Shotbeak.com

As you might know. Music is my second passion after the web. If I am not studying or making websites, I am making music and going to gigs. I have plenty of music-related stuff to share with what I’ve been busy with.

A new post of mine is up on Bandwidthblog, in which I talk about Facebook and Spotify. Gist: They are on the right track. What I’ve found with automatic sharing with Tweekly.fm is very much in line with what will make Facebook and Spotify a success. Go read it to see why.

A music video!

I made this a while ago in July, but never managed to share it. It’s for one of my songs, called Move Along.

It was shot with my HTC. It will be title track of a new EP I am working on (will include vocals). The intention of the EP will be to fund myself an iPad 2, so I can start jamming some live gigs with it connected to my Mac to Ableton. I’ve always wanted to do a gig, but I found it incredibly boring and not worth anyone’s time to just stand and press play. Ableton connected to a midi-controller will add some live elements to it. Look at TouchAble. Here is an example:

Awesome! Here is a snippet of another song that will be on it.

Some gazey WIP by Simon Segfault

Finally, I’ve started playing around with Node.js again. Expect a real-time music related application soon. Quite excited about this. I have no idea how it will turn, but I guess that’s what makes it exciting as well.

And finally. Keep listening!

——–

P.S. On non-music related note. TwimeMachine is now officially up for sale. Contact me if you are interested.

When I was a child, my mother used to (and still does) make the yummiest soup. I also quite enjoyed dipping some bread into the soup: so much so, that on occasion I would play around and dip two-three slices into it, effectively rendering the soup useless. Too much bread.

Omnomnomnom

Did I expect the soup to turn a congealed wheat? Not at first of course. With my young mind, I knew I liked bread. I liked soup. I liked bread and soup and stuffed some more bread into the soup. That’s how I am starting to feel about Facebook. I keep adding friends; friends keep adding me. And it is starting to fill up, becoming noisy and bloated. Why is that happening? Dunbar’s Number, my friend. Dunbar’s Number.

Robin Dunbar's book. Read it.

Dunbar’s number (proposed by Robin Dunbar) is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. What is that number? 150. It has surprisingly shown up in a lot of real-world examples (from nomadic tribes to modern day factory floors). I was wondering if this would apply to online-relationships. Considering that Facebook is about ‘connecting with people you care about’, the data reveals a surprisingly similar trend. Facebook’s stats show that the average amount of Facebook friends are… drum roooll. 130.

Now, I’ve spoken about this in the past. Today, it is becoming more apparent as Facebook’s active users in the USA has dwindled by 6 million users. Maybe it is just a seasonal trend, a momentary dip, or maybe it is indicative of a greater problem? Facebook doesn’t know what to do about this increasing bloat.

People change. You aren’t that great of friends with some of your highschool buddies. You are however, adding more and more people on Facebook, without actually dumping some of them off. Facebook has only been around for the majority of its users for 2-3 years.

Now move forward a few years, and people will have changed. They will have new people who are more important in their lives. This means, Facebook’s average friends count will keep growing.

How has Facebook battled with this? They have recently (and silently) slipped in controls for the news feed that show only people you most interact with. The odd thing is, it doesn’t run across all devices that way! If you have Facebook for Android, you will notice a lot more updates that doesn’t appear in your web feed (m.facebook.com is the same as the web feed). Does it work. Not really. It sucks in a certain way to determine what I deem important. Just because I don’t interact much with a person/band, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be in my feed.

So. What now?

Good question. One which I’ve been following quite avidly since my previous post about it. People will keep dipping their bread into their soup. Facebook needs to change if it wants to fend off against this impending problem. Either they find a way to beat the 150 number, by changing the way we communicate and stay in touch, or a new social contender comes to the fore that keeps your connections to under 150 (via some implicit social graph machine).

Suffice to say, I am definitely keeping an eye on this! All this talking about soup has made me hungry.

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?

Facebook is removing the ‘boxes’ on profile pages, going in effect this week.

This means my Facebook application Muse Lyrics that allowed a user to post their favourite lyrics onto their profile page, will be practically useless. Facebook is moving third-party apps to tabs. I don’t know if there is a point in posting lyrics onto a separate tab. The point was to have it visible on a profile page.

So, for lack of anything better to do with it, I’m saying goodbye to it. It will still remain up, as it is. I might do something later on with the application. For now, I’ll just let it die.

RIP Muse Lyrics.