Erica Glasier: Oversocialized! Social media & interactive futurism from sunny Winnipeg

I am freaking out so much right now that I thought the best way to show my reaction to the news slash rumour that Facebook is incorporating location-aware updates and releasing the API to developers is in pictures. Pictures of me going mental on Twitter.

The best way to look like a superfuturist guru is to predict the demise of the current big thing. Social overload is leading some to wonder if, rather than being the year of ubiquitous social web, 2010 might just be the year social eats itself.

People are muttering about social networks not scaling. Overfriending, social lines blurring, and etiquette confusion are sucking the fun out of Facebook. We know you can only maintain about 150 meaningful connections, and that as networks get bigger they turn from conversations back into broadcasting. Group inertia also keeps us mired where our group already is—no one seems to be asking for one more network to log in to, update, and remake connections on. Google Buzz did not entice my mother-in-law.

I’m not sure it’s the number of friendships we’re trying to maintain, it’s the intrusion of different kinds of relationships into inappropriate spaces. It’s like when your spouse shows up at work and it’s so incongruous to see them there that you act weird in front of your work friends. You know?

“It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”

Web 3.0 (don’t roll your eyes) is gonna be about signal to noise. Connecting everyone was great, but it turns out we don’t like everyone. Filters like lists are weak at this point, whether to limit their adoption (more sharing = more revenue) or because demand hasn’t been great enough. But if Big Social doesn’t want to see a precipitous decline in participation, they need to hire a few usability experts and make it happen.

So Facebook is where my robust profile resides, and where I’m most likely to contribute to conversations. You can have the most holistic relationship with me there. As such, I’m ending up friending people I haven’t met IRL, and Facebook is becoming less of a front-porch-with-a-beer and more of a cordial-nod-at-the-grocery-store experience. I kinda like beer. But I’m scared to say so, because Senior People Are Watching. Socializing just became brand building, ugh. What can we do to get that down-home feeling back? How can I associate with people who like my blog without them seeing me in my jammies?

The smartest thing Facebook could do would be to introduce a secondary request system, “Professional Request”, and scoop LinkedIn. I belong to LinkedIn but don’t use it, in part so as not to replicate effort. Facebook could make LinkedIn utterly irrelevant by allowing users to add professional contacts that would receive limited (or different) profile access – perhaps restricting photos, video, and application activities (Farmville, I’m talking to you), highlighting instead fan pages and status updates. This pared down sharing would become the accepted new norm for professional relationships within Facebook, allowing users to keep their Dunbar 150 in the lifestream loop while still offering aquaintances limited access, including messaging. With etiquette in place to govern this dual stream of relationships, users can feel more confident expanding their personal networks to include people they haven’t met IRL and with whom they still want to engage without sharing baby pictures.

This could extend to what virtually amounts to dual profiles, with separate status updates for personal & professional contacts, and a rich niche for developers to build apps geared towards enhancing professional connections. Facebook could smoothly handle this double stream for sophisticated power users that have both networks to maintain.

Btw I googled “LinkedIn is useless” to find this video. Facebook, if you want to pay me for this awesome idea, I’ll be glad to send you my Pay Pal info.

Despite all the moaning about dying print publications, people are still eager to absorb daily news. What they expect out of the experience has changed, though, according to a new Pew Research Center report. Now people want multi-platform news on demand, customized, and spreadable.

Next in a series of interviews with female Canadian social media stars! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.

Today we welcome Adele McAlear, a Montreal marketer who’s feminist street cred includes being the founding Executive Director of the Vancouver chapter of DigitalEve International, a non-profit organization for women in technology. She also contributes to Technically Women.

In almost 3 years of working in social media, I’ve had overwhelmingly good experiences with women being supportive and helping each other to get ahead. There have been one or two instances that were a little less than pleasant, but I’m willing to chalk those up to people just having a bad day. (Or perhaps I don’t want to bring down the whole gender for the rare instance where all was not smooth.)

For myself, I will help people, regardless of gender, whom I believe are genuine and who treat me with respect. I won’t  go out of my way to help people when I’m made to feel like I’m simply a stepping stone to get someone else. You know, the people who look through you to the next person up the food chain as they stare blankly with a false smile. But, I’ve had that feeling from both men and women, so I don’t think that it’s gender-specific.

