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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

*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?

Facebook saw the success of Twitter and subsequently changed their homepage (which I still think is a bad choice). Facebook also made the status update feed real-time: an inevitable change, considering they also opened the status API. What is this Facebook? Are you trying to become Twitter with photos and quizzes? C’mon now.

Seeing the real-time building, Google saw that they were losing search power and made options available to their search to make it more real-time.

The biggest surprise to the real-time venue is definitely Google’s Wave. Will it change the way we interact on the internet? Who knows. When you see a wave (a real one) approach, it might seem huge, but that might mean it might break before it’s of any use to the surfer. Meh, it’s a bad analogy, but you get my point. Will be really interesting to see what Google Wave can pull off!

So where to now?

I didn’t expect to see this surge into the real-time web. I’m wondering what web services will filter into the real-time environment. The implications are immense to me. It means that people are now even more connected, right now. Within 5 minutes of it happening, I knew about the hudson river plane crash.

What implications it has on our psyche, I don’t know. We are more and more, constantly aware of the world and its happenings…

Where do you think the real-time web will go? What do you think the psychological implications are for being constantly and instantly connected?

The article states that David Edgerton says, “The internet is rather passe… It’s just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers.” If you look at clinically. Yes, the internet is a form of communication. It allows countless amounts of people to connect around the globe without any form of restraint (speaking in terms of physical space and time). What David Edgerton don’t see is that television, radio and newspapers are predominantly 1-dimensional media. What do I see on my TV? The shows that the media execs think I might want to see. Radio? It’s the same. I tune in, to listen whatever is on. Newspapers are the same. They write the stories that they think their market wants to read. It is lobsided: a few people determine what thousands see and hear. As mentioned in a previous blog post. Because the new web is allowing everyone to become media creators, more and more forces are able to exact on the supply and demand of what people want to see, hear and read from the media. Fred, the 1st person to have 1 million subscribers on YouTube would never have come to fruitition if the internet didn’t exist. No media powerhouse could’ve predicted his success.

One great promise of web 2.0 was that it would lead to a post-industrial world in which everything was dematerialised into a shimmer of electrons. But last year’s oil price shock and this year’s recession, not to mention every year’s looming eco-catastrophe, show that we are still utterly dependent on the heavy things of the old economy.

Where are these promises written? Yes, ideally, that’s what the web could achieve. Yes, we are still dependent on the old economy, but that doesn’t take away the merits of the internet and what it is trying to achieve.

The first objection to this [empowering of the individual] is that it destroys institutions and structures that can do so much more than the individual. The liberty which the web offers to the individual voice is also a restriction on group effort.

What? Linux? Firefox? Wikipedia? What drives people to work collaboratively on these projects? It is by the desire that we all have. I want an OS to do what I want it to. I want a better web browser. I want instant knowledge. It is driven by individual need, but through the web, it makes it much easier create things bigger than individual need. It is rewarding to feel that when I contribute to an article on wikipedia, I’m passing down knowledge and contributing to a whole, greater than myself. The article states that wikipedia is plagued by inaccuracy… The inaccuracy is almost, always temporary. The information is more often than not more accurate than real encyclopaedias.

Even Twitter is already coming to be dominated by conventional, non-web-based celebrity — Oprah Winfrey in the US and Stephen Fry over here.

These are already powerful individuals. The web is an extension and accentuation. Why should the web not reflect this?

The slightly more sinister aspect of this is that excessive individualism leads with astonishing rapidity to slavish conformity. The banking crisis may not have been caused by the internet but it was certainly fuelled by the way connectivity and speed created a market in which everybody was gripped by the hysteria of the herd.

Yes, with this I have to agree. The web accentuates everything we do. A run on the banks would crash the market quicker than without the internet. Isn’t this better though if you think in the long-term? The banks would’ve crashed if the internet didn’t exist, but it would’ve taken a tad longer. Word of mouth spreads regardless… If it crashes quickly, isn’t it then true for the opposite? It stablises and grows out of the funk much quicker too. For those not easily gripped by hysteria of the herd could also have used the internet to gather more information on what is happening.

Or there is the weird phenomenon of flash mobs.

Cmon! Flash mobs are awesome. A beautiful side-effect of people being brought together without the limit of time and space. It’s like the 21st century mexican wave.

 I know that this article — it always happens — will be sneered at all over the web by people who cannot think for themselves because they are blindly faithful to the idea that the web is the future, all of it.

The Internet is a global network of interconnected computers, enabling users to share information along multiple channels (thanks wikipedia). Of course it is the future. The potential of what it can achieve is only at the beginning. The web can bring people together that have been seperated by time and space, enabling and empowering them.

It is the cultists who threaten the web. They are the ones encouraging dreams of a utopia of the self.

Threaten the web? In what way? What do you want it to be? If the web is being threatened there must be something you want to keep/protect… Baffles me.

 The web is human and fallen; it is bestial as much as it is angelic.

So is humanity. The web is an accentuation of our society. You’ll see ghastly things and read opinions that you thought no man could harbour. These are just things about who we are. With the internet it has only come to forefront of society. You’ll also see things like Wikipedia, stories of love through the net, meetings of long-lost friends, inspiring blogs and feel the connection with, not strangers, but humanity. A lot of human endeavours have been about connecting and trying to understand each other. It is driven by the need to have at least 1 other human being understand who you are. This is what the internet is doing: extending the individual.

I said, that because we don’t remember the things we did, we must take the things we did on the internet as truth. It is the only measure for what we did. On top of that, it means that we can determine how our life must be like. Write something positive about your day, because when you look back in the archives (of life), it is THAT you will see.

Subconsciously I think it is already in effect. Take a look at Facebook. When we upload photos, we try to upload the photos we would want to look at. We determine what is seen. With that limited knowledge, other people take whatever they see as truth.

Remember the 25 things note? We were able to determine the way we want to be represented. It is only the internet, but because, it has become such an integral part of everyday society, people start to accept the way people are presented.

As with the recent 100 truths note meme circulating on Facebook. With this, we can show people what we are like. We reveal more information about ourselves so that people will get the right idea about who we are. If more is known about someone, you won’t make assumptions and conclusions on certain aspects of that person.

I’m sure there is a note that I can design that could prove this a bit more.

With the coming of something like the internet, we can determine who we are, what our lives must be like, and for what we will be remembered. Truly powerful, if harnessed correctly! I have another “Are we that which is written” post lined up. Watch our for that.

To me, pre-internet media was like communism. There were these “high” up individuals who had all the say in what we viewed. They somehow had to measure the “supply and demand” of the viewing public. Most big channels still do it this way. They still have shows based on assumptions of what would work. It’s like communism. You can’t effectively measure the supply and demand of goods. You have let the individuals and Adam Smith’s invisble hand do the work.

After the internet came along, allowing everyone to become a journalist (through blogging) and their own media creators via sites like YouTube, media became capitalistic.

No pre-internet media could’ve gauged the success of Fred Figglehorn. This was created through individual supply and demand.

It got me thinking. Isn’t it possible to extend this to a governmental system? Sort of like an open-source government. Yes, with democracy, we choose who leads us, but these leaders still have to guage what they should provide to us based on assumptions and calculations.