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I’m going to out on a limb and say that the biggest issue online networks will have to face in the next few years is the increasing ‘noise’. Two of the largest social networks are already trying to maintain it. Twitter have created their lists and Facebook have also tried working with lists. Their newest approach is a step (tagging groups) in the right direction I think.

There are several problems related to the increasing noise. The first is of course, obviously, the increasing noise. There is just too much information being processed too fast for it to have any sustaining meaning. Remember when you only followed 20 people on Twitter? You engaged more meaningfully with the people you followed. The larger the noise, the less engaged you become to each person. A new photo-sharing startup, called Path,  is trying to solve this problem by limiting the amount of “friends” you can have to 50. Is this the best solution? I don’t think so. The internet is increasing the amount of weak connections we have. That is the power of it. Once a month, you might see something interesting from the outside social circle of acquaintances on the web. Twitter has tried solving it with lists. This has worked to some extent. I wouldn’t be using twitter as much if it wasn’t for lists. I follow 1000 people and at that number, my home feed is already overwhelming. But all 1000 people are interesting people that has the potential for me to share meaningful relationships with. The current system just doesn’t allow it. Facebook have also opted for ‘lists’, but data showed that no-one actually uses it. The problem with the list method is that people only start using it once their stream becomes unmanageable. At that time it is too much effort to go back through all your contacts and define them to lists.

Facebook opted for an inventive new system with the new groups. The user tags people who they think should be involved in a group. There is saying that you are defined by the company you keep. You don’t have to do anything to be “involved” on Facebook. You just need an account. You are tagged in photos and added to groups, because to an extent your social circle does define who you are.

As life continues, you meet new people. In the past you progressed naturally through social circles: highschool friends went their way; college friends went their way; work friends went their way. But with Facebook all of them are added to the same stream, having mostly the same importance/priority. When I leave university in a few years, I’ll meet new people and add them to Facebook. I have once went back to Facebook and deleted ‘friends’ I have no interest in. How many people will do this? How many people will instead just stop using Facebook because of a convoluted stream?

The future of social networking will lie in the hands of the social network that will show you the information you want to see. Will it be a machine/algorithm based solution or a user imposed solution? Are we capable of maintaining a large social stream? Is it a greater psychological (even physiological) issue?

I’d like to think that online networks will follow the same trend as the food industry. People will want to go back to making the most of their local connections (compared to people going back to healthy, locally produced, organic food). How many people actually know their neighbour? We are global citizens, but we still thrive locally. You aren’t going to get a beer with Rob 1000km away from you. It is going to be an interesting mindshift!

So, there’s been rumours floating around for a while of Google’s supposed Facebook “killer” called Google Me. It has now been denied. Whether this is true or not, I believe Google has been approaching social a bit wrong (like Mark Zuckerberg said). The past two previous big-ish attempts into the social arena wave (supposedly e-mail killer) and buzz both kind of failed.  Well, Wave failed not so much of the social aspect, just that no one actually knew what to do with it. Uses were invented, but a product should of course have a clear intuitive use.

The way ‘Wave’ and ‘Buzz’ worked, is that it started out by automatically taking your social ties from your current Google contacts. In omst cases, this meant gleaming your contacts from your gmail. Now, my gmail contacts is a totally different ‘social network’. I speak to maybe 3-4 of them daily, but that’s it. The rest is just there, because Google decided once I mailed people it should pop up on chat list. I have nothing wrong with this. I remove people that I know for sure I won’t talk to again, but I don’t actively curate it. I see no reason why, it is too small. Now when Wave came along, Google assumed the people I want to “wave” with, is my gmail contacts. It is a fair assumption, but was it the best social network to wave with? I just wanted to wave with maybe 3 people, my brother and 2 friends, organizing a DnD campaign. The other people were now in my ‘wave’ contacts. It was too much of an effort to take them out. So I just left them there.

But it left with me the idea that my wave contacts were there. That is who I’m going to wave… People I don’t talk to. I didn’t really go back. I didn’t use wave after organizing that DnD campaign. Before I continue, let’s look at Buzz.