I’ve found fewer instances of the “Old Boys” club in social media, but it’s still alive and kicking. I was trying to think of why more people of both genders follow men and I think it comes down to men being perceived as more influential in business. Like the concepts of fame begetting fame; of men making more money than women for the same job, of why women pay more at the dry cleaners.

That said, I have some great cheerleaders who are men. And I have some who are women. I think that my experiences in social media are really just a reflection of society at large.

Lucky you! You’re off to SXSW in sunny Austin in a few weeks, to meet other geeks, ogle the internet-famous, and generally get whipped into an interactive froth. Here’s your top 10 tips from a seasoned South By’er to make your webby whirlwind a little more user friendly.

1. Pack your Havaianas

Austin is in Texas. Texas is sweat-inducing even in March. You might still sport jeans and an evening cardi, but you’ll appreciate the built-in air conditioning that accompanies a bare foot. And get a pedi. You’re going to be walking a lot, so decallus and beautify in advance.

2. Pre-pimp your iPhone

Thanks to ubiquitous wifi, in ‘08 I got away with carrying only my iPod Touch for internet access! You gotta have:

• SXSW iPhone app
  • View/build your schedule
  • Map conference and festival events each hour
  • Exchange contact info with people you meet
  • Read news, and search attendees, events, and venues
• SitBy.Us
  • I’m not kidding, this lets you find where your friends are sitting at each panel. I haven’t used it, but this little piece of Star Trekkian-futurama sounds so useful.
• Tweetie 2
  • It costs $2.99, but you’ll save at least that much, what with the free beer (see #9). And it’s worth it, because Tweetie 2 has the works: lists, retweets, multiple accounts.
• Foursquare
  • You’ll drink the Kool-Aid by the end of SX, so you might as well go prepared.
• Facebook
  • So you can let your mom know your flight landed safely.
• Blogging apps
  
  • Wordpress so you can blog while waiting in line
  • Image editing software for sprucing up your iPhone shots

3. Beg, borrow or steal a netbook

If you ain’t iPhone-enabled, you’ll want a connected device, but for God’s sake bring a netbook. I wept at the weight of my server-sized laptop more than once. There’s beautiful wifi everywhere in the conference centre, but don’t sit outside in the hot Texas sun to blog (however tempting it might be). I did this in ‘09. overheated my motherboard, and spent a fortune on a long distance, roaming-charges fraught tech support call that ultimately left me lugging a blue-screened brick. Because they hung up on me.

4. Don’t get the Big Bag

As a marketer I know this is poor sportsmanship, and I get that sponsorship keeps costs down, but you don’t need the Big Bag. It’s a canvas tote with a groovy Adobe logo on it (and makes a dope grocery bag later), but it’s jam-packed with flyers and weighs a ton. Whatever one good freebie it may or may not contain is not worth lugging that thing around the entire first day, or the environmental guilt you’ll suffer tossing all that paper.

5. Carry ye olde school paper business cards

There’s nothing like the personal touch of trading cards with new contacts, especially if you’re traveling solo and looking for some nerd love. Take this opportunity to spiff up your blog or anything else you’ll be herding people towards with said cards. And check out Bump, a cute iPhone app that lets you bump your phone into the phones of cute boys and exchange contact info.

6. Ditch the dSLR

Unless you work for the Big Picture and are really married to depth of field, use a point ‘n’ shoot or your iPhone. dSlrs have 3 strikes against them: they`re expensive if you break or lose them, they’re heavy, and you can never whip them out and focus when the action’s going down. I’ve lugged a full-size professional video camera around that damn conference, and, I mean, just don’t.

7. The early bird gets good seats

Obsessive earliness about everything will get you a room across the street at a price you can afford, time for a leisurely crêpe & coffee breakfast, and phenomenal seats. Wear a watch if you have to.

8. Travel toothbrush + Colgate = your purse’s new BFF

You’ll have serious coffee breath at some point. Carry a mini bottle of Scope, too.

9. Don’t go pregnant

Beer is a fundamental component of both Austin & SX, and having to pass it up (sometimes it’s FREE!) is a drag. On the flip side, you may find the prevalence of hops revolting. Blogger Dooce was 5 months pregnant at the ‘09 extravaganza, & she said the beer stench that passes for air in Austin made her physically ill. So try not to be conferencing for two if you can help it.

