Social connections

From Open, Connected, and Social

1 Insanely Social Connectivity
2 Crowd Theory
3 One Click Make a Contact
4 A Tale of Two Networking Experiences
5 Looking More at Twitter- As a Phenomenon, as a Small Piece Loosely Joined
6 Twitter Publishing/Viewing Tools
7 Interesting in Twitterspace
8 Warning, Warning

Insanely Social Connectivity

We are the network.

Crowd Theory

One Click Make a Contact

For me, flickr has always been the stellar example of web 2.0-ish aspects in a well designed wrapper. and the way it enables social connections via contacts could not be easier. From here, you can easily get a quick look at the recent photos form your contacts, jump to comment on them, get an RSS feed, embed them in other web pages... all the right stuff.

A Tale of Two Networking Experiences

"If I Fall Into One More Social Network Tool I’m Going To Scream Like a Banshee" - LinkedIn is an online network of experienced professionals from around the world. When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. In most social network apps, like adding a flickr contact, you get to their profile, click add contact, and it takes care of the communication to the target. In LinkedIn, I am presented a web form.. and I have to drudge out from somewhere the email address of the person I am trying to add and type it in the field. If I am in a hurry and do not customize the message, they get some trite canned message that sure must feel like spam in the inbox. The recipient then has to click a link from the email to accept the invite. There is no syndication of content outside the site, no ability to communicate into the site (my LinkedIn profile)

Twitter is something different all together - a service to post short (140 character) posts of what you are doing at the moment, with the ability to post form the web, a phone, IM. When you add contacts, you see everyone's activity in one flowing stream, and engage in multilayers of conversation. In twitter, like flickr, creating a contact is as simple as clicking a single link. (my twitter profile).

Looking More at Twitter- As a Phenomenon, as a Small Piece Loosely Joined

Is this the modern version of the Dullest Blog in the World?

Cole Camplese on Twitter Me "The idea of wasting time to update the mundane seemed not only silly, but almost downright stupid. But then I got an account, asked a bunch of co-workers to get accounts, and started to think out loud with them about how we could use this. I am now seeing Twitter as a very interesting tool set for a whole host of things … a bunch of them are around organizational dynamics, structure, project tracking, and other on the job kinds of things."

D'Arcy Norman Calls it "nanoblogging" ... "more of a quick 'I'm doing this right now' kind of status update rather than a blog post. You create a set of 'friends' and get to see updates in almost realtime of what they're up to. Right now... What's kind of cool is that it makes it easy for me to track what I'm doing, so when it's time to do the Dreaded Procrastinated Timesheet Entry mere hours before the payroll cutoff, I could just spider the list of archived updates. '

Ross Mayfield describes it well -- "Twitter, in a nutshell, is mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network. You can use it with SMS (sending a message to 40404), on the web or IM. A darn easy API has enabled other clients such as Twitterific for the Mac. Twitter is Continuous Partial Presence, mostly made up of mundane messages in answer to the question, “what are you doing?” A never-ending steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own. Messages are more ephemeral than IM presence — and posting is of a lower threshold, both because of ease and accessibility, and the informality of the medium."

There is almost a predictable adoption curve seen in people who approach twitter. (This graphic is a nod of appreciation to the design and ideas of Kathy Sierra's magnificent blog Creating Passionate Users)

Comment from Cole Camplese "Sorry about Twitter, but there is something interesting there. Funny, it has gotten me back into participating with the blogosphere … the ad hoc nature and the instant stream of updates has me bouncing around like I haven’t in quite some time. A lot of my twitter friends are sending quick thoughts with links that are pushing me all over the place. It is fun, but is addicting at an alarming level."

Narcissystem still growing rapidly (Robert Scoble) "Steven Hodson chimes in with a 'blogosphere reality check' and says we’re all living in a bubble: The reality is though that outside of our little insular world of blogs and co-presence what we do has no importance. My answer? Why is Steven blogging then? Ahh, he’s just as narcissistic as the rest of us! The narcissists talking to other narcissists."

Twitter Tips the Tuna Many to Many -- "On Wednesday, Twitter tipped the tuna. By that I mean it started peaking. Adoption amongst the people I know seemed to double immediately, an apparent tipping point. It hasn’t jumped the shark, and probably won’t until Steven Colbert covers this messaging of the mundane. As Twitter turns 1 on March 13th, not only is there a quickening of users, but messages per user."

Twitter Publishing/Viewing Tools

Twitter's Badges (both Flash and JavaScript) that can be copy/pasted to any web site.
- example- students collaborating on horizon project post their activity in twitter, published in wikispaces site
Twitterific The most awesome twitter tool-- for Mac OSX
All twitter accounts have RSS feeds
- Nancy White's Twitter RSS feed
Alex King's Twitter Tools for integrating WordPress and Twitter
TwitThis enables others to tweet your content (like Digg This)
Twitter / Second Life Mashup or TwitterBox
rss to twitter publishes any rss feed to a twitter account