Ian M Rountree

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Never Mind the Buzz, Cocks

February 13, 2010 by Ian 15 Comments

bella_durmiente on FlickrWhen I started Tweeting, I didn’t de-construct the service because I didn’t feel I knew enough about what I disliked or appreciated about it. I also didn’t know what it was actually for. The same thing goes for Facebook – when I joined, I didn’t get it, mostly because all of my friends were using it in such starkly different ways. Dynamic networks are like that – you can’t judge the entire service or network based on the habits of a few groups of users. Much as we like to burn the Midnight Oil, it’s impractical to over-study networks that just came out.

But then Google released Wave. Instant internet-wide love/hate relationship. And now it’s Buzz. And it’s another case, in part, of twenty people using the same services fifty different ways, and no one seems to know what they’re actually for. As much as we like to think well of Google, this is far from The Cure for Social Media.

It’s easy to see why. Buzz interrupts you, something internet marketers have been trying to avoid for years. It makes a mess of your inbox, when its default settings are on, and there’s no real way to get right of it, short of turning it off. This all or nothing approach has a number of people convinced that Google’s off their own kool-aid and making some key errors in product development.

To me it just looks like they’re taking the tactic of Ship-Then-Perfect to an entirely new realm – I wonder what Seth Godin would think about that, actually. But I doubt he’s on Buzz. He’s not even on Twitter, really – which is fine. However, Jeff Jarvis, one of Google’s few scholars, has a great deconstruction of the visible intent of Buzz on his blog; post titled “Google’s Buzz(machine)”

I turned Buzz off after my BlackBerry went ballistic over the first fifty alerts coming in within five minutes. The merging of my inbox was too much – I don’t want that, and it’s easy to see from all the clutter on Twitter and elsewhere, that not many other people do either. Stephen Hodson noted that Search Engine Land completely killed a story about the rumoured split between Buzz and GMail – which may have proven an important point about exactly how much we try to appease El Goog, even when we dislike features of their services.

The important point that many of these de-constructions are missing is that this is a service stil in Beta. Google is well known for their endless cycles of public beta. Christopher S Penn made the first good point when he talked about why Buzz is Brilliant and Deadly for Social Media 1.0 on his own blog – and I agree with much of what he says there. Robert Scoble, Supercurator, made a note about Google’s announcement as well, taking the tactic of talking about why Google won’t go after Twitter or Facebook on their own. The bit that convinced me to look more into Buzz?

Google isn’t willing to piss its users off to get to the next level. [Facebook’s] Zuckerberg is willing to piss off Facebook’s users by changing the platform. He is in the midst of changing his platform once again from something that was only for private friends and family to something that’s more public so that Facebook can effectively compete in search (or, at least, be like Twitter and sell its feeds to Google or Microsoft). Google just isn’t willing to do that over and over.

I think Scoble’s got it right here – the features we hate about Buzz are temporary. Already, people are coming up with stupid Buzz tricks to make sure that the service is usable – and it works. I’ve turned Buzz back on, having followed about three of the tips from AEXT.net‘s article on Undocumented tricks for Buzz. Most important trick there? Convincing GMail not to deliver Buzz notices to your in box. Anyone with a Smartphone needs to use that, just to make the service liveable while Google is still ironing out The Kinks. Tip number 5, on finding a user’s name to @ them with is also very handy for larger following groups and conversations. Props to Mark Dykeman for sharing this one, as well – I would have written Buzz off entirely without these tips.

I’m still not sure how I’m going to use Buzz. Don’t be surprised if you see some posts in the next week about how I actually do use social networks personally – I think some study might be required before I can decide if I really need that extra tank in my motor pool.

What do you think? Is Google off its rocker, or is this another instance of the Big Country saying Yes before it’s time?

UPDATED: Jeff Jarvis dropped a post about Buzz’s to-soon launch.

UPDATED x2: The Supreme Court of Texas Blog also added some privacy concerns about Buzz, especially poignant information for journalists, lawyers and, yes, even bloggers.

Photo by Aitor Escauriaza.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: AEXT.net, big country, buzz, buzzcocks, christopher s penn, el goog, google, google buzz, jeff jarvis, midnight oil, nevermind the buzzcocks, nevermind the buzzwords, nevermind the linkbait, pun alert, robert scoble, stephen hodson, the cure, the kinks, wave, yes, zuckerberg

Personality Thieves – The War for the Identities of the Internet

December 23, 2009 by Ian 4 Comments

Big Ass Feed Icon
photo by Danny Sullivan

Robert Scoble posted an interesting discussion topic on his Facebook wall, asking the deceptively simple question: Who will win the Identity war in 2010?