10. Schedule your bliss

You can use the tools to build yourself a kick-ass schedule, but how do you know what, from the dizzying array of options, to attend? You don’t want to miss anything great!

Follow your gut and attend things that sound cool to you. Don’t bore yourself with technology or industry-specific talks, if your eyes light up when you see something about community-building. I’ll never regret deciding on the fly to go see something that sounded funny and getting to experience the madness that is Eric Nakagawa, original pre-Ben Huh creator of I Can Haz Cheezburger. Or attending a talk with Hugh MacLeod and having a genuine Gaping Void cartoon on the back of a business card thrown at me, now framed in my studio.

SXSW  is about the culture of the web, so go to panels that define that for you. Trends and technology will leak into everything that happens, so focus on what gets you stoked. And have a blast for me

Photo by jefield | Flickr Creative Commons | CC BY 2.0

I know, I know, I’m an enigma wrapped in a riddle. On the one hand I love social networking, work in social media marketing, and check in with Foursquare. On the other, I’m righteously indignant that Facebook insists on publishing my fan pages and friends list to make a buck. I think geolocation is so cool, but I’m worried that we’re cutting down the privacy forest faster than the hairy-legged tree planters of social convention can reseed it. If there’s no trees, we’ll all be able to see each other going to the bathroom.

Wired experimented with it, arming one poor writer with an armada of GPS-enabled tech & watching his psychological breakdown. Mashable terrified us with it, making us consider the looming specter of personal injury & property loss. Location sharing is the big cool thing for 2010. But is location awareness just TMI for the careful constrains of society as we know it?

It’s weird on a fundamental level to think that one day soon you might be found, contacted, hassled, marketed to, located at any time. People like time off. People need to pull the covers over their head at some point during the day and say “enough”. Blackberries, cell phones, the ominous eye of the Google Streetview car, all intrude on our personal domain and connect us, however inconveniently at times, to other people.

It’s not just that people know what movies you like and what pages you’re a fan of. The new location-aware web will let them know where you literally are. How to get to you at all times.

This is more than a breach of a general sense of decorous privacy. This is an encroachment into our most personal resource, our time. Our attention, our thoughts, are diverted, captured, required by others. A rising sense of panic accompanies the sensation you might never be alone again. Continue reading

Next in a series of interviews with female Canadian social media stars! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.

Today we have Vancouver’s own Monica Hamburg. Monica’s a writer and social media consultant/evangelist. She also speaks about social media strategy and tactics, and writes a blog of the weird.

Very loaded topic. Before I address this, I need to remark that I’m a feminist. It should go without saying (but it can’t) that I believe in equality for women – and that I am fully aware of the issues we face. And now to the stuff that will get me hated. Sadly, in general, women aren’t always each other’s best allies. In some cases, there is competitiveness that surrounds the way some women interact with one another. Also, there is not much to be gained from excluding men – while there is a great deal that can be learned from working together. And, in my experience, exclusively female groups have their own issues.

The thesis that women are better at social media than men… well, I think this is one of those “I want to believe that we’re better” statements. Even if we are to assume that men and women have these stereotypically distinct approaches, there are great advantages to the other angle. Sure, women can be chattier are sometimes more intimate – but men are often more willing to state their opinion and allow themselves to remark on things with humour. While this may not always translate as “likeable” it does lead to more instantaneous connections – and a deeper feeling of collusion.

Of course, what it comes down to is the person. I really try to stay away from the “popularity contest” aspect of Twitter etc. The concept of “head butterfly”, rubs me the wrong way. I try to help people who are respectful (among other qualities) – and I make a sincere attempt not to judge someone based on their social web popularity or lack thereof.  It would be profoundly ignorant of me to assume that a person’s value is based on how many followers or connections they have.

Certainly, I’ve seen the concept of cattiness present itself on social networking sites – and I’ve seen men react in embarrassing ways too. I’ve also had a great deal of support from both genders – recommendations for talks, endorsements and the like.

But, if I’m going to make a huge blanket statement – overall, men have been more willing to accept my sense of humour – at least at the beginning.  But times they are a changing.