Lee McKusick

Social Media has taken the internet by storm in the last few years. It recently surpassed pornography as the prevelant Internet activity among 18-24 year-olds. Yeah, shocking, I know. So there must be something to this whole social media revolution. Why’s it so successful? What differentiates one site from another? What’s next for the world of cyberculture after the hype of social media wears off? Or will it at all?

I took a look at some of the most popular social media sites: Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and Facebook, to see what each of them had to offer and what could be said about them, both positively and negatively.

 

Twitter is a website that asks people “What are you doing?” It gives you 140 characters to describe what you are doing at that moment, and propogates that status update out to everyone who is “following” you or anyone who happens to take a passing interest.

My first impression of Twitter was that it is a one-trick pony. One whose trick is duplicated elsewhere to boot. Facebook has a status update, you can post notes to Pownce, Jaiku is similar (which I didn’t know at the outset of this, because I couldn’t get an invite, but that’s another story), so what’s the big deal?

For me, starting out with Twitter was a bit of a struggle. The first time I tried to import my Gmail contacts (from any of my accounts) to see if anybody was actually on Twitter, it wouldn’t finish and gave me an error message (”Whoops! Something went wrong with the remote service. Please try again in a few minutes.”). It must have been a fluke, though, cause the next day it went through. I’ll simply halk it up to growing pains.

Luckily for Twitter, however, my experiences and opinions are changing over the course of my research, and I’m happy about that. When I first signed up for Twitter, I was skeptical. As I said, the whole one-trick pony thing, and why would I want to know about every little thing people are doing? It seemed like it would be incessantly annoying. But after talking with Professor Lawley, who was the only person I could initially find who I know and was actually on Twitter (and thanks again for allowing me to follow you), it made me realize something. Twitter isn’t about knowing every little thing that people are doing. Well, I mean, it is, but it’s more than that. It’s a way to feel connected to someone and informed about what’s going on in their lives, even if you wouldn’t normally get to see or talk to that person regularly. If a friend lives on the other side of the country, unless you’re really good friends that person isn’t going to call you up and gives you the “bad day at work” or “It’s a good day for such-and-such reason” type of updates that Twitter can provide. And to some people, that sort of distant-connectedness can be a valuable thing. If Facebook is a social networking meal, Twitter is that small cup of coffee or snack that gets you through the day.

Chris Saad, co-founder of Particls, said this about Twitter:

There are two main reasons why Twitter is so great.

1. It’s dead simple
2. It has lots of great people on it.

This is the essence of Twitter’s success. Anybody can use it, and anybody can use it. It’s a community. And in social media, if you create a community, you’ve done your job.

 

Jaiku is an invite only service. Unfortunately, it seems to be a bit difficult to get an invite through the Jaiku site (I never got one at all, even with 3 emails), so someone already there sending you one is your best bet. (Thanks again, Liz).

Jaiku essentially has the same concept as Twitter. You post short blurbs about what you’re doing, where you are, etc. However, Twitter is more specialized in that it only focuses on what you’re doing, whereas Jaiku encompasses all apsects of your presence. Not only can you post your Jaikus yourself like you would Twitter, but you can also set it up to pull information from your RSS feeds as well. Flickr, del.icio.us, blogs, YouTube, all of these have RSS feeds, and can be input into Jaiku so that it auto-updates when they do. Post a photo to Flickr, Jaiku updates with it. Write a blog post with a major rant? Jaiku updates with it. All without you having to so anything extra, your followers in Jaiku are quickly able to see.

Under the hood, Jaiku is better than Twitter. It has better mobile integration, since it was developed by people in Finland from Nokia, you can comment on peoples’ Jaikus, the RSS ability, all of these serve to make Jaiku a technically better service. Of course, it’s not without flaws:

As Robert [Scoble] said in one of his Twitters:

“well, Jaiku is reacting slower than Twitter. It requires more clicks to see your messages than Twitter. And is more complicated. I never knew of it until today, which isn’t saying much. What’s cool about both of these is the people on them. NOT the technology.”

- Chris Saad

In the end, Jaiku and Twitter are based on the same concept of allowing people to share their experiences and day-to-day life with others. Whether you prefer one or the other is really no consequence, as long as you discover the purpose behind the technologies, and connect with people. Otherwise, it’s a useless technology. Besides, you can simply add your Twitter feed to Jaiku, and update them both from Twitter, if you wanted.

One thing that I wish Jaiku had is the ability to mass-search for people to add. Twitter will search your email account’s contacts to see if people are on, but Jaiku does not have that same feature, which is rather disconcerting once you’ve been spoiled by Twitter.

