What’s your take?  How do you use the service, and to what degree are lists important in organizing what’s there?

On the technical side, this is a huge step up.  Many sites are non-trivial, requiring a number of steps, and, more importantly, some reasonably obscure structures.  The tweet button also looks very nice: subtle, and entirely functional.

Twitter’s scope

The first competitor that comes to mind is Digg; yes, Facebook is also in the mix with its Like count, though the Digg count has been around for years now, and was, in my mind, the starter of the second run of website counters.   Furthermore, Digg launched its own shortening service more than a year ago; and as of today we now have t.co, Twitter’s crazy short domain name.

I’m not sure where Digg is headed, though they seem to be having a lot of trouble this past year.  I’m currently in the alpha, and I can’t say it either gets me excited or gets me to visit the page any more than I had.  I do hope they can pull it together, though with Tweets superseding Diggs, the future seems to be headed for the.. bird.

Then there’s Facebook, which has had its Like Button for months now.  Realistically, the Tweet Button is more in conversation with this particular element, albeit with JavaScript and HTML5 rather than a single URL with GET variables.  I’ve gotten less fond of Facebook by the year, and that Twitter is now again taking over this realm I’m much happier to teh bookface.

Future reach

This particular story is about aggregation, and about integration.  To me, the next step seems to be going back towards Digg: having some function whereby a URL can be prepended by t.co, for instance, which would start a Tweet with the appropriate URL link and title.

More importantly, being able to share content from mobile devices has to get easier, one way or another.  These systems tend towards that, though still depend on the particular site to implement the button.  Blogger had a “Blog this” toolbar button, and it seems we’ve forgotten this type of functionality in the mobile space.  There must be some web-standard way, too, which does not depend on a platform-dependent app/toolbar/addon/etc.  It’s rather meaningless without widespread adoption, which is why it’s more sensible to have this in the hands of an established community with a large userbase.. though I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see where this all leads.

Yes, I said exposure, as though it were some sort of bacterial infection.  There’s a bunch of information on the Internet; the one that caught my eye in a big way was Dan Yoder’s Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook.  The EFF also has a number of great articles related to Facebook on its Deeplink Blogs related to Social Networks.  I highly encourage everyone visiting this page to dive deeper into these articles, and for those that come in the future.

Look, but don’t touch

My advice to those who aren’t already in Facebook is that it’s best to stay away.  You’ve done alright by this point without it, and there are enough snags that it’s worth keeping away.

For those already in the system, I’m not sure that deleting your account makes all that much sense.  In many ways there is a lot of concrete value in having a Facebook account, connected to your friends and family.

With that said, I do think it’s best to not put any more information into the system, and to remove what Likes you have left.  Think of Facebook more as a read-only system, not as read-write.

Alternatives

In truth, there are countless reasonable alternatives to each of Facebook’s features, and you can rather easily find the same value outside. This may be the time to start a blog, a website, a Twitter feed, a flickr or Picasa account; or, sans all that, to just go back to email as a primary mode of communication.

There are countless other options where you can get out what you put in, without the same threats of privacy or lock-in.  Don’t click on any of the Facebook ads, and if there are people whose content you really like, softly encourage them to put their efforts somewhere else.

I’m not particularly pushing Google, though their Data Liberation Front is a wonderful initiative which puts the power back towards the user.  WordPress, additionally, makes it easy to export all your content in a couple of clicks.  Twitter has an option of protecting your content from anyone beyond the list of those who you accept.

Final thoughts

In the end, I think the solution is by a number of small movements.  With my Facebook account, I may still “Like” someone’s status from time to time, though I’m done with Community Pages or Pages.  I’m no longer letting Facebook import my data from Netflix or Twitter.  I’m no longer going to use its messaging, instant messaging, status updates, notes, wall posts, etc.  It’s up to you to decide where you want to go with all of these decisions, though I certainly do recommend less over time rather than more, in terms of any kinds of Facebook interactions.

Overload

At this point in the game, of the three big offerings out there listed above, Twitter is currently winning my heart for top spot.  Perhaps the rise of Twitter has spurred on Facebook and Google in a space which perhaps may not exist in the same capacity as they do today.  Fundamentally, though, the end result in all these networks come to a matter of data overload.  Twitter’s 140 character limit occasionally looks silly; the result, however, is that it’s forced its users to reduce the amount of data, which in turn lessens the load on our collective brains.

Tying down big bundles of data

Facebook, on the other hand, works with highly structured data.  Google, on the other hand, has worked on finding structure in huge masses of data, attempting to give a flexible, working structure for all varieties of content.  Now that Facebook has so many users, it’s begun to take the Google-like approach: I have more than 600 contacts in Facebook, though I contact nearly zero of them on a regular basis through that particular service.  Facebook’s recent redesign, emphasizing the search bar to be both larger and front and center.  Google, now with Buzz, is looking to very slightly structure the conversations it previously only attempted to catalog.  The two, then, are on increasingly intersecting paths.

