Breaking Twitter for the making it fitter (see also: Google+ and possibly others...if there were others)

BLOT: (27 Sep 2011 - 02:10:21 PM)

Breaking Twitter for the making it fitter (see also: Google+ and possibly others...if there were others)

I have now used Twitter since, shoot, I don't know. At least since a couple of Mays ago. I like it. Sort of. I use it more than any other social network, probably more than any other communication device outside of email (mostly for work, website communiques, and business transactions), Gtalk (my friends Allen and Becca and my brother Danny), and SMS (mostly to ask my mom how she is doing and to send stupid comments to Allen and my sister-in-law, Alicia). I stick doggedly to long-form communication, but I neither well feedback the blogs I read nor regularly get feedbacked for my own blogginations, so that is not so much communication as outpouring with a mutual respect to ingest said outpourings from others. We stand, apart and alone, dancing our own dance and knowing, when it matters, someone else is dancing not with us, but over there, in their corner, at the same time as us and sometimes that is as best a "with" as this life gives. A relationship best summed up by the fact that, when measured out, the distance from you to I is the exact same as the distance from me to you. Daily greets!

I am a big believer in the growing domination of social sites in the same way that I am a big believer that if I throw a golf ball up in the air it would follow a certain arc back to the ground, roofs nor invisible forcefields nor a catcher notwithstanding. Right now, social sites are built like grocery stores [see: the fact you currently need Facebook to sign up to Spotify, and their defense of "As most of our users are already social..."]. It behooves them to make it hard for you to navigate. You get your click on and they get their advertisement clicks on and along the way you add five new friends and eventually you forget how to function when not knee deep in a ghost of a satire of social interaction. The fact that social sites, in their current form (Friendster, Orkut, Myspace, Facebook) have been around long enough to know better, and yet their search and interaction features are at all time high of enforced serendipity, clutter, and link scrounging suggests that they have learned it is better to cripple than to free. As user spejic said in a comment to a BoingBoing post this morning about Facebook tracking sites you are on even when you are not on Facebook: "If you are not paying money, you are never the customer." Take a moment to think about how true that is.

In fact, I would rather pay for my social sites. Use the Livejournal model. Charge me a nominal fee, with a discount for buying it a year a time, to give me more options, few-to-no advertisements, and the ability to tweak my experience to my expectations. I would love to pay $3 a month for Twitter if that meant I could do away with things like "Who to Follow" and "Trending Topics" (SKINNER BOX!) and have a better Direct Messaging interface and a much better method to handling lists versus following. Toss in the ability to back up my own tweets and I am sold. I would almost, almost, go as high as $5 a month for those options, if you guaranteed my tweets were opted out of whatever marketing data system Twitter is using to pay for itself.

At any rate, the past couple of days have seen me hacking away at my Twitter account and my Google+ account. I don't suppose I have any other real social sites, except Livejournal, which I am satisfied with, and my Delicious and LinkedIn accounts which I mostly ignore. My goal is fairly simple: I want to bottleneck the stream of noise into a few purer sources of signal, I want to prioritize certain streams over others, I want the streams to be diversified enough that they can function as mood themes, and I want the individual streams to be structured so I am off social sites for a few days it is not too hard to catch up. Rather than dig through dozens of celebrity posts and reposts, I need to see what the people I love are doing. Rather than dig through pages of useless data, I need a way to spot important data, decided by my metric and not by some algorithm that another company finds for me. This last aspect is the hard part. With Twitter, I could design my own app and then use filters and a hardcore list of most important people. With other sites, I usually have to flow against their decisions to get to the meat. I'll keep working on it, though.

In Google+, I set up a series of Circles with fun Lovecraftian names that sort my friends effectively into "Those I love, but not necessarily like" [Esoteric Order of Dagon], "Those I like but not necessarily love" [Innsmouth], "Those on down the road who are ok outside of the inbreeding" [Dunwich], Celebrities [Order of the Silver Twilight Lodge], work related [Miskatonic U.], and people I barely known [Plateau of Leng]. As of right now, all my posts on G+ are going to be circle only. It's not too hard to get into Leng, so to speak, but I mainly need G+ to be a place where I dick around with friends until some time when the Miskatonic U. Circle actually becomes more important and then my posts will likely either be with Miskatonic U. or without it. I refuse to collude work, friends, family, old church groups, and so forth into one choked stream of data not meant for any of them.

For Twitter, I thought about matching the sort of Circle set up I was developing for G+ but decided to take a different approach. While the Circles represent how I interact with the others and how I would like them to interact with me, with Twitter I decided to set up certain themes. Since about the beginning of Twitter lists, I have had a "Friends" list [originally it was called XtreemFriends as kind of a joke] that kept the most important users grouped together. It was a private list and one I edited kind of often to get it down to the just the important bits. Then I followed tons of others that never would have been on the list. Well, recently I went "Screw that" and unfollowed everyone not on that list. Screw following people I don't care to follow. I like keeping up with some celebrities and so forth, sure, but if I am developing tools to get around them how about, instead, I develop tools to treat them as an appendix? Most, but not all, of the people I unfollowed got sorted into a series of lists. All of which are now private. I have a list for TV personalities and British comedians, and one for Books and Horror talk, and one for stores/products, and one for News. The idea is that I can, once a day or so, check out those lists and those that I like the most I can check a couple of times a day, and all the while my Twitter feed updates much, much more slowly but I don't actually skip any of the content.

Now we come to the part where I give it a month or so, and by this I mean quite literally a month, and I'll go from there. If the Circle thing doesn't work out, I'll reforge my G+ back to its original intent: a place only for my close friends. If the List thing doesn't work out, oh well...I'll probably just delete the lists and keep only following the people that I like. One day soon, social sites will have nothing to do with following people you like and be all about following virtually every one else, but I'm crotchety, and I'm old, and you can get off my lawn.

CREDITS: Butterfly Net Clipart from http://butterflywebsite.com/clipart/constructtable.cfm.

The Internet

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: September 2011

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