Google thought my gmail contacts were the people I’d like to ‘buzz’ with. Still, a fair assumption, but isn’t there a better network suited for this? I don’t use Buzz. It only imports my twitter feed these days. It is an annoyance I’d do without. Once Buzz opened it automatically took my gmail contacts as the people I’d “share” with. Wrong. I had to remove some people, unfollow others and so forth. Bleh.

What I’m trying to say is, is that each product will have its own social network, the people I’d like to share with in that “area”/”network”. Facebook is my network for my personal real-world relations. I’d like to keep it that way. That’s what I decided Facebook should be for me. I decided Twitter is my ‘open’ online presence, the place where I meet new people, share information with like-minded individuals and just participate in the online stream. That is what I decided Twitter should be for me. Other people have other ideals. Some make their Facebook totally open, some make their Twitter private.

Google is behind on social and they desperately want to grab hold where Facebook is gaining. They are scared and they want to catch up. They are doing it wrong. By trying to impose the social connections they have made, people will stop using it, because as mentioned, each social network has its own use imposed by the users. Companies shouldn’t impose the social connections they think we will have.

So with a trailing thought, I really hope that if Google is working on a social network, they don’t impose social connections. They are big enough to launch anything. I’ll create my own connections thank you! Not only does create it it more hype (“are you on Google Me?”), but there is also the fun of connecting in different networks (“starting afresh”). If the product is good enough, I’m sure people won’t mind the effort to re-establish connections. I think it is much better in the long run.

So, Evan Williams recently stated that Twitter will reach 1 billion users.

All I’m going to spew here are my thoughts. If you disagree, please do and tell me what you think.

I think people use Twitter for 3 reasons? Narcissism, watered-down RSS reading and marketing. I’m not going to lie, I use Twitter for all the above. I sometimes like saying what I’m doing. It is cathartic to share great and sad moments with people who might or might not care. I’m not going to spew everything I feel and do, but only the noteworthy things I’d want to share. My rule is: if I want to tell my real-life friends, I’d say it on Twitter. Having breakfast is not news. I use it follow interesting links people might post (watered-down RSS reading) and marketing my personal projects.

If you don’t fall into that 3 categories, you don’t usually stay on Twitter. You will join it, Twitter being a “buzzword”, but then like so many people, only post a few statuses and never come back.

I contend that the social aspect arises from the 3 main uses. In other words, the social relationships I have formed from Twitter was a result of having other goals in mind. Unlike Facebook, I think people don’t join Twitter to be social. The inherent social structure isn’t that intuitive. The classic example is when people say: “So it is like Facebook, but just status updates? Why would I want to join?”

To me, Facebook is my real life social graph put online. Twitter allows me to create a totally new online graph that starts online and feeds into real life (for whatever purpose). I guess it depends how you use Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is for strengthening the current relationships I have. Twitter is for finding new connections (whether I want to share my breakfast or market my projects). I don’t post my blogs on Facebook, because I don’t think my friends will want to read it. I post it on Twitter, because I believe the people that follow me might find the subject matter interesting or just like consuming information.

So to come back to my question. Will Twitter reach 1 billion users? Probably. I’m more inclined to say that it won’t. Hosts of people will still come to join based on curiosity and talk. Of these, some will stay, finding the purpose they use it for (sharing their music, following celebrities, following news accounts, blabbing about their breakfast, etc). I still feel that Twitter’s use is still too ambiguous for late adopters and laggards to get on the bandwagon. The ephemeral nature of tweets is also a problem. Facebook stores the “actions” into an easy to dissolve manner: photos are easily browsable, the feed easily readable. If you see my Facebook profile, you’ll pretty much know what I’m on about. If a person arrives on my Twitter profile, finds I only have @replies to my followers in my stream, it will be uninteresting. There is no summation of what I tweet about generally (except the bio) and why I should be followed. Twitter being a service where it is focused on accruing new connections (in my opinion), still falls behind in that regard.

