Facebook and Twitter vs all the Others

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29th March, 2012, NCurse

I  recently signed up for menshn, because I sign up for most new social media sites I hear about to see if they can be useful in any way. However, while I understand where menshn is coming from, I can also see that it won't be successful in unseating Twitter. The reason for this is very clear to me: Twitter and Facebook have a casual element that isn't replicated in menshn, because before you make a comment you decide which room you are going to place it in based on the topic that it fits.

This means that before you start to write you have to think, whereas in Twitter this level of thinking is removed. You can add a hashtag if you want, but it isn't necessary, and the hashtag also means that your tweet isn't confined to one room, and so others may well respond to the tweet at a tangent, or add their own hashtag to signify that it occupies more than one grouping, and will be of interest to others.

In Facebook, meanwhile, although you are largely confined to sharing with your friends, it has the same casual element as Twitter which means you don't need to think before you share. (This can be good or bad as a result, but in terms of a barrier, like a casual game, it means there is very little in the way of you and Facebook.)

Quora like menshn attempts to order and categorise in advance, so you comment on a topic, like a free flowing Wikipedia. This makes a lot of sense, and offers to extend understanding. However, Quora hasn't unseated Wikipedia, because sharing knowledge requires more time to be spent on crafting and storying, and to fire off what you know only has a limited use. Especially when attempts are made to shape what can be opinion and hearsay, when really it needs at the very least the checks and balances that Wikipedia imposes.

What is true of Quora and menshn is also true of the LinkedIn discussion forums, where the topic areas become cyclical, lacking in depth, influenced by people selling their products, and not very worthwhile to follow.

It is true that blogs in this day and age are looking like old media, because Twitter and Facebook have been so successful. However, even if they are old-fashioned, they are still useful: an intermediate place between the social media of the Twitter and Facebook generation and longer considered pieces published as articles and books.

The point that I am making here is that the form must be reflected in the content. But there are other factors as well. When Empire Avenue first launched, I thought it was an exciting take on Klout. I still think this is true, but it hasn't taken off in the way it should have done because there is a lack of conversation, and everything is reduced to the trading and attempts at increasing your value. This becomes an empty reason to keep going and the drive to continue is lost after a relatively short period of time.

I'm being purposefully harsh here, because I am thinking about what the future will hold for social media. I'm also thinking about where my time is best spent. I don't use social media for pure distraction, I like to learn from it, but that learning doesn't occur in the most obvious ways, and so while Quora and menshn should be better than Twitter for this purpose, in real use they are not.

I won't defend Facebook in the same way as Twitter, because I don't get that much out of the platform. However, I think that is down to my own personality, and I know that plenty of people do use and enjoy, and learn from Facebook, and the question of its success won't depend on whether or not I like it, but on maintaining the casual element that it shares with Twitter.