
The end of social - tortilla
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/12/the-end-of-social.html
======
cageface
Increasingly I see the most important role online to be that of the editor. I
already have far too much information to deal with. The one service I'm
willing to pay real money for at this point is the one that finds only the
very most interesting bits for me. So far this role has really only been
served for me by a handful of genuine friends.

~~~
acabal
That's precisely why while everyone is predicting the death of traditional
publishing houses, I predict that they'll continue to flourish (though in a
slightly transformed state) even with ebooks supposedly leveling the playing
field. In an era where everyone and their grandma can sell their ebook on
Amazon, you need a respected publisher (or "editor" as you put it) to sort
through the coal and present you only with the gems.

This is a role that traditional publishers actively do today!

~~~
Turing_Machine
I disagree. That's what "people who bought this book also bought that book" is
for.

~~~
zasz
Yeah, also bloggers. Reading books and then writing reviews is the kind of
thing people will do for fun.

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kmfrk
For those interested, a tangentially related article, "Faux Friendship"[1] by
Willian Deresiewicz, is one of my all-time-favourite online articles, which I
urge everyone to read.

It's long, but worth it.

[1]: <http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/>

~~~
chunky1994
This article is spot on! Brilliant stuff! Thank you!

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moocow01
I couldn't agree with this article more. Due to the awkwardness around not
accepting a friend invite, my Facebook consists of just about everyone I've
ever known in my life. It is convenient to have an easy channel to track
someone down if you need to talk to them but the wall has become completely
unusable to me. The combination of 1) having too many people that I don't have
real relationships with on Facebook 2) many of my _friends_ ' postings of very
low value things (ex. I'm eating an apple right now) 3) the increased usage of
auto-updates (ex. I'm listening to 'Rihanna'), Facebook has turned into a
wasteland of posts where about 1 / 500 updates are actually useful to me and
finding that 1 is no longer worth it. I know the natural response to this is
that I should be organizing my friends better but I'm not sure that this is a
solution, because I have certain friends that will post 'low value' updates
and then post something very 'high value' (value meaning somehow interesting
to me). So the first problem for Facebook is trying to figure out how to
cherry pick the good posts to show me and this in itself is incredibly
difficult. But the problem gets exponentially harder as I add more friends
(which will continue to happen to avoid awkward moments in the real world)
assuming that I only have time to read X number of updates. In other words if
on average every friend has 1 / 100 high value updates, the chance of Facebook
getting it right and getting that high value update into the 100 updates I
read every day gets lower as I add more friends and there is more noise to
filter. It seems to me that there may be a bell curve to the usefulness of
Facebook based on your friend count - in the beginning it is marginally useful
when you only have a few friends, it becomes very useful when you have some
magical conservative number of friends and then it becomes again marginally
useful as your friend count gets very high. The problem is that keeping your
friend count at that magical number and not progressing past that is very
difficult.

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jcr
Two relevant papers (a few links away from the oreilly.com article)

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1826825>

<http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DAED_a_00114>

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hansef
Social streaming creates white noise, while curated social sharing provides
meaning. Having the devices in a hundred friends' pockets passively alert
their social profile that they ate at a burger joint is meaningless. Having my
friend tweet a photo of the mouthwatering burger she ate at the Umami Burger
in my neighborhood at least provides some level of ambient value.

I listen to a lot of new music. My Spotify account is linked to Facebook.
Seeing an automatically posted list of the last 70 songs I listened to might
be interesting to a stalker, but having me specifically post "Bah, the new
Weeknd mixtape isn't nearly as good as House of Balloons" actually tells you
something about my taste.

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jderick
I'm going to disagree here. One important distinction with automated sharing
is that it is being displayed in a sidebar, outside the main feed. It isn't
just adding spam. It is allowing you to dive deeper, see some details that
maybe your friends wouldn't have thought to share with you but maybe you would
have been interested to know anyway. If you are in a hurry and just want the
big events of the day you won't read it. But if you are just relaxing with
nothing to do or feel like reading something a little different maybe you will
learn something new about one of your friends.

