I Will Not Die

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I’m a huge proponent of this little piece of advice: write what you know.

But I’m going to break that rule, hence my calling myself a “noob.” What do I know? I know about human tragedy, perseverance in the face of impossible odds, greeting life each morning with a vengeance unseen since the days of Ancient Greece, and about the poorly understood and fully enigmatic practice of poetic prose. That and I know a lot about ice cream.

However, there’s plenty I don’t know. For starters, one of my nagging failures has always been social media. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that when it comes to social media, I’m just plain retarded.

Why social media has always been difficult for me

I could actually probably publish a whole blog on the problems of social media, but I’ll try to summarize it into a short section. For me, the primary problem has been twofold:

1. It takes too much time, and
2. There’s too much distilling necessary in order to make it valuable (which leads back to #1)

Keep in mind that this is all just my narrow opinion. But when I’ve tried to use social media, I’ve always found it difficult to actually do much with it.

I’m open to the possibility that it’s because I go about it the wrong way, but I usually end up doing stuff like this:

• Go to Digg, Reddit, or other social media sites
• Examine the popular articles
• See almost always only these types of articles: politics, humor, technology
• Find something that might be interesting
• Read the article
• Discover that even though it’s popular, it’s not something I really like
• Read pages of rude comments made by highly cynical users
• Read pages of rude comments responding to the rude comments
• See that I’ve wasted two hours that I could have spent doing something much more valuable
• Realize that I’ve only visited one such social media site
• Give up
• Go eat ice cream
• Go to bed

In other words, I end up sifting through a bunch of junk. When I do find something I really like, I find out it has four Diggs, is completely buried, and I feel like there’s just no point to actually giving it a vote. Ideally, a feature of these sites I could use to enhance my experience would be to find people who have-like minded views, then associate with them through the site, see what they’re into, and read what they like and share things that I like. But at the rate I can find people I really like on these sites, I could spend a year trying to develop the right kind of group and that would still be on just one damned site.

A huge obstacle of mine is time. I only have a few short hours during the evenings to write articles, and read articles on the blogs I enjoy reading. My focus has been devoted to building my blog and contributing to the blogs I like. I don’t have much time for anything besides that.

But then I was rescued

Then friendfeed came and saved my soul. I’m so retarded about social media that I had only vaguely heard about it until I read this article on Steve’s blog. It piqued my interest. Thanks Steve, I owe you one. I also received some great insights from a long talk I had with a friend of mine. So I signed up.

Oh. My. God.

I love it. My initial interpretation can best be described by this analogy: Friendfeed is to social media as a feed reader is to blogs.

Only better, because I can stalk people.

Here’s why I like it:

• I can see pretty much all forms of social media in one place
• I can interact with the people I’ve met easily by commenting directly on the site
• I can find people I like very easily by seeing a variety of things they are doing, so I can get a fuller sample of their tastes
• No one is rude. I’m not sure how this is possible, given my experiences with the individual social media sites, but so far it’s true. It’s possibly because it’s much more personal. For instance, if you’re rude, everyone will know where to find you, your Flickr account, you name it
• I can sort popular items and find out what’s been busy, on any site including Digg, Reddit, Flikr, everything
• I don’t spend so much damned time sifting. I can quickly browse and even search for things I like
• It’s reverse-engineered. Instead of going to a site, looking for someone I like, then going to another site and repeating the process, I can find people I like directly and go to their profiles on social media sites the back way. In other words, friendfeed lets me start with the people, then go to good content, rather than starting from the lousy content and looking for good people

Possible disadvantages

Some people have argued that it could be adding to the noise of the Internet by aggregating so much stuff all in one place. While it is a little overwhelming to see so much going on all at once, the amount of time I’ve saved looking for interesting social media content has more than made up for it so far. I’ll keep up with it and post a follow up on friendfeed soon. If you’d like to subscribe to my friendfeed, you can go here: http://friendfeed.com/dereck

My prediction

I think the site is so cool that I’m going to make a bold prediction: I think friendfeed will have an Alexa rank of less than 3,000 by year’s end.

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Dereck :: Jul.31.2008 :: Blogosphere :: 7 Comments »

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