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."