The Future of Social Networking
Has anyone besides me noticed that the trend of social networking sites has been to gather as many contacts as possible and then inundate them with with posts that don’t really pertain to anything they want to hear (or read) about? It is as if we are meant to believe that our networking contacts want to hear about the party we are planning for this weekend, or that our friends want to hear about our next corporate meeting.
So what’s wrong with that? Personally, I have accounts with two of the biggest social networking sites, as well as a few others. I check at least those two every morning. My “book” wall usually has about 160 new posts since I last visited, and my “little blue bird” site has around twice that many. While I would like to check and see what a certain segment of my contact list is up to, how do I even read that many posts to find the ones that interest me? I suppose I could start drinking my morning coffee from a bigger cup…
Now, I do not have a huge list of contacts. It’s quite small, actually when compared to those that I have seen with thousands of followers, or subscribers, or whatnot. I am afraid to put more people on my contact list for fear that I will be overwhelmed by what my grandfather used to call “raucous cacophony” (loosely translated to mean “discordant noise”).
The other problem is that my friends don’t really care about my latest blog post on the advantages of micro-niche marketing, and my coworkers don’t really want to hear about how Jason ended the evening with a lampshade on his head. As a matter of fact, every single post that I send out will wind up on the wall of people that care about the topic and people that don’t. The more “noise” I introduce to a segment of my contacts, the fewer of my posts to those people will get read.
This phenomenon is not at all uncommon. If you think having more contacts gets more of your posts read, statistically, it’s the opposite. The more contacts you have, the more people will simply not care about what you are posting. That seems counter productive to me.
How about your “bio” page? Have you found yourself wanting to put something there that your friends will see, but decided not to because you don’t want EVERYBODY to see it? I would love to have different bios for different segments of my contacts. I refuse, however, to open multiple accounts for different contact groups. That just seems like too much work, but I know many who have done just that.
So what do I propose? What if I had all of my contacts categorized for me, with a separate “wall” for each category? I could choose my “friends” wall and just see the posts by my friends. I can post to my “friends” wall and only those people will see it. I could even do a search for keywords and have a list of friends pop up that match that keyword and quickly post to all or some of them. Each category would have its own bio associated with it, so only my friends could see my “friends” bio, and only my coworkers could see my “coworkers” bio. All my friends could see the pictures of me being drunk and silly, without worrying about what my coworkers might think.
The best part is that since I am only sending posts to people that I think will want to read them, more of my posts will actually get read! I can send out party invitations to my friends in San Jose, or quickly update my coworkers about a change in plans for the next meeting.
What I am looking for is a kind of a “buzz conduit”. I want something that will channel the buzz to the people I want, and organize everybody’s buzz for me to read in a way that I see fit. I want to share things with people without sacrificing my privacy.
While there doesn’t seem to be any plans in the works for any of the web 2.0 giants to implement anything like this, there is a project in the works that will deliver just that – your own private buzz conduit. It’s called buzzduit.com, and it will be launching soon!
Go to buzzduit.com if you want to know the second it is ready to launch. You can even send suggestions or ask question by replying to your confirmation email.
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