The New York Times' Sunday business section had another good profile of an entrepreneur. This week, they focused on the creator of Twitter. It's an interesting story of how this company stumbled into a big thing.
Like most bloggers, I use Twitter quite a lot. I don't use to it to follow friends, but to get ideas for blog posts. It gives me a heads-up on what people are going to write about in the next hour.
I also use Facebook, but much less frequently, because I can't figure out how to write a status that is appropriate for my former students, my mother-in-law, my cousin in Toronto, Apt. 11D readers, my grad school adviser, and the guy who used to follow me around in high school. It's too much pressure, so I've been keeping relatively quiet lately.
I've got Facebook and Twitter running in one app in the background right now and will check in throughout the day. I guess many people use Facebook and Twitter in different ways, but that Facebook is more popular, because it connects people who have real connections with each other.
Last week, I spent a lot of time online looking for real groups. Because Ian doesn't attend the school in our town and because he has special needs, we have to work a lot harder to find after school activities for him. It can be done, but it takes some research and some driving around. I've also been looking for a writing group, because I've been working in the local library with the crazy people for the past month and I wanted to join a group to get feedback on the rough draft.
It was very time consuming work to find these groups, because there is no central location for this information and because the local groups that offer these activities aren't the most technologically savvy.
Community life is a good thing. It makes us happy. It's good for political life. It makes us live longer. So, why does it take a week of research to find it?
It's a hackneyed observation, but I'm going to say it anyway. Online community has taken a real hit to real community life. Or perhaps it stepped in to fill a vacuum. I'm not sure. I can tell you that I don't know the name of the weird couple that lives across the street. Steve has given them nicknames — Freddy Mercury and Horse Lady. We've lived here for six years, and we don't know their names.
I wish it was more profitable to create offline community. Other than Meetup, which has managed to nicely bridge online and offline community, real community building is non-existent on the Internet. Virtual communities don't require a physical space. You don't have to train organizers or pay them salaries. 30 geeks in a room can write code, and there's no need to hire a bus to pick up seniors to take them to a community center for an evening of Bingo. Virtual community is cheaper and easier.
Instead of being made the Mayor of Starbucks, I wish that one of these coding geeks would create a virtual community bulletin board. I think that there's a way of making a profit doing it. If you give me a cut of the dough, I'll tell you how to do it.
Apt. 11d 
Whatever code you want, Pesto is at your disposal….he’s always up for a code challenge ; )
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Doesn’t someone in your household work in finance? If you need investors, start asking.
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I think online community participants and offline community participants don’t always overlap.
I’m pretty sure the top animators are in the middle of the Venn diagram for both, but there are so many people on the edges who aren’t that interested.
I kind of feel the same way about Facebook actually. I started on BBSes in 1990 and was pretty involved with some early online communities, and a lot of the people I know from those hate – HATE – Facebook. Some use it regardless because it has become a default communication tool but they aren’t sharing their passionate selves there. Some are very careful NOT to mention what’s most important to them there.
I think the people who really like Facebook tend to be the people for whom it’s not that different from their regular day, just online – they aren’t out engaging in wild and crazy new ideas, but having the same conversation about what’s on sale at the mall that they used to on the phone.
Which is what those of us who were misanthropically browsing via anonymous FTP over a 2600 baud modem were trying to get away from. As I remember it. 🙂
And in that sense I think it’s almost antithetical to a group that goes deep into one topic, in person, locally, to take that conversation online. Even though it makes a lot of sense from a recruiting and information management perspective. There probably is a killer app out there to be developed, though.
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“And in that sense I think it’s almost antithetical to a group that goes deep into one topic, in person, locally, to take that conversation online.”
This is an interesting concept. I think there are a variety of ways in which information becomes different when it’s shared on the internet, across the world, perhaps, rather than on a physical bulletin board, in a physical archive, or in person, and that we fundamentally haven’t groked that difference. I’m guessing similar things happen when people first developed writing (and things could be written down and preserved across the ages).
My current item of interest for the phenomenon is that the voter registration info in my state has now been placed online (as part of the public records law). Presumably, it was always available, but it required going into the basement of 100s of county archives to find before. Now, anyone can search the info online (anyone at all, including someone in zimbabwe with internet access). The site contains names, birthdates, gender, home addresses (with one digit blanked), the date of registration and the last time voted. It’s an incredible amount of info to have about strangers, and it’s available to everyone. Placing that info on the internet was a big deal, but it was done based on the principle that information that’s available can be available in any format.
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See that’s interesting and I guess has to do with what you use Facebook for. I have it up whenever the computer’s on, but I mostly use it to keep up with friends in other states and to have a handy way of contacting most of our local friends at once. People with boring or annoying status updates get edited out of the news feed. I can still contact if I want or check in on their pages once a month (or less for some) but otherwise I ignore them.
My most usual post on Facebook is either an invitation to local friends (we have a weekly open house dinner that I post on FB) or sometimes a status update about our three preschoolers for their relatives out of state. No chatter, I don’t like it and it will get you kicked out of my feed.
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JennG, your comment is interesting. I too was one of those people who was online in the way-early 90s. Not quite BBSes, as I wasn’t quite so technically proficient. But I was an early adopter. And I do miss the ways non-FB, non-Twitter formats enabled people to communicate quite deeply on topics. I can’t do that on FB or Twitter, and it drives me crazy. There is a huge disconnect, too, on FB between me and people like me who are used to expressing in great detail our political ideas online, and many friends/family who think that FB is the equivalent of the watercooler or backyard fence. Maybe they’re right and I’m wrong, but it still drives me crazy. 🙂
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