You got to have friends . . .
January 27, 2009Friends are an essential requirement in our day-to-day lives; not just in the real world, but online as well. Without friends life is a lonely existence. Building networks of friends enables you to broaden your experience, to interact, learn, share, recommend, debate, argue; be enriched by friendship. Often you can gain new insights and perspectives or learn basic information that your needs – or you might find yourself contributing to, and helping others.
Recently one of my FaceBook friends, a girl I have know for over thirty years, on hearing of my current dire, financial position – came around with a big bag of groceries, including some coffee and cigarettes. I would have been climbing the wall by now otherwise. [More big hugs.] This came about because one FaceBook friend talked to another, who came over to feed me. I’m glad I have friends in the real world.
Imagine if you had, say, a Twitter account, but you had no friends to subscribe to; or if you had a FaceBook account and had no friends. There would hardly be any point to using these services: there would be no one in your Twitter stream, and your FaceBook experiences would be very limited. Friends who do not go online often can be quite dispriging about the value of sites such as FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed etc and often have viewpoints that are not always correct.
Take FaceBook. I resisted joining FaceBook for quite while, thinking it was mainly a site for younger people, I soon found people that I knew in real life and began adding a network of real friends, most of them living in Adelaide. Gradually I sought out people I knew, and some people I knew sought me out as well. I began to interact with a group of Adelaide bloggers and added this group, then added a large group of mainly American bloggers and social networkers that I follow on other services. These are real people, and even though I am unlikely to meet many of them, my own interactions have resulted in firm online friendships, as well as many new developing ones.
Often people are added as friends according to various interests, old school friends, musician friends and people in the entertainment industry, people I have worked with in the past, people I have met through university, social networkers interested in this new social phenomen. On FaceBook I would generally add people that I know or have interacted with online; to me it is pointless to add people whom I don’t know, or don’t share similar interests with. It is not just about the numbers, I don’t think having thousands of friends on FaceBook will really make me any more or less popular.
Twitter is an entirely different case. Twitter displays a stream of short, 140-character messages, or status updates. There is a public stream, that displays a continuous stream of updates on all sorts of subjects, from users all over the world. You can choose to follow people you know or share interests with, who will be displayed in your stream. The more people you ‘follow’, the more updates will flow. People who find you interesting can ‘follow’ you. On Twitter I find it more likely to follow people I don’t know, than on FaceBook. Sometimes I will follow people just because they have an interesting profile icon. It seems more appropriate to follow people you don’t know on Twitter than it does on FaceBook.
At some stage there will be a limit to how much information you can digest, or how many people you choose to follow. For some this may only be a few people, others have suggested that once you are following more than 300 people – you reach a ‘critical mass’ where there is too much information to digest. Others follow thousands of people, for instance, Robert Scoble and Louis Gray have a prolific following and they both generally ‘follow back’. They will often interact with their followers and are both quite approachable.
At the moment I follow about 800 people and have nearly 400 followers. I broadcast all sorts of information and trivia; generally I try to ’shout out’ about my music or videos; I repost or draw attention to interesting articles regarding media and social networking. Often I, and many others, will talk about food, coffee, television programs, art or any trivial subject.
Twitter is a very useful platform to distribute information. If you have a message to deliver you need a large number of people following you, in order for them to recieve it. In turn, some of your followers will rebroadcast (retweet) your message to their followers who may then spread it to other followers; this is a viral distribution system. Each time I post an update it is received by my 400 followers, who may or may not pass that information onto their own followers. (In some ways, this is similar to having your own newspaper circulation.)
Twitter is a recent phenomenon, but it has spawned hundreds of applications and sites devoted to it, enhancing or extending the services offered by twitter.com
FriendFeed is a service that lets you aggregate RSS ‘feeds’ from other services into a FriendFeed stream. You can direct you feeds from Twitter, FaceBook and many other services; FriendFeed will log your activity on services such as YouTube, Flickr, Last.fm and more. Where Twitter provides an almost random stream of information and conversations, FriendFeed provides threaded conversation as well as commenting and ‘liking’ (similar to favoriting). A recent post by Robert Scoble resulted in a conversation with well over 300 comments. This post was about 50 ways to make friends on Twitter; the post was often hijacked, added to, derided or applauded by others, such is the interactive nature of FriendFeed.
In my opinion, users are much more visible on FriendFeed than they are on Twitter; and it is not hard to find people with similar interests to your own. There is quite a friendly community at FriendFeed who will engage and interact with other users. Engagement is the name of the game; whilst you can stay in the background and never post anything, by participating and interacting with other users, you will become more visible and attract more followers.
FriendFeed provides a service that lets you keep track of your activity on other social networking sites; there are other websites such as, MyBlogLog (Yahoo) and Plaxo-Pulse that provide similar services.
OpenID, Yahoo Connect, FaceBook Connect and Google Connect allow you to log into some sites by using your OpenID, Yahoo, FaceBook or Google ID. You can join various communities of users and participate in their activities.
So . . . as the song goes . . . “You got to have friends . . . ” Whether in real life or online – friends are an enriching asset that will enhance your day-to-day life in the real world, as well as contributing to a more positive online experience. As I make my progress through a maze of social networking sites I often run into the same people, the usual cast of characters, the usual suspects. Robert Scoble is everywhere; so are many other active networkers. It is quite common to befriend the same people on dozens of different sites or to look for them on other sites after you have initially added them on Twitter, or FaceBook.
I don’t really hate the real world, or any of the people in it. I have just been overwhelmed by events and been feeling a little sorry for myself. Things will get better – as long as I interact with myself, and keep myself engaged. If you want to cheer me up you could always watch one of our videos and leave a comment.
I wonder if I am a candidate for intervention?
adioso
Chris Loft
Interesting and thought provoking article
One thing about consuming all the information is that you need to learn how to filter, so you’re getting high quality content from high quality people, and, needing to skim, so you can make a decision fast, as to read in full, skip, save, respond or forward.
Twitter is something where to try and read every update would drive you mad. Too much noise! So it makes sense to follow individuals and use the search functionality judiciously – whether you follow 80, 800 or 8,000.