Brain Vibe

Let’s be honest, if the geeks had their way, no one would be allowed on the web and we would still be passing notes through ftp.

Today, the internet has been taken over by the average person. MySpace and Facebook defined the social network. It is about the party. Are you invited? Are you part of the group? Are you popular? So, how many friends do you have following you anyway?

You know what is the same? The discussion of etiquette and the proper way to engage. Social media has rules. Social media is about fitting in to how it was “intended”. I think this notion of what social media is is holding us back. It might be about the conversation, but it can be so much more than that.

Here are some examples of social media being beyond a personal conversation.

ReadWriteWeb provided a review on a new social app called Yawnlog. People log their sleeping patterns and dreams and then can share them with their friends.  Maybe a nice widget addition to Facebook.  But, a real product?  Here’s the thing.  The value isn’t that you can track this and share with you friends.  It’s the potential for trials and longitudinal studies.  The application has more value for science than a gadget that I’ll use with my friends and discuss what my dream meant.

LouisGray.com talked about what Twitter is really about (see article), listening, not friend following.

“Even if you are a rabid information junkie, the constant updates from Twitter can be too much for anybody to absorb, even with a few hundred connections. To believe that I am seeing all of a friend’s updates with 6,000 connections, or that Scoble can see the updates from ten times that many, is clearly impossible. So while a small population of Twitter is using the service to follow individual’s updates, a huge number are instead using it to broadcast updates, monitor keywords, and occasionally, send direct messages to people or reply in public. Twitter is simply too much to handle as conversations are lost, people’s updates can be of any type, and the limitations of the service, including the much-discussed 140 character boundary, make it a poor foundation for exchanging ideas in a crowd.”

So, when we talk about Twitter as a social network, how can you say that when you can’t really exchange ideas through conversation.  It is bill-boarding.

I think there ia also something to the fact that in the end, 99% of people out there are watchers, not participants.  Maybe they participate in their micro networks in Facebook with real friends, but there are only a handful of people out there that are part of the social.  That leaves open a huge opportunity for social media to fill beyond “Whoever Has the Most Friends Wins” theme.  Increasingly, and you see this particularly with Twitter, that social is pushing past the confines of personal conversation.  As with the web, the value is in the topics of conversations – the information.

Let’s start considering that maybe the power of social media isn’t that it is social but that it is about linking people, experience, and ideas to move forward in a non-cyber world.  Since when did a clique do anything but hold someone back?

Filed under: brainstorm, marketing technology, networking, social media, collaboration, Conversation, Facebook, following, information, longitudinal studies, Louis Gray, MySpace, opensocial, Robert Scoble, social media, Social network, Twitter, yawnblog