Twitter, on the other hand, has avoided both of these traps: it’s a self-contained cataloging and reduction service, by which information is captured in a headline and a link.  Twitter is not self-sufficient, and their business model has been to allow for open access and extension by third party developers.  Search functionality has long been a central feature; and while the recent lists and retweet modifications are certainly more structure than was there a year ago, these are both features which are first non-essential, and secondly were largely supplied by third-party apps such as Tweetdeck who had their own RT and groups functions.

Back to Buzz..

My first problem with Google Buzz is in its approach towards privacy: by default, all Buzz content is made public. The only way you are allowed to post privately is if you first specify a Google Contacts group with which you want to share.  In essence, Buzz is copying functionality from Twitter in order to bolster its under-utilized functions.

Buzz as a commenting service rings rather clearly of Google Friend Connect.  Friend Connect has been around for a little while now, though it never quite took off.  Largely, it’s JavaScript-based systems were a bit awkward, both for display purposes and for the webmaster / developer.

Buzz as a Google service seems to also try and fold more users into both Gmail and Google Chat.  I’ve had a Gmail account for years, and I never at any point felt any real desire to utilize the Contacts groups.  There’s just not all that much reason for it, even though it’s been there for a while.  Indeed, the main difference between Google Chat and Google Buzz is that most conversations in the latter are not implied to be private, and are thereby more accessible to both search and data-mining.  It’s a brilliant, subtle spin headed towards putting our conversations out in the open.. where, I may argue, they don’t necessarily belong.  Moreover, Buzz does not seem to employ length limits for each post; and its public nature again heads more towards overload from all sources.

At this point, it’s hard to say where “social media” is headed, and how it will transform the way that we humans will interact with each other.  Community as a service is a bit of a new concept, and in this digital world it’s a tad scary to think to what degree fads and corporate market shares play a role in these interactions. Perhaps what’s most important is that we are able to forget the websites and the branding and eventually settle on the humans we care about more than the technology that connects us together.  I wish everyone the best of luck in accomplishing if only that.

Some time last week or so I had a half post here, and I think I’ve condensed my thoughts a bit better.

I’ve been on a bit of a circuitous route with publishing content, lately.  A while back, I posted everything to my blog, before I got into any of this WordPress madness.  I literally had a text field and a date field, and that was it.  Twitter has then taken up a lot of my attention, and I migrated more towards it when I transitioned to a more “legit” blogging system.

Also, can I say again that I really had the word “blog” ?  Can’t we just start over and get a new word?

My point

Currently, I feel like I’m a bit between worlds, and I’m having more trouble figuring out what the point to Twitter is if I can just write more in depth versions of my thoughts in here.  Twitter works really well in terms of aggregating content, finding the real point; but without other avenues (links outside), there’s absolutely no chance to tell a story.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between producing and filtering: blogs, large / long content is certainly more production oriented.  The trouble, then, is that there’s just so much shit out there that it’s impossible to make sense of it all.  This is where Twitter stepped in, and it’s maintained it’s vantage point here for explicitly this reason.  Twitter is a filter, and nearly nothing about production; and that’s more a strength than a weakness.  We don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water, and keeping messages reduced to headlines alone allows us to cope.

With that said, Facebook has continued to gain ground in social media.  It has a massive userbase, lots of applications, and a ton of very structured data.  It doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, especially with the potential it has in terms of aggregating all sorts of information for marketing, etc.

I don’t want to see Twitter go away, and the changes they’ve been putting into their system are all good reasons as to why they should be sticking around.  Lists, for one, finally has allowed me to stop following certain people without losing track of them.  Every person pace to their tweeting schedule, and all it takes are a few very active users to completely flood out other friends.  Keeping such users in a list rather than following directly makes this content more like an “opt-in,” rather than an “oh, shit..”

Adding in retweets is another big step, and transforms the service a slight amount.  Is it necessary?  Not exactly.  For posts that bump up near the character limit, adding in an “RT @username” requires hacking away some content.  My account just today got this particular feature, and I did notice that Facebook does not take in the Twitter-supplied retweets.  This is sort of a bummer, since a lot of my Facebook usage entails posting to Twitter, which then gets a larger audience in Facebook.  Perhaps this is a function of their beta testing or some temporary glitch; time will tell.

With all these changes, I really hope that it is enough.  It’s rather obvious there shouldn’t be too many tweaks to the system, since it really is the simplicity and versatility of Twitter that makes it so powerful.  On the other hand, I hope their search continues to gain power and relevance; and, more importantly, I hope that Facebook doesn’t end up buying them out and taking away the good things they have done.

You can find me on Twitter as @rlaskey, though I should also warn that I haven’t had the time to post as much there as of late.  I haven’t made too many lists at this point, and I’ve toned down list of people I’m following; though certainly say hello if you’re out there.