In the past few weeks, I've had talked with late 30s-40-something friends who express disdain and frustration with both Facebook and LinkedIn.

These friends feel that Facebook is not really usefully, too diffuse, and most of the applications on it are a waste of time, which means it is great if you want to waste time, but not as a tool. Other friends (and sometimes the same friends) are also not hot on LinkedIn.  They like it better, because it has great critical mass in the job field, but they're frustrated by the clunkiness of the search, the cumbersome communications tools, and what they see as the employment-specific narrowness of the experience.

I'm an active FB and LinkedIn user, and I find them to be invaluable, but that's because I use them as explicit directories. In other words, when I meet people I'd like to stay connected to (and remember how to contact them and who they are) I add them to FB and Linked In.

LinkedIn works as a professional rolodex for me, a list of people I am connected to that allows me to see what they are doing and have done and how to reach them.

FB also keeps me connected, but that's the color wash on the black and white LN listing--if it's someone I've met briefly, FB can bring them to life as a more 3-D person--someone who updates their news feed, likes particular kinds of sports and music, and--often--shares friends with me.

Basically, what this means is that  I use these two services to create explicit social network directories--listings and contact management that provide useful and interesting records of people I meet.

Interestingly, one could argue--and I will--that the biggest wasted effort is email. Your email list--particularly the people you message, as opposed to the people (and spambots) that message you--is a rich contact list, but the data attached to each person is pretty much buried. There's no way to know that smernit@gmail.com is me, and to assemble the meta data about who I am that will provide as rich a picture (and not feel totally stalkerly) as LinkedIn and Facebook can.

(And yes, I know people have been talking--and trying--for years now--to build email out as the basis for a social network, and that *smart* email is one of the so called Next Big Things--just show me the products and the people using them, folks).

"I find the colloquialism "You must join the conversation" a tired phrase legacy of 2006. It's overused, oversold, thrown around and just not accurate."

--Blogger Jeremiah Oywwang, Web Strategist, writing about how rankings, ratings, and even reading can be among the greatest behaviors within a community.

I seem destined to have back and forth discussions with Steve Hodson, who picked up something I wrote yesterday about becoming more engaged with twitter and friendfeed than I have been. Steve's a really eloquent, persuasive writer, and I was engaged in reading the piece when I got to this statement that just stopped me:
"While blogging has been heralded as the new news medium there are those of the early adopter crowd who have used blogging as a way for them to have conversations but blogging was never meant to be the end point where they would stay. In the meantime though they attracted the most attention and as a result those of us that wanted to make blogging a career had to work even harder to get noticed."

So, did Steve just say the following:

• People who started blogging a few years ago (2003 for me) are making it hard for people like Steve to get noticed?
• Non-professional bloggers (like me) should get out of the way of people who want to be professional bloggers (like Steve?)
• and, finally
• Those old folks in the early adopter crowd didn't really have the committment to keep blogging, unlike Steve who is called to the vocation so deeply he wants to make his living from it?

Say it ain't so, you of short vision and big hubris, who make lots of silly and incorrect assertions here.

• First of all dude, what is a "professional" blogger? Someone who wants to live on the AdSense pennies they collect? Someone who starts a blog publishing network?
• Second, you're bitching because there are people who started blogging before you who get in the way of your getting noticed? Bah!  Blogging is a  cream rises to the top process, not a who's the best looking dude of the three left on the desert island. Scarcity does not relate to quality, face life and take a deep breath. (Your friend Corvida is a great example of that--she's super talented and now widely read--and when did she start, six months ago?)
• You imply that the writing that non "professional" bloggers do just makes noise, and you say tha FF and twitter make it  easier for "professional" bloggers to rise above the noise because those loud fools just go over there. Steve, this sounds alot like the "I belong to a special priesthood and you stay away from my clubhouse" that old time journalists did  and as such it is utter bullshit.

Summary of what Susan thinks:

• Steve is a smart guy with good ideas whose blog I enjoy.
• This particular post is full of bull hooey and mistaken assertions.

For the past four years, my pattern has been to get up early, have breakfast, check email, read, blog, and walk the dog, not always in that order. Now, that's changing.

Getting up early, check; walking the dog, check; eating breakfast, check--but I'm not blogging. Instead, I'm checking twitter, frendfeed and my email, then switching to facebook.

At that point, I'm 40 minutes into my allotted hour + 10, so this is definitely a behavior-changing pattern.

Here's where the shifts are I want to note and talk about:
a) Relying on social network connections for news.  Jerry Yang might resign? Someone tweeted the link.

b) Treating discourses more like transactions--getting short snippets of broadcast info from people works well in twitter, friendfeed comments.

c) Email is spam and items that need discussion. Notes on wire frames for a remote project need email--meeting for lunch should not (even if it still does.)

d) Blogging is for sharing longer and more thoughtful items (don't fit in a tweet or a bookmark), and posting digital assets--sound.video, images--that don't fit in a twit or SMS format.

Of course, I am still blogging pretty much daily and wil continue to do so, but I'm probably typical of alot of people for whom the blog(which replaced the newspaper online) is no longer the information source I rush to in the morning--now I go to my virtual communities, where people not only tell me how they are, they tell me what they are paying attention to.

How has your attention shifted? Do you fit this pattern? Have another one? Share, please.

