Social media for the Paranoid

Door to Door Service

The FT is reporting that the amount of cellular phone data traffic has surpassed the amount of voice traffic.

We’ll that’s nothing. I’ve been to the planet Bolt where cell phone calls almost don’t exist and data is everywhere. During my four hours on planet Bolt I saw the future – and its like a hyper accelerated version of eight minute dating. If you want a conversation on planet Bolt, youd better be able to pitch in 8 seconds, and that has big implications for how a business – or even a parent communicates with a younger generation.

So first, let me explain that earlier last week I organized a drinks party for alumni of my business school (Insead) in Orleans, a local bar and restaurant. Due to a splendid piece of good (or bad) timing, I managed to pick the same time and place as a 1^st birthday party, and an eight minute speed dating session. The ensuing chaos caused several of the single guys to take one look at the babies and make a run for the hills, and me to win the “piss up in a brewery” failure award.

So what did I learn from watching two hours of speed dating from the comfortable world of a drinks party? Well, that it was a huge amount of work and stress for all involved – especially as it seemed to be done without the benefit of that great social lubricant – alcohol.

Anyway, back to planet Bolt, which on planet Earth is know as the Bolt Bus. This is really a Greyhound bus in wolf’s clothes – with brand new black leather seats, power outlets at every seat, and free wi-fi. All for $15, including a free trip from Boston to New York. Makes a change from the Fung Wah bus which pioneered the concept of cheap bus rides from Boston to New York – along with the concept of unscheduled picnics in the breakdown lane of the Turnpike, while Mr Fung Wah would poke around in the engine compartment as clouds of black smoke billowed out.

The Bolt Bus was full of twenty–something year old cool dudes – and me. The entire bus of fifty or so people made a total of two phone calls – one in Yiddish to a guy’s mother (who else?), the other to announce the bus’s arrival. Two people (including me) read a newspaper, and one person had a book. So what did they all do? Well very little talking for a start. Instead everyone was online – with iPhones, Droids, or laptops. Everyone had a dozen conversations on the go – all the time. One Berklee College of Music student was arranging a piece of music on his laptop by asking his friends to send him snippets of music that he would mix together – all via Facebook. Another was writing a term paper with the help of her Facebook friends.  The pace was crazy. People were texting on their cell phone at the same time as tapping away on their laptop. Just looking at the speed with which they switched conversations made me dizzy. Eight minutes would have been an eternity in that world – more like 8 seconds. So what did they do when they ran out of steam? Slept. We could have been on the moon – nobody looked out the window, and long attention tasks like reