Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com ]

09/01/08 Sharing Isn’t Tearing

SINGAPORE - I have an aunt who used to tear things out of newspapers and magazines she read and post them over to me. Every now & again I’d get an envelope with a few cuttings of interest to me in it. As we move from the physical to digitally distributed information (Paper Subscriptions -> Electonic Feeds) we’re losing something emotive. Getting an email with a link is not the same as getting an envelope with a cutting in it. Even worse, while I thought it’d be huge, I just don’t get Google Reader’s “Share This” feature - something’s not right here.

• IMPERSONAL - I can only share things with everyone - really, I want to be able to target people or groups of people easily. I have 1528 people in my Google Contacts, believe you me, they are not all interested in the latest mash-up I’m nerding over. Neither are you interested in my friends who want to hear about the latest person to climb Everest with no eyes, arms, legs or even naked. So we know we don’t want to share something with everyone.
  

  im·per·son·al - having no personal reference or connection b: not engaging the human personality or emotions c: not existing as a person : not having human qualities or characteristics.

• COMMODITY - Its free, so suddenly the quality barrier is lowered. “Sure I’ll send it, it won’t cost me anything” vs “Is that worth the price of a stamp to send?”. Now you get sent every link, picture, video, that is interesting enough to be worth a single click.
  

  com·mod·i·ty - a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price.

This is one of the great digital divides at present, too much information. I used to believe that the way to filter spam mail was to get everyone to sign up to a new email protocol which would still be free to send mail, but cost you money if the address bounced. This would ensure everyone was sure the address was correct and reduce ’spam-list’ usage. In the same way you could imagine it cost you something to share something, either in points earned from receiving things or in a direct cash transaction. We need something like this to reduce the digital information-flow.

Now I’m looking at it a different way - with our computing power we should be dynamically filtering-out not restricting - focus on the filters. Imagine our filters learned our trends and only began to show us shared material that reaches our level of interest that we’d “pay” for. Now we’re talking! Now we are putting the tolerance level control back in the users hands.

How this play pans out will be a massive step in the internet - the challenge is to surpass information overload by adding the attributes of economic-value, human-emotion & physical-attachment to digital information.

-Robin.

(Image Credit: Sharing a Chinese lunch with my new work colleagues.)

Tags: google reader, share, sharing

1 Comment

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09/01/08 Robin Blandford

As James has said before - it would be fantastic if Google Reader was Google Re-Writer and you could add you own little intro to pieces (much like a comment) then share them.

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