SteveStreeting.com

I left Facebook about a year ago and have been using Twitter as my primary social tool ever since. At the heart of this decision were my main gripes with Facebook:

1. Facebook misrepresents relationships
   It’s clear that Facebook was designed by a young person with borderline Aspergers. Relationships are black and white, you’re either a Friend or you’re not, and they’re symmetrical – information has to flow both ways. The real world doesn’t work like that, I have real friends, family, casual acquaintances, people I like to keep up to date on but who I’ve never met, and people who like to follow me but who I don’t know. I interact with every one of these groups of people differently, and very often in asymmetrical ways. The concept of a ‘Friend’ who I’d share private information with online is completely unrealistic. I know Facebook bolted on ‘lists’ but everything is totally hobbled by this misguided overarching ‘Friend’ concept.
2. Facebook’s signal-to-noise ratio is unmanageable
   Whether it’s automated posts from games & other poorly considered apps, or just people pouring every trivial little element of their life into it, I was drowning in trivia in a few months to the extent that it was a chore to keep up to date. This is a function of the people you’re connected with of course, but here’s the problem – because of the way Facebook simplifies relationships, you can’t really do anything about it without offending someome, because:
3. Facebook creates social awkwardness
   Because Facebook only recognises one type of connection as pointed out in 1, it makes managing your information stream impossible without offending someone. For example, I may very well have real friends / family who I want to connect with, but who I don’t necessarily want to listen to 24/7 because they have .. ahem.. ‘very poor communication filters’. That doesn’t mean I don’t like them, we just communicate very differently. Sure, I might want to dip into their updates every so often, but I don’t want to have to wade waist-deep through their posts every time I go online to find the gems from people who are better at filtering themselves.
   On Twitter, I just unfollow people who I don’t feel like listening to every day, and trust others to RT things that are good (I can always re-follow later). They don’t get told, and generally it’s not considered offensive. Conversely unfriending someone on Facebook is equivalent to saying you never want to speak to them again – it was literally easier just to close my entire Facebook account than to deal with it any other way. Sure you can create a Facebook group, but since groups are visible to all, creating one called ‘People I like in person but who are kind of annoying online’ isn’t going to avoid the problem.

So I went with Twitter because it basically sidesteps all these issues by being public (lack of ‘pretend’ privacy leaves no-one under any illusions about appropriateness), asymmetrical (I can follow someone without them following me and vice versa), and easily managed / filtered without offence. I largely had given up on a ‘rich’ social network that worked the way I wanted, because everyone else seemed to swear by Facebook’s way, which I hated.

Then, last week Google came out with Google+, their latest answer to the problem. Invitations are hard to come by, they’re still in limited testing, but I managed to sneak in before they closed a loophole, ironically via friends on Twitter. I didn’t expect to like it – I expected another Facebook – but I was wrong. Key to what makes Google+ different is that it doesn’t use the concept of ‘Friend’, but instead uses a core concept of ‘Circles’. Google have done what Facebook have refused to do, and have recognised that relationships aren’t binary, aren’t always symmetrical, and are all different. Circles can be used to filter the things that you post into groups of people who can see it, but just as importantly to filter incoming posts too. Most importantly, the person can’t see what Circle you’ve put them in! So if you like the person in real life, but find their online posts a bit vapid, you can put them in a circle that you don’t have to read as often, and they don’t have to know. No-one has to get offended, and you get to keep your stream sane. Perfect.

So far, I like it – it’s taken the best bits of Twitter (control without offence) and Facebook (rich media platform) and slapped them together. Of course, there’s the question of whether people wedded to Facebook will switch or not, although for me that’s a moot point since I already ditched it, so any people on it that do come across to G+ are a bonus, but I lose nothing if they don’t. Twitter users seem to be quite eager to adopt it, probably because they’re natural early-adopters and appreciate the Twitter-like circle setup for the same reasons I do.

