A twit no more. Disconnected from the hive.
Yesterday, drowning in a sea of updates, I disconnected from the Twitter hive. Its constant stream of free-form presence updates has undeniable appeal, but the sheer volume of information, coupled with the lack of mediation tools, has made it unmanageable for me.
I briefly flirted with Jaiku. In addition to the updates, it also aggregates feeds for a user, letting you collect RSS feeds, presence information, and status updates all in one place. So few people I know use Jaiku, however, that that flirtation was short lived.
So I've turned to facebook. Facebook has the appeal of Jaiku's feed aggregation, coupled with Twitter's short form status updates. It also provides deeper tools than Twitter or Jaiku for managing which updates end up being delivered to your mobile, and which not, which solves the "sea of updates" problem for me. Facebook gives you very fine control over which updates and from which users are delivered as text messages, versus accessible only online.
Best of all? Apparently my whole network already knew about facebook. When I loaded my contact database into it to see who I knew on facebook, I had an instant friends network of nearly 200 people.
Whatever the category represented by Twitter and Jaiku, facebook seems to have already conquered it.
May 2nd, 2007 at 8:53 am
[...] May 2nd, 2007 in Messaging, Mobile Life, Social Networking  Interesting post from Alec Saunders.. Is this a new [...]
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:31 am
You will be missed on Jaiku & (much less on Twitter). I understand your desire for selective updates as it goes in line with “new presence”. However that brings a lot of ? to my brain.
Incredible how traction is hard to sustain in these social networking environment.
Will I see you around in Second Life soon? Later - Martin
May 2nd, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Alec,
Interesting post and decision. Somewhat ties in nicely with something I wrote today how our communication is increasingly moving back into separate “walled gardens” such as Facebook, Twitter and Jaiku:
http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2007/05/facebook_myspac.html
It’s definitely an interesting time… and it’s a struggle to figure out where best to spend one’s time and energy. Congrats on at least making a decision in that regard!
Dan
May 7th, 2007 at 12:23 am
[...] May 06, 2007 A twit no more. Disconnected from the hive. — Alec Saunders .LOG Tags: [...]
May 7th, 2007 at 7:17 am
[...] A twit no more. Disconnected from the hive. — Alec Saunders .LOG (tags: twitter facebook myspace web20) [...]
December 12th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Alec,
I think you should reconsider!
Cheers
Stuart