Increasingly I see the most important role online to be that of the editor. I already have far too much information to deal with. The one service I'm willing to pay real money for at this point is the one that finds only the very most interesting bits for me. So far this role has really only been served for me by a handful of genuine friends.
The other day I walked past a female colleague's desk. She had a bunch of powdered donut holes sitting there and I had a ridiculous urge to say "balls" like she was a college roommate or something.
Now, I obviously didn't say that. I wouldn't say that to a male colleague either. I wouldn't even say something like that to my college roommates. I don't know what I was thinking. It just came into my head and I had to put a stop to acting on it.
But whenever I think about frictionless sharing, I'm going to think about people saying "balls" whenever they have the urge.
Loukides is right. There's no societal value to frictionless sharing, is there?
But to your point about the editor. In my stupid scenario, I was, thankfully, my own editor. Presumably Facebook doesn't share everything with everyone, only what it thinks should be shared. They've usurped the role of editor. So maybe that's their value ad? I can go around saying "balls" all day long, but Facebook will be kind enough to not relay the message to my grandmother.
But you still have to make an explicit action (eg hit play on spotify). It's not like Facebook is pulling things out of your head, you still have control over what you're sharing with people.
That's precisely why while everyone is predicting the death of traditional publishing houses, I predict that they'll continue to flourish (though in a slightly transformed state) even with ebooks supposedly leveling the playing field. In an era where everyone and their grandma can sell their ebook on Amazon, you need a respected publisher (or "editor" as you put it) to sort through the coal and present you only with the gems.
This is a role that traditional publishers actively do today!
In contrast, I have predicted the relative demise of traditional publishing houses precisely because most of them are now so poor at performing the non-writing tasks that used to be their natural contribution that one has to question their continuing relevance. We're living in an era when self-publishing is cheap and easy, and when word-of-mouth advertising and sites like Amazon sell far more books than knowing the manager of the local bricks 'n' mortar bookstore. Publishers have a future as a one-stop support network for authors who only know how to write but also need design work, editorial guidance, etc. Publishers have no future as a pure middleman in the distribution chain, whose services reduce the author's percentage cut to single digits but who don't generate an order of magnitude more sales than a dedicated author self-promoting on-line.
I agree, nothing beats content that have been deliberately selected just for you and friends, who know you personally, are best positioned to do just that.
How have you been getting content from your friends? I'd love to hear about that from you.
On a related note, I thought I'd just share that I built this app called Handpick, which helps you be selective about what you share with whom you share:
I still rely on good old-fashioned email. I try to exercise enough restraint in what I send out that I don't saturate my friends' attention. I used to run a private email list of about 20 people but haven't had the time to curate it lately. I'll try your beta if you have room.
But yes. I agree with you. And not just the most interesting bits: the ones most out of my usual loops. We have this vast online space and find ourselves locked into a few echo chambers.
The problem with those links is that they don't cover what I need to know to be better at my job.
Roughly I need something (and my guess is that this is the same for everybody) which covers these areas:
* General news which actually matter. This includes stuff like SOPA (but only once and not on every tech site) as well as important elections and a few high profil criminal cases (but only the general overview I don't need to know the details) so that I can converse with others. This shouldn't be more than 20% and less than 10% most of the time.
News from friends and relatives -- a combination of Facebook and google plus sorta covers this, but it isn't very good since some people share so much that it gets irrelevant and others share almost nothing at all so I still miss important stuff. This should also be about 10%-15%
Professional development -- essentially something like what they were trying to turn Code Quarterly into -- high quality, upto-date, high quality, long (but not padded for length) articles delivered about every two weeks. This magazine (which would properly be sent as an email) would be adfree (for the same reason consumer reports don't have ads) and fairly expensive. This should take up the rest of the time.
This is in part my motivation for http://hubski.com, which is a sharing-based aggregator. I think that news that comes with crowd-sourced analysis is infinitely more valuable than the MSM formula, and that's where aggregators shine. However, curation is something that doesn't crowd-source as well. IMHO curation gets stale if it's completely crowd-sourced, but it also gets stale if it's left up to the individual. The solution I'm trying is to allow users to put their curation in the hands of a group of select people. It's easy to see who is contributing what, and if someone isn't providing value, you swap them for someone else. -You basically build a curation group.
I guess I don't agree with you after all. HN is close enough to what Code Quarterly was trying to do that it's hard to believe an expensive product could get off the ground. The real problem is that too few people are able and willing to actually write quality long-form pieces.
I've thought for a long time that "Web 3.0" will probably be based on some form of curated user-generated content for immediate satisfaction, combined with deeper original content produced by specialists.