And it’s for that reason that I think Twitter has most to fear from Google+. Facebook will probably trundle on with all the people who don’t particularly care about managing their streams in an optimal way and don’t feel a need to switch. Twitter though is used by a lot of people (like me) who are a lot more picky about this sort of thing, and those are exactly the people for whom Google+ will resonate the most. Right now, the main limiting factor is that there are no native tools for Google+, and using it on a phone or iPad is still a bit clunky compared to the kind of optimised native tools you can use for Twitter. But that’s coming I’m sure.

I haven’t even talked about the group video chat, or the really nice photo viewer, how Google+ notifications appear when you’re on any Google site (search, GMail, Reader – a huge advantage for adoption), or how they’re iterating really fast on this. In all, I think it has great promise to be a social network that doesn’t annoy me – yet. One of the big challenges as they develop will be how they handle bot-posting from the inevitable games and other applications once the API is released (I hate it when people hook up everything under the sun to auto-post to social networks, and I unfollow them on Twitter even if they’re friends). We’ll see.

I’ve never really liked Facebook, as regular readers of the blog will be all too aware of, but I’ve been a user of it in the last couple of years, mostly at the cajoling of friends. During this same period of time I also started using Twitter, a service which I was also skeptical about initially. Previously, I’d always relied on my blog, forums and official sites to do my interacting, and I wasn’t sure I needed anything else.

What’s happened in the last couple of years is that Twitter has risen inexorably in my daily usage due to being genuinely useful as a networking aid, while Facebook has not fared that well at all. I tried posting updates to it from Twitter for a while via Selective Tweets, which led to a considerable blip in my Facebook usage (even though I wasn’t using the site) but honestly I can’t be bothered with it anymore. And not just because of the rubbish that sloshes around Facebook.

Facebook is ‘sold’ on the idea that you can realistically make / be friends with people, or even keep in meaningful personal touch with people you do genuinely know, via short messages and photos on an online service. My personal opinion after trying to use it as such for a while, is that this is a massive crock of elephant dung. Relationships are built on meaningful contact, and Facebook provides – is only capable of providing – only meaningless, trivial contact. Of all the ways you can keep in touch with people, it’s about the very worst you could possibly use, IMHO. It’s convenient, sure, but convenience doesn’t make for good personal contact. Honestly, if you can’t be bothered to make the effort to meet someone in person or talk on the phone (and home video calls aren’t that hard in the 21st century), then really you’re not that bothered about keeping in genuine contact with them. It’s better just to be honest – you’re kinda interested in knowing what’s up in their life, but not interested enough to have coffee with them, or otherwise make any genuine time for them.

In this context, Facebook is a fallacy. The whole point of Facebook versus Twitter or any other public internet medium is that Facebook is ‘private’ (barring any changes in rules they might feel like making to make a buck on your data of course). But if you don’t care enough to speak to someone other than in Facebook, and vis-a-vis you’re not really that much of a friend, then why would you want them to know things you wouldn’t post publicly? This is behind many the Facebook fo-pahs that seem to crop up with increasing regularity. Twitter is honest about the level of interaction  you’re having with people. Facebook tries to make you think it’s more significant than it is.

Maybe you’re a highly gregarious person who genuinely has over 100 real friends that you’d share your private information with. Maybe you feel that personal relationships are upheld and maintained by Facebook messages. I don’t, and I’m going to stop pretending that it’s serving a useful purpose in my life. I have a small collection of friends and family with whom I exchange information by meeting and speaking to them – these are the only people I’d consider exchanging genuinely personal information with. There’s a second much larger collection of people whom I don’t meet personally but who I’m interested in keeping in contact with, and by and large they’re all on Twitter – which also does a far better job of delivering that information without bombarding me with all kinds of other nonsense. There’s really no useful middle ground for Facebook to fill, for me. And using Facebook as a supplement with people I already know? Frankly it’s far more entertaining to talk to them about their week’s exploits than read about them on Facebook – in fact Facebook can take the wind out of a good anecdote

Really, you should never post anything on the Internet that you wouldn’t mind being public, since Facebook hardly has an unblemished record for actual privacy (whether that’s via Facebook themselves, or friends or friends-of-friends). I think that a lot of people use Facebook like I use Twitter, except there’s far more scope for dangerous misunderstandings about what is appropriate to post. I think non-digital social protocols dealt with sensitive & private information much better, and that online services are best used only for non-private things. From now on, that’s what I’m going to do, and I’m not the only one.

