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One of the better analogies I've ever heard for Twitter is that it's like a really crowded party: there are lots of conversations going on at any one time, and just like at a party one can casually listen in on a number of them simultaneously and choose to engage those that are most interesting. I've been trying to execute that metaphor for the last year or so, gradually following more and more people and accepting that there will be important stuff that I miss as a result. The upside is that I get exposed to more interesting stuff than I might otherwise find. But upon reflection, most of the "interesting stuff" I've been seeing on Twitter is largely ephemera: small time wasters that entertain me for a minute or two, and then fade away forever.

Since my first tweet in late 2007, I have made a pretty conscious choice to limit the number of people I follow on Twitter. I only have so much capacity each day to read what's happening in the world, and the more people I follow the less I can consume from any of them. I regularly stop following people who get really tedious or simply tweet so much as to dominate my feed. And I've resolved for 2012 to further reduce the number of people I follow.

I've decided to retire from the "crowded party" and instead focus on the people about which I really care, or at least those people who have things to say that affect my life. I already have plenty of ephemera in my life (anyone reading Boing Boing has enough ephemera to keep them busy all week long!), so I don't really need to be exposed to more.

Whereas Owen has decided to abandon Twitter, I've purged many from the list of people I follow on Twitter down this morning, and will likely reduce it even further in the days ahead. For the time being, I've elected to keep following a few "noisy" people (Cory Doctorow and William Gibson being the most prolific) because I do get some interesting news of the world from these folks.

This may well reduce the overall utility of Twitter, but I hope that it will improve my sense of connectedness to the people about which I care.

I've made bold claims in the past about my intentions to not use Facebook. Alas, my stance lasted only four months. I've added content to my Facebook page. I don't feel overly guilty about this, though, for two reasons.

First, I didn't actually go to Facebook to add that content. I've been using Posterous for a while now primarily to share the crazy photos I take with my iPhone. I also occasionally link to some crazy website, or share something I find interesting. I email photos or send links to Posterous, and Posterous posts on my behalf to Twitter. They recently added Facebook, and a slew of other social services, to their autoposting system, so now when I send a crazy photo to Posterous it will be posted to my Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Second, I have yet to comment upon anyone else's posts, like or dislike any posts, or in any other way make use of Facebook.

The question remains, though: why did I enable autoposting to Facebook, given my previous hardline stance against the site in general? I said before "There's no specific value to me to dilute my online presence by using Facebook." Well, Posterous allows me to cross-pollinate without diluting my online presence. I don't need to go to Facebook to add content there. I simply do what I was doing before -- sending stuff to Posterous -- and it ends up at both places.

While there's some overlap between the people I interact with on Twitter and the people I'm "friends" with on Facebook, it's actually a surprisingly small number of people with whom I'm connected at both sites. So using Posterous allows me to remain marginally engaged -- or at least visible -- to those people who only use Facebook. It's foolish to think that I could get them all to use Twitter just to stay up to date with me, so using Posterous' autoposting functionality allows me to meet them in the middle.

I still use Twitter for my day-to-day status updates, and for sharing goofy links, asking and answering questions, etc. I don't have any intention to change that any time soon, and I still have no intention of using Facebook in what would be considered its "conventional" way. But at least I can share some things with more people, and maybe have a conversation topic the next time I see someone in a face-to-face situation.

I'm reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It's a surprisingly thought-provoking book, and I recommend it if you're interested in learning more about the "why" behind the ways Internet communications are changing not just how we communicate, but how we think about communicating.

The book explains in comfortable detail the major shift from scarcity to ubiquity across several historical industries. The art of the scribe was all but destroyed by the advent of the printing press. The art of the news reporter has similarly been disrupted by the ease and speed with which independent agents can publish information. A subtle but important corollary to this shift is the change in relationship between producers and consumers. We're all pretty used to being consumers, but many of us are just now figuring out how to be producers.