The question was asked with specificity towards tech platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Google and so on, but it’s an important question to ask of ourselves: to whom are we giving the leverage of our primary identification on the web?

Like a lot of others who are best suited to interface, I’m an adaptable person. This is both a great help in my work, and a hindrance with my friends for one simple reason; when I spend time with you, I’m going to start to sound like you. If I spend an evening watching QI, I have a flare-up of British in my speech. If I spend too much time reading Justin Kownacki, I get ornery. Too much Seth Godin and I fall afoul of sweeping inspirational pessimism. I’ve been accused of having a weak identity, but I don’t think that’s it, primarily because I’m not alone in this behaviour; I just happen to display it as a very visible means of communication. I’m in the habit not only of speaking your language, but speaking your accent as well.

Identity is a touchy subject for a lot of people. We like to be ourselves, but easily fall afoul of pop culture epidemics. Every teenager falls into a category during high school – those who try not to get branded as “outsiders” by their peers, which makes demarcation an impossible process to avoid; it only goes away when everyone stops participating, and it’s not human nature to remain intentionally ambiguous. Social networks make this even more difficult to avoid – Twitter has lists, Facebook has the friend system, as do so many other networks. It’s not a bad thing, but as with so much else, awareness is the key to safe navigation.

The idea of identity, of finding peers to connect with, is so easy to reconcile with our daily lives that technology has adapted it as a mode of operation – we can’t ignore this. Peer to Peer filesharing. Friends lists. Contact lists, address books, RSS feeds, folders, libraries, right down to the DLLs that run your computer programs. Grouping is everywhere. And because it’s everywhere, it’s possible to manipulate.

I recently read an article on Brad J Ward’s blog from last year about “FacebookGate” where a group had severely infiltrated student-run graduation groups for various schools – for who knows what purpose. Perhaps data mining. Maybe stalking. It doesn’t matter. What matters is this event as a demonstration of the very demarcation we use to identify ourselves being used for purposes we did not choose when we claimed the label in the first place.

It gets worse: Over the last month I’ve seen both Chris Brogan and Amber Naslund suffer outright plagiarism. Brogan’s world saw a hack marketing an eBook made out of a collection of Chris’ blog posts. Naslund had a blog post ripped right from her site and posted, no claim of attribution whatsoever, on another site. This goes beyond casual emulation for the sake of communication; this is outright personality theft.

So how does this apply to technology as a communicative and cultural force? In practice. I make a habit of signing up for every social networking site I can lay my greedy hands on, whether I’m aiming to use it or not. I’ve been trying to snap up my own names as a username for the last three months as well, for branding purposes, it just makes sense. Now, think about that for a second. Think about what I just said.

Branding purposes.

Sounds funny, doesn’t it? We talk about personal branding all the time, but it’s always as an external force, information we’re carefully aligning outside ourselves on networks, website after website, trying to make a name for ourselves. We get annoyed if our names are already taken, but how do we fight back? Not by making a mass acceptance of the fact that our personal brands are facets of our identity – that would be silly, applying a business term to ourselves – but rather by setting up “Verified Accounts” and other measures to make sure the people represented by certain usernames really are themselves. It’s a good thing, but it’s still external.

Scoble’s question about who will win the identity war this year – and it will be this year, it has to be, or it will never come – is a big one. I answered by asserting that it won’t be the creation of utility that wins. If we’re looking for utility we already have a mesh of social networks for that. Facebook for friend gathering Twitter for grapeshot conversation, LiveFyre for in-depth enquiry. FourSquare and Gowalla for relational location. We build our online identities out of these things, among many others (personally branded websites, I’m aware, are a big deal as well. I’ve got mine, did you get yours?) and often forget that the idea of identity is more about accessibility than it is about utility. We use these networks to get our words out to others, to track interest in what we say based on how, when, and how loud we say it.

Whatever wins the identity war will provide the greatest power of accessibility and cross-feeding to the largest number of people with the least amount of hassle. Google’s profiles are a great start, but it’s not quite enough. If I know El Goog half as well as I hallucinate that I do, they’ll improve it; I can see the potential there for the perfect outward-facing home base meshed with the ultimate inward-facing dashboard. I wonder if they do, too.

Maybe it won’t be Google. Maybe it’ll be something, or someone else that brings up that killer app.

I just can’t wait to use it once it’s there.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: amber naslund, bloody-mindedness, brad j ward, chris brogan, el goog, Facebook, foursquare, google, gowalla, identity, justin kownacki, livefyre, QI, robert scoble, scobleized, seth godin, social-networks, sociology, stephen fry, twitter

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