March 27, 2008
@ 09:05 AM
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Pondering the Social Problem
After listening to TWIT rave about Twitter for the better part of the last year, I finally signed up when I saw that Scott Hanselman was using it. I did what I thought was expected of me and added Leo Laporte, Scoble, Calacanis, Kevin Rose and Hanselman. I also discovered that Rollins had an account. I downloaded twhirl. I thought I had it all set up. I am officially jumping onto the new Web 2.0 bandwagon. Web 2.0 prepare to socialize me, ENGAGE!

Within about a 24 hour period, I realized I was missing something. Why did I sign up to a service that allows media personalities to spam me many times a day? Scoble and Calacanis were the first to go. Rose is hanging on by a thread. Leo doesn't really use the service, so another useless attachment. At least Scott's feed was interesting. We had a couple dialogs about mundane stuff. That was interesting and showed the potential.

So I struck out and attempted to find a peer group that I could fit into and make Twitter useful for me. I poked around in the people that Scott was following. Added a few of them. I asked in the ALT.NET IRC channel for Twitter URLs. I now have a handful of people I respect that I am following and a few of them have chosen to follow me. I am beginning to see usefulness emerge from the tool and that is interesting.

There is still an issue with all of these social sites. The main problem being that I don't want to maintain a presence on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and the multitude of other social outlets. As I add new ones to my list of tools, others become abandoned. Images that I store in Facebook for my friends to see do not automatically show up in my MySpace page neither are my Twitter followers notified that I have added them. I am not in control of the data.

I have recently discovered some tools that attempt to tie the social sphere together. TwitterFeed allows me to tweet when I post a blog entry. But what about Facebook & MySpace? LivingSocial offers many applications that live within the social sites that allow you to describe yourself better, but how do I get that data on to my blog? Having one central location to push social data out is an interesting problem.

Google is doing some work in this area with OpenSocial. TwitterFeed's use of OpenID is a step in the right direction. Let's hope and advocate that these services address future problems of content ownership and keeping the data free so it can be moved around as services die off from lack of innovation or another FaceBook type crushing takeover for dominance.
 
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