Loren Feldman recently quit social media almost entirely, and followed up with a couple of posts explaining his reasoning. One of them, “It’s Not You, It’s Me” lays the blame on social media as being nothing but selfish in nature:
When The Facebook overtook Google I knew that that was the end. Here’s why. You can only do 3 things on The Facebook.
- Play games.
- Talk about yourself.
- Talk about your “friends”
When you conduct a search you are outside of yourself. You are “searching” for something.
- Knowledge
- Information
- Something you want to know more about.
- Someone you DON’T know.
Do you see the differences? Intent. Facebook and twitter do not expand your universe. They constrict it. They put you in a box and look to keep you there.
This is definitely true, and I feel much the same way about Facebook as Loren does. Twitter’s a slightly different beast, but still along the same lines. Even so, I get more value out of Twitter than I do out of a simple Google search.
Know why?
People.
Both Twitter and Facebook are inherently social, but where Facebook has turned into a home for Farmville and quizzes about finding out what flavor of bubblegum you are, Twitter has become a fantastic network for entertainment, answers, and social interaction. It’s not putting you in a box; if anything, it vastly expands the size of the box you were already in. It takes the contents of other boxes and makes them available to you instantly. Boxes you probably didn’t even know existed before, but that you now wouldn’t want to be without.
Yes, “social media” can be inherently selfish, but it can also be inherently… well… social. Sure, I can do a search on Google for the best burger joint in the city, and find business listings and maybe even reviews. But I don’t know any of those people, and they don’t know me. I can ask the same question on Twitter and get immediate responses from people I know, people whose recommendations I trust more than some anonymous commenter on Yelp.
And that is the value of Twitter, to me.
I completely agree with you. While Google gives you search results, twitter gives you relevance and validation. I’m at UWM for Information Resources right now but concentrated on the internet taking over as a primary resource for information (vs traditional libraries etc) – and one of the things that keeps coming up is yes, you can do a Google search, and yes, we are making progress every day to code information as semantically as possible to make the search results more relevant – but the role of a traditional knowledge manager still needs to have a place on the web, in some form.. A way to qualify, validate, and make relevant TO YOU, the information you are (now) able to find on your own.
I think twitter does a great job of that – I know that the people I follow come from my same background, know more than me, are more on top of things than I am – they are essentially acting as my knowledge managers to validate and make available trusted information that actually IS relevant to me.
Great post, found your site through the Mke UX group notes. :)