Disruptive Conversations

Over on his "Fleet Street" blog, Dave Fleet has put together a great list of the "42 Top Social Media Tips and Tools". Very nicely done list!

(And a tip of the hat to Lee Hopkins for pointing it out.)

Technorati Tags: social media, tools

If you don't yet understand why the walls need to come down between social networks, here is this great video from Michael Pick of Smashcut Media (first seen on Particls.Blog):
DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

Indeed... this kind of portability is exactly what we need. We need to have control over our own information and network. Join the conversation over at DataPortability.org....

Technorati Tags: attention, data portability, dataportability, dataportability.org, identity, social media, social network portability, social networking, social networks, walled gardens

Do you ever go to a website on a frequent basis to see if it has been updated? Do you go to a bookmark you have or click on a toolbar icon or even just type in the URL into your browser address bar?

Do you do that for this website? Do you NOT subscribe to the feed but rather just come here from time to time to see if anything new is here?

If not this site, do you do this for another site? How often do you go and visit the site? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Randomly?

I had an exchange today with someone I greatly respect and in the course of the conversation I realized that the reality is:

I don't really go to any websites these days on a regular basis.

I don't go to friends' websites. (Sorry!) I don't go to my employer's website. I don't go to any organization's websites. I don't go to my city's website. Every once in a while I might hit CNN's web page or a weather site, but that's about it. I do go to Facebook's page and Google Apps pages, but I think of those more as applications and communications services.

I don't have time in my daily work or home schedule... even though going up to my Bookmarks menu, choosing a link and then waiting for the page to load isn't a whole lot of time, it is some time... and if I get there and nothing has changed, it is wasted time. So I don't do it.

The only reason I visit a web site these days is generally if either:
1. The website turns up in a search result.
2. I get notified that there's something interesting there that I should look at.
3. Random times when for some reason I decide to go there, perhaps remembering a URL for a site I wanted to check out.

That's it. (Note that I do get the content of many websites through the ways I mention below, but I don't actually go to those websites and see their page.)

As I think about it, my consumption of information online really comes down to five ways:

1. E-mail, although I get too much of it read it all.
2. Twitter, where I see links from people or services that I follow.
3. RSS feeds where my reader pulls it in and I quickly scan through the posts.
4. Skype persistent group chats where I'm connected to several different groups of people on various topics.
5. Searching for data, typically using Google.

The key thing is that, with the exception of search:

All the data comes to me!

Email is in my inbox, either on my laptop or my Blackberry. Feeds end up in my newsreader. Twitter I usually read in an IM chat window where I can scan it and search it. Skype groupchats I obviously read in Skype. I whip through and scan the info fast, clicking links if I want to see them and potentially firing off replies. I visit web pages only because I've seen an email with info and a link, or someone's twittered the link or posted it in a Skype groupchat... or because of a link in some item in my RSS feeds.

For better or worse (and I can argue philosophically that it might be worse), that's how I consume data. Funny thing is, I know I'm not alone. This is the "Web 2.0" way. Let me pull your data in some way and I'll consume it.

Don't make me go to your website to get updates. I won't.

So if a website has an RSS feed (or a Twitter feed), I'll subscribe and see when there are updates. Otherwise, I'll probably just only go there on random times when I think of it. Which, unfortunately, won't be often. I'm living in the blur.

Are you?

Technorati Tags: twitter, attention, tools, web, web2.0, RSS, feeds, communication, collaboration

As I've written about in the past, I continue to remain concerned that social networks are really just "walled gardens" that are isolated from each other. Late last week, Robert Scoble getting temporarily kicked out of Facebook brought the attention of many of us to "DataPortability.org" and its "dataportability-public" Google Group. Now, today brings word that Facebook, who has usually been a holdout in "open" announcements to date (like OpenSocial) will be joining in to the Dataportability.org project. The news can be found here:

• Particls Blog: "Individuals from Plaxo, Google and Facebook join DataPortability.org Workgroup"
• Read/Write Web: "Bombshell: Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org"
• TechCrunch: "Facebook, Google And Plaxo Join The DataPortability Workgroup"

The news is outstanding, really, for those of us who want this kind of data portability. To have basically all the major players working together will be excellent. It would, indeed, be great to have the walls start coming down...

The devil, of course, lies in the details... time will tell whether true actions will emerge out of the DataPortability.org initiative.

Still, it's a great way to start - and I've definitely joined the GoogleGroup mailing list to join in the evolution. Let's see if the walls can shake a bit, eh?

Technorati Tags: facebook, dataportability.org, dataportability, data portability, social network portability, social networks, social media, social networking, google, plaxo