Life After Twitter And Facebook

You know those apocalyptic strategy games, where a huge catastrophe strikes Earth? And everything is dark and sad, you don’t have any resources left and you gotta make it by yourself? Well, let’s imagine that for a second. But instead of all the Earth being hit, let’s pretend that only two major things are hit: Twitter and Facebook. Lets try to imagine our life after the sad end of Twitter and Facebook.

1. Instead of being happy when somebody is following you all of a sudden, you just start asking yourself “why”. Especially when the following is taking place on a dark alley.
2. When you really like something, you just smile. You don’t look desperately for the “like” button.
3. When you meet someone new you don’t get automatically in your mailbox a letter promoting his latest hugely discounted ebook.
4. You finally start noticing that trees are actually growing around you, not inside computers, when you press that tiny button called “Farmville”.
5. If a guy promises to retweet you if you do the same for him, you suddenly decide to cross to the other side of the street. From where you can safely shout at him: “You dirty pervert!”.
6. When they’ll want to stalk each other, people will revert to the old fashion way of using private investigators.
7. Some of the unadapted will start talking out of the blue in short, witty and somehow cryptic sentences, not longer than 140 chars. They will be called “Tourettes” and usually avoided at parties. When they’re not the party attraction, of course.
8. Historians will be puzzled by the unexplainable extinction of an entire species, called “social media expert”. Much like the dinosaurs. No living proof of that species will ever be found again.
9. If friends will want to send you photos from the last barbecue, they’ll send you photos from the last barbecue. They won’t tag you, that is.
10. Poking someone you barely know will usually trigger a lawsuit.

Many years after the complete extinction of Twitter and Facebook, a brilliant (yet strangely unadapted) student, dumped by his girlfriend, will want to show to the whole world that he’s not as bad as he looks. Of course, he writes a web app for that. The app eventually explodes into an incredibly popular site. Student becomes billionaire. Hundreds of millions are using the site. In an old, dusty chronicle, a historian finds out that it was a prophecy about that web site. Many years before, an entire civilization, in a desperate act of survival, left a cryptic message. Within weeks of hard work and thousands of super computers involved, the message is finally decrypted: “Social media is not dead, you idiots. And it’ll never be”.

Of course, a small faction of historians will give a completely different interpretation to the message, claiming that the first ones used the wrong decryption mechanism. For them, the message will look like: “A venti latte, please. With sugar on top and lots of cream. Presto!”.

Why Less is Not Always More With Social Media Productivity

This is a guest post by the very fine Chris Garret, @chrisgarrett.

There are some very good examples of less being more, in design, productivity, and so on. When it comes to social media though, this is not necessarily the case.

I keep hearing the following advice

• Schedule your tweets to go out automatically so you do not spend too much time in social media
• Only follow a few people so you do not get information overload
• Limit your interactions to only “key players”
• Hook up your blog to your social accounts so you do not have to manually post links
• Have a maximum of five minutes a day set aside for social media

… and so on.

With due balance and context, some of this is good advice. Some is sourced from good advice but taken to illogical extremes (eg. only five minutes a day?).

The problem with blanket advice is there is no connection to you, your goals, or your overall strategy.

First you have to answer WHY you are getting involved in social media.

Then you have to work out a strategy that works toward that goal.

Limiting yourself and your social media interactions to an arbitrary time figure is like saying you will only use the telephone for five minutes a day just in case you get into wasteful conversations. “Sorry Mr Customer, I have to hang up now as I have gone past my five minutes for the day”. You wouldn’t do that, so why are people happily doing it with social media?

Track progress towards what you want to achieve, do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Most of all … Do what works for YOU.

About the author: Chris Garrett is a new media commentator and internet marketing coach living in the UK. You can find him regularly guest posting at blogs such as this one, or writing for clients such as Cogniview and his own blog at chrisg.com.

Don’t Spend Your Money Buying Friends

This is a guest post from Zoli Cerei from SimplyWillDo.com.

The recession or, speaking a bit more generally, a lack of money shouldn’t cut down on your social life. We have to be aware of the correlation between our financial and social status, and have to learn to separate these. This coin has two sides: those who are financially strong enough may end up “buying” friends and later feeling insecure about them and question themselves whether they can count on these people, or not. The opposite is when those financially unstable don’t have the confidence to build a social circle because they fear uncomfortable situations caused by money.

A modern day manifestation of this issue is the exchange of internet friend for money. You might have also faced this, it is basically just another kind of advertising: this time what you pay for are Facebook friends or Twitter followers. Were these sites meant for that to happen really?

Friends, Money and Giving Value In Real Life

Be respectable by respecting others. Everyone shares human values of high standards, and if you want to observe this just a little, you will. Once you start respecting these values, others will appreciate the gesture, and respect you in return. Respect doesn’t have to be material, an honest compliment, a helpful movement but even powerful constructive criticism can mean a lot to the other one.