 

Upon going to Pownce’s website, I was disappointed to find that it was invite only like Jaiku. But, in the interest of research and pseudo-journalism, I put my e-mail on the waiting list for an invite. I was pleasantly surprised to wake up the next morning (err…afternoon, hehe) to find an e-mail waiting for me in my inbox with a signup link. Now, it may be like Gmail was where invites are as prevalent as pennies, but it’s still nice to have quick response. It just makes you feel good.

I have to point out something from the signup process though, that I got a kick out of. Not only is the page aesthetically pleasing with its circles and spheres, but it’s rather inviting and has a very friendly aura. It asks for the standard things: username, password, name birthday. No surprises there, although as you fill out each field a dialog bubble pops up to the side giving a short description of what the field is looking for, written in plain, simple, friendly English. I don’t know why it seems different than other websites’ signup processes, but somehow it does. It seems…human. But I have to say, my favorite part of it was this:

Under the Gender dropbox, it gives you about 10 different choices. There’s the standard Male and Female, but also Dude, Lady, Chicky-poo, Bloke, Bird, etc. Just something that allows you to further customize the experience, and an option not usually seen. I myself chose Gentleman.

Now that I actually have an account with Pownce, I’m impressed overall. It provides a nice hub for all of your social networking needs. A part of your Pownce profile page allows you to set up link to all your other presences on the internet: All the apps covered here, plus things like del.icio.us, Flickr, Youtube, and a bunch that I’d never even heard of. You can also add your IM info and links to your personal websites, i.e. blogs and such.

Pownce has developed an application that runs off of Adobe Labs’ experimental software AIR. According to Adobe Labs’ site, AIR is a “cross-operating system runtime that allows web application developers to use their existing web development skills (HTML, Javascript, Adobe Flash®, Adobe Flex™, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.” So far, it seems to work well, and it looks nice, as far as application GUIs go. Simple and easy to use.

You can post messages, links, files, and events all from the desktop app without opening up a single browser window. For example, to post a message, just click the Message button, type your message, and click Post It!, and you’re done. This is a feature that I really enjoy. It’s nice to be able to work with Pownce in its own self-contained environment without a browser.

For $20 a year, you can sign up for the pro version of Pownce. This allows you to send files up to 100Mb instead of 10, there are no ads (Although I haven’t seen any ads yet to get rid of…), and you can “design a custom theme.” Not worth it in my book, but then again, I’m new to Pownce and don’t have much of a presence there. If it does take off, then I suppose it might be worth it, but for now, I’ll stick with the basic package.

Pownce does not have a mass-search ability like Twitter either. I suppose this is one area where Twitter outshines all. Go Twitter, shame on you, Jaiku and Pownce. Tsk tsk.

 

Ah, the giant. (Well technically, last I knew mySpace still gets the most traffic of all the social networking sites, but my views on that are expressed below.)

Before I cover Facebook, I want to say that it is impossible for me to fully cover it here. It at least deserves a seperate post, and even then I’d probably hit only the tip of the iceberg. If you’re really interested in Facebook, make a profile if you haven’t already. The best way for you to learn about it is to experience it firsthand, and chances are your friends are on it already, which may not be the case with Twitter, Pownce, or Jaiku. That said:

Facebook is a completely different beast than any of the three previous animals here. As I alluded to before, Twitter is the social snack, which Facebook is the full-course meal. It allows you to coordinate social events, share photos, have discussion groups, play games, and gather massive amounts of data about a person. I say data because that’s really what it is. You won’t know who this person is, but you’ll know their favorite color, their musical tastes, hobbies, and anything else that person wants to put on their profile. To quote a song by the band Eleventyseven, called MySpace (which applies equally to Facebook in this instance):

Still I’d like the chance to really see
If what you say is true and has integrity
Cause I could know everything about you
And still know nothing at all
I know that it’s wrong to form an opinion on only what I see
But in my defense it’s really hard to know
When MySpace is the only thing that you ever show

It may seem like I’m harping on Facebook. To some extent I am, and I feel I must make something clear. While I am harping on Facebook, and these other all-encompassing social sites for being shallow, I still have Facebook set to my Firefox homepage. I use it all the time to stay connected. It’s become an invaluable tool. I’m simply warning against the pitfalls of a system where people can reveal as much as they want and yet still have all their walls up.

On another note, Facebook’s been getting some bad press lately about their new advertising platform, Beacon. Beacon tracks customer purchases on certain websites and sends that data to Facebook, so that (professedly) it could be used to share that information with friends (i.e. Person X’s friend, person Y, sees that X bought item Z, thus resulting in a greater chance that Y will go buy Z also, or, and probably even more likely, that Y will then mooch off of X for Z. I’d like to thank Algebra for enabling that exquisite substantiation. I’d also like to thank the thesaurus for enabling me to use that word.) Anyway, apparently Beacon is acting more like spyware than most users would like. Case in point, a guy bought a pair of gloves for his girlfriend, but Beacon threw up a message in his feed that he bought them, which his girlfriend then saw. Result: a spoiled gift, and an unhappy couple. Could this be the beginning of the end for Facebook’s reign?

