Tag: silos

Why Facebook (kinda) won

Mike Caulfield has a good post about how Facebook and siloed social media got traction in ways the blogosphere circa 2005-2008 never maintained. He has a good point about the user experience – people aren’t going to go look at 10, 100, 1000 different websites with different graphic designers, publishing models, and navigation structures. That’s where the simplified UX of Facebook comes in. A single stream, pulling stuff from everyone a person cares about. And that jerk from junior high.

But, if it was just about having a streamlined user experience and consistent email-like interface, RSS readers solved that a decade ago. Google Reader was that. Fever˚ still is that for me. I don’t think that’s why Facebook is where every non-geek hangs out. I think there are a few reasons why people are there:

  1. Because non-geeks don’t want to publish openly. They want to share things with their friends, and only their friends. I also see this with instructors and students – many just want to share with people in their class/section/group. That’s why the LMS is still so core on campus – it’s basically a clunky version of the Facebook UX pattern – share stuff with the people in a small context, and only those people. Ask non-HTML-syntax-nerds about how they share things. Many will say “share? Why would I do that? That’s so high school! Why would I want people to know that?” Or “OK. Maybe my friends would be interested in photos of my vacation. But I sure as hell ain’t posting them on the web!” Or some variant. Facebook soothes people into thinking they’re sharing only with people they’ve let into their groups. That’s something that the blogosphere never did, and it’s something that held back a lot of people from participating in the open blogoweb back in the olden days.

  2. Because normal people don’t want to think about stuff like domains, or backups, or updates and patches, or plugins and modules. They just want to see what their friends and family are up to, and maybe post some clever photos. And, although webstuff is way easier to manage than it was back in the dark ages, it’s still not as easy as it needs to be for dad to use it.

  3. Because that’s where everybody is. Facebook feels like a place. It’s tangible. That’s also something that the distributed blogothingy never achieved. It’s something different for every participant or observer. Facebook is Facebook. Everybody is there. Because there’s a “there” there.

So, we can either fight against Facebook and insist that everyone leave it and do things The Right Way™ – or come to terms that for the vast majority, Facebook (or the siloed design pattern represented by Facebook) is what they are comfortable with. And that’s OK. That doesn’t stop anyone from doing things more openly. The web is what we make of it. If we think there are better ways, and that openness is important, we need to continue modelling and exploring. But we can’t expect people to follow. Or to even be interested. Or to not think we’re freaks for doing things out in the wilderness.

And maybe, part of our explorations will involve finding ways to make the wilderness more approachable. Maybe we’re building trails and national parks so city folk can experience things they wouldn’t otherwise experience. I’ve got some ideas about that, and am hoping to get the chance to help build some stuff…

an update on reclaiming ephemeral media

It’s been 5 months since I started reclaiming my online content, after reading Boone’s thoughts and following his lead.

So, what have I learned in those 5 months? First, it’s surprisingly easy to host your own content. WordPress handles the media management. I haven’t FTPd a single file, nor HTMLd a single line of code. Some of the processes are a little less streamlined than the third-party silo tools offer, but even those only require a couple more clicks in an app on my phone (the WordPress app seems to like me to set image dimensions each time, if I want to constrain to 840px wide). Not the end of the world.

I can easily shoot a photo on my phone, process it with an app or two (if I want), and upload it to my blog with just a couple of clicks. The publishing workflow is basically the same as with the hosted silo services.

Ephemeral media page

Looking at the directory on the server, I use nearly 60MB of space per month of media uploads. I’m only posting photos and screenshot images, and most of them are resized to 840xwhatever before uploading. That works out to about 720MB per year of storage. That could add up over a few years. But, hosting packages typically have several gigabytes of storage available. I’m currently hosting my site on mediatemple, and my [gs] grid hosting package comes with 100GB of storage. I can buy more if I need to, but won’t have to think about that for several years. I’m only using just over 6GB at the moment, and much of that is for some BIG videos (that also make up the lion’s share of my bandwidth usage – if I dump them, my storage and bandwidth are pretty trivial).

The hosting of content is easy, and works really well.

What I’m definitely missing out on is the community layer. Things like the “From Your Contacts” page on Flickr. Even though my ephemeral stuff is presented in a similar manner to how it is on Flickr, I have no way of easily following the activities of dozens of people (or more). I can do it through RSS (and I do), but the simple page showing the latest photos posted by everyone I follow? I miss that. That’s the one thing I still use Flickr for – even though I haven’t posted a photo there in 2 months, I still check the From Your Contacts page almost every day.

I’m starting to think about how to replicate that functionality, in a more generalized way. Flickr’s page is handy, but of course it only handles people that post stuff to Flickr. What about people that post to other services, or to their own sites? A more generalized display that is service-agnostic would be great. Since most sites and services already do RSS, it seems likely that something could be built around RSS feeds. I already subscribe to the feeds of many people and follow their activity streams that way, but there isn’t an at-a-glance latest activity view.

This is the kind of thing that is often “solved” by inventing a new tool or app, and just waiting for everyone to adopt it. Because that always works out so well. What’s needed isn’t a single tool, but a way to easily follow activity (not just content) of many people over many sites and services. Feels kind of like RSS, but only geeks seem to do RSS anymore. If there isn’t a simple Like or Follow or +1 button, it’s a non-starter. But then we’re firmly back in third-party silos territory…

The connections between people, outside of the third party silos, is still complicated, messy, and way more difficult than it should be.