In the same way that facebook let people 'send emails' that didn't have to be
read, these sidebar updates allow you to 'post statuses' that don't have to be
looked at. It is adding a new priority level to communication. Kind of like
the background music in a coffeeshop, you wouldn't say you go there just for
the music, but you definitely appreciate the ambiance and the music is
something that adds up to make that experience.

~~~
Qz
_It is adding a new priority level to communication._

The 'this doesn't matter' priority?

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jcromartie
I'd like to see the end of the use of the word "social" as an uncountable
noun.

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nextparadigms
He actually means the "end of Facebook". There will be other social services
to take its place, just like Facebook took the place of Myspace. Those
services probably already exist, just like Facebook existed years before
Myspace even started to lose users.

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tewolde
I agree, it will definitely be the doom of Facebook or any other social
network if it does not let users easily differentiate between sharing and
faux-sharing. It will be like an email account that can't filter out spam.

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guard-of-terra
I wonder why people write their opinions on facebook music experience sharing
without mentioning that last.fm already solved this problem at least once and
the solution was a meaningful product that worked for some people. In this
context, reading claims like "a constant pipeline of what's queued up in
Spotify, it all becomes meaningless" make me laugh. People figured it out and
it wasn't meaningless.

If they don't know about last.fm, why do they bother? They obviously don't
care about music very much.

~~~
Alexia
The whole point of Last.fm is that you get stats on your listening habits (and
those of your friends). The realtime thing is just how the system collects the
stats. Besides, even there, my friends' "Now playing" stuff in never bigger
than a small icon on the side. It's not the core of the site.

Facebook, with Spotify, gives you the useless part (the "Now playing") without
the good part (the advanced stats, recommandations, music compatibility, etc)

~~~
guard-of-terra
That's the fact any seamless sharing reviewer should mention.

Others have figured out, the world doesn't end with facebook.

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chadyj
I agree that lots of random sharing data can be useless, but I think it is
only useless in its current form. There is a great deal of data to be
intelligently mined there.

For example, I wish Facebook told me aggregate info, like 12 of my friends are
reading X book, and 15 listen to Y song, and 5 have liked Z restaurant. To me
this is a lot more compelling as I can see real trends in what my social
circle is consuming.

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jronkone
In other words, automated "now playing" scripts are as annoying and useless on
social media as they were on irc and and instant messengers.

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weichi
Interesting article, and as a forty-year-old who doesn't use facebook, it
makes sense to me.

But I wonder whether 20 year-olds who have been immersed in this kind of thing
for 3-4 years would agree. And what today's 13-year-olds will think then
_they_ are 20, and this has been a part of their entire post-childhood..

~~~
Zirro
Well, as a nineteen-year old (quite soon to be 20) I can say that I don't care
much for the Facebook ticker (the "share everything" list), nor do my friends
seem to.

I agree with this article, but I may not represent the "average" Facebook-
visitor, considering I barely read my friends updates, create updates of my
own or play Facebook-games. (I visit for two groups which I participate
actively in)

Sharing everything takes the value out of it, and I think most people, 20-year
olds or not, would agree. Perhaps that's why I've stopped checking what my
friends are saying, my interests are already way too specialised for me to
have any interest in what they blast out to everyone.

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frossie
Good piece. It is not far off from the things people like danah boyd have been
saying. The exchange of personal information is a unit of social currency. If
you treat it like it has no value, then it becomes of no value. Editorial
effort, on the other hand, both adds value and also signals value.

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twmb
This has been posted by andygeers 5 days ago.

/item?id=3315065

It's currently on page 7 of the top.

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lhnn
Writing a letter, is much more personal than sending email or texting. It
means you've taken time out of your day to sit down, plan out your thoughts,
put them in a package and pay to have it shipped to someone personally.

Or how a cheap, thoughtful gift means more than a $100 bill at Christmas.

It's the effort, the thought, that really counts.