Be friendly, because that’s the best way to actually make… friends. Too many people fear kindness. Kindness is in a way revealing yourself to someone else, showing something from the inside of you. Too many people fear responsibility, since when you’re taking responsibility for something, then you become accountable for that thing. Too many people fear saying their opinion out loud: if your opinion is no longer concealed, you may too be criticized. Friendships involve all of these: being friendly means being nice and kind to your friend. It also means taking responsibility for them and for you as well. It means undertaking your opinion, and saying it honestly even if it is negative at times. Too many people fear being friendly, because it is not always easy, no one said it is. But it’s obviously the best way to make friends.

Be a loyal friend in happiness and in sorrow, too. I observed that, contrary to the saying, a friend in need and sorrow isn’t always a friend indeed. Rather, a friend in joy is. While being next to someone when he is going through hard times you might even comfort yourself observing that you are actually in a better situation. However, when your friend has just accomplished one of their dreams, it is usually harder to honestly be happy about the situation.

Realize you can’t be friends with everyone. While you can buy everyone a beer at the party, and that might make everyone feel good, you can’t actually be friends with everyone. There are people who you don’t name as your best friend; however, you would like them to call you their best friend. Is that fair? Being best friends is mutual.

The depth of online friendships, or buying Twitter followers

Provide Great Content. This is the first step to any relationship, and not just online. You provide something that others like and that they would like to receive more often. In the online world, that’s the moment when they hit the “Follow” or the “Subscribe” button. Whatever you’re doing on the internet, keep an eye on providing something useful to the online society, and others will notice you.

Make Your Voice Heard. Engage with others. Replying to tweets and leaving comments can be at times as useful as it is to buy an advertising spot, and it costs nothing. Today, the web is “social”, and as I said, being social is by far not equal to being rich. Show you’re a human, not just a bank account. Engage.

Be honest. Don’t call everyone your friend after the click of a button. That’s something that really annoys me in the case of social networks: relationships are instantly branded as friendships. Making friends online is possible; however, just as it is in real life, it is a process. A relationship goes through several phases until it can be called a friendship, just like you don’t go to bed on a first date. If you have not yet gone through this process with someone, don’t call them a friend yet.

Conclusion

Money is a powerful tool in our lives and using it wisely is an unquestionable power of any man or woman. Money can buy you medicine, it cannot buy your health. It can buy you sex, but not love. It can buy company but not friends. Showing human values and respecting your fellows, however, will surely turn into great experiences.

About the author: Zoli Cserei is a very young simplicity and productivity blogger and an ever-curious hacker of life who writes for Simply Will Do. Check out his blog to see whether he has some useful stuff for you or maybe subscribe to his RSS feed for more.

Twitter versus Facebook

In the last 5 years, the most important digital places I spend time in are Twitter and Facebook. Surprisingly enough, they seem to be the most popular social networking sites too. Recently, I had a short morning conversation on Twitter with one of my followers about what  question these sites are answering. What is the reason Twitter and Facebook exists, after all? The following post was born out of this interaction.

Twitter and Facebook Question

The Twitter question is undoubtly: “What are you doing?”. As simple and dumb as it seems it responds to a fundamental need of human beings:  curiosity. It may have killed the cat, but made the humans happy too in the process, that’s for sure. A part for answering this question, Twitter is not doing more. I’m reading this, I’m cooking dinner, I’m hanging out with friends, these are typical Twitter actions. Sometimes, a conversation can last for hours, sometimes it ends in a tweet.

The Facebook question poses a little bit of difficulty, but in the end I think this is: “What are you up to?”. In the beginning, Facebook was just a place to keep in touch with friends, sort of a digital address book. In the last 2-3 years, the increased interactivity, fueled by a wave of new apps built on top of their API made Facebook more of  an entertainment place in which you are invited to play. Games, interactions or causes, all are sharing a subtle entertaining vibe on Facebook.

API Usage

Twitter is giving an API for creating different clients for the same environment. You can access the same rules, via a different skin or device.

Facebook is giving an API for creating different meta-environments. You can create your own rules, and engage users in a different, sometimes totally unexpected type of interaction.

General Context

Twitter keeps the context fixed, while Facebook changes the context frequently. That means, Twitter has a limited set of features, which remained fixed for a long time. The learning curve is faster than on Facebook, because of this simplicity. On Twitter you can focus only on interaction, on Facebook you keep focusing on adapting to the environment.

On Twitter you reach out to people, on Facebook you reach out to challenges, apps and complex interactions. Reaching out to people is spontaneous, unexpected and builds up social skills. Reaching out to challenges and complex logical interactions builds up intellectual skills. While they are surely more engaged than usual Twitter users, typical Facebook users are not as social as you would think they are. The abundance of social tools (poking, commenting on walls, liking, etc) masks the genuine message.