They knew about this and added the “Who to Follow” feature. Sure, thanks! But why? Tell my why I would want to follow said person. Facebook lives on current social graphs, so they don’t really have this problem. I meet someone, I add them on Facebook. If Twitter can make sure the right people, follow the right people, it will explode. If I join and they take my location and interests (3 simple tags even) and suggest people to follow in my hometown I might not know. Great! I can create new connections! Twitter have the advantage that following someone is more socially accepted than friending someone you don’t know on Facebook.

The other problem, and I think this is also the case with Facebook, is the size of streams. I think the golden 150 number still holds true for online connections (perhaps maybe more as it is more manageable). I follow 1100 people. At this low number, my feed is unreadable. I can’t digest the information, before the new information appears. I have thus created lists to follow the people I really want to read depending on occasions and location. The problem with this is that people only start doing lists once their feed becomes unmanageable. It is way too much of  a mission to go back and all the people I follow to lists!

Much rambling, I digress. What do you think?

Square “launched” today. It is an interesting new product that allows anyone to easily accept payments from cards in the offline world. This makes it easier for the little guy to accept payments via a credit card at places like a flea market for example.

The idea itself is brilliant, probably garnering many facepalms of “why didn’t I think of that?”. What intrigues me most is that this basically means, bar a few examples, that carrying money around has once again become even more pointless.

With the advent of the internet, money has been disappearing into digital numbers, something that’s never in your “hands” anymore. You still have to carry cash around for “petty” payments, but with the advent of Square I see it lessening even more. It is disturbing actually to think that the essential thing that determines my well-being is actually so frivolous. I can’t physically account for my well-being anymore. It is disappearing.

I say bring on a new crowdsourced economy without money driven by our desire to innately collaborate  through the reduced opportunity to communicate through the internet to share what we love to do.

After studying for a test this past week, I reaffirmed a theory of mine. It’s not technically a theory. It is already happening, and I think most people can agree.

I have to remember about 300 pages for a test. I’ve realised how I remember the knowledge. I remember where the information and even sometimes how the data was structured on the page, but I couldn’t remember the details. To me, it feels like the pointers to memory that are used in computers.

I feel that our generation, driven by the internet (Google and Wikipedia) where we have a wealth of information at our fingertips start to think about our knowledge in a different way. We don’t make the effort to remember all the data, but rather only remember where to get it, once we need it.

So in essence, my knowledge is being reduced to a bank of pointers of which Google and Wikipedia are the most important (Wolfram to a lesser extent).

In the past, it could’ve existed to a lesser extent, ie just go to the library to get your information, but the effort required was much greater. To me it is apparent that it is becoming more profound.

Is it good or bad? I’d say, it’s a natural progression for the merging of humans and technology. I’m no expert on “brain power”, but it seems obvious that we don’t to spend too much time to remember it all, but rather spending time on applying our knowledge.

Rupert Murdoch wants you to pay for online news.

*facepalm*

That’s what I did. Seriously. News is news is news. You shouldn’t pay for it.

Before the internet, we paid for newspapers to get the news. Why? It makes sense to me, that we did it because we paid for the physical product. We paid for the paper the articles were written on, we paid for the distribution and we paid for the writers. If newspapers didn’t exist, news would still spread, but it would be through word of mouth. That’s as free as it can get. Newspapers could charge money for bringing news together in a physical product and then making it slightly more reputable.

When TV came along, news became even more free. We simply had to pay for the TV subscription. No real need to buy newspapers. Both of these mediums had ads to support them. Many eyes saw TV and print ads.

Now the internet came along, further minimalising the opportunity costs for news. With the internet, news became democratized. We could share news by just lifting our fingers. This also meant that news sites saw countless eyes on their pages, further increasing ad revenue.

The internet closed the time and space for news to spread. The internet is word of mouth news without the space and time restrictions. Why should someone monopolise something that happens? No one owns news.

News sites shouldn’t expect us to pay for it: not in this age. Your advantage as a news site is the eyes that read the pages. If you limit that, the news will inevitably spread through other channels.

That’s my opinion at least. Who agrees with me? Am I missing something?