Twitter BITTER and the Social Network Bubble of 2009

Social Networks. More than likely you belong to one at this point. They seem to be popping up everywhere. Your friends are on them, and they invite you to join yet another. Newscasters mention them, celebrities, and athletes are now using them. The problem is, there are simply too many of them to keep up with, to keep updating, and to keep straight in your head. My theory is that 2009 will be the year that we start to see some social networking backlash. I could be wrong, but....

In it's most basic history, the first MAJOR social network to catch on was MySpace. It started as a way for unsigned, independent musicians to promote their music without a major record label. That changed, though, and millions of people had Myspace pages. There are MySpace business pages, Myspace bullying, and MySpace court cases.

The next MAJOR social network to really catch on was Facebook (even thought it was created about the same time as MySpace). It started out with college students only, but soon opened up to anyone and everyone. Facebook was more structured, though. It wasn't overloaded with crappy backgrounds and non-stop music restarting with every press of the back button. MySpace has been retooling, but Facebook got hold of people's attention pretty good. Besides, Facebook lets you send virtual drinks to your friends! Who wouldn't switch social networks for that?

I believe that today, the fastest growing social network is LinkedIn. LinkedIn was originally meant to be about creating high quality professional connections. If someone was listed as a connection, you could be guaranteed that the two connectees knew each other well enough that if you asked one to introduce you to the other, they could. Not so today. LinkedIn is all about the number of connections, quality be damned. This is a basic point that all the networks fall victim to. As soon as you make the number of friends/connections/followers public, it turns into a competition to get the highest number.

And then we get to what I'll call the peak of the bubble, Twitter. Twitter is referred to as a microblogging tool that allows you to broadcast out short messages to you legion of followers. It has become the mainstream face of social networking. It is mentioned on the news, people like Shaq are using it, and even President Obama made major campaign announcements over it. I remember being introduced to Twitter by the online news show, Rocketboom, quite a while ago. The host, Joanne Colan was trying to do the newscast but kept getting interrupted by inane little blips, called tweets, on her cell phone.

With Twitter, we are starting to see people with thousands of followers, even hundreds of thousands. I'll bring it down to about 100 for what the average person might contend with. Now, the best way I can illustrate what Twitter is like would be if you stood in a room with 100 people and had to listen to their collective streams of consciousness all at the same time, unfiltered. It really can be quite difficult to manage. And some people tweet more than others. I thought it would be a good idea to follow TechCrunch on Twitter. They completely overwhelmed my "newsfeed" (to borrow the term from Facebook) with 10 times as many tweets as anyone else and I had to stop following them.

CNET has an article online about getting started with Twitter. It recommends that you should not just tweet every little detail of your day as was the norm in Twitter's early days. Here's an excerpt:

Finally, what should you write? Literally answering "What are you doing?" may get boring fast. At least to folks following your time line. Some of the most enjoyable posts are witty observations, breaking news, and links to interesting stuff, like Web sites and pictures.

How many people do you know that can consistently provide you with short, witty observations? I tend to think that many people are signing up to see what it's all about but in the end will simply be lurkers (people who are basically idle, listening but not contributing).

If you look at the complete over saturation of information that the average person has to deal with and will have to deal with, you'll get the idea. On a given day, you might start off by checking your e-mail and your Facebook. Then you go over to check your Twitter account (unless you've got them tied together). Perhaps you check your blog and respond to a couple of posters, or you read a blog you follow and post there. Then you check your cell phone and there are more text messages on there that need to be answered. And THEN, you might actually have to check your voice mail and talk to someone. E-Mail bankruptcy is already upon on. The average person simply doesn't have the mental capacity to handle much more and it is increasing exponentially.

We've already seen networks fading away this year. Second Life, once quite popular and touted as the future of online is retooling and repurposing as a distance learning application. My prediction is that LinkedIn will be next. Users might not start cancelling their accounts en masse, but I bet that their growth will crash and few professionals will regard it as anything of value.

In all honesty, if you are out at a sporting event, shouldn't you just be enjoying the event and not worrying about telling everyone at that exact moment where you are and how much you're enjoying the event???

And here is the real problem with social networks, born out of their greatest value (in my opinion): the power to turn dormant friendships into passively active ones. This is where people you haven't talked to since high school or college all sync up on a social network. Everyone is following everyone and so you get tons and tons of updates every day from people you have not seen and may not see for years. This can have a dilutionary effect in the long run because you will start paying less attention to your newsfeed and maybe miss the really good stuff from the ones we're closest to.

I suppose the question that will really be the deciding factor will be how much the human brain can handle and get through in given day. I think we're already exceeding capacity.