So far, but hard to beat

Steven Hodson on communication technology utilization:

Communication is a great thing but over-communication I think can also be a detriment. We seem to want to spend so much time talking about literally nothing in order it seems to justify our use of these tools. Communication tools are meant to enhance our lives and our work but it seems that they have become more of a means to lose ourselves in the mundane instead.

I don’t think it’s all justification of use - some of it is trying to lead by example so the “mainstream” will learn and adopt. Meanwhile, the mainstream is still figuring out how to make this month’s mortgage payment.

Let’s be honest - if you read beyond the catchy headlines you’d never get the grass mowed

• The psychology of foreclosure - Robert Shiller makes everyone mad (Calculated Risk)
• “Dude, where’s my file” - asking the portability question the in context of business reality (Scott Karp)
• Ben Bernanke’s Bubbles - Greenspan is probably pissed…they were his bubbles last week (Wall Street Journal)
• Real bloggers twitter - or, why the real world will never catch up (Louis Gray)

Josh Catone:

A new report from Royal Pingdom reveals that Twitter unsurprisingly led social networks in downtime for the first four months of 2008 with a total of 37 hours and 16 minutes. The good news is that even with all that downtime, that’s still a 98.72% uptime percentage for the first third of the year — which isn’t terrible. Can we really complain about a free service thats “only” up nearly 99% of the time?

No, you can’t.

Folks will use any and all outliers (i.e. a world without twittering Steve Job’s keynote is like a world without bread and water) to justify the need for 100% uptime, even though whatever downtime they do experience will probably never exceed the (self-proclaimed) utility garnered from using the service, and even though just two years ago Twitter’s downtime was roughly 100%.

I don’t even use the service, but I still find the whining extraordinarily unjustified.

Via Dennis Howlett of ZDNet:

If anyone needed convincing of Twitter’s business utility, today is that day.

Questions:

and…

It may be clubby, but it certainly isn’t dangerous. Michael Krigsman’s analysis is nothing but FUD conjured to create some traffic.

The very fact that tweets become public means any unauthorized corporate communications can be tracked to their source in an instant. The scenario Krigsman laid out will only happen once - the perpetrator will be handed a pink slip thereafter.

Far less insidious than say SMSing someone, who forwards it to another, who then forwards it via email from their Blackberry to yet another, etc. etc.

Scott Karp says:

Twitter is massive waste of time.

I disagree. The act of “twittering” may be a time sink, but there are plenty of interesting conversations worth listening to (particularly if you are skilled at parsing noise). Fancy buttons and rounded corners does not make a venue for the general public - millions of sign-ups in a world of billions doesn’t either. It’s a club, like any other.

Just listen.

The winner is Ted:

I started using Twitter in the first place because it made me feel like people cared. Web 2.0 gives you this impression that everyone wants to cuddle with you. Fact: prominent figures in Web 2.0 only care about you so that you’ll invite them to your startup’s VC-funded launch party with an open bar. The worldwide group-hug is an illusion.

To this end, not only am I deleting my Twitter account, but I also fiddled with the privacy settings on my Facebook profile. I’m not one of the privacy-out-your-ass Reddit types, it’s just that nobody cares. And if nobody else gives a shit, neither do I.

I’ve been tossing services because I wound up with too many roll-over minutes.

There’s an interesting conversation that’s been taking place over the last twelve hours regarding recent innovations in the Web 2.0 space, or the lack thereof.

It started with John Heileman of New York Magazine taking a few swipes at the hype, which was quickly picked up after Fred Wilson made it clear some of the article got his goat. Steve Rubel followed up, and despite the fact that I’ve had a tough time following Mr. Rubel’s ramblings about Google Reader/Gmail as groundbreaking “research tools” yada yada, I have to give a general thumbs up to his prognosis - there is a lot of Kool-Aid hitting the gullet, and a dearth of “wow.” The few bright lights in the bunch are hardly world changing either - Twitter, for example, may be nifty, but as Richard McManus put it:

“Twitter, which Steve mentioned, is one - albeit it is still extremely niche and no mainstream people I know use it.”

My personal opinion: Twitter is a great platform, but Richard is spot on. I was skeptical at first, and then got an explanation. I embraced it, installing plugins for this blog, applets for my Blackberry, and Twitterific for the desktop. But Twitter is a social app, meaning you need your friends on it for it to be either fun or even remotely effective as a communications platform. Unfortunately, all my friends are those same mainstream kind of folks, and despite prodding some to join none saw any long-term value. Throw in the fact that I’m no groupie (meaning I quickly dumped my follow list as I personally knew none of the people I was following), and the rest is history.

