Social Media / Networking

Inspired by twitter blaming @scobleizer for their stability problems I have decided to use him as a scapegoat for everything.

I've been sitting here today reading tweets and posts from folks preparing for tomorrow's twit-out as they try to synchronize their twitter and friendfeed / jaiku / pounce / brightkite / other messaging platform lists and it's occurred to me that we've created nightmare when it comes to managing our social graphs, the process of re-adding all your friends / buddies / people you follow / etc is painful at best and impossible at worst.  As I join new services I find myself bouncing into my favorite followers websites, friendfeed, etc to see if they have mentioned using whatever the new service is.  To be honest a good part of the reason people don't leave twitter is they don't need to recreate their social graph elsewhere.

OK, just joined brightkite (http://brightkite.com/people/nibbler) feel free to add me, if you want.  After using it in Austin, TX this coming week I'll write up how I feel about it.  Although if people could stalk me before, now they can show up where I am at any given moment.

Now, all I need is the API so I can really play.

Some posts this evening about a twitter boycott scheduled for 5/21 to protest the outages at twitter.  Where I'm all for protests that have some meaning, I really don't understand this one.  As far as I'm concerned a protest makes sense when a company's customers feel that the company is willfully mistreating them.  A perfect example of this is the livejournal protest from last month.  LJ users felt that adding adverting without notifying them was unfair and protested.  Whether the protest was successful or not, is another question, not for this post.

So, I might seem to be the most fickle blogger on the planet but I am turning Disqus back on. There are a few things driving this:

Although this mentions Religion, it is really a Tech / soc networking post.

The other day I had a "conversion class" at Church with a group of people who are looking to either be received into the Church or for Adult Confirmation.  As we were leaving I mentioned to a couple of folks that someone reached my blog by goggleing "tom synan conversion" (Tom Synan was the Priest running the class), and I was curious if it was one of them.  Their answer baffled me, "I've never really understood, what's a blog"?  I resisted the urge to say "google it" and I did my best to explain blogging and the basics of social media. 

One of my tweeps @AnnOhio sent me a post card from her travels and while I was looking at it a flashed back to the QSL cards that HAM radio operators use.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the widening gap between the early adopter and average users in the social media space (in particular order here, here, here, and here are a few).   The posts have been a little angst-y even to the point that you might feel all is lost in the social media space.  Let's go through this.

A couple of folks have asked why I am basically reinventing friendfeed and presenting my lifestream  on seanreiser.com.

So I've been noticing recently an increase in the number of spam accounts adding me on twitter. I won't link the accounts here, mostly out of a desire not to give them any google juice. These accounts are generally, obviously spam (all posts are related to stocks, "that certain part of the male body", selling die cast cars, etc, etc) and link to some product or service. Some twitter spam-y accounts I do subscribe to (The twitupdates account springs to mind), because I find value in them, it's providing a service I like so it's more bacon like then spam.