Leo Laporte Is PIssed At Buzz, The World, Everything

Leo Laporte had set things up so that his Google Buzz was reposted to Twitter, and then somehow the set-up failed, and 15 days or so of his ‘show notes’ had not been public, or at least had not been reposted to Twitter.

But no one pinged him to say ‘Where’s the notes?’

Buzz Kill : LOL: The Life of Leo

No one noticed.

Not even me.

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.

Thank God the content I deem most important, my Internet and broadcast radio shows, still stand. I believe in what I’m doing there, and have been very fortunate to have found an audience. I’m pretty sure I would have heard from people if there had been 16 days of dead silence there. Hell, if we miss one show I get hundreds of emails. But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place.

I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more. I’m sorry for having neglected you Leoville. From now on when I post a picture of a particularly delicious sandwich I’m posting it here. When I complain that Sookie is back with Bill, you’ll hear it here first. And the show notes for my shows will go here, too.

Social media, I gave you the best years of my life, but never again. I know where I am wanted. Screw you Google Buzz. You broke my heart.

The world moves at a slower pace than the surface of social tools suggests. This is not a waste of time, it is the weight of time.

So the message is that microstreaming isn’t as engaging as blogging, in Leo’s estimation. But Leo confuses ‘social media’ with Buzz’s take on microblogging, and blames the implementation of Buzz for causing his whopping dose of angst.

The connectedness that comes from streaming is not obliterated by a few days — even a few weeks — of silence. I could take a month off and people would still feel connected to me when I came back. And I wouldn’t worry if no one pinged me and asked what was I up to.

What we are up to online is not immediacy, like Polaroid pictures. We are building connection, belonging, and shared meaning, and that takes time. Although streaming apps seem highly immediate, their sphere of action is not.

Sure, on a news basis information passes through the stream-o-sphere quickly, like mouth radio. But our connections build like neurons, like learning to play the guitar or picking up another language. Slowly, day-by-day.

So don’t despair, Leo. The world moves at a slower pace than the surface of social tools suggests. This is not a waste of time, it is the weight of time.

related articles

Five ways mobile changes the world. Forever.

Brian Solis has a great wrap-up of a developing (and inevitable) collision between Twitter, the reigning social presence flow app, and Jaiku, it’s less well-known but worthy competititor. Leo Laporte’s now well-known defection to Jaiku from Twitter has led to a lot of folks checking Jaiku out for the first time. Solis characterizes the impact of that break this way:

[from Twitter Me This, Is Jaiku a Threat? Let’s Ask Those Defining the Landscape]

[…]

Now, there is a line in the sand. A division between Twitter and Jaiku. No one thinks that two can survive, that this tournament of arm wrestling will divide the community.

However, I don’t think so.

Both offer points of value that will appeal to different market segments (left and right) as well as those who can enjoy playing both sides of the fence (the middle).

[…]

Back in December I joined Jaiku to test it out and I had this to say:

[from Jaiku by Stowe Boyd]

Basically, you are pushing out status messages to a list of buddies (and the whole damn world, if you want to) like Twitter, including by texting on your cell. The added wrinkle is that Jaiku allows you to add RSS feeds from your blogs, Flickr, and del.icio.us accounts, so that Jaiku becomes the pulsing bloodstream of your online identity.

I returned to Jaiku again in March, after I had become a confirmed Twitterholic:

[from Trying Jaiku As A Better Lifestream]

I was fiddling with Facebook today, to see if it could be tweaked into being a better single stream for all my traffic, and I managed to crash Firefox by putting Technorati tags into a Facebook ‘share’. I have decided to continue using del.icio.us bookmarks because I can tag them, even though they feel awfully static.

The answer might be to add more streams to Jaiku. I have included my Last.fm recently played stream, the Ambivalence feed, and I have the nice folks there trying to figure out why Upcoming.org RSS feeds don’t work (missing the ‘.xml’ suffix?). I already had Twitter and Flickr streams there.

One nice thing about Jaiku: comments are possible on all stream items. Look at this screenshot, based on an interchange with Petteri Koponen of Jaiku. Note that the initial start was a Twitter that was streamed into Jaiku.

This comment notion is great, and provides an interest new dimension to social presence flow. In Twitter, we do something similar by direct messages to others, or via a ‘shout out’ into the stream by writing a message with an ‘@’ preceding a person’s name: “@ briansolis - nice post”. [Note that the latter spontaneously occured on Twitter, invented by some savvy user. It’s not a supported feature.]

But in Jaiku, comments get added to the initial message: a neater solution.

Also, Jaiku has the flavor of a tumbler blog as well. Various flavors of elements in the stream are denoted with different icons. Any sort of RSS feeds can be flowed into the traffic, and passed along to your downstream buddies. In this way, it actually feels much more like a Facebook profile page than Twitter.

Both Twitter and jaiku are mobile, although at the moment Jaiku is only supported natively on S60 phones. Jaiku’s ambitions with mobile seem more advanced than Twitter, involving a sophisticated client on the phone that supports presence and messaging. Twitter is limited to SMS, at the moment.

So, is this the final bout for supremacy in social presence flow apps? I don’t thinks so. It’s early days yet, and the apps are rudimentary at the moment. I think we will see a lot of innovation, as well as efforts by the majors to get involved — either by acquisition or by their own efforts.