Chitter Chatter
The “funky stew of social networks” (a quote from the recent seesmic entry via YouTube, as below), and the steadily rising drone of chit-chat over twitter, seesmic, indeti.ca and a myriad other services is getting to fever pitch. (If a stew can be feverish). So much so, this guy is writing a book about it called “Welcome to the tweet generation”.
The explosion of services in and around real-time behaviour broadcasting (which I’m going to call RTBB, mostly because I can – I think they are properly called “presence streams” or “lifecasting”) is one of the Big stories of the last 12-18 months. It’s fuelled by the innate desire of humans (the kind of thing I refer to a lot) for two things:
- Connectedness - feeling a connection to other human beings, being aware of what other people are up to, and them being aware of you. The outcome of this is (supposedly) greater connectedness. Ironically the noise levels, and the sharing of information with people you actually don’t know that well, probably often has the opposite effect.
- Cool new toys – much of this technology just has the “wow, that’s pretty cool” gut reaction from its users. Because of that, loyalty can be very low and use is often very short-term.
Taken together, this appetite for new models of, and tools for RTBB will mean a lot of new services will be keep being launched for the foreseeable future. Darwinian evolution will mean the fittest (probably a combination of the best ideas combined with the ability to grow, develop and monetise) will last – or services that sit as aggregators will end up catching the majority of the traffic.
When I remember to twitter/tweet (whatever the verb is) I’ll do it. But I have to remember first, and then describe what it is I’m doing, and probably filter it myself for its interest-level…. I know, that’s probably not even in the spirit of it! So, what might be needed is a “presence stream” tool that posts updates without heavy user intervention.
The noise, in any case, will continue to grow, and that will mean we need better ways of filtering out the interesting and relevant items.
