10 Membranes

Social Media Membranes

It’s time to review the social media I use. When I started this tumblelog a few years ago the name was designed to reflect the way social media platforms create a kind of virtual membranous layer around the self; they are, to go a bit cyberpunk, a digital extension of one’s person, a projection of the individual. The more platforms you are on the more digital skins you are enveloped by. Having a tumblelog would be a convenient way of drawing them together into some kind of whole, creating a single epidermic wrapping or less pretentiously, a one stop shop outside the pirvacy safeguards and passwords of walled garden networks. 

The social web is a cruel and Darwinian world where fads and sites explode and implode with the fleeting regulatory of a well orchestrated firework display. Where does it leave my original selection on the footer? What should stay, what should go? There seems to a wave (but not of course a Google Wave, hoho) of social media culling at the moment, and by the unspoken, unthinking rules of the internet I, and everyone else, therefore have to automatically follow that wave. Thus:

Twitter - I remain completely hypnotised by Twitter, surely the web phenomenon par excellence in it’s simplicity, self referentiality, twilight zone character inbetween work and casual selves, new Twitter native networks, flippant content, link streaming, somehow crossing the status update with the RSS feed, API centre to a thousand apps, mixing memes and business, jokes, debate and real time news. While I have had off times with Twitter I now use it more than ever, and it has definitely overtaken RSS and email lists as my principle way of staying on top of the professional tumult of digital publishing. 

Facebook - While the global growth trajectory has made Facebook the third largest “country” on the planet, like many in the initial university wave I’ve basically stopped using Facebook as a social instrument and now use it as a photo-repository and address book. There was a phase of messaging people via Facebook rather than emailing, texting or hell, even meeting, but this seems to have waned as Facebook’s myspace-ification bubbled and the unnecessariness of an extraintermediary factor became apparent. Still without doubt essential, fun and diverting the lustre went years ago. But we all knew that. Clearly, it stays (and social gaming my save it yet). 

Bookbrunch blog - Replaces The Digitalist, current thoughts fit, one hopes, for public consumption on work related matters. 

Del.icio.us - Now, I can’t help but feel that there is something terribly unfashionable and 2006 about Delicious these days, that it is somehow a little embarrassing, a bit shameful, part of the 2.0 bubble, something a bit jejune and forgotten about it, tainted by the ever-present whiff of Yahoo. There is a palpable lack of buzz around Delicious; you feel it immediately on even looking at that then trendy now passe URL. Despite all that I still use delicious, still like it, especially the reskin they did a while ago, and will no doubt continue to use it. Folksonomies are useful and here for the long haul and there is still an urgent need for the ordered storing of interesting websites, especially for research purposes. It may be the case that an academic resource (along the lines of academia.edu or mendeley) will supercede this, but not yet. 

Friend Feed - Social media dodo. It is a) a graveyard, b) was rendered pointless when Facebook bought it, or rather, bought it out and made it irrelevant and c) probably would have been rendered irrelevant by Buzz and d) was actually one social network too many - it was meant to make things easier via aggregation but actually became just one aggregator amongst many. Everything is aggregated everywhere already, so what is the point? I once had high hopes for friend feed but in 2010 this ones goes. Oh, and I always thought the redesign sucked. 

LinkedIn - Keeps getting more useful, a definite keeper with a simple idea that will always be needed e.g. a career based shop front and rollerdeck of business contacts. The interesting thing about LinkedIn is that despite what it claims it’s much more useful for connecting with people you don’t already know than people you do. At least, that is the way I often use it, and doing so as lead to many interesting encounters and conversations. If I am connected on LinkedIn with you and we haven’t met - let’s do lunch. 

