So, I’ve been grappling with how to best manage my personal feed across social networks. It seems silly to update my status separately on several social networks when services like Ping.fm exist to enable broadcast updates across networks.
A few weeks ago I did a test and linked my Facebook and Plaxo Pulse feeds to auto-update when I post updates on Twitter. I then asked my contacts how they felt about receiving so many status updates from me. I got some honest feedback: it was too much information.
I am not a prolific tweeter–I update 0-5 times per day. Most of my tweets are observations or status updates, some are sharine interesting articles, blog posts or concepts. So, why did this seemingly perfect concept of cross-social network updating not work in practice?
There are three reasons: the audience, the origin and the action. Though all of my Facebook friends and Plaxo contacts are, by definition, participating in social media, the majority of them have not immersed themselves in it from a cultural perspective. Just as most news publications use blogging as another article format, so do many social networkers use these tools primarily as another form of interpersonal communications, just as they use e-mail or IM. In both cases, they have not made the big shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0: from a world of information exchange to a world of deep and meaningful collaboration. As I’ve already stood on my Web 2.0 soapbox, I’ll refrain from repeating myself here, except to say that embracing social media means adopting a single persona and believing that collaborative thinking is superior to self-promotion.
Second, Twitter (and not only Twitter, I should add) is of a different ilk than Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn and others. Committed members of the Twitter community have made taken the plunge and are living by the tenets for Web 2.0: trust, transparency, openness and collaboration. Furthermore, a large number of people who follow one another on Twitter met one another on Twitter. This stands in stark contrast to networks like Facebook which are founded on the principle of retrobuilding existing networks. Twitter enthusiasts want more detailed information more frequently because this interaction is the basis of their relationships.
Finally, the action: on Facebook or Plaxo, a status update is a broadcast; on Twitter the action is micro-casting, not broadcasting. Twitter followers find one another through keyword searches or threads based on topics of interest, geographic location, or social situation, e.g. being a mom. Microcasting is Chris Anderson’s Long Tail in action: people building communities around niche areas of interest.
So, for now, I will keep my tweets separate from my status updates, but I have to say that at this particular point in my social network evolution, I feel a closer sense of community and am experiencing more meaningful collaboration with my Twitter followers and followees than with my real-life–albeit retrobuilt–network.