Having already disrespected mailing lists, I might as well get all my ranting about old staple communication techniques out of my system, by admitting that I’ve never really liked IRC.

There’s nothing wrong with it per se, particularly as a casual social tool, but I just can’t say I’ve ever received any great value from it in a project sense, primarily because of it’s real-time and unfocussed nature. As a user of a project, I’ve frequently found that the people that are able to answer my questions are not online at the same time as I am. Secondly, even when those people are online, they tend to get mobbed by everyone, and anything more than one or two active discussions turn the channel quickly to a confusing mess. As a project lead, I always dreaded going on IRC precisely because of this “mobbing effect”; the usual outcome was for me to lose a couple of hours answering a ton of questions – which was not an unpleasant activity, it’s nice to talk to your users, but at the same time it’s a terrible time-sink, and unlike some people I’m incapable of multitasking real-time discussions with coding, at least not on anything remotely complex. As such, my IRC attendance slowly dropped off and I now rarely go on any more; I felt a bit guilty about that, but figured the community would rather I got more done than spend time talking.

I realised recently that Twitter has now settled into my life as a more effective replacement for the times when I might have previously found IRC somewhat useful, despite the noise. It’s as close to real-time as matters, but at the same time it’s not a chat system, which for me is a good thing, since it sidesteps by design the major downsides of an open chat system – the tendency for real-time discussions to ramble on, and the implied expectation of a real-time response. You often get that, of course, but there’s no perception that it’s an affront if there’s a delay, even of many hours. As a system that needs to sit alongside ‘real’ work, it’s a lot more practical in its utility. Also, as primarily a ‘pull system’ (you choose to follow people), the signal-to-noise ratio is far higher. People can reply to your posts, and you can reply to theirs, so the same kinds of discussions as IRC tend to spring up, but they tend to be more useful, because they’re among peers more often than IRC was. Sure, other people can @user you in an unsolicited fashion too, unconnected to your feed, but that’s generally considered impolite so it’s rare. There are also no ‘channels’ so I don’t have to be watching many places depending on the subject, channels simply form naturally based on individuals and subject tags. Finally,the 140 character limit does tend to waste less time for the reader – although for the writer time can sometimes be lost trying to shoehorn a coherent point into that space.

As a result, I find I have all of the benefits of IRC (in a project rather than casual social sense), with few or none of the downsides. I have many semi-real time, compact and most importantly useful exchanges with people on the service, all in a very convenient package (after trying a few clients, I settled on TweetDeck to organise things).

This might come across as me wanting to wall myself off from the ‘n00bs’ in my community. That’s not true, it’s just that time is my most valuable asset, and it’s finite; crushingly so. I’m happy to answer questions on the forum – where I can dedicate a known amount of time and tackle as much as possible, regardless of whether the person is currently online or not, and Twitter fills in the more social & real-time aspects without being a burden. IRC by contrast is high maintenance and extremely wasteful with time for the same purpose, and I just can’t justify it.

So farewell IRC,  I really won’t miss you very much.

It’s now almost a year since I decided to try using Twitter, specifically to post about Ogre development work I’m doing and other Ogre-related things (well, most of the time anyway). Seeing as I totally deride the concept that it’s a good thing to share the inconsequential, tedious minutae of your life with the internet and view it as the absolute pinnacle of sad, narcissistic behaviour, joining Twitter was a hard sell. After all, at least on a blog you have to write enough in a post to naturally filter out anything that’s not worth saying (in theory), while Twitter seemingly encouraged you to share whatever crossed your mind during the day. In the end my reason for joining was that there tended to be things large and small that happened in and around Ogre that many people might like to know about, and these things didn’t always warrant a blog post,  a news article on ogre3d.org or even a forum post. Provided I stuck to that raison d’etre, perhaps it could have value.