One big problem we have today is that many on-line social sites become closed and introverted, which leads to the Internet echo chamber phenomenon. Heck, you're reading one of the best examples right now. Such places can still be interesting, informative, and insightful (as posters on another good example might put it) but they also tend not to introduce dramatically different ideas very often, which means that while you can learn a lot in the first few months of following the discussions and perhaps the early days of contributing, the useful-signal/noise ratio drops rapidly once you've seen 90% of the groupthink before.
Another big problem is that it's not just the sharing of citations (in whatever form) that is becoming a flood, it's also the content itself. The Internet is full of blogs where most of the ideas are not really new and original, most of the analysis is fairly superficial or based on second-hand thinking, but every now and then the author writes a gem and attracts attention. Perhaps this is human nature, but I think it's often a case of a blogger who has potentially interesting thoughts to share but who simply lacks the time or inclination to do detailed research and editing of their posts, making the hit-or-miss-but-mostly-miss result almost inevitable. Thus not only the aggregators/social news sites but also many of the sites they link to become a flood of same-old-story material.
I think people are going to tire of this before very long, as we start to realise quite how much time we waste maintaining superficial on-line relationships and consuming superficial content. However, it is difficult for anyone with life's many other commitments to do a good job of producing good content or of filtering what's out there. Sooner or later, we're going to have to admit that there is value in good content (including proper research, careful presentation, etc.) and either people who want to produce it as a hobby will have to spend more time writing fewer (but better) things or people who want to consume more good content are going to have to pay smart people to create it as a real job. Likewise, there is value in good curation, but having someone who can pick out a manageable level of good content to present to a community without becoming repetitve and while actively seeking relevant new ideas from new sources is often not a job you can do in an hour a night, either through your own work or through focussing a user-generated stream that accepts submissions in real time.
I'm not sure we're ever going to get an idealised situation because every individual has different interests and, just as importantly, might be interested in different new ideas if they found out about them. But I'm pretty sure we can make a decent first approximation, at least as good as any of the big name on-line social discussion sites today. We're just going to have to pay for it, one way or another, sufficient to attract the relatively few people who are both willing and able to produce and curate really good content if they have the chance.
Good, but dated and preachy (TL;DR humans make life too controlled and easy, and then they pay for it, how dare they, serves them right, harrumph, etc.).
I am more interested by the continued bleating of friends for new ideas and the continued rejection of ideas throughout it than by the predictions of a worldwide communication network. 'News' aggregators and commenting systems, a hundred years ago.
Makes me wonder if mining old sci-fi stories for things to build would be worthwhile.
> I am more interested by the continued bleating of friends for new ideas and the continued rejection of ideas throughout it
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. For most people, who have (or would have) interest in a lot of different areas, there are probably already several lifetimes' worth of new ideas out there if they can only find and enjoy them. Such is the power of connecting billions of people in a global network.
On the other hand, while that solves the breadth problem for those who want to develop themselves as rounded individuals, it doesn't attack the depth problem for those who want to advance a particular field of art or science that they really care about. I think we might do best at that by adopting something like academic practices of ongoing sharing and collaboration, but done on a global scale by anyone who cares, and with something way better than journals as the means of peer review and promoting the best new ideas to the top so others can expand and build on them. Of course, it needn't necessarily be an academic subject either, it could be anything from sports coaching to cookery.
For those interested, a tangentially related article, "Faux Friendship"[1] by Willian Deresiewicz, is one of my all-time-favourite online articles, which I urge everyone to read.
I couldn't agree with this article more. Due to the awkwardness around not accepting a friend invite, my Facebook consists of just about everyone I've ever known in my life. It is convenient to have an easy channel to track someone down if you need to talk to them but the wall has become completely unusable to me. The combination of 1) having too many people that I don't have real relationships with on Facebook 2) many of my friends' postings of very low value things (ex. I'm eating an apple right now) 3) the increased usage of auto-updates (ex. I'm listening to 'Rihanna'), Facebook has turned into a wasteland of posts where about 1 / 500 updates are actually useful to me and finding that 1 is no longer worth it. I know the natural response to this is that I should be organizing my friends better but I'm not sure that this is a solution, because I have certain friends that will post 'low value' updates and then post something very 'high value' (value meaning somehow interesting to me). So the first problem for Facebook is trying to figure out how to cherry pick the good posts to show me and this in itself is incredibly difficult. But the problem gets exponentially harder as I add more friends (which will continue to happen to avoid awkward moments in the real world) assuming that I only have time to read X number of updates. In other words if on average every friend has 1 / 100 high value updates, the chance of Facebook getting it right and getting that high value update into the 100 updates I read every day gets lower as I add more friends and there is more noise to filter. It seems to me that there may be a bell curve to the usefulness of Facebook based on your friend count - in the beginning it is marginally useful when you only have a few friends, it becomes very useful when you have some magical conservative number of friends and then it becomes again marginally useful as your friend count gets very high. The problem is that keeping your friend count at that magical number and not progressing past that is very difficult.
