Burdseed

I’m still testing out a few more tumblelog-like site features.

One is a pretty basic feed of current social conversations. Right now, this has my twitter feed (with pretty lame styling), but I’m hoping to add in Google+ at some point soon and improve the general look and feel.

Call me a luddite, but I’m rediscovering RSS.

The rise of Google+ has caused me to reconsider my social network use and information needs. And, strangely enough, the losers are the Big 3 social networks themselves.

I used to be a heavy RSS user. Then, at some point, I began to rely more on Twitter for social curation and news feeds and stopped reading RSS. But I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated by Twitter’s signal to noise ratio. In my case, the worsening feed hasn’t been caused by a bigger list of sources; rather, it’s been caused by my sources tweeting more and more about less interesting things (check-ins, link bait, off-topic RTs, Instagram, and so on). Unfortunately, this loss of fidelity hasn’t been offset by an increase in serendipity.

Enter Google+.

Google+ exacerbates the fidelity problem by focusing on threaded conversations and commentary, often by people I don’t know. Although Google+’s topical organization is helpful for creating conversations, the noise within these threads is exceedingly high and will only get worse as more people join the network. “Engagement” appears to be trumping “relevancy” and serendipity is low. This has long been a problem on discussion boards and doesn’t appear to be solved on Google+.

I’m still using Twitter for real-time updates and chat, Google+ for occasional threaded topical conversations, and Facebook for friend network posts. But I’m spending more time as a consumer with raw signal and, by and large, that seems to be long-form articles or micro-blog posts distributed via RSS.

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Update (July 23, 2011)

Robert Scoble has posted a Google+ thread about the noise issue, which serves to illustrate the problem beautifully.

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Update (July 24, 2011)

One unexpected benefit of my return to RSS is the fact that I can enjoy the writing of certain authors without suffering from the terrible website designs of their employers.

Do social networks mark the end to endings?

Paul Ford argues in this week’s New York magazine that the Facebook wall (and by extension, the Twitter stream and Google+ conversation) are bringing an end to drama, narrative, and literary closure: “The tide brings in status updates; the tide takes them out.”

This is definitely a central design (or failing) of today’s social networks. However, it’s not necessarily a preference of broader society or the always-connected consumer. People crave entertainment, and entertainment comes from drama. Curation of social feeds, algorithmic or otherwise, will increasingly need to extend beyond the basic filtering of LOLcats and checkins. Ultimately, social applications will provide consumers with context and weave together coherent stories using social feeds and content snippets and traditional dramatic devices, like beginnings and endings.

Today’s Post of the Day comes from web thinker Nova Spivack.

He wrote five essays about Twitter, Facebook and Google+ available here and, if nothing else, deserves a shout out for blogging dedication. All are worth reading, and do a good job of comparing and contrasting the three social networks. I agree that Twitter’s real strength lies as a messaging platform, Facebook’s strength lies as a general friend network, and Google+’s strength appears to lie largely as a discussion platform. As such, Google+ appears to pose the greatest potential threat to microblogs (e.g., Posterous and Tumblr) and the discussion functions of traditional blogs (e.g., Disqus) and a significant threat to specialized knowledge networks (such as Quora or StackExchange).

My favorite post of the group discusses the need for Twitter to adjust its API strategy in this new world order and return to its messaging roots.  Twitter recently has been losing support within its developer base and its recent moves towards becoming a media destination will increasingly bring it into conflict with Google and established content portals. That may prove to be a big problem for the company in the long run.