minor jive

Different social media spaces have different norms. You may not be able to describe them, but you sure can feel them. Finding the space the clicks with you is often tricky, just as finding a voice in a new setting can be. This is not to say that one space is better than the other. I don’t believe that at all. But I do believe that Facebook and Twitter are actually quite culturally distinct and that trying to create features to bridge them won’t actually resolve the cultural differences.

apophenia: Some thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates (via funsize) (via soupsoup)

What’s funny is that Twitter basically just took an idea from AOL 4.0 where you could update your “status”… which around 1999 turned to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM or iChat) where you updated your status at all times with tricks like #d for date or #t for time if you were slick. It really became useful when AIM was used in combination with Napster when I started college, because you could easily find people on AIM you could then find them on Napster if you had their name and get all of their music.

Then MySpace had status updates, then Facebook had status updates, then Twitter took that single piece of each of those sites and made it their entire business model. There’s a reason they aren’t making any money off of it…. because MySpace and Facebook are doing it while offering a lot more (with photos, groups, fan pages, suggested friends and many different ways of connecting. The only reason Twitter took off as a service is in the Web 9.0 era, people jump on whatever is “next” and “new” regardless of overall benefit of the service. Twitter should thank Shaq and Ashton Kutcher for their popularity, but I predict the drop off from Twitter will be even more drastic than MySpace’s… and that place is a digital ghetto.

(via rillawafers)

No no no, don’t be so cynical. Twitter took off because it is different in three crucial ways: mobile, API, and asymmetrical follow. Those are huge differences. Asymmetrical follow is a key point of danah boyd’s article — it creates a scale-free network that friend networks like AIM, MySpace, and Facebook can never create.

(via caterpillarcowboy)

Source: funsize