Because it sounds good, I occasionally like to warn audiences to whom I’m speaking that “email may be the fax machine of my generation”. By which I mean that, in 20 years, we’ll all be looking back and laughing at the goofy “electronic mail” with the “at sign” and “attachments”. There’s evidence that today’s teenagers use email less, or at least differently, than older age groups. They’re using instant messaging systems, texting and channels like Facebook to communicate.
Yesterday, on the aforementioned Book of Face, somebody I know wrote the following in a conversation thread:
I usually respond ‘yes’ to any event I am invited to on FB regardless if I’m actually going or not.
When I asked her why she did this, she wrote:
Well I figure people don’t really care either way. And it’s nice to say ‘yes’ always nice to be invited. So far no one has even noticed that I do this. Sometimes it’s because a ridiculous invite (environmental event in Toronto) deserves a ridiculous response. But really the bottom line is that people don’t care about FB event invites.
This raised an obvious question for me: how seriously do people take Facebook event invitations? Where do they rate compared to an email, an invite by text message or an Evite message?
I struggled to devise a poll that asked the right thing. This poll assumes that an email invitation is weightier than an Evite, and both are more serious than a text message.
I’m particularly interested in hearing from people, say, under the age of 25. How seriously do you take Facebook event invitations?
I’ve had a few days to kick the tires on Google+ (pronounced ‘Google Plus’), Google’s shot across the bow of Facebook and, to a lesser degree, Twitter. It’s a nascent social network built around the concept of ‘circles’, where you group friends and acquaintances into clusters so that your online social interactions are more distinguishable than in other tools.
Google hasn’t had a great track record in software products in recent years. Sure, Chrome has been a massive success, but Knol, Wave and Buzz all failed to cross that trough of disillusionment after a flurry of early excitement.
Will Google+ make that leap? It faces the tremendous inertia of Facebook, whose more 600 million have invested serious time and effort in their profiles. That feels like a nearly insurmountable obstacle.
That said, let’s look at some of the possible reasons why they might:
Users get bored with tools and platforms. We saw it happen when Facebook eclipsed MySpace, and when Gmail eclipsed Hotmail.
I haven’t tried it yet, but maybe there’s a sweet spot for Google+ Hangouts, group video chat sessions. On the other hand, there are rumours afoot of a Facebook partnership with Skype which might quash this competitive advantage.
Users might start seriously caring about privacy, and they trust Google more than they trust Facebook.
Google+ is being integrated into all of Google’s products. If you’ve got a Google Account–for Gmail, Google Reader, Docs and so forth–then you’ll see the ‘Sandbar’, the black bar at the top of our Google apps. Much like Facebook, there’s a red notification number on this bar that will constantly be reminding you of Google+ activity. Google has an enormous existing user base, and they’re not going anywhere, so this ever-present hook into the user may be the difference-maker.
Of those four, I think only the last reason has serious merit. Why do you think Google+ could win?
The other day I received an invitation to my 20-year high school reunion.
Man, I am old.
The reunion is, of course, being put together on Facebook. The organizers have created a ‘Grad 91′ group, spread the word and in a couple of days, 68 people have joined. My grad class was about 150, so that’s just under half.
In 2001, I went to my 10-year reunion, and had a good time. It was pretty fascinating to see how my high school classmates–very few of whom I’d kept up with–were progressing in their lives.
Of course, 2001 was a pre-Facebook world (Facemash was still two years away). Aside from rumours and trash talk I’d heard from the few classmates to whom I regularly talked, I knew very little about my classmates.
In 2011, I can just cruise around Facebook (I use ‘cruise’ in the ‘drive around’ sense, not the ‘pick up’, gay culture sense) and learn all about my classmates. Who got fat? Who got thin? Who has a brood of children? Who’s just plain brooding?
That takes a lot of the delight and surprise out of the actual event, doesn’t it? When you meet your high school crush, it’s not “wow, you look great, how was your decade?” Now it’s “I’m glad you got that mole looked at” and “I love the colours you chose to paint your garden shed”.
But then that familiarity might lead to deeper conversations about things that matter at this, the (hopefully) halfway point of our lives.
What do you think? Has Facebook wrecked or improved reunions?