"Catering to the need for intellectual stimulation is a little nebulous, but obvious at the same time. Designing the APIs in a particularly elegant way will naturally help bring in the best and the brightest engineers; throwing together something that barely does the job will inevitably turn off the elite. One subtler example: creating "simple" and "power developer" APIs will help the newcomer developers get up to speed very quickly, but not rob the advanced ones of the full power of the platform.

It's worth pointing out that ultimately, until non-advertising business models are devised for social applications (and probably even after they are) valuable distribution (reach + frequency) is going to be the main underlying goal for all developers, commercial and otherwise. The examples above simply illustrate what the platform can do to refine the definition of "valuable distribution" for the developers."

--Max Levchin, Slide, writing about motivating developers in social media applications, aka "games."

"....you define yourself by who you follow. If you only follow your family, that defines you. If you follow a crowd, like I do, that defines you too. One is not necessarily better than the other, you just gotta decide for yourself what kind of inputs you want.

--Robert Scoble, commenting on Friendfeed in a discussion of  to what extent social media can scale, especially with filters like FF, and to what extent plain old pickiness or decisions about how to use these tools will inevitably kick in (ie you can't really get that much out of following, aka scanning, 10,000 people.)

Susan sez: Side point: Each tool has a different purpose and can have different rules and roles for how you use it. I'm still tight with the tweets, open with the blog and FF.

NYTimes columnist David Brooks keeps writing the coolest stuff. Here's some snippets from the latest, on the ascendency of geek culture:

"The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of designers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis."

and

"Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes. They honor him with videos and posters that combine aesthetic mastery with unabashed hero-worship. People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers."

Woke up this morning and read Duncan Riley's right on the money post Blogging 2.0: It's All About the User, and Louis Gray's related and more personal Blogging 2.0 causing friction with 1.0 bloggers.

Duncan talks about attention shift, as I and others have, and then Louis picks up the meme and says: " You can spot those living in Blogging 1.0 as they're the ones railing about keeping all their comments on their blog, and they're the ones saying that FriendFeed or Twitter have absolutely no value, and complaining about the noise."

I found this amusing, because even as it has some truth, it also has that kill your foreforefathers meme that seems both way too old skool and quintessentially male. (As in the young bull elephant fighting the old one for the herd, and so on...)

Seems to be the new--and better way--to go forward--is to educate--and collaborate. That seems to be what has happened as careers blogger Penelope Trunk's launched Brazen Careerist as a new network--she' s teamed up with some 20-something folk, more recent grads, to build a site with far more reach and relevancy than either might have achieved solo.

When Louis says "Those bloggers who accept the changes will have a natural advantage over those who do not. The additional time it takes to engage on FriendFeed, Twitter and other social media sites will absolutely pay off in the end, even if it's hard to understand for those who've always accepted things for what they are," I agree with him. 

And yet, positioning a face off between 1.0 and 2.0 seems so yellow-journalism, drive page views, WWE to me (And I'd like to be hitting 3.0, anyway, myself.)
 
I like Penelope's approach of inclusion, and appreciate how her network is based on bringing in the founders of Employee Evolution, a site dedicated to recent grads and their transition from school to work.
 
Seems to be that folks in our own little social software digital village could benefit from a similar approach, rather than emulate those elephants.

What do you think, folks?

I remember, even a year ago, I felt that I had it sweet with information management. My bloglines reader was full and well-organized, I had techmeme, blogher, and the NYTimes, and I pretty much cold check into flickr and upcoming whenever I felt the need. Plus I got lots o news in my email, and that crazy little thing called Facebook has these new status updates.

Yep, life was sweet.

Flash forward to today. May 2008. First of all, my attention has gotten completely fragmented. At any given moment I allow myself the luxury, I flit between twitter, Facebook, friendfeed, gmail, youtube, techmeme. and whatever else strikes my fancy. In truth, I feel like a high class street cleaner, someone who has to go back and start over the mind she's done cleaning  a particular expanse of road--in other words, scanning my feeds takes way too long, and once I've done it, I wonder if there's something that was added when I was somewhere else that I missed--and therefore, do I need to go back and start over?

Arrgh.

In other words, I'm halfway toward being a total flitterati.

What's a flitterati? It's when you have continuous partial attention for everything and nothing, when a steady diet of comments and 140 word tweets have dieted down your brain to where deep reflection seems impossible.It's when it's too much work to write something long, and when following along on other people's lifestreams takes the place of actually reflecting on what's going on.

Navel-gazing of the third kind, in other words. Only through a digital lens. Extremely fun, but truly broken, and scary if reflection is what you value.

I'll be at the Editor & Publisher conference in Las Vegas for the next couple of days, in support of the Knight Foundation announcement of the 2008 Knight News Challenge winners.

If you're not aware of this Knight program, it's a multi-year grant program that supports innovative ideas that use digital media and technology (mobile, platforms, etc.) to transform local and regional community news and support discourse in the commons. Knight has funded both very location specific projects and much more platform-driven efforts and these efforts have jump-started platform and tool development around local, community, news and even some social justice and accessibility issues,because of how well-distributed the funding has been.

Last year's News Challenge (2007) winners iwent to 25 individuals, and to private and public entitiesthat ranged from individual developers to  MIT to MTV. This year's list of winner's is equally cool, and the announcement of the winners is tomorrow.