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10/03/08 Microblogging Channels - Don’t do it.
SINGAPORE - I’ve tried channels on Jaiku and don’t like them - to me they negate the point. The point, no, the beauty, of this medium is my continuous partial attention by seeing everything (most) things you type. I don’t care if it’s not for me (that’s how I meet new people), I don’t care if it’s not an event I’m attending (that’s how I choose which I go to). Once it’s all relevant to my interests. The minute you start spinning off content into millions of isolated channels I start to lose the information flow.
That said… track conversation on Twitter and you’ll see that there are tight groups of people with a few crossing threads between circles. These are niche circles - at present, generally geeky. Now we have a problem - my journalist, legal, art, sports, sales, & political friends don’t want to read the stuff that will spill into their inner circle from me.
Here’s where it’ll go… not channels - but separate services.
Niche Me-to’s will start to emerge. You’ll have lots of them, totally separated.
Me-to’s will crop up each with their own function set. Where we use tinyurl as a reference to our online world, lawyers or authors may want a shortcode or tool to say 2nd line, 5th paragraph, case #114 and will need tools to track that. Artists may want to shortcode the brush type or medium they are working with. Journalists making sure they are referencing the same story at the same time.
Just like you currently talk on different discussion forums on the web, you will sign up to as many different micro-blogging services under different persona’s and enjoy them all in different volumes. A pick & mix of the web where you friends from one will never know you are active in another. Just like real life.
Each service will hold a different central interest. How is this different from channels? The persona is the difference. You can all subscribe to my entire feed in each service, just in each I will hold a different persona.
(Image Credit: Wake-to-wake jumps at Punggol, Singapore. Yesterday by Author)
9 Comments
If that make sense people would already be writing different blogs representing different facets of their identity. Oh wait…
Very astute observation. Are there opportunities for someone to build a white-label microblogging platform? A microblogging Ning?
For sure.
Infact I cut half the post out not to confuse the issue - I reckon that Twitter should do that. Become a realtime ‘anyone can contribute’ wire platform (with plugins/apps) and offer communities different services…
- Twitter Legal
- Twitter Finance
- etc.
You are 200% on the money on this Robin. You may see this happening very soon but possibly not exactly in the way you think. :)
and this is why Google’s OpenSocial work may be going the wrong way entirely. My group of “friends” on Twitter may not contain the same people as my group of “friends” on LinkedIn, or any other service, since they reflect different facets.
11/03/08 Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ] » Blog Archive » Microblogging Will Be Information Overload.
[...] « Microblogging Channels - Don’t do it. [...]
I still don’t get how a Twitter Finance would be any different than a Twitter Finance channel unless you want to manage friends as contacts instead of themes as content.
We used a Podcamp channel on Jaiku during CreativeCamp in Kilkenny. The channel will stay dormant until another organiser picks it up and populates it with people interested in contributing to the flow. It could be a cluster of people from anywhere in the world and the RSS-powered channel would work elegantly.
Some great points here. Perhaps there could be a “wikipedia of twitter shortcuts” that twitter could plug into via a search discover/ social push . As to bernie’s comment, I think the key difference is “intent”. With a twitter flow I get what comes through and am exposed to wider surface of interests. On the other side, I might actually need a “tip channel” for finance, because my “Intent” is to use that information to help me make trades. The problem with the surface model is akin to the problem with FB mini-feed: how can I blend and present for maximum benefit. I like twitter but sometimes I find the inability to “select out” stuff I don’t want to hear annoying. I don’t want to hear “dropping the kids off at school”, I do want to hear “dropping into google offices Dublin”. Perhaps this is where some of that semantic magic might come in. At the European Contact Centre conference yesterday the head of Ez jet was showing how they monitor online conversations on things like Yahoo Answers to see if they can “enter the conversation” http://www.iqpcevents.com/ShowEvent.aspx?id=67356&details=67402, i.e. enter the stream?. Missed the presentation buy I expect that every customer service person will want to “hear the conversation threads” related to their products or services, and in turn this will have to be provided as a “value added service”, plugged into an Siebel CRM 2.0 system http://the56group.typepad.com/pgreenblog/ …. so….now wondering where this conversation goes! :)
17/03/08 Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ] » Blog Archive » Microblogging - Continuing The Conversation
[...] we looking for the ability to Filter In or Filter Out? The inability to filter out things we find annoying e.g. ‘dropping the kids off at school’ yet hear ‘dropping into Google office in [...]