Social streaming creates white noise, while curated social sharing provides meaning. Having the devices in a hundred friends' pockets passively alert their social profile that they ate at a burger joint is meaningless. Having my friend tweet a photo of the mouthwatering burger she ate at the Umami Burger in my neighborhood at least provides some level of ambient value.
I listen to a lot of new music. My Spotify account is linked to Facebook. Seeing an automatically posted list of the last 70 songs I listened to might be interesting to a stalker, but having me specifically post "Bah, the new Weeknd mixtape isn't nearly as good as House of Balloons" actually tells you something about my taste.
I'm going to disagree here. One important distinction with automated sharing is that it is being displayed in a sidebar, outside the main feed. It isn't just adding spam. It is allowing you to dive deeper, see some details that maybe your friends wouldn't have thought to share with you but maybe you would have been interested to know anyway. If you are in a hurry and just want the big events of the day you won't read it. But if you are just relaxing with nothing to do or feel like reading something a little different maybe you will learn something new about one of your friends.
In the same way that facebook let people 'send emails' that didn't have to be read, these sidebar updates allow you to 'post statuses' that don't have to be looked at. It is adding a new priority level to communication. Kind of like the background music in a coffeeshop, you wouldn't say you go there just for the music, but you definitely appreciate the ambiance and the music is something that adds up to make that experience.
Super agreed and also I feel like this is one aspect that nobody gets right so far. Some updates are very important. Some are interesting. Some are boring on scope of things, but can still be interesting at the moment.
Communication between people is tiered in importance, and this is the first step in acknowledging that. I think the ticker is a genius idea.
On top of that, Facebook tries to surface interesting aspects of the passively shared information. If multiple friends read the same article, Facebook will tell me. If someone visits my profile, they can see what music I've been listening to for the past month.
There is a such thing as having too much shared information to deal with, but Facebook filters it and presents it in a way that I find useful.
He actually means the "end of Facebook". There will be other social services to take its place, just like Facebook took the place of Myspace. Those services probably already exist, just like Facebook existed years before Myspace even started to lose users.
I agree, it will definitely be the doom of Facebook or any other social network if it does not let users easily differentiate between sharing and faux-sharing. It will be like an email account that can't filter out spam.
I agree that lots of random sharing data can be useless, but I think it is only useless in its current form. There is a great deal of data to be intelligently mined there.
For example, I wish Facebook told me aggregate info, like 12 of my friends are reading X book, and 15 listen to Y song, and 5 have liked Z restaurant. To me this is a lot more compelling as I can see real trends in what my social circle is consuming.
Interesting article, and as a forty-year-old who doesn't use facebook, it makes sense to me.
But I wonder whether 20 year-olds who have been immersed in this kind of thing for 3-4 years would agree. And what today's 13-year-olds will think then they are 20, and this has been a part of their entire post-childhood..
Well, as a nineteen-year old (quite soon to be 20) I can say that I don't care much for the Facebook ticker (the "share everything" list), nor do my friends seem to.
I agree with this article, but I may not represent the "average" Facebook-visitor, considering I barely read my friends updates, create updates of my own or play Facebook-games. (I visit for two groups which I participate actively in)
Sharing everything takes the value out of it, and I think most people, 20-year olds or not, would agree. Perhaps that's why I've stopped checking what my friends are saying, my interests are already way too specialised for me to have any interest in what they blast out to everyone.
Good piece. It is not far off from the things people like danah boyd have been saying. The exchange of personal information is a unit of social currency. If you treat it like it has no value, then it becomes of no value. Editorial effort, on the other hand, both adds value and also signals value.
Writing a letter, is much more personal than sending email or texting. It means you've taken time out of your day to sit down, plan out your thoughts, put them in a package and pay to have it shipped to someone personally.
Or how a cheap, thoughtful gift means more than a $100 bill at Christmas.
I wonder why people write their opinions on facebook music experience sharing without mentioning that last.fm already solved this problem at least once and the solution was a meaningful product that worked for some people. In this context, reading claims like "a constant pipeline of what's queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless" make me laugh. People figured it out and it wasn't meaningless.
If they don't know about last.fm, why do they bother? They obviously don't care about music very much.
The whole point of Last.fm is that you get stats on your listening habits (and those of your friends). The realtime thing is just how the system collects the stats. Besides, even there, my friends' "Now playing" stuff in never bigger than a small icon on the side. It's not the core of the site.
Facebook, with Spotify, gives you the useless part (the "Now playing") without the good part (the advanced stats, recommandations, music compatibility, etc)
Agreed. A single event can be meaningless, but the aggregation can still have value. Of course, that depends on how the system manages the data, not on the data itself.
