that's so last month. or the problem of obsolete sns's.

last week my friends and i got in to a debate about the "eminent" demise of facebook. they insisted that the sudden emergence and success of twitter was proof that people no longer considered facebook as the source for internet communication and recent (failed) redesigns of facebook were the death throes of the once all powerful site. i disagreed. for several reasons.

to begin with, i don't believe facebook and twitter are meant to do the same things. i would even go so far as to say that twitter is a "social networking site" in the strictest sense of the word. i say this knowing full well that i am not the model user/appreciator of twitter, but i do listen to those that love the site and what sticks out most to me is how unidirectional the messages of twitter seem to be. transactions on twitter seem to clearly fall into two categories, input and output, with little overlap. some people use twitter to glean bits of news from sources important to them (input) but, at the heart, twitter is geared toward the individual who wants to broadcast status messages to an audience (output). sure, followers can reply, but conversation is limited to 140 character snippets and a scrolling home page where new posts replace the oldest. in this way, it's hard for me to think of twitter as a community building site (community implies the exchange of significant content. and, yes, that was a value judgement.) and, as the "networking" part of social networking implies some sort of exchange, i really wonder how this is achieved under such time/space constraints. and, you know, telling 200 followers you had cream of wheat for breakfast hardly seems like a way to build or maintain relationships.

facebook is a horse of a different color. with a number of functions (contact information, messages on the public wall and the private inbox, picture albums, etc.) i don't understand how it is perceived as being in direct competition with twitter. if anything, twitter is simply one element, the status message, extracted from the entirety of the facebook world. now, i should disclose the fact that i think both sites are superfluous. facebook is just as guilty of encouraging the me-centered approach to 2.0 (i tag myself in a friend's picture, i list movies/tv/books that demonstrate my pop cultural savvy, etc. etc. ad nauseum) and i am just as guilty as the next in participating. that said, it fulfills my definition of social networking in that users exchange information. and, successful or not, the redesigns are always crafted with that input-output exchange in mind (you can digg a comment now, see new photos as soon as they are posted, read friends' status messages on your home page the moment they are posted...).

so will twitter kill facebook? not exactly. i think it's important to note how the twitter is keeping facebook on its toes, but i don't take it as a real threat. and while we may be too lazy to read an entire article in the paper (140 character summaries, please!), i don't think were willing to live by status messages alone. twitter's numbers may be rapidly increasing, but facebook has the edge in that this generation (see pew study) love uploading content (pictures, videos, audio...).

but i suppose the golden rule here is that nothing lasts forever. does any body even remember friendster? have all those myspace users run to facebook and never looked back? twitter may have its moment and facebook's popularity may lag (though numbers say membership is still growing) but one day the only places you'll find both sites will be on the wayback machine.

new news

not just on the graduate level...

web based learning has reached our neighbors across the pond. brittain is restructuring it's educational program to include lessons on twitter, wikipedia, et al. at the elementary level. 

proponents of the change stress that children today must have a firm grasp of technology if they are expected to succeed later in life. detractors say this should not come at the expense of traditional (read: print) learning methods.

i think it's safe to say there's room for both. why not assign students the task of researching the victorian era in both wikipedia and a reliable print source? why not have them twitter in (historical) character?

the people have been heard! again.

it seems like facebookers really know how to cause a fuss over changes they don't like. last month they lead a rebellion against the terms of use clause that gave facebook indefinite ownership over all user content (you quit, but facebook holds the info in your profile hostage). this month, facebook users complained that the redesign to the site was no good and facebook acquiesced. apart from confusing regular users (me: "hey, where'd that button go? it was right here a minute ago.), the redesign streamed more details in the public forum (your "friends" see more and more about you on their home page) and made privacy settings difficult to locate. but, no more.

in light of this and our discussion on monday, i think i'll go investigate those privacy settings now.

the people have spoken!

hallelujah! tropicana renegs it's new usability-challenged packaging thanks to the internet cries of many. 

i'll never again stand in the freezer section searching, in vain, for the pulp free oj i love!

the twitter on twitter

well...if david pogue says twitter isn't the time-sucking, ego-driven, of-the-moment internet phenomenon it appears to be...then may i'll reconsider my stance.

my gripes aside, he does raise the same interesting point that boyd did in her article on blogging. namely, that twitter can be "precisely what you want it to be".

pogue defines his twitter as being useful for somethings that would not "merit a full blog or article post." to that i would say, 'does a blog really have to be that involved in order for you to consider posting it?'

having all of these technologies that do, essentially, the same thing (facebook's status message is comparable to a twitter feed, twitter feeds resemble short musings in a blog post...) seems redundant (eliminating redundancies is what i do. i've got the cataloger's gene.). i can justify having a facebook that displays personal information within a network of people who are likely to need that information (it's been a helpful tool for making dinner/drink dates with old friends. whether or not they showed up for those meetings is another story all together.) in addition to having a blog where i upload content (something more involved than that status message). they connect me to people in different ways.  the facts are on facebook (name, location, phone, email. leave a brief comment at the sound of the tone), the thoughts are on the blog (the who, what, where, when and why of my life. no character limit).

but, it looks like i've just talked myself into a corner trying to define what these technologies are. in trying to make them distinct things, i've uncovered that, yes, they can be anything.

begin again

the hardest part about blogging: choosing a title.

i got home last monday determined to whip up the best class blog i've ever created (easy, this is the only one) and i couldn't get past the first step. what do i call this thing? it had to be witty (popcultural references a plus, but nothing too obscure/obnoxious). it had to be something i would remember next week (too many accounts, too many passwords for me to remember these days). and, most importantly, it couldn't contain an alias with some combination of numbers and x's (xXLibrARyRocKsTArrXx680, anyone?)...seven days later and i have a blog i'm not too embarrased to call by name.

one might say, "nicole, you obssess over inane details!" this is, of course, true. but i suppose i'm getting at something else here. namely, technology is rewriting the rules of everyday communication. like the unspoken etiquette of email forwarding we spoke about in class last week, technology is changing the ways we communicate with one another on all fronts. social networking sites ask me to add every detail of my life to my profile; my peers determine the socially acceptable format for doing so (hence, my "favorite movies" really have to say something about me as a person and the name "xXLibrARyRocKsTArrXx680" is so 1998).
rumors abound about the negative impact of texting on language use in teens and parents complain that they just don't understand their kids anymore (maybe not a new problem, but predictive texting is getting the blame for this one now).

in any case, i suppose i'll come to terms with being on the tail end of the "me generation." i'll update my myspace/facebook again (because friendster is so 2003), do the blog thing again (my early days of oversharing on livejournal be damned), and work on getting something real out of this blog two[point]oh! sounds promising to me.

...but no twitter.