Shirky points out that the process of publishing information in the age of mass amateurization has changed from "filter, then publish", whereby information is specifically identified as noteworthy and worth sharing, to "publish, then filter", whereby the ease and convenience of sharing information combine with the relative low cost of such actions to make it easier for everyone, everywhere to share whatever is on their mind. The audience then selects which things deserve their attention.

This explains perfectly why so much "user generated content" is perceived as fatuous, or at least just plain boring.

It's simple. They're not talking to you.
We misread these seemingly inane posts because we're so unused to seeing written material in public that isn't intended for us. The people posting messages to one another in small groups are doing a different kind of communicating than people posting messages for hundreds or thousands of people to read. More is different, but less is different, too. An audience isn't just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn't just a small audience either; it has a social density that audience lacks. The bloggers and social network users operating in small groups are part of a community, and they're enjoying something analogous to the privacy of the mall.

Shirky goes on to detail how you might overhear some portion of a conversation at the mall food court, but you'd be considered rude if you actively turned your attention to that conversation. You're not part of the audience, or the community.

This was one of those "Of course!" moments where the blindingly obvious suddenly makes sense to me. All the people posting stuff to Twitter aren't necessarily writing for you or me, specifically. If we lack the context of the community that cares about the information, we most likely lack the interest to place any value on that information. It's easy for us to deride the boring, trivial posts because we don't care about the content or its creator. This is not a failing of the social tools, but rather our own failure to adequately filter.

I don't care much for Westerns, so I'm unlikely to watch a Western movie that might be on television. I'm not going to spend any time in the Westerns section of any bookstore. I'm certainly not going to read a Louis L'Armor novel and then complain about the fact that it's a Western. I filter out Western input from the media I select. It's easy to do with television, movies, and books; but not always so easy to do with some of the social media sources I use.

If I overhear a conversation at the mall food court, I'm not likely to tell my friends about it unless something particularly noteworthy catches my interest. I'm not simply going to call all my friends and deride the boring, petty conversation I just overheard; nor am I going to make a blog post out of it. It takes too much effort to do that, and there's basically no benefit. But with the ease of perfect digital copies, it's trivial for us to excoriate some banal blog post, or some trite Twitter update.

I'm more than halfway through "Here Comes Everybody" and am really enjoying it. It's sparked a number of interesting lines of thought that I'm really looking forward to exploring. I highly recommend this book.

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

-Illusions, by Richard Bach

It was remarked recently that friendship is the new capital. The implication is that people with few connections on social networking sites have less value than those that have lots of connections. I just read personal branding in a recession, and saw that the same sentiment was put forward there, as well. On the web, social equity is viewable through ... the amount of engagement you have on social networks. Quantity, not quality.

I strongly disagree with this idea.

First, I want to be very clear about my use of the word "friend". To me, a friend is someone to whom I will unconditionally give money. A friend is someone I'll go out on a line for. Someone I'll pick up in the middle of the night if they need a ride, no questions asked. It is someone in whom I can confide. I've long held a clear distinction between "friend" and "acquaintance," and the number of people I call friend is small. I'm careful not to refer to people as "friend" unless they truly are. If they're not a friend by my definition of the word, I'll call them a "buddy" or "a guy I hang out with" or some similar lexical indication of a casual relationship.

Following someone on Twitter does not make them my friend. To make the claim that someone with more followers is somehow a more "valuable" person is outrageous in my mind. In part, this is because I see friendship as a two-way street. I don't think it's possible for me to consider someone a friend (by my definition of the word) if they aren't capable or willing to reciprocate that relationship. In online relationships and social networking sites, the power users with thousands of so-called "friends" aren't really establishing friendships because the relationship is largely one-way. The social network power users aggregate and redistribute information, but what do they give back to the people from whom they glean the information they rebroadcast? Maybe a link? Maybe a "shout out"? That's not a very rewarding relationship, is it?

