foursquare Archives | Ian M Rountree

I’ve had to reconsider how I use social networks lately, because I think some of the people who are connecting with me are doing it wrong.

Don’t get me wrong, I love making connections. I’ve met some very interesting people mostly through Twitter and blogs. In some instances, this is clearly fanboy level connection – I’ve subscribed, commented without expectation of a response, followed them on twitter and so on. In other instances, I’ve made new contacts through Facebook and even instant message – which are, or at least have been, my favoured “personal” connection methods.

But some of this needs to change. I need a real sense of home base. I need to shore up the connections I’ve made with meaningful contact.

I’ve also been using Foursquare lately. I check in daily at my workplace, in my mall, at the coffee shops I frequent when I go there. I’m mayor of a couple of places, but I’m by no means prolific. I’ve got a few friends – for some reason, Robert Scoble and Julien Smith even clicked the “accept friend” button, which is cool because I like putting a diverse range of information (not just a volume of information) to the people who intrigue me. I’ve also got a number of local friends on there. But then there are the strangers.

I got a request from a former colleague. Which was neat. But when he checked into my store, I popped my head up and said hello… And he didn’t have any idea who I was. Didn’t have as sharp a memory for people as I do, it turns out.cHow useful is this service, really, if you don’t have ducks in a row enough to recognise someone you used to work with, when you had the presense of spam enough to request they add you on a social network?

Even better was getting a request from Egor Lavrov, an apparent entrepreneur (who I had never hard of before) out of Florida and the Dominican Republic. I hit accept, because I still haven’t decided how I’m using the service, then checked out Egor’s profile, and promptly gagged. The guy has easily a hundred friends. How, in a location-based game/network, are you supposed to keep up with that many people? Especially with people jockeying for points and cluttering the streams? He’s forever checking in and is ALWAYS off the grid! What’s the point of doing this, convincing that many people to track you, and then never giving them any information to work with?

Now note, I’ve got Scoble and Julien, and Dave Peck was actually my first friend on Foursquare (even though I’ve never connected with him anywhere else), so I can’t really speak to diversity of location. But I do have to wonder if people are paying attention to the reasons WHY you friend someone on Foursquare?

Who might you want to follow on 4sq or Gowalla? If you’re on a location-based service, you likely should be friending people you have a chance of meeting, or at least want to keep track of at least a little. Scoble travels, Julien speaks. I track them because I may miss an announcement of where they’re doing their public work – which I’m interested in. My friends, I like to track for obvious reasons. But seriously, why am I going to friend a thousand people there? Friending metrics are useless on location networks. Try again.

How do you filter on LinkedIn? I don’t use LinkedIn thoroughly yet because I’m not that active doing events and outside client work for my job yet. I have it, it’s a semi-static living resume. But I sort of agree with Chris Brogan here, that it’s not a get-more-contacts game. The more accurately you can make your contact list reflect your working life, the better off you’re likely to be. If you want to find me on LinkedIn, go ahead – but it would help your case if you want me to guest post or contribute to your efforts somehow. I will trust me. I love to help. It’s what I do for a living.

Who should you friend on Facebook? Whoever you want. Friending metrics are useless on Facebook, it’s not a collector’s game, but thankfully the platform is flexible enough that whether you’re going for a collection of loose friends, or a tight-knit group of really core buds, it will work for you. I like Facebook. Actually, a lot, much as I prefer Twitter for daily entertainment value lately. If you’d like to connect on Facebook, be my guest – but be warned, it’s filled mostly with useless trivia and the flack that I don’t push out in a more professional demeanour.

Which leaves the biggest contender: Twitter. Praise Be The Tweet. There are a lot of theories on what’s effective on Twitter, but the simple truth is that it’s a very popular, and thus powerful, engine for putting yourself in front of whoever you want in a really simple, expressed way. It’s great for linking, initial contact, on the fly public conversation, and big self-promotional pushes. Collect people, keep it small, follow no one but track a bunch of lists – the possibilities are so flexible that, as much as the followers number still matters to some people, it has no attachment to how you follow, who you follow, or how you interact. If you’re not following me on Twitter already, you’re not one of the cool kids – but it’s not hard to get in, because I have no say in it. Say hello!

So how do you do it totally wrong?

Lots of people will argue with me about it even being possible to use a service wrong, but let me explain.

When I see someone on Foursquare behaving in a way that works better on Twitter, that’s broken. It’s not about behaviour, so much as it is about approach. The language of location networks is locality. The language of LinkedIn is reference and relevance. The language of Twitter and, to an extent Facebook, is conversation. You can’t have a conversation with me on Foursquare – so that fails. You can’t assume relevance on Twitter without digging far further than the profile page, so the LinkedIn approach is of limited use.

At the end of the day if you really want to break a social network, just treat it like the other networks you’re already on.

Photo by Nesster.

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.