And in fact, it’s actually been very useful. I’ve almost stopped blogging about Ogre work unless there’s a significant event or something I feel needs greater analysis, because my Twitter feed is a better way to get the word out about things. It’s also been useful to get feedback on certain technical issues and to keep up to date with what other people are doing. Specifically, I tend to only follow people who post about things I’m interested in, rather than just because I know them.

And this tends to work well – I’ve found that Twitter users, or at least the ones I follow, in general tend to automatically filter their content to things that are actually interesting. This is in contrast to Facebook, which is so chock full of the utterly banal that I lose the will to live every time I try to catch up with the feed – there are usually some things in there I’d genuinely be interested in, but it’s so full of crap I can hardly face spending the time to find it. Much of that is due to its insistence that I’m somehow interested in the events of all the Facebook games people are playing, when in fact I couldn’t give a flying toss what new fish someone has just unlocked in some ridiculous mini-game. I’m close to just deleting my account and forgetting all about it – if you want to be social, grab a coffee / drink with me sometime or something – at least then you’re unlikely to keep interrupting to tell me what your level is in FarmVille.

Computer systems are tools, and can be used for good or ill. I’ve come across lots of people that use Twitter in a genuinely useful and non-intrusive way, and I try to do the same, and as such it’s made a firm place for itself in my day – something I would not have taken for granted when I started using it.

So, the intertubes are awash today with people venting their spleens about Twitter’s decision to stop sending replies by people you do follow, but to people you don’t follow, to your main Twitter feed. Previously you had the option either way, and now some people are getting their panties in a bunch about it.

There are two things to say about this issue:

1. Personally, I don’t want to see all the random replies to other people I don’t follow. I already deliberately only follow a small number of people, beacuse frankly I don’t have time to sift through a huge list of tweets every day. I have absolutely no idea how anyone copes with following more than about 10 people who tweet regularly, and still get something done in the day, nevermind seeing all the secondary replies. Am I just inefficient at processing large numbers of posts, or do I just have a staggeringly lower level of patience than the average Twitter user? The way I have things right now, I read every one of the posts from people I follow, because I consider them interesting, and that takes little time. I couldn’t do that if I was following 100 people and their replies to other contacts too, so I’d either have to lie (ie stick to etiquette and follow them, but then filter out most of what they say on the client), or just spend all day reading Twitter. So personally, this seems a sensible choice – you can always use the Twitter web if you really have nothing better to do but surf Twitter, or browse your friends ‘following’ list if you’re desperate to mine the system for new contacts.
2. Twitter is free. If you paid nothing for a service, you are entitled to offer your constructive feedback which the providers may choose to listen to, but you are not entitled to have a major tantrum about it. As Matt Asay suggests, if you care about the service that much, then you should probably be paying for it – and God knows, Twitter needs a business model other than the typical Web 2.0 “Attract viewers …….  profit!” fantasy right now. On the whole, the Internet needs a slap to wake up its users from the bloated sense of entitlement they’ve developed over the years, fueled by a huge number of startups that delude people into thinking they can expect everything for nothing. 100% free models don’t work (yes, I know, I’m an open source advocate, but that doesn’t mean I believe that you can give everything away) – they are a complimentary aspect, or a stop-gap until you can develop a real model or pursuade some sucker to acquire you before the hype train grinds to a halt. Eventually, these cycles of pretending that you can get premium service for free will end, and everyone will have to face up to the reality that ‘freeloaders’ have a place (building momentum, awareness etc), but ultimately they’re at the bottom of the food chain. Plankton are vital to the oceanic ecosystem, but no-one asks them for their opinion.

I’m a bit of a grump when it comes to a lot of the Web 2.0 startups of recent years. I still dislike Facebook – originally it was just an in-principle reaction based on their rather irritating child-CEO and his ability to attract vast amounts of investment based on a business plan made entirely of arm-waving and wet tissue paper, but now having used it for a while, I dislike it on its own merits. Even with my relatively small friends list it seems dedicated to the task of swamping me with as much useless information, stupid applications, and other such nonsense as it possibly can. Occasionally there will be a nugget of something in there, but it’s drowned in so much crap it’s hardly worth the effort to filter it. Sure, it allows me to keep up with the activities of ‘friends’, but in a much more shallow and sterile way than actually meeting them or talking on the phone/skype/in-game chat. Anyone who thinks Facebook is a good way to develop actual friendships is deluded. As a supplement for real-world or voice meetings (e.g. arranging get-togethers, sharing photos etc), I can see the utility, but I attest that it’s really not even the most efficient way to do that, what with all the junk on there. So generally, pass.

