by Andy DeSoto on July 28, 2008
If the Internet were a royal bloodline, it’d make for one great chapter in a history book. Way back when content was king, the merit alone of an essay, video, or song was enough to warrant its success. As the months passed, however, and the amount of great material online skyrocketed exponentially, content wasn’t enough– great material needed great conversation surrounding it to ensure it truly stood out.
The evolution hasn’t stopped there, though: with time, more and more services have emerged to provide unique ways for Internet users to be creative. To help cope with the myriads of similar existing services, aggregation emerged as a method of tying one’s individual content and conversations together into one coherent bundle.
Yet the Web continues to grow. As more content and conversation is aggregated, aggregation services have even arisen to sort out the aggregates, resulting in an almost overwhelming firehose of social media noise. We need an innovator– fast– to keep us from drowning in information that is extraneous, duplicate, meaningless, or offensive.
Fortunately for the Internet, we have that innovator: FriendFeed. This new-age service has revealed to us the true ‘fourth generation’ of social media value: filtering.
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by Andy DeSoto on July 11, 2008
This just in: my favorite social aggregator, Socialthing!, now supports the following splendid services:
In a July 9 blog post, Matt Galligan introduced these new features, the first to be added since the Socialthing! 2.0 release mid-June.
It sounds like there may still be a few issues the team needs to work through, though, warns Heidi Cool: “Incoming its only showing my Plurks. Outgoing is supposed to work but I’m not getting the option to post.”
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by Andy DeSoto on July 9, 2008
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” - Steve Jobs
Face it: in the digital age, your time is one of your most precious commodities. Never in the known history of the world has a culture needed to perceive, process, and act on information to the extent each and every one of us must today.
Unfortunately for us, though, the same tools that bring human beings together over generations, cultures, and continents—social networking and social media sites—can devour hours and hours of our limited spare time. As our involvement in different services and sites gets more involved and complex, it’s easy to spend exponentially more energy online if our habits go unchecked.
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