End note: Dunbar’s number
On a vaguely related note, I was interested to learn that Julie’s high school class had never, to her knowledge had a high school reunion. She graduated from a big high school, with more than a thousand people in her grad class. As I mentioned, mine was 150, which reminded me of Dunbar’s number. When I graduated, I knew the name and face of every student in my class, so that probably makes us more inclined to reconnect later in life.
Yesterday I was reading this list of things that babies born in 2011 will never do, and was struck by this one:
Forgotten friends: Remember when an old friend would bring up someone you went to high school with, and you’d say, “Oh yeah, I forgot about them!” The next generation will automatically be in touch with everyone they’ve ever known even slightly via Facebook.
That’s an idea that’s been kicking around in my head for a while. The web makes it increasingly difficult to close a chapter in your life. Whether that’s coming out of the closet or just leaving middle school, the increasingly detailed memory of the web means that artifacts and relationships of your previous chapter will follow you, possibly forever.
Today, of course, you can manage your privacy settings in Facebook and LinkedIn, and block people on Twitter, but the trend is toward more openness and findability for individuals online.
There’s value in forgetting and moving on, isn’t there? Whether it’s just a high school bully or an overly-clingy college roommate, there are always people we want to leave behind. And I think there’s a certain cognitive burden in being that findable, or even being able to find just about anybody from your whole life. The web’s long term memory is going to make that harder and harder to do.
Do you think we’re better off remembering everything, or selectively forgetting?
Incidentally, if you got a message from me in the last half-hour or so that looks like this, don’t click any of the links. I received this from a known Facebook friend, but clearly I should have worked a little harder to parse the title.
I think was just on autopilot. Bastard spammers. Eternal vigilance, and all that:
I subsequently received another similar message from another successfully-phished friend, though this one was for the even stranger sounding “Home Income Time”. Dear me.
I have a small problem. I really like the World Cup. Yet the games are played in the morning, with the last game finishing up shortly after lunch. I sometimes watch one game in the morning, but I have to record the rest and watch later in the day as time permits. I also occasionally do this for hockey games, particularly eastern ones that begin at 4:00pm here on the West Coast.
Of course, I spend a lot of time online, working and playing in the real-time, flow-oriented social web. So there’s a high risk of my learning the outcome of sports events before I get to watch them. I’ve heard similar complaints from people who time-shift television shows–the finale of Lost, for example, or the season premiere of True Blood.
I address this problem by going very light on Twitter, Facebook and, uh, high-risk blogs until I’ve watched whatever I recorded.
Smart Filters to Avoid Disappointment
There arevariousapps which offer muting functionality for individual keywords or users. What I could really use is a view of Twitter and Facebook that magically removes all messages related to, say, the World Cup.
How would we achieve this? The simplest route would be using bundles of related keywords as a filter, maybe gathered through a crowdsourced process. For the World Cup, we might block all country names and team nicknames for starters. Then maybe common terms like ‘goal’, ‘keeper’ and so forth. Next you’d probably want to block all player names. This presents an immediate problem, as you’re filtering out a bunch of common names like Lee, Kim, James and Green.
Ideally, I guess you want a service that can algorithmically discern between “Blimey, England keeper Robert Green concedes an easy goal” and “Blimey, our England office is never going to make our goal of going green this quarter.” Presumably the service would track a user’s historic data, too, and adjust the prediction based on the likelihood that they’re talking about soccer.
Occasionally I have odd little ideas. Sometimes I actually do them, sometimes I just write about them or sometimes I disregard them out of hand. The other day I had the notion to create a Twibbon–a little add-on to your Twitter and Facebook avatars–for Ivory Coast, the World Cup team I’ve decided to support. You can see it on my Twitter avatar.
Then I thought it would be fun to make avatars for the other 31 teams participating in the World Cup. James helped out, and we went to Photoshop Town. If you, like me and most of the rest of the planet, are excited about the upcoming tournament, you can find your team and Twibbon it up.
To me, it feels like 2009 was a banner year for infographics. Those sometimes-beautiful, always-intricate images that help us understand big or complex topics used to be the strict purview of news channels and textbooks. Now they’re everywhere. What’s to blame? Freer access to source data, simpler creation tools and bigger monitors? I’m not really sure, but I’ve never seen an infographic that I didn’t like.
Huh. All of those were about the web. For designers and site publishers alike, there’s a deep vein here for link bait around industry-specific infographics.
