sarah,
There isn't anything wrong with the way you use ff. Everyone uses it differently. For me it's often a lot of lighthearted fun. Sometimes it can be quite serious, but I tend to reserve that for socialmedian. You mentioned glue, but have tried a Semantic Firefox addon, called Headup. If you haven't I really suggest you give it a try. It's not the perfect tool by far, but it's a step in the right direction. Have a wonderful day!
Matter of fact is that I'm leaning more and more towards a "supernetwork" that will allow all current social interactions/actions to be performed. Of course, I'm pretty sure this would take a lot of work, not to mention criticism.
And since I have a hunch, I started the LinkedBook Experiment in order to get some results regarding user's openness to sharing all available information across multiple networks. I hope to have some pretty interesting results by the end of January.
And maybe this will be a good starting point for that perfect social tool you mentioned :)
Great post Sarah...you've really got me thinking...
I am a firm believer that Firefox tabs are the perfect read it later system....well..maybe not, but I use them for that as well.
Great post Sarah. I'm basking in the glow of knowing you found the Burger King post interesting. :) Thank you for the link.
Have you checked out Twitter2FF. It's a little app that matches your Twitter followers to FriendFeed profiles, so you can easily subscribe your followers feeds, or follow your FF network on Twitter. I suspect we'll see a lot more of those "glue" apps rolling out. I hope so.
Happy Holidays.
Sarah what you're talking about is Implicit vs Explicit Gestures.
As I've written about here: http://revolutionofme.pbwiki.com/Revenue+Magazine+Article+-+Audience+has+Left
A click should be considered a gesture of interest. It is an act of participation. FriendFeed and other tools should be smart enough to detect reading an article as an implicit gesture towards your paying attention to it, and by definition, being interested in the topics the post covers.
This is actually what the 'Implicit' section of APML (APML.org) is all about.
By the way thanks for the follow on FriendFeed :)
You're right...
I am thinking of my mother and sister who still share an email address with their husbands and debate whether online shopping is safe. FF would positively bewilder them.
Someday (soon I think) a clever developer is going to build and package a social service that reaches out to that market (the average Internet user) and makes connecting with each other simple & seamless.
Maybe Google or Facebook are on their way with their latest "friend connectors", who knows.
You are spot on, Sarah.
The key question is relevance - is this information relevant to me? In some cases it is harder to answer than in others.
Is this photo that friend posted relevant? How about the article she just read? How about a Tweet?
Unfortunately in many circumstances it is hard to know.
However, it is clear that just clumping it all together and showing it to the user in a raw form is not a solution. This puts the burden of work on to the user's brain.
With Glue, we are able to microchunk the life stream into different useful bits and deliver them in context. Glue can do that because context is clear - you are looking at a book, a movie, a music album. But in other circumstances it is difficult to discern.
Sarah,
I know what you mean. The tool is not ready yet, but we are working on something similar at blogtronix. The problem is that in the beginning, this works only internally, since its a bit hard to integrate it with lots of API's from the start. So, we are working on our smart social networking engine with this exact idea in mind, but first we will make it work with our reader, our blogs, our wikis, docs, RSS, social network, etc. Than after this is working right and our users give us a few more ideas and we fix all the bugs, we can open the mashing with other networks and API's. This could be done also with a simple browser plugin and I think Google is after this model at the moment.
Cheers,
Vassil
@Chris K: Yes indeed. That's a helpful app - but it would be even more so if it was automated. I had to click "follow" a lot when I used it.
@Chris S: Thank you, great link and info.
Everyone else: building the perfect social tool that makes me cry? ;) - I'm @sarahintampa on Twitter
I beg to differ. Amazon.com is my favorite example of a great social networking tool, and it does exactly what you just described. It delivers material to you who's relevance is based on your experience throughout the site. Not only that, they've leveraged their network to enhance their business as well. Amazon.com is doing it right, and no one seems to notice.
How can you spend 7 hours a day on friendfeed? I can't do one hour on FF, Twitter, and Facebook combined in a day. Guess I'm not very social.
