My Social Timeline: A Social Mapplication

A number of folks, I think inspired by Loic Le Meur's post, My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog, have tried to map their social 'graph', which I take as a map of the social applications they are using to channel their online interactions with people. Brian Solis, Chris Herot, David Armano and dozens of others have posted on this. There is a site dedicated to the topic: Social Graph Central.

I am going to call this theme "social mapplication" because it is not a real social diagram, involving specific people. It's a sort of mind map about application use and the implied social communities associated with them.

I have structured my own first go at this using a timeline model. I think the change over time from one solution to another is pretty interesting. In the graphic, I have tried to use larger fonts for those social apps that are more important relative to the number and depth of connections that have come about through my use. I have also arrayed the applications left to right ranging from those that are principally one:one communication tools, like email and IM, to one:manyish tools, like my blog (yes, I know there is a conversation going on there, in general, but still, it's a lot of posts from me to the world), and last, the many:many apps at the right.

social mapplication, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The dominant app in my world -- in my life -- in terms of engendering and supporting sociality is blogging. I started with Message from Edge City in 1999, running on top of the defunct Convey.com. I transitioned to Blogger when Convey.com was shut down, and launched Timing. I was asked to blog at Corante, and briefly was running on Red Mind (?) with a blog called Instant Messaging, but quickly switched to MovableType and renamed that blog to Get Real. I left Corante in December 2006, and launched /Message on Typepad. The fonts get bigger because /Message has been a big bang in my life, even bigger than the impact I had with Get Real, despite losing all the network effects of being one blog among many in the Corante blog network. Along the way, I was also writing a personal blog called /Ambivalence, on Typepad, and I just folded that into /Message.

Blogging has been perhaps the single most important activity I have ever undertaken; I recently stated that it trumps my Master's in Computer Science in terms of a return on my involvement. Through my blog I have become well-known, and I have discovered countless friends and colleagues that have enriched my life in immeasurable ways. Blogging has become the primary enabler of my work as an advisor, designer, and consultant, that is at least an order of magnitude more important than other 'marketing' I might be involved in, like public speaking. My world is primarily structured by the connections that blogging has made, and which now make me.

I have participated -- in some cases actively -- in the use of dozens of social applications, but most haven't made much of an impact. Last.fm, for example, I only used actively for a few months -- three or four -- and then I fell back into solitary music appreciation. I have used Google docs for years, but not in large social schemes, usually one on one, as when someone sends me an attachment in email and I opt to make it a Google doc instead of downloading it. I have used SlideShare.net, but in a passive publishing approach. What are left, after all is said and done, is a small group of applications that get a lot of my fractured social world crammed into them:

• Email -- Yes, I do a lot in email, and while it is way over to the left, a primarily one:one tool, there is still a lot of social network in there. I am now a firm Gmail user, and I am hoping for the day that a genius at Google finally gets around to a social email scheme (I have some thoughts on that, if Google would like some help, by the way).
• Instant Messaging -- I am principally stowe Dot boyd AT gmail Dot com these days, since that grandfathers my older identities of stoweboyd via AIM and Jabber. While I occasionally use Skype for international VOIP, I don't boot up Skype all the time. Nor do I use Yahoo or Microsoft Messenger any longer. And Twitter is cutting into my IMing, since it supports direct messages.
• Next to blogging I have a collection of specialized social applications, which are arrayed vertically to indicate their specialized nature.
  • Basecamp is a social work management application, based on social media notions. I have real heartburn with the app, but it does enough that works so that I keep using it. (I will obsolete this with Workstreamr in the near term, which is a separate issue.) It does not really have any sense of community, as in the community of Basecamp users; but it is a useful tool for collaborating on projects.
  • I have recently dropped del.icio.us for Ma.gnolia as a social bookmarking solution. Del.icio.us has been too slow on innovation, and the UI is a pain. Ma.gnolia now supports daily posting of links to my blog, which is essential for me.
  • I use Flickr avidly, uploading pictures and sharing nearly everyday. I have recently consolidated /Ambivalence into /Message, for various rants that I would have kept separate from my technoid mumblings in the past. But I am going to shift food and wine writings directly into Flickr.
  • Long, long ago, I used Plazes as a proto gelolocational tool. I stopped after the disastrous second version came out, and I really didn't use anything for years despite flirting with Dodgeball and others. I adopted Dopplr immediately upon its release, and it has become a critical important element of my travel planning and sharing. (I also use Tripit, but not in a social way, as yet.) I would like to see a long list of enhancements, but Dopplr, along with Flickr, is my example of a perfectly niched social application. (I also believe that once Mixin is available, I will be using that as a social concierge service. I have a post coming about Mixin, that will explain all.)
  • At the extreme right are the social networking applications, and honestly, Twitter has become totally dominant in that space for me. I have basically stopped using other services. I never used MySpace, I fiddled with LinkedIn (and others like that: ZeroDegrees, Spoke, OpenBC/Xing, Ning, Plaxo, and others) but I never was particularly active. I was briefly interested in Facebook when it first opened up, but I have found it more like an afternoon at the mall than a really social experience.

