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Confessions of an annoying Facebook’er (and Tweeter — and Buzzer…)

So Buzz came out yesterday. Have you seen the stuff about Buzz? You might not have noticed if you’re not using Gmail yet. Buzz is a social network integrated with Gmail. Right now, you can post your latest thoughts and it will show up in the Buzz Box of everyone’s email that’s following you. If you want, it will also post a story every time you add new photos to Flickr or Picasa. Or a new video to YouTube. All in all, it’s sort of a cross between Facebook’s Wall and Twitter.

If you’re not familiar with these things, here’s some background. If you are, skip the indented part (though the first paragraph of this next paragraph is also for social networking vets):

As usual, when a big new social media strategy comes out, the general public yawns and poo-poos it and says that it sucks. If you’ve been a Facebook member since the beginning, like I have, you might have trouble remembering what it looked like in the early days. It was just a neatened up Friendster in the early days, with more privacy. Computer Weekly’s blog has a great retrospective on the face of Facebook from 2004 - 2005.

Facebook didn’t really start innovating until it’s programmers launched The Wall. Man, did people ever grouse about that. Folks were signing petitions to get rid of The Wall. They wanted their old, simple, not-particularly-interactive Facebook back. To be fair, there were glitches in the beginning. It was almost like you logged into Facebook when the Wall first came out and it put up a story. “Golem Radio HAS LOGGED IN FOR THE 8TH TIME TODAY! WHAT A LOSER.”

Ultimately, though, Facebook users started to realize that the Wall was useful. Especially as it improved. The Wall is now like a newspaper that you can open every day and see what your friends are up to. Not random old guys in fancy buildings that you’ll never meet — like in the real newspaper — but people you really know. Big news to them may be big news to you, even if it’s not big news to many others. You can see what photos they have posted. What comments they’ve made about their lives. What parties they plan to go to. Facebook is also doing a better and better job of figuring out whose profiles you really pay attention to, and mainly showing you tidbits about them (frankly, I think it’s being a little too conservative these days, but I digress).

Moreover, if something somebody posts on their wall really grabs you, you can make a comment about it. You can say anything you want. Sometimes pretty extended conversations get started. Strangers start weighing in. Real discussions get under way. I once got pretty heated with some guy I will probably never meet over whether not fixed-gear bikes are hipster fad or a legitimate cyclist choice (since the most popular post I’ve ever written on here is defense of fixed gears, so you know which side I came down on).

Anyway, most of these sites will talk to each other. So should you link them up? You can make your Facebook status update every time you post a tweet on Twitter. Google Buzz will do the same. Buzz links up with all of Google’s main services. In fact, Google has had a very Twitter’esque service for a long time (though I think they stole this from AOL’s Instant Messenger), if you use Google Chat. In Chat, you can always give yourself a “Status Message.” Ostensibly, this is so you can write things like: “At lunch, be right back.” Or “Really busy, work chats only.” That kind of thing.

Honestly, tho, most people use it to post silly stuff. Here’s a quick sample of what’s up on my contacts Gchat statuses right now:

My favorite and most frequently repeated status is a Matt Fraction quote from his run on The Immortal Iron Fist:

Mission critical stuff, right? In fairness, since I work in politics, I often make my status an appeal to my friends to do online actions that we are pushing as well. It works, too. If I write the first few words compellingly enough, my friends look and take action. Nice of them.

OK, now, Buzz will let you update your Buzz network every time you update Twitter and every time you update your Gchat status. Facebook will let you update your Status on their every time you update Twitter, but I don’t have any of these things linked. Why not? An on-line friend of mine and I were both thinking about exactly this question. She promised that she was going to unfollow people on Twitter if their tweets were the same as their Facebook statuses. Why read them twice, right?

Look, I know that I’m kind of annoying to be in a social network with. I just like too many things. I’m always finding things I want to show other people. I post a lot of stuff. Many folks don’t much care about some of things I put up. I write a lot of status updates, and I find it fascinating to see which things really strike a chord for folks and which don’t. (One time, I wrote, “I am playing his old Billy Joel albums, and I think you know what that means…” Multiple friends started making guesses about what it meant. Lots of fun. — It meant I was in a “New York State of Mind,” by the way. A woman I haven’t seen in over ten years got it)

The problem is, if you’ve got friends with a lot of different interests, you’re probably going to post things that some of them dig, and some of them don’t. The trouble is, Facebook gives you an option to “Hide” your friends. To kick them off that newspaper I talked about at the start. Say I post about three things: underground hip-hop, The Cubs and Philadelphia’s social scene. You may love my posts about Philadelphia’s social scene, but if the other 2/3s of my status updates are irrelevant to you, you might hide me. Kinda sucks, right? You’re missing out on my great comments on Philadelphia.

I think Buzz has an answer for this problem, but more on that in a future post.

For now, I want to comment on how I treat these three social technologies.

Gchat Status: The fewest people who also happen to be those that I’m closest to see my Gchat Status. There’s also no ongoing report on Gchat statuses. You can’t see a wall anywhere that shows you how often I change my Gchat status or find out what it was an hour ago if you weren’t looking. You also only see it if I have my Gmail open somewhere. I could change it 40 times a day, and unless you glanced at my name on your chat app forty times a day, you won’t see my changes. To me, Gchat status can change a lot — but it really does speak to how I want to present myself to the folks that I know and interact with regularly. It’s also nothing I really want a record of.