There are no perfect social tools, at least not yet. There are favorites, based on the goal you want to achieve, or perhaps your personal learning style.
I think most of the goals you describe in this article are not necessarily what Scoble wants to achieve. See my blog post on this for more:
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/12/24/scobles-twitterfriendfeed-intervention-aka-these-tools-are-for-different-missions/
Sounds like Ms. Perez and everyone commenting need to go back and re-read Professor Gelernter's book Mirror Worlds...
"...Those are the goals of our lifestream. In our view of the future, users will no longer care about operating systems or computers; they'll care about their own streams, and other people's. I can tune in my stream wherever I am. I can shuffle other streams into mine -- to the extent I have permission to use other people's streams. My own personal stream, my electronic life story, can have other streams shuffled into it -- streams belonging to groups or organizations I'm part of. And eventually I'll have, for example, newspaper and magazine streams shuffled into my stream also. I follow my own life, and the lives of the organizations I'm part of, and the news, etc., by watching the stream flow." - David Gelernter July 2003
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/fflifestreams.html
@chrissaad I think FriendFeed et al. don't care so much about metrics that you and I would value for understanding the quality of a network. They pump metrics like number of friends and followers because those metrics drive a social imperative that encourages more use of their tools. Quick, I need 500 friends to look credible. 1000 to look influential. Seeing metrics that show the overwhelming majority of people deliver mediocre value might tend to dissuade use.
Regarding the FriendFeed stats I agree that they need a bit of an overhaul. Several folks questioned and complained about the results. Sure you can use Likes and Comments as part of the calculation, but I would also like to see some old school analytics as part of the equation including clickthroughs of items, profile page visits, etc...hopefully they do this in the coming year.
As an aside, I find RWW to have consistently great writing.
Posted by: AJ Kohn
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December 24, 2008 2:06 PM
AJ: me too. Really great stuff.
Posted by: Robert Scoble
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December 24, 2008 2:15 PM
This is great thanks keep it up..
140 million active users on facebook ... those numbers sound pretty frikkin perfect to me ...
Great insights, part of the "problem" is people work, explore and learn in a very ad-hoc manner and our tools need to understand and enable this mode of work. I think tools need to provide loosely structured navigation and interaction around ad-hoc information processing.
Great article,
Christopher
Hi Sarah,
Thanks Michael (comment #3) for the heads-up (no pun intended : )
Leveraging "WHO you know" to enhance "WHAT you know" and letting you share this experience with your friends is indeed what http://headup.com is all about.
If you want to get an invitation to take our newest version out for a spin DM me @headup on twitter, or email me at miked[at]semantinet[dot]com.
Merry Christmas!
Mike Darnell,
Creative Marketing
http://headup.com - "Your web, connected."
You're pointing out the need to have the Social / Smart Interaction in the same place as the content.
That's why the first urge is to start with a feed reader.
But the downside to aggregators is they end up stealing PVs from the original publishers, and only capture a subset of the site's full userbase. Oh, and aggregators never capture the flavor of the original sites.
Seems like publishers themselves need better tools and a way to hook sites/interesting content together without a PV or identity-hungry aggregator in the middle.
Thank you for an honest assessment of where the social web is today. There are absolutely fantastic things going on, as evidenced by the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, etc. But a social web that is truly useful for wide swaths of people (i.e., in the way that e-mail and Google are useful) will depend on the things you describe.
Your post is an example of why ReadWriteWeb is at the top of my feed reader.
These guys seem to be going after what you are looking for. www.favo.com, can not tell for sure as they have not released anything yet.
This is great thanks keep it up
Great post. This is true of all media. In diary-measured media like radio, there is the issue of "Phantom cume," which are people who listen to the radio station but forget to write it down in the rating diaries. The monitored rating system now being used radio in large markets illustrates this effect very clearly. Any kind of metric where it depends on the user to click or confirm an interaction is susceptible to this type of "phantom usage."