pownce

The social network pruning series is a collection of brief articles that each cover a technique you may wish to use to keep your social networks at a more manageable size.  The last two tips were #1: Full names only and #2: Eliminate cross-posters.

Social network pruning heuristic #3: Familiarity matters

If you maintain a profile on one or more social networks, you know all too well the time it can take to keep track of your friends’ updates, shared items, and conversations.  It wouldn’t be particularly difficult to stay on top of this social news if there were 48 hours in a day, but it’s not likely that our calendar system will be changing in our favor anytime soon– as educated and intelligent computer users, our time is often more limited than our resources.

As a result of this crunch, it’s in our best interests to ensure we spend time on social networking sites efficiently.  Yesterday, blogger Chris Brogan summed this issue up nicely in a post entitled, “Are You Living Consciously Online?” In it, he asks an important question (as I’m learning all great blog articles do):

How are you spending your time online?  Are you making a difference?

It’s with this that I make my next recommendation for simplifying your social networks: removing individuals that you don’t immediately recognize or recall.

If you’ve spent a prolonged period of time on a networking site, you probably have a good idea of who the major players are in that community, as well as those that contribute meaningful content, participate actively in discussions, or post attractive vacation photos of themselves, depending on what you’re into.  This means that if you scan through your friend list, you’re more likely to recall the contacts that are most meaningful to you because you’ve spent the most time looking at their updates and name.  If you don’t recognize someone, take a look at a few of their previous posts and see if any ring a bell.  If none do, this individual may be contributing to the noise rather than the signal.

In short, use how familiar you are with a contact to judge whether or not you should remain their follower.  If it’s hard recalling anything meaningful they’ve contributed, chances are good the only thing they’ve been contributing is stress.

Just to emphasize the importance of keeping online contacts manageable, here are some great quotes from a discussion that got going on Pownce last night regarding meaningfulness on social networks.  Hopefully these two individuals won’t mind me sharing their thoughts.

Mike Lewis recommends,

“Don’t lose control when it comes to these networks. I took a step back and made myself cut the noise. Its hard but it has to be done sometimes.”

Scott Phillips also adds,

“If someone has added me on Pownce or Twitter and the media posts far outweigh the typed posts, I ditch them, especially if there is no relevancy. I add and remove all the time and I have no issues with people that remove me. It’s all part of building a community.”

Without a doubt, keeping networks in reign is one of the key requirements of keeping them enjoyable.  As these two super-users can attest, being overwhelmed by meaningless content isn’t something anyone is interested in.  Unfollowing unfamiliar individuals on networks is one technique that can help.

Slick.  Sexy.  Simple. Even in its first iteration, Socialthing! has been drawing a heap of attention ever since its inception last March at SXSW, a music and media convention.  Although the service has eliminated more functionality than it’s added in the three months its been around, everything’s about to change for the better in just a few hours when version 2.0 is officially unveiled.

Despite playing (arguably) second fiddle to FriendFeed for a while now, Socialthing!’s provided simple and easy-to-use aggregation services I’ve been unable to find anywhere else on the internet.  The iPhone interface is a work of art, the lifestream is intuitive, and every square inch of the service is a joy to use– the Socialthing! team seems to really know what its doing, but yet they continue to improve upon their already-excellent design.

Writes Ross LaRocco, a 2.0 alpha tester,

“Socialthing! will have lots to offer in coming months, years, and years beyond… it’s just nice not to have to log into Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, etc. to see what friends are up to.”

Although many of the service’s incoming features are still speculative, we already know some of what what improvements will include, thanks to a few sneak-peeks courtesy of Socialthing!’s Twitter feed.  Digg, de.licio.us, and last.fm are being added to the lifestream, and features such as auto-updating and social history caching are being integrated, too.  Along with speed tweaks, future widgetizations, and more, the new iteration of this service is sure to please.

I’m personally excited, however, to hear that the team has gone to great lengths to provide an update that will be far from incremental.  Writes Founder and Visionary Matt Galligan in a recent blog post:

“After we released Socialthing! at South by Southwest this year, we had quickly realized a few things that we wanted to change. We immediately started work on the next version, but the hardest part was realizing that it couldn’t be an incremental change, it was going to have to be a major revision. That’s why we’re calling it 2.0. The things that you’ve come to love are still there, our great UI, ease of use, etc. But a lot of the things that have had criticisms are changing. We’ve fixed a lot of things, added a ton of new features, and all in all, made a much better app.”

These are wise words.  Kudos, Socialthing!  I’m on the edge of my seat waiting to see 2.0 in all its glory.  Good luck with the release!