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social networking

Tweeting from the air

by Jacob Grier on January 3, 2010

I hesitate to post yet another article defending Twitter from its detractors, but David Carr’s piece is very good and this anecdote is too amazing not to share:

The act of publishing on Twitter is so friction-free — a few keystrokes and hit send — that you can forget that others are out there listening. I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. (He turned out to be a great guy, but I was doing a story involving another part of the company, so I had to decline the offer. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.)

Think about that: In 30 minutes someone working for Virgin saw his Tweet, figured out which fight he was on, and got a message to an employee on the plane to locate him and offer him a new seat. Perhaps they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble for someone who’s profile doesn’t mention being a writer for the New York Times, but still, it’s like we’re living in the future!

The truest sentence in his article is this one:

There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.

[Via Maureen Ogle.]

Previously:
Selfish benefits of tweeting
Follow me on Twitter here

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FourSquaring in Portland

by Jacob Grier on November 13, 2009

The new Portland food blog Under the Table with a Jen has a story up today that’s all about FourSquare. Lance Mayhew and I are quoted extensively in it, and I even managed to answer her questions about losing mayorships without making a Sam Adams joke. Go me!

The story also unveils a new incentive to visit Carlyle:

But, he agrees, so far Foursquare has been largely overlooked. “So far I haven’t seen restaurants doing anything to formally acknowledge FourSquare. My friend Ron Dolette (from PDXplate.com) has a secure hold on the mayorship of Carlyle right now, so I’m going to buy a drink for the first person who can unseat him.”

Ron’s a little too complacent in his hold on the mayorship right now, so I’m hoping we can give him some competition.

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Twitter lists and fake following

by Jacob Grier on October 30, 2009

Twitter is rolling out the option to make lists of people you follow. So far most of the lists I’ve seen have been about categorizing people: booze, irl, libertariat, coffee, and rock-solid-peckerwoods (yes!) are a few I find myself in. This is useful and, since most lists are public, a potentially great way to find new people worth following.

So far I’m just using the feature to deal with the massive flow of tweets, creating a separate list of the people I care most about following. I can check this short list when I’ve been offline for a while without being inundated by posts, dipping into the main Twitter stream whenever I have more time. This is basically the feature I hoped for back in April:

A simpler approach would be to offer people binary levels of contacts on Twitter: One A-List they never want to miss and a larger stream they follow only as time allows. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s an easy solution. It could be implemented completely within a browser if Twitter decided to make this happen. Yet as far as I know, this option doesn’t exist anywhere.

And now we have it. Thanks, Twitter!

Using lists like this reduces the costs of following new people since one no longer has to worry that they’ll distract attention from more relevant content. But there’s a downside to this: It basically enables the “fake following” feature of FriendFeed. When users have to compete for attention, the decision to follow someone signals some level of commitment and engagement (unless one is the type of user who follows everyone indiscriminately). Now there’s no way to tell if someone is really following you or just politely fake following you, which I think might reduce some of the live conversation aspects of Twitter that make it such a cool platform.

Twitter has become too big to not have a feature like this. In the past few months I’ve been reluctant to follow new people simply because I don’t want to miss updates from my close friends in the flood of tweets from acquaintances. So yes, it’s probably worth paying the costs of having lists, but I’m going to miss the transparent simplicity of the old system.

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Is FourSquare the next Twitter?

by Jacob Grier on October 2, 2009

I’m reluctant to sign up for new social networks these days, but this post from Ryan Graves has convinced me to join FourSquare:

I need you to join Foursquare. Even if you think it’s a waste of time or “nerdy”, I’m trying to help you avoid being late to the party…again. There are a few key reasons that lead me to believe Foursquare will be huge, at least huge enough for the non-internet person to benefit from. A few of those reason are the huge potential that is location based applications, it’s fun and non-internet people can see why they’d want to join it, and it helps cities work better.

The way Foursquare works is, you go to a venue (bar, restaurant, park, etc.) and check in. Once you’ve checked in Foursquare awards you points and tallies the amount of times that you’ve checked in there. You’ll receive more points at more popular places and if you’re the person who’s checked in at that venue the most you’ll become the mayor. Also, by checking in to multiple venues and checking in often you receive badges for your check ins. The competitive mood of the game works incredibly well for it’s distribution and is quickly addicting.

It’s still clearly a young service and the user interface isn’t very intuitive. The iPhone app works best with location services turned on, which is a drain on battery life. Despite this I’m enjoying it so far and see a lot of potential for finding friends when they’re nearby.

I’m not sure how much I’ll get into the competitive nature of FourSquare, though it does offer some advantages to those of us with non-normal working hours:

You can only earn points at certain times:
* We DON’T give points for normal-work-hour checkins (e.g. Mon -> Fri, 8am -> 4p)

This would make it very easy for me to become Mayor of Carlyle, which I currently am. But I’m going to stop checking in there and hope someone else takes the title (it could be you!).

As with any social network, FourSquare’s usefulness will grow with its user base (at least up to the point where people you want to avoid join the service). I’d especially like to see more people in Portland on it. If you do sign up, find me here.

[Via Julie, who also beat me to Twitter.]

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Faking it

by Jacob Grier on August 27, 2008

From Kottke:

This is a little bit genius. One of the new features of FriendFeed (a Twitter-like thingie) is “fake following”. That means you can friend someone but you don’t see their updates. That way, it appears that you’re paying attention to them when you’re really not. Just like everyone does all the time in real life to maintain their sanity. Rex calls it “most important feature in the history of social networks” and I’m inclined to agree. It’s one of the few new social features I’ve seen that makes being online buddies with someone manageable and doesn’t just make being social a game or competition.

I was actually just wishing for a feature like this for Twitter. Twitter works now because it’s popular but not that popular. The list of people I follow is manageable, has room to grow, and is populated mostly by people I’m genuinely interested in getting updates from. But what happens if the service achieves Facebook levels of popularity? Then I’m stuck with either rejecting people or letting the signal get lost in the noise. Fake following is a way out.

But is it a good way out? I’m not so sure. For one thing, as Merlin Mann says, “the whole idea’s pathetic on a number of levels.” For another, the very existence of the option imposes costs on all users, whether they use it or not. If a friend realizes you missed one of his updates on Twitter, for now he knows it’s an honest mistake. If fake following becomes an option, your friends will have to wonder if perhaps you’re using it on them. The option breeds distrust.

A feature like this should come with a way to signal honesty. Let users declare on their profiles that they haven’t enabled the option. Or if they have, let the world know that they may be fake followers. One group of people you can trust, another that’s a little more dubious.

Twitter is perhaps even more susceptible than Facebook to “boyd’s law” as stated by Cory Doctorow: “Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” Facebook is great for deep networking, for keeping track of who I know where and what they’re generally doing with their lives; I don’t care how big my friend list gets. Twitter’s more like a live conversation, creating a social sixth sense of what my friends and other interesting people are thinking and doing. I’ll have to be selective about who I follow to keep it valuable.

I’m with Mann on this one: if you’re going to be a publisher of updates, have a thick skin. Don’t be offended by friends who don’t follow you and be ruthlessly selective about who you follow. Don’t waste your time on updates you don’t care about.

And if you hurt someone’s feelings, it’s not the end of the world. You can still be Facebook friends, after all.

[Via Tyler Cowen.]

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