    But Twitter has become the primary means of social interaction for me, right after blogging. I consider it the best example of flow applications, and it has grown to a really critical aspect of my online interaction with a world of "virtual friends". Leisa Reichelt coined the term "ambient intimacy" to get across the special feel of Twitter, and David Weinberger calls it "continuous partial friendship", but both of these fall short. I believe that Twitter, and other promising applications, like Friendfeed, create a new sort of social awareness based on the flow of other's updates:

    [from Christine Rosen on Virtual Friendships And The New Narcissism]

    Online interaction is increasingly a flow of small touches, brief quips, recommendations, updates, and inquiries. I maintain that you can't analyze your way to understanding how it all works, anymore than you can master the piano or martial arts analytically. You have to wade in it, maybe even wallow in it, to get it.

    But those who live in a world of thought and will, who analyze their way through everything, are generally reluctant to wade in the water. It's easier to sit on the bank, telling stories of all those who skinned their shins on a rock, stepped on a frog, lost their way, slipped and drowned.

    Yes, there are risks involved. Yes, people do jump headfirst into the shallows, and break their necks. And that may be enough to keep a lot of people out of the flow. But not the rest of us. Some of us live more through the skin than the brain, are pulled more than pushed, are more curious than cautious. It takes all kinds to keep it rich, even the reluctant and risk-averse.

    I just passed 2000 followers today, at Twitter, by the way

    
    Twitter / stoweboyd, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

This brings me full circle to Loic's lament: that the social plane has been fractured into a bunch of possibly non-overlapping spheres. He, specifically, wants to get things rejiggered so that the blog is again the center of his social world.

I think that the conversation in online relationships will inexorably move to wherever the flow is richest and fastest: people want to 'live' in a stream of conversation that is ingested in tiny bites. Embedded in that stream will be references to larger chunks of media, a blog post or a video, that require the user to leave the stream and reflect on them for more than the fifteen seconds it takes to read a Twitter post. New comments are made on those larger 'meals' which can be thrown back into the stream with a link back to the original 'meal': the precipitating blog post or video that has caused the comment to be made.

I have recently argued (see Beyond Blogs: The Conversation Has Moved Into The Flow) that the conversation will move to the stream, and we will be seeing less and less native comments on blogs for example.

I have suggested that we should be pulling the comments out of the stream, and presenting them on the blogs, even if people aren't creating them there. I expect that we will see a large number of the new networked comment companies -- like Discus -- will figure this out, and start offering it. Likewise, blog search companies, like Technorati, Sphere, or Blogrovr, could be doing this as well. This is the next landrush for social media companies.

Comments

[Peter R. Wood]

"Ma.gnolia now supports daily posting of links to my blog, which is essential for me."

del.icio.us has had this functionality, so I'm assuming this wasn't among the reasons for switching - just something you missed after switching and are now able to use once again?

[Greg Jagiello]

Great visual, that chart. Wonder if it's possible to somehow add a layer for "quality" and/or "quantity" of the resulting communication? I'm no Tufte, so I'll pass, but I'd love to see that.