Social Map

Loic Le Meur started a discussion this week on how the diversity of social software has caused caused content to become diffused.  He longed for the day that he could bring it all back together on a place that he owned, such as his blog.  Mike Arrington reposted Loic's hand-drawn social map on TechCrunch and asked if aggregators such as Friendfeed or Socialthing could be the answer.  Brian Solis offered his own social map, and Justin Davey stared a blog where people can post their own maps.

In doing mine, I tried to capture the connections among the various services that I use.  I'm sure I didn't get all of them, but the exercise illustrates the complexity of the connections.  One thing I noticed is that Twitter, Facebook, and my blog have the most connections and for me, Twitter is the most useful, having displaced Facebook as the place I look for what my friends are doing.

There are really three different problems caused by the proliferation of social software:

1. Following the activities of my friends, colleagues, and interesting people in a manner that is time-efficient and that ensures I don't miss something important.
2. Distributing my own content to places where it is relevant and where people are likely to see it.
3. Cross-linking the various identities used on different sites.

I am afraid the aggregators who attempt to solve #1 will suffer from the same problem as RSS readers, namely that they lose the nuances of the native formatting and require constant maintenance of the feeds.  I have used them from time to time (BlogBridge some some nice  social features)  but I'm always discovering new blogs and tiring of old ones, so I have found that following links and bookmarking web sites is just as efficient.  I'm more likely to discover something new or be alerted to a significant event by getting a Twitter message.

Distributing content is a task that is more easily handled by automation, usually achieved through bilateral arrangements between services.  For instance, when I post to my Typepad blog it automatically gets sent to my Facebook feed (if I remember to log into Facebook and haven't saved a draft in the meantime, grrr) and can be sent to Twitter.  It's relatively easy to set up these arrangements, although the security is often sloppy, requiring me to share my credentials among the services.  Watch for some well-publicized security disasters to wake people up to that one.  Facebook has a useful mechanism for providing one-time authorization codes but it's rarely used and somewhat cumbersome for the user.

Identity linking is a potentially useful feature for tracking those friends who insist on using silly, made-up usernames, but thanks to Facebook and a general maturing of the Internet there has been a refreshing turn to real names, or handles such as Scobleizer which provide generous hints as to the person's identity.

In the end, none of this may matter.  If you are reading this post your are probably among the early adopters who use Twitter, Seesmic, Facebook, Flickr, and dozen other services on a daily basis.  This diversity stems partly from a connoisseurship of the best services, but I suspect it is also a sign of the early adopter who experiments with everything.  The average user is more likely to stick with a small number of services.  Facebook is trying to exploit this phenomenon and become the destination site for social communication, but as it adds features and applications that creates opportunities for simpler, more targeted services.  Indeed I've found my own use of Facebook has dropped significantly when I started using Twitter.  I still like Loic's idea of managing everything from a place I own, like my blog.  The first blog engine to allow me to do that in a painless manner will get my business.

Comments

[sbrand]

Cool map and thought experiment. One refinement. Unless you are a radio or TV personality, I think the Radio and TV section should be an input (parallel to Rich Media) rather than an output, right?

[Christopher Herot]

Steve, good point. I wasn't paying much attention to the direction of the arrows. Many of them should be bidrectional, especially if you think of them as control as well as data flow.

There are lots more at Social Graph Central.