Gchat status is the equivalent of the look on my face right now. If I’m scowling right now and you can see me, I probably want you to see a scowl. But if I walk down the street and into an ice cream store, I’m going to want to smile and I don’t need the girl behind the ice-cream counter to see both my scowl and my smile. All she needs is the smile.

Twitter: Of all social networks, Twitter is the hardest to explain, so I’m not even going to try other than to say, it’s like Professional Wrestling: you either get it or no explanation will satisfy you. I will say this about Twitter… no one really tries to “keep up” with Twitter. You can have 1000 friends, all of whom are posting stuff all the time, you log on, you read the top 15 or so posts. If any of them grab you, you respond. If not, you don’t. Or you write something of your own that has nothing to do with anyone else’s posts. Maybe they react to you, maybe they don’t. Here’s what you know about Twitter… you know few people really read every post anyone posts and you also know that Twitter users have opted-in to this madness. You have to post a LOT to be a truly annoying Tweeter, because the site just doesn’t really work in a way that emphasizes overuse. So I’ll post as much as I want on Twitter. I try to be interesting, but sometimes I’m intentionally opaque. I write things for no one’s benefit but mine. On there, it doesn’t much matter.

Twitter is the equivalent, to me, of asking me how my day has been. It’s spontaneous but curt. I might say almost anything in that moment, and if the first clue I give you seems intriguing, you’ll look at my other posts. It’s the equivalent of asking follow-up questions in a real interaction. If it doesn’t, though, you’ll leave it and move on to the next person. I can choose to try to grab you or not, and you’ll probably still say hi the next time we cross paths either way. Of course, if I want you to stay interested, I can also choose to try to make what I say worth your while — and that will earn me a following on Twitter. If that’s what I’m after.

Facebook Status: You can do a lot more than update your status on Facebook. I’m a big fan of posting links, in fact. And images. And videos. Lots of stuff. The trick is, you have to stay pithy and engaging. You have to say things with a wide appeal or risk getting hidden by your friends (you’ll never know they did it — the secret shunning!) or, worse, totally unfriended. When you post on Facebook, what you have to say is going up on peoples’ Walls. Since Facebook is the most mainstream site, you also know your audience has a high skepticism about social networks. There are a lot of people looking at Facebook who take a weird pride in not really participating in it. Just lurking. These folks are easily annoyed. So you want to be judicious in your Facebook posts.

Facebook is the equivalent of a cocktail party. If you’re interesting, fun and engaging– folks will flock to you. They will respond to what you have to say. They will comment back. A little crowd will form around you. If not, though. If you talk to much, if you say stupid stuff, if you speak out of turn, you may find yourself muttering in the corner.

So what’s Buzz? Like I said, your Buzz friends are based on the people in your email contacts. (at least, if you use Gmail — but who’s still using hotmail, right?) The ones you actually do email with. Email is still the most real form of Internet communication. It’s the reason why people get on the Internet for the first time. It’s still the main thing people use the Internet for. There’s no question that Facebook and such has replaced some of the emailing I once did, but not totally. Buzz is closer to email. It’s closer to you. It’s the people in your life who will give you a little more benefit of the doubt, who will spend a bit more time with you. So here’s what I think Buzz is:

Buzz is your drinking buddies. It’s a more intimate setting. Folks will give you some time to hold forth, but make it good. You can go on a bit more, but you can’t ramble. You can’t make it irrelevant. You don’t have the lowest common denominator problem of Facebook, but the system is going to let people know that you’ve said something when you say something. An unread message symbol will appear in their Buzz box. We are all trained Pavlovianly to react to that unread message symbol, so don’t make it appear for people if it’s not going to be worth their time. Just like on Facebook, they can shut you out of their Buzz Box, too. When I go into Buzz more, in the future, I’ll talk about how some of the ways it’s set up makes it easier to emphasize this intimacy even more, in a way Facebook never managed.

So that’s how I see it. There are real differences with each service, and, no, you don’t need to participate with all of them. Anyway, it also explains why I don’t integrate all these different services. The look on my face isn’t the conversation I want to start at a bar. And I probably want to say something strategic at a cocktail party, as opposed to when I randomly meet an acquaintance on the street. Then, it’s appropriate to drop whatever’s on my mind. The random acquaintance probably doesn’t want to hear the details of my latest theory on Sestak’s chances of upsetting Specter, though maybe my bar buddies will sit still for that one.

Social-networks work best if you try to treat it as much like real social interaction as you can, while recognizing that you’re doing it with more people at once than you ever could in real life. At the same time, none of them are actually in front of you when you are playing with your social network, but you forget that they are watching (and the way they are watching) at the risk of losing listeners. And why say anything if you don’t want people to listen, right?

Note from 2020: I declaim every word of this post. Social media is bad. We didn’t know. Buzz was pointless. I should have been able to tell. And yet I was a fan of Google Plus when it came along too. Fun to see that Google actually nuked its promotional post about Buzz. Internet Archive linked above though.