I think the fundamental issue here is the way in which folks use social networking sites. Some folks seek to use them for professional purposes, while others seek to use them for purely personal purposes. It's easy for people "doing business" on social networking sites to underestimate the importance of the social aspect of many of these sites and services, and to miss the point entirely on how they can be used to strengthen the bonds of real friendships. When using social networks for professional pursuits, quantity is important. Following a lot of people from which you can obtain information improves your chances of getting information worth sharing. But it can be a full-time job to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the people you follow aren't really "friends" are they?

I know that my stark separation of "friends" and "acquaintances" is not standard for most folks, and that's okay with me. It would be interesting, though, to see social networking sites offer some relationship indicator other than simply "friend". But I suppose terms like "leech" and "peon" aren't likely to get much use in a social networking site, are they?

The value proposition of social media sites like Twitter has always been somewhat vague to me. I've stated before that I'm skeptical of social media, and that I'm not one to jump on social network bandwagons. I recently purged a bunch of people from the list that I follow on Twitter because I wasn't seeing any value to reading what they had to say. There's only so many hours in the day, and I'd prefer not to spend them reading about what other people had for lunch.

I know that part of my problem with aggregating too much information is the workflow I use. I'm extremely linear when I process things: I work from oldest to newest when reading news in Google Reader. It's only in the last couple of months that I've started marking whole categories as read, even if I hadn't read them: "if I'm not reading them, why am I aggregating them?" is the question I ask myself. When I reload the Twitter home page, I scroll down to the last thing I read (or the bottom of the page, if I'm that far behind) and then work my way up. I rarely page back to see items pushed off the home page. I use the Twitter home page because I haven't found a dedicated Twitter client I like.

But the thing that's really stuck in my craw right now is duplication of information. Most of the people I follow on Twitter are also people included in my list of feeds in Google Reader. Whenever someone posts a new blog entry, there's almost always a Twitter message declaring that fact (our software automates this for us). I almost never click the link from the Twitter message to the blog post, knowing that the post will eventually be picked up by Google Reader for me to review. Most of the people I follow on Twitter also tweet enough other stuff to make it worth continuing to follow them on that service. A notable exception is, interestingly, CrunchGear: the overwhelming bulk of the CrunchGear tweets are simply the new posts that have gone online. Since I'm aggregating CrunchGear in Google Reader anyway, what's the value in following them on Twitter?

I could, of course, aggregate the Twitter feed(s), so that Google Reader is my sole source of incoming information. But I've noticed a pretty big lag in Google Reader most days, such that a tweet posted early in the morning by someone might not be displayed to me in Google Reader until mid-afternoon. Most of the time, this might not be a big deal, but every now and again someone will tweet something that merits an immediate response: either a question for which I know the answer, or a request for a recommendation, or even an invitation. These things can be time sensitive, and I'll have missed the window of opportunity if I rely on Google Reader catching them and displaying them to me.

It's this delay that also prevents me from using something like Yahoo Pipes to create some kind of filter to weed out the extraneous bits, so that I can focus on the compelling data from each disparate service I use.

The thought that started this little tirade was the idea that I might integrate my Twitter posts directly into my blog, in a fashion similar to Chris' lifestream. Rather than a dedicated page, though, I would simply grab my tweets and store them as a new Habari content type for display alongside my normal posts. I could then also include my Flickr photos, and whatever else I wanted, making the front page of my site the complete clearinghouse for all my online activities. Then folks could simply aggregate one site to follow what I'm doing.

It's a nice idea, but it fails in execution. In addition to the delays noted above for feed readers acquiring new data, the convenience of replying on Twitter is made more complex: a reader would have to see in my feed what I had posted to Twitter, then go compose their reply either at the Twitter site or in their Twitter client. Similarly for commenting on my blog, or on any Flickr photos I posted: following the lifestream is just one piece of the puzzle. Interacting with the information presented in that stream is the next hurdle.

What do you think? How would you like to simplify and integrate interactions with aggregated information?