Adapting to a difficult environment is clearly one the most important evolution processes. While Twitter maintains a rather loose environment with fewer rules, Facebook is constantly loading it with new restrictions. Coping with every new change and improvement in FaceBook frustrates users but at the same time is making them stronger. On Twitter, the only challenge must come from within, there is only the internal motivation: to manage an increasing number of connections in small, standardized chunks of actions. Facebook users may become stronger but their social motivation needs constant challenge. Twitter users are building up social skills in a more natural way.

A typical Facebook user is a little more stressed than a typical Twitter user. He knows he have to cope with a new challenge at any given moment: being it a new environment rule (like tagging users or changing the look of the feeds or of the site) or being it a new gift or other request he receives from a new app. It’s like being prepared to face a new threat every second. It surely makes them more powerful but I don’t know if it’s making them enjoy their presence more.

A typical Twitter user is most of the time concerned only with his incoming or outgoing interactions. He can chose the level of those interactions by limiting or expanding the number of users he follows. He has a greater control of the game than a Facebook user, who, regardless of the number of friends, is exposed to an increasing number of stimuli. A Twitter user usually enjoy his presence or at least is constantly refining his game in order to enjoy his presence more.

Social Media Vocabulary

By “vocabulary” in social media I understand the interaction units. In a language you have words as interaction units, in a social media site you have a set of actions by which you can play that specific role.

On Twitter you have a limited and pretty much standardized vocabulary: tweets, replies and direct messages. You can post links and that’s that.

On Facebook, you have a virtually unlimited vocabulary. You can express with hundreds (if not thousands) of apps, you can play Farmville or Mafia Wars, you can write on walls, poke, or become a fan.

Usually, languages with a simpler vocabulary tends to become more popular. English surpassed French during the 20th century as an international language, partly because it has a simpler vocabulary.

Twitter or Facebook?

I favor simplicity in face of complexity. In my opinion, if it keeps the actual strategy, Twitter has a bigger evolution potential because it has fewer rules to be followed. It’s a simpler, much robust digital organism. Facebook is like a wrestler on steroids: impressive, hugely complex but ready to crush at any given moment. Its complexity is becoming its heavier burden.

I think in the long term the stake will move from adapting to a complex environment (Facebook) to adapting to a complex stream of interactions (Twitter). We, humans, are already incredibly complicated machines, we don’t need to create another hugely complicated environment to adapt more. What we need is to interact more, to create around us a new social model. In this regard, Twitter allows a bigger freedom and the human interaction throughput is higher in Twitter.

FaceBook keeps the game closed. The rules are changing and they are seldom changing by popular request, on the contrary. Facebook may succeed in creating a challenging environment, like a huge amusement park, where you want to go every once in a while for some thrills, but you can’t live your real life in an amusement park. Real life is outside an amusement park, real life is made of simple human interaction, of spontaneity and unexpected. I like a roller-coaster every now and then, but I can’t work and become useful in a roller-coaster.

For me, Twitter is Auckland, Facebook is Las Vegas.

I’m A Twitter Citizen, Work In StumbleUpon, Occasionally Travel To Reddit

Last month StumbleUpon had around 7 million registered users. Twitter is coming up pretty close, with around 4 million registered users, while Facebook watches all this from a distance, with more than 200 millions registered users. Why are those numbers important, apart from dry media statistics? Because they are not just numbers, they represent populations.

One of the most surprising and most important effects of social networking is the creation of a new type of country. A country which is not defined by physical borders, but by domain names. A country which is ruled by Terms Of Service, and not Constitutions. A type of country which, in some cases, is far more rich than most of the traditional, physical bordered countries.

If you’re surprised by these affirmations is good. It means you are from the old fashioned generation which thought email is the final frontier. If you’re not surprised, I bet you are one of the happy citizens of those new countries. You are already an active member of that population and help the economical growth of that specific country.

Well, for those still surprised, I will try to uncover in this article why and how the social media is shaping the new digital-political structure of the world, the structure that will overlap in the end the familiar geo-political structure.

Traditional And Digital Countries

A traditional country model is defined by borders, physical borders. A citizenship is defined by a special identification document, by which you are recognized. The traditional model of a country is territorial. You can’t really DO something outside the physical borders and your citizenship. The value is defined inside a territory, where there is a currency which you can trade for value. A traditional country is defined by fixed factors, like geography.

On the other hand, the digital countries are defined by interactions. Your citizenship is your username. In the Amazon country, you interact by buying things. In the eBay country you can do even more, you can sell your stuff too. And in the Monster country you can hunt for a job. All of these are interactions. And all digital countries are defined by interaction, instead of physical borders. Interactions performed over the internet. (more…)