Clay Shirky went on what he admitted up front was a “tweet rant” last night. It illustrates why I’m glad I’m on Twitter and why I think editors should be on Twitter. More on that later, but first, here’s Clay’s rant:
0/N Experimental tweet-rant coming.
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
1/N @Meatspac. Ello. ~Club. These are all post-scale networks. The published narrative around them asks “Is X the next Facebook?”…
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
2/N …to which the answer is not just No, per @Betteridgeslaw, but Hell no. These networks are fun because they don’t scale well.
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
3/N @meatspac is Be Here Now. If you want to leave a message for another user, you have to ask real live people to remember to pass it on.
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
4/N @meatspac also has no login, profile, or away message. (It has Mute. Mute, not login, turns out to be the core feature of spam control.)
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
5/N Ello is a social network that doesn’t have Like, Reply, Re-Elloing, or *working search*, and I dread the day when it gets those things.
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
6/N Tilde Club started as a joke, and only even makes sense to the .001% of the immernets that know what a shell account is. (/me feels old)
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
7/N But .001% of the net is 10,000 people or so. In IPO terms, bupkis. In social terms, bigger than the biggest party you’ve ever been to.
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
8/N Social value is always a trade off between density & scale. The social graph, as weaponized by LiveJournal, created internal horizons…
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
9/N …that let users the experience small group interactions while allowing companies to grow to web scale. This was a good hack.
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
10/N But the social graph is not the only hack. Another is to not privilege scale over density in the first place.
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
11/N Not prizing scale over density is what @meatspac, Ello & ~Club have in common. It’s also why their interfaces look so dumbrilliant.
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
12/N This is why coverage of these services tends towards stupid. Tech journalists want to make predictions about the future…
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
13/N …that don’t seem ridiculous today. (They love Apple for packaging upgrades like revolutions.) When the story changes, they miss it.
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
14/N The current story is NOT that Facebook is “being replaced” or “faces challengers.” It has ONE BILLION USERS. <–not even hyperbole
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
15/N The story is that there are new hacks other than the social graph, which support social value not easily convertible to ad dollars.
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
16/N Networks like ~Club are an adaptation to a Facebook-dominated social landscape, not a challenge to it.
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
17/N=17 These services aren’t a new way of creating FB-like value. They’re a new way of being valuable in a world that already has Facebook.
— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) October 10, 2014
Did you know about Meatspace, Ello and ~Club? Are you using them? I had heard of one of them (Meatspace), but really didn’t know anything about any of them. And I’m not using them. I don’t know whether any of them is important to the future of media, or whether they are all destined-to-fail startups that reached their peak of fame in getting mentioned by Clay Shirky on Twitter. Only one of the three, Ello, has merited a mention in the New York Times that I can find.
Since I criticized Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet for not being active on Twitter and he responded, warning against creating a new “priesthood” for journalism, some have raised questions on social media, other blogs or in comments on my blog about how important it is to be active on Twitter and why.
Well, here’s a reason: Twitter is eight years old. I’m not saying it’s the cutting edge of digital media. It was eight years ago. If you’re active on Twitter, you may still be catching up. I don’t’ use Twitter to be on the cutting edge, just to keep from falling behind. But I want to be aware of the cutting edge and exploring the value of new tools. And you’re more likely to learn about those new tools on Twitter than in old media.
So now I need to go fiddle around with Meatspace. Or Ello. Or ~Club. Maybe all three.
Update: I’m no the waiting lists to get into Ello and ~Club. Meatspace looks kind of odd and probably not for me. But I thought the same thing about Twitter, too. First impressions aren’t a very good guide about the value of social media.
The Buttry Diary 