My guess on this subject is that we'll start (are starting) to think a bit less about the particular services we're using, or rather we'll piece together what we want from lots of services that knit together ever more neatly. This will let everyone tailor their Twitter experience to their tastes, or perhaps choose a different micro-blogging or IM service and plug it in in place of Twitter. Perhaps OAuth will make interoperability between them a reality, or perhaps everyone will start using FriendFeed or Netvibes or something to hook their communities together.
It's true that we have often seen social sites show a surge of growth and then gradual rot (or perhaps just slower growth). Think Friends Reunited, MySpace, perhaps Facebook. Perhaps this is more complex than just being best for the early adopters and then becoming rubbish, though. Actually the network effects need a certain scale in the first place. Also, it's a bit like the earlier days of the web when "portal" services tried to do everything and control everything, and do it from one place; for a while this was OK and then people realised that AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, their BT home page etc were actually rubbish and they could go out there and get the experience they wanted from lots of different services. Google, for one (and yes, I realise that Goohovah also wants all your base, but its services are all available discreetly and can be embedded and exploited from other contexts)
Back to the present, and Facebook may be "web 2.0" but it has that olden-days portal feel, and only if it opens up more will it survive; it's too much of a walled garden right now. That may work OK for MySpace, up to a point, since it has a particular slant with a critical mass of musicians, but for a generic social networking site it can't go on forever. That's why I think that more atomic services like Twitter than people can use to compose their own experience out of bits and pieces will keep on appearing, as will things that glue them together. I expect that services will appear to help you filter out the crap or focus on what you like. Think about how bit.ly and the like have developed symbiotically with Twitter. As long as Twitter keeps focussed on the core offer of simple, short messages and lets everyone else build houses of all sorts from those simple bricks it can remain useful. That's my optimistic take, anyway. Quite how we shield ourselves from becoming vulnerable through dependence on a single service I dunno.
Cheers, Jeremy
________________________________
From: Museums Computer Group on behalf of HARRIS TONY
Sent: Fri 07/08/2009 10:17
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] twitter's down...
>'Social Networking' is about being in at the beginning and getting out before *everyone* joins, because when everyone joins it stops being exciting and becomes mundane, >noisy and spammy.
As maybe the PM found to his cost on YouTube?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/dailypolitics/andrewneil/2009/04/gordons_youtube_blunder.html
Once Government joins the foray does that mean it is now 'mundane, >noisy and spammy'? I ask this because we are currently in the final stages of redeveloping our website, (http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk <http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/> ) a central government website and once the new site goes live we will only be using sharethis initially. I personally feel that social networking can be useful for us, but also I feel like 'we are jumping on the bandwagon after the horse has bolted' and it does feel a bit contrived. But, I suppose if you don't try you won't get any results, whatever we do it will need to be focused around our audience.
Tony Harris
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tony Crockford
Sent: 07 August 2009 08:36
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: twitter's down...
On 6 Aug 2009, at 16:43, Ottevanger, Jeremy wrote:
> Or perhaps we'll just wait for Twitter to recover again!
for anyone considering an official twitter presence, this 20 page strategy for government departments might be interesting:
http://neilojwilliams.net/missioncreep/2009/how-to-write-a-corporate-twitter-strategy-and-heres-one-i-made-earlier/
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