Dopplr - Ah, Dopplr. You were so beautiful, clever and sexy and, whatsmore, you were a storming web 2.0 start up based in London. Your clean minimalist design; your colourful, crisp and contemporary logo; the way your plugged into Google Maps and Flickr photos; the reports you sent out, detailed, endlessly fascinating PDFs of a year’s worth of travel; yes Dopplr you were great, the start up of start ups with cool users and even cooler founders. But then you got bought by Nokia. Then you lost all your people. Then we started to wonder why we were sharing our trips with only a couple of people. Then we started to realise there wasn’t much point, that it was more trouble than it was worth, that it was just so much social media masturbation/peacock travllier-than-thouing. With Trip.it, with other networks, with geo-locative functionality the death knell for Dopplr has, I fear, been wrung. 

Last.fm - Like Dopplr I used to love last.fm, not least because it is London based. Unlike Dopplr I also used to find it genuinely useful and fun. Listening to last.fm I discovered so many new bands, songs, found a whole new way of listening to music. For me last.fm wasn’t just a website but a new aural universe, a new relationship to songs and of course a new business model for the beleaguered record industry. I still find that of all the music services last.fm is the best for discovering new music services and tag based radio stations can be revelatory in their electicism and pin point brilliance. Listen to a tag like, say, Berlin, and you will find a world of music. But, but, but….but Spotify. Even with the eye ball drilling annoyingness of the adverts the control, the marvellous control is unbeatable. Now it has the artists playlist and playlists generally then it really does have everything and I constantly teeter on the edge of buying a subscription. Unlike with last.fm though I have no desire to make my Spotify social. I have way to many guilty pleasures on there and don’t want to have to listen to things just so people don’t realise how much I like ———- so it makes the choice hard. Given though that last.fm is probably used only about 5% of the web music time, then it may have to go. 

Daytum - Stupid really, I was never going to keep this up and despite the patent attractions of the software this isn’t a major enough platform to register below and requires too much self discipline for too little payback to maintain. I’ll stay satisfied with the Feltron Reports. 

So, what has emerged? I never had a Flickr account up here as I don’t take many pictures, likewise I never had a Vimeo channel as I don’t really make videos (and not of course a Youtube channel, Youtube having the same relationship to Vimeo as The Sun to the Guardian- a more popular, commercial and trashy version of essentially the same thing). Neither are needed now. 

Two things have popped up that could get included. Firstly are the check in meister geo-locative networks. I tried both Gowalla and Foursquare but Gowalla won, largely on account of my phone running Android and the Foursquare app repeatedly failing. So far though two things have held me back from getting fully involved. Firstly I have residual doubts about sharing my location; yes, these antediluvian and fogeyish misunderstanding of the brave new world maybe mark me out as a bonehead living in, like, 2006 (using delicious for crying out loud), but still, there are times when one doesn’t want to run into people or certain people, when the great clouk of anonymity bestowed by London is a shield and a benefit and the utility of locative functionality shrinks to zero. By that I guess I mean those times exist more than when they don’t. Secondly this is pro-active social media. When you walk into a theatre or a restaurant you actually have to consciously think about checking in. I just don’t do this. I think about the play or the meal. It intrudes on life in a way that other media doesn’t, without a huge amount of pay back. It maybe that I will seriously get into Gowalla or Facebook Places, but maybe not. Still, they are cool right now, and pathetic media airhead that I am that counts for something and may mean they get a slot. 

Secondly, and relatedly, are the games that have grown up - the games that sit in your browser, that infiltrate your Twitter account or that, even better, permeate your day to day life (e.g. Chromaroma). Yes this is pro-active but this is fun. And no, I don’t think Foursquare is a game. If it is a game, then it’s the lamest, most boring and hopelessly crap game of them all. Indeed, you win by leading a boring life, by going to the same place over and over again. This is not a game; this is the crushing/comforting reality of affluent but nonetheless brain numbing post-industrial capitalism. Interesting games subvert and distort that turning the office space or the commute into arenas of hidden narrative and play. A game that becomes more real than the real, now that is something I will put on the footer. 

There were are, a social media audit in full, and quite enough of it I should think.