Outrageous

This is classic hype: a article in VentureBeat this morning that exclaims in the most recent blown-out headline that Facebook may now be worth $100 billion (go look for it…I just couldnt bear to link). It was worth just $15 billion a few days ago, and only a billion a year ago. And nothing has changed for this enterprise other than the fact that they have many more users who either a) are too poor to turn advertising dollars spent into consumer purchases made or b) spend so much time on the internet that they are completely oblivious to any and all web advertising. That, or they’re like me…they have money to spend, but clean out their cookies with ever increasing frequency. The really sad part about this - nobody but the digeratti will ever even read it, and even if a major publication does pick up on it (like so many do nowadays), the general populous doesn’t care one iota. All it’s going to do is make them aware that they need to clean out their cookies more often!

I know why it was written - the author wanted some traffic - that traffic begets ad dollars. A ridiculous headline is a sure fire way to get there - write some complete bull about a system wholly dependent on advertising so you can get some advertising revenue yourself. Doesn’t seem like there is much value add to me.

I guess it’s fun for some, but…

I was bored with Facebook in about a day - to me it was AOL on steroids. I tired of Twitter in a few months - it’s useful but extremely distracting. MySpace…a bid childish. Meebo - neat, but isn’t “everywhere” IM access what phone-based apps are for? Tumblr - clean and simple, but so is a Wordpress install. I could go on and on, but I don’t have much in the way of ads on this site.

How about showing me something that actually helps me get work done, makes me money, for goodness sakes…catches me more fish. Take some of these information technologies and point out how they apply to an industry sector I’m interested in - securities arbitrage, corporate-owned life insurance, distressed and/or hard-to-price assets, composites and extrusion, far-east import/export, or the promise of nuclear fusion reactors the size of air conditioning compressors. That would be innovation.

Gotta go…I’ve got a phone call (remember those?).

I was about to agree with Steve Rubel regarding this slightly longwinded request for meta-search tools, and then I hit this:

Today all of us are generating a torrent of content across lots of different sites - sometimes hundreds of them. This includes everything from financial transactions your bank site is logging to email that sits in your Gmail or Hotmail account to content you’re posting on Facebook and, increasingly, documents you’re creating using rich internet applications like Google Docs. In addition, lots of data comes back at you too - replies, account alerts, pokes, etc.

I just had to throw the bullshit flag right there. Maybe Mr. Rubel & Co. are generating all this data, and spawning alerts and pokes and all that jazz. Unfortunately, most people are logging into their bank account to pay a few bills, booking an airline ticket or a rental car, picking their fantasy sports team, and searching for new quilting patterns. Contrary to “popular belief,” the average internet user doesn’t have ten social network accounts, use Gmail for anything other than a spam dropbox, or spend their days Twittering, Jaiku-ing, or Meebo-ing their fingers off. Those that are, and aren’t being paid to do so, will likely get jobs soon that don’t pay them to do so (and/or will fire them IF THEY ARE doing so).

Maybe 1/10 of 1% of the internet users on the planet will ever see the need to dig around for an email they sent three years ago via their personal account, or archive a bajillion feed items for the purpose of sorting through them next autumn while trying to scratch together a keynote speech for some overpriced conference. The other 99.9% of users will click over to their favorite search engine, find the chicken marsala receipe, and go about their evening polishing off a couple of bottles of wine with a few friends, sans laptop, Blackberry, or those iPhones with their insidious operating system lockdown.

Everytime I hear this benign babble, I put one more nickel in the “I’m betting on the Mahalos of the world” pot, and move on to checking the stock quotes.

Disclaimer: the author has Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo! Mash, and a couple of other accounts which he rarely visits a second time. He occasionally posts pictures to Flickr, and does not maintain his del.icio.us account (since his browser bookmarking still seems to work just fine). He Twitters every now and then, under lock and key.

Web-based communication channels are burgeoning - people are being inundated by information, and are inundating each other with it. It’s consuming time, we humans’ most precious resource. There’s organization, disorganization, and a never ending stream of new venues to choose from.

Recent thoughts around the web

Nothing new, but…

What I’m waiting for is reality to set in. We’ve already heard plenty of folks complain about being pummeled by email, getting behind to the point where they “declared bankruptcy” by purging their inboxes and kindly requesting that people resend. Now it’s happening with network invitations. People’s Facebook profiles are getting clogged with requests for friendships and notices of new applications. They are publicly announcing they are going to follow fewer people on Twitter. These “troubled” folks are the core user base - the fans, the founders, and the venture capitalists providing the funding.

Reason and quandary

It’s become literally impossible to adhere to Dunbar’s number in the virtual world. Some are taking action because they realize the quality of their communication is what matters, not the quantity. Meanwhile, breaking basic sociological maxims are a requirement of all these networks - they either grow exponentially or die - quality does not matter. The very people these networks need to spread the word are the ones “losing clock” trying to keep up.

Something will give.