Facebook and Twitter

I’m a blogger, and on some modest level a web publisher, a designer.   I have mixed feelings about both Facebook and twitter.  I think that they are places to gather clues about current affairs, but they have a tendency to attract advocates like iron filings to a magnet, and I’m not all that convinced that they are anything but a couple of current attractive utilities.

In the late eighties and early nineties most of us who were online had boundaries established by service providers such as Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL.  When browsers emerged and the web overlaid networked resources like Gopher and usenet, most of us who were in these private walled gardens clapped our hands in joy that we could now be free.  The Internet Service Provider business became one of simply providing connectivity, and no matter the collusive arrangements between companies like Yahoo! and AT&T your ISP remains just that, a simple boat launch access to the Ocean of Information available on the Internet.  You don’t need to use the Yahoo! crap.

Now, with a marketing model reminiscent of the early days of Apple when they made it available free on the school-yard, the Facebook folks have accumulated a huge user base by giving it away.  Regardless of the metaphor, whether you call it the Hotel California, a giant Skinner Box, or a Roach Motel, some material percentage of Facebook users have online experiences  that are largely bounded and defined by this 21st century heir to the walled gardens of Prodigy and AOL.  This regression can not be all good since people are denying themselves the opportunity to be exposed to the standard tool-sets we use to create on the web in favor of the proprietary (and amazingly limited junk) offerings of Facebook.

Within the walled garden, Facebook users are provided tools to develop Facebook applications that layer complexity on the Facebook experience.  When I first loaded the Super-duper Fun Wall Graffiti Posting and Virtual Road Kill application, I was only empowered to throw dead pets at my friends (and of course to receive the same from those friends who had similarly tricked out their facebook experience with the S-dFWGP&VRK functionality).  Yesterday I received proof that Facebook is an evolving realm with ever more layered complexity.  I received an invitation to make snow angels with a friend.  Naturally I accepted, and I passed the invitation on to five friends — not, I must add,  out of a profound love of creating snow angels or a desire to see if I could catch virtual frostbite and soak my virtual winter clothing as much as to “level-up.”  The developer said that if I invited five more people I’d have even more opportunities for virtual things to throw and activities to perform with my friends.

I would love to link to that facet of my Facebook experience, but the wall around Facebook is high and virtually impenetrable.   When you’re on the island, behind the wall, in the roach motel, whatever… it’s easier to link out to the real world.  So we can find opportunities to share real stuff with our kindred Facebook-noids.  We can promote causes, worthy and unworthy.  We can organize interest groups.  We can link to external information relating to these causes and groups.  We can embed nasty little down-sized videos and stuff.  We can receive in-line advertisements from large corporations and we can advise our friends of the color and consistency of the mucous our new cold has brought to us.

The external linking that people do creates a little sandbox of clues, and may (along with the community organizing aspect) make Facebook more valuable than a dead trout.

On twitter we have the opportunity to slap each other with dead trouts, if we can keep it to under 140 characters.  Twitter is a utility that appeals to everyone’s internal network router.  We can ping each other all the live-long day.  Doo-dah.  But, twitter is also a place where clues can be gathered.  If you’re careful and don’t “follow” bandwidth hogs like Calacanis and Scoble, you can find a lot of worthwhile information.  If you do follow the more prolific tweeters, you have a lot of noise to filter.  I read JP Rangaswami’s blog and I follow him on twitter.  Yesterday on twitter I thought he pointed to Howard Rheingold’s posts about treating Facebook friends as “a public.”  (As I look for that “tweet” now, I can’t find it.  So somebody else must have pointed me that direction.)  Meanwhile, on his blog he was going on about cricket scores in the India/Australia matches.

Honestly, I suspect that even if I understood cricket I wouldn’t really care about the matches, but it’s telling that JP finds ubiquitous access to the global ocean of information merits his attention and gratitude.  I haven’t seen that kind of appreciation expressed for the ability to make virtual snow angels on Facebook but the ability to flog each other with dead trouts has fired his imagination.  Yes, in fairness, the enterprise uses for a twitter-type utility are huge, and the interpersonal/locational awareness the constant pinging affords can give a work team a real advantage.  But my experience with twitter has been on the personal level, not the professional.  I have seen people swarm a friend with support and good wishes simply by updating their photos to include peas.  (The woman, facing breast surgery, was using frozen peas instead of an ice bag compress and her friends showed solidarity with their pea pictures).  I have seen a fellow who was probably quite drunk insult me for the whole world to see.  I have followed links that I never would have found otherwise.  Indeed, the compressive aspect of the shared information allows us share what’s happening while it’s happening in a way that approximates an RSS news feed.  I prefer to catch a scent from twitter, rather than to be faced with a mountain of information from an aggregator.  And we each have only so much bandwidth for this work, so if we are fishers in the ocean stream, then it’s nice that there are lots of shoals and reefs at which we can anchor and expect to land a big one.