Looks like even the blogosphere is getting sick of its Ouroboric cliquishness:
Bringing all of this Web messaging and activity together in one place doesn’t really help. It reminds me of a comment ThisNext CEO Gordon Gould made to me earlier this week when he predicted that Web 3.0 will be about reducing the noise. I hope Gould is right, because what we really need are better filters.
I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know. People like Mike and Robert can do that, but they are weird, and even they have their limits. ^
As posted here before, we need editors to make sense of all this mess. There’s no sense having every user filter through every news item, when someone who is good at that sort of thing might do it well. Otherwise, why is there a “top” of the blogosphere? What Slashdot, Arrington, Battelle, and others do well is not posting news of a tangential or duplicate nature. They find the best thesis statements on the topic, compile them, and give us the skinny.
Every time TechCrunch “breaks the news†for yet another web 2.0 service or desktop application people jump on it. Within minutes I see Twitter conversations that talk about the new application. People run around providing the developers with suggestions on how to improve the service. It’s called user feedback I believe. The problem with it is that the “user†in this case is a tech person. Which is fine if that is the target audience. But if you want to become big, if you want to be the next Google or Facebook, then you will have to remember that any non-tech consumer out there will not have the same desires as us techies do. How many people do you know outside your tech community that want to have 25 desktop applications live, running Firefox alongside with 10 tabs open, twittering 100 times a day, reading and commenting articles on Friendfeed, writing a blog post about it, starting riots to get traffic going, AND still have a normal day job and a life after that?
If anything, web 3.0 should be about the user, about user value, about letting the Internet evolve around you, instead of around some destination site or walled garden. Web 3.0 should set us free, letting the important things come to us, instead of us having to go to the important things. It’s about freedom of data. And yes, noise reduction or filtering will be nice. But that isn’t really what web 3.0 should be about. Until it is here I’ll be dreaming of a user centric web. ^
Web 3.0 isn’t going to be about the user until we determine what the user actually wants and needs to be doing. This goes back to the oldest fight in the web industry, one I’ve had with clients and executives many times: they want something flashy, but those of us who are both geeks and user-centric designers want a web application that has inherent function. What are the big successes of the web? Google (research), Amazon (retail), e-mail and Twitter (communication), blogs (identity). Other than that, the many small successes are the numerous business and government sites that let you take care of life’s many details with a few clicks.
If you look in the tech world, just how many tech bloggers do we really need? How many of them are breaking stories or offering a unique angle for a unique audience that nobody would serve if they completely pulled up stakes and disappeared? Not too many. With the exception of about the top five or ten blog networks, no tech blog offers enough of a pull that an advertiser would consider them a must to invest with. And even among the top networks, the rush to publish is becoming silly to watch, as my RSS feed reader will fill up with near-identical stories, usually written by people who haven’t done any original reporting beyond reading a press release, other blogs, or listening to a financial earnings call, if they’re really serious. ^
As if proof of his statement, this blog post is filled with mostly redundant views caused by bloggers commenting on each other by taking a basic idea, adding observations, and making it their own.
Looking at all the various web-based activities and projects, what we can tell is that not everyone is going to have the time to be as heavily involved in social media and we are.
Even those of us at the lower end of the range, offering up only a few hours per day, are still heavily involved with social media when we’re placed on this “real person” scale that Nina provides.
If we’re going to recommend a service or activity to a friend whose alarm goes off at 6 AM and doesn’t return home from the office until 6 PM, then we need to respect that their “spare” time is precious. Whatever new app or service we’re trying to push on them should have real value. ^
Again, what the web needs is more competent aggregators with an eye toward real benefit to the user. Why do people read Slashdot? It’s the important news about technology, and its real benefit is not posting the stuff that’s duplicated or tangentially relevant.
The razor belonged to a man named Ockham and he was not a scar collector.
Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “If a proposition is NOT
NECESSARY it is MEANINGLESS and approaching MEANING ZERO.”“And what is More UNNECESSARY than junk if You Don’t Need it?”
Answer: “Junkies, if you are not ON JUNK.” ^
Go for the jugular of the story like an old time newspaper reporter. Stop information overflow — by not posting what is, in the clarity of necessary efficiency common to the last half-hour of consciousness, not necessary.