 

I could reference and give a similar evaluation of mySpace here, as I did the other services. I choose not to. In the words of Ra’s al Ghul: “Like Constantinople or Rome before it the city has become a breeding ground for suffering and injustice. It is beyond saving and must be allowed to die…When a forest grows too wild, a purging fire is inevitable and natural.” mySpace in my eyes is what Gimli saw Dagorlad to be: “festering, stinking marshlands as far as the eye can see.” My point is, mySpace is so convoluted and so inundated with problems, technically and aesthetically, that it just needs to die. It has served its purpose as the start of the social media revolution and can now safely fade into obscurity and let more competent entities take over.

Nevertheless, I think that it is still the social networking site that gets the most traffic, and therefore deserves a cursory glance at the very least. If your friends aren’t on Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, or any other social media site, you are left with two choices:

• Make a MySpace as this is the only valid scenario for doing so.
• Get new friends.

 

Overview

Each of these social media services offers a different take on the social aspect. While they all involve connecting people to each other, they go about it in different ways. Here’s a good summary of what each has to offer:

• Twitter: lets you know what people are doing. May or may not be useful for people you could get the same information from in a more traditional way, but nice if those methods are less accessible, or if you just want a quick, unobtrusive “social pulse.”
• Pownce: A hub for other social media services, as well as the ability to share small files with your friends.
• Jaiku: An aggregator for popular services, as well as an all-encompassing Twitter. In addition to knowing what someone is doing, you can see what they’ve been doing on the web and in real life, through their various RSS feeds.
• Facebook: A comprehensive social networking package, allowing the dissemination of much more, and more varied information than simply “What are you doing?” or “What do I want to share with you?”
• MySpace: X_X

 

What’s Next?

Social media’s not going away anytime soon. Therefore, since it has a future, it is worth speculating what that future will be. Here are some of my ideas about where the yellow brick road will take us.

• Jaiku was recently acquired by Google, so there will likely be some sort of integration, a la Blogger, or a la Yahoo/Flickr. I have to say, I like the simplicity of the new Blogger login. Simple, easy, one-stop shopping. Whether their implementation with Jaiku will be as accessible remains to be seen, but so far Google has done a good job with their “Don’t Be Evil” motto and made their products exceedingly well.
• I anticipate that with the development of things like Adobe Labs’ AIR technology, more and more services will develop stand-alone applications like Pownce that are integrated with the web service.
  • This is something I’m really excited about, because it reduces the risk of being distracted. If you’re wondering what I mean, think about a time when you’ve gotten online to do one short, simple thing, and then four hours later you’re sitting there with 10+ Firefox tabs open trying to figure out what it was you were going to do in the first place.
  • As a specific example of what I mean, I would love to be able to have a little text box in the corner of my desktop that I could click, type something, hit enter, and have it update my Twitter status. 5, 10 seconds max, boom, done. I think that would be is really valuable for Twitter. (Also, something to have Twitter be updated if my Facebook status changes. They have it the other way, but if I’m already on Facebook at the time, I’d much rather stay there, and not have to take the extra step over to Twitter’s site…). Anyway, those type of improvements are the kinds of things we’re likely to see.
    • Twitteroo - A desktop app that does exactly that: allows you to post twitters straight from your desktop. And also allows you to see others. Nice work, devs.
    • Now that Facebook has removed their mandatory “is” from users’ status updates, the Twitter app is much more useful. Before, if you updated Facebook with Twitter, it would say “Lee is twittering: ___”, which is annoying. Now, it just normally updates, which is nice.
• On similar veins to these is Google’s development of OpenSocial, a common API for many different social networking sites. This will allow web developers to create applications that will work in any of the OpenSocial-enabled networks. Unfortunately, Facebook is not a member of this (mySpace is however), and thus to maximize their potential, developers must essential create two applications. One for OpenSocial and one for Facebook. I can’t see this as being healthy for the social media environment, so there will likely be some sort of change afoot. The only questions are what the solution will be and when it wil come.
• In my observations the popular venues of social media have been progressively sophisticated. That is, the one that is currently the most popular at any given point in time is always cleaner, easier to use, and more refined than the previous best. For example, mySpace was revolutionary at its outset, and I’m assuming “better” than Friendster (I never used Friendster), and Facebook is clearly more refined than mySpace (although with the release of the API and the development of applications, it is quickly becoming rather cluttered.) This progression may seem like an obvious statement, but it has some implications. If the trend continues, who is next in line for the throne of social media? Time will tell, and we will await the next generation of social media.

Thanks to Chris Brogan for the idea for this post.

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