LinkedIn I like, because it sticks to the point. Every business person needs their Rolodex, and that’s what LinkedIn is – a business tool. It doesn’t claim to be central to your life, or that you can build / sustain real friendships there or other such twaddle. The focussed nature of it means there’s less noise, so it’s easier and quicker to get what you need. Contacts there are not personal, they’re a reference for it you’re looking for work, a contractor, a partner etc – which is appropriate for the medium in a way that personal relationships are not. I don’t feel the need to constantly update it or prod my contacts, or keep track of all their statuses; it just does what I need and gets out of the way.

I’ve avoided Twitter because again, it just looked like a way to pour time down the toilet. It seemed like blogging without the in-built filter that says ‘is this worth blogging about’?. Besides, I already actively participate in forums, mailing lists, blogs etc – I really didn’t feel I needed yet another dimension to have online discussions in. And I don’t really want to tell the entire world what I’m doing at any one time – I strain out the small number of actually interesting things already and post them up on this blog, and the rest of the minutae rapidly decreases in value the more degrees of separation away from me you get; so in fact real-world communication works far better as a filtering mechanism for that. Clay Shirky described why information filters in the real world have historically done a much better job with these kinds of things.

However, I decided to open a Twitter account anyway, but only for a very narrow subset of ‘what I’m doing’ – that is, what I’m currently doing in core Ogre. Obviously I blog about that sometimes, and I post in the forum for things that people need to know about, and keep the roadmap on the wiki up to date, but sometimes there are low-level things that don’t warrant that, but people are still interested in. I used to use IRC for this, but over the years drifted away from it, as it was too time consuming to loiter in channels for extended periods looking for topics in real-time, and people just bombarded me with questions all the time anyway so it was a little too much like hard work. So, for things that don’t warrant a blog or forum posting, I’m going to try to keep Twitter informed. There’s also a widget on the right there.

The focus will be kept deliberately very tight – so nothing about my other work commitments, personal life etc are going on there. If any of those things merit comment, they’ll get a more considered entry in my blog. Consider this a sort of ‘pre commit log’ of sorts! If I continue with it, anyway…

To my everlasting disgust I finally caved in and signed up to Facebook today. My singular reason was that a friend of mine has just moved to North America (to complete his years-long transition to the dark side) and he’d stated his intentions to publish most of his personal stuff there rather than blogging about it, so with much grumbling I now have a placeholder account to let me peer into that little den.

Now that I have my own account rather than peering quizzically at other people’s (over my horn-rimmed spectacles perhaps, as is implied when people hear I don’t use it), I still say Facebook has so few new ideas that it’s absolutely criminal that it’s valued so highly. It does the job sure, in a vaguely pedestrian way, but I see nothing more than a few tiny refinements on what everyone else has already done a ton of times before.  I still reckon it’s on borrowed time until someone else does something sexier and the student population move on to the next fad – just like they did the last 2 or 3 times. I’ve lost count of the number of social networking sites I’ve been invited to over the years (since about 2003/4 when they started getting popular), and after having gone through temporary membership of a few by 2005/6 I just got totally just bored with the whole thing. Now that I’ve finally joined Facebook, I’m fully expecting one or more of my friends / family / contacts to invite me to join the next thing that ‘everybody’s using’ in about 6 months – that’s normally how it works. Yawn. I certainly can’t be arsed to obsess over the content of my profile all over again. No, I’ll stick to LinkedIn where I can actually derive some (small) tangible business benefit, and my blog which I control and is thus doesn’t have to be moved / recreated every time fashion changes. And no, I don’t feel the need to start twittering, we all know where that can lead.

But the thought of being a part of something that that pompous, vacuous git Zuckerberg benefits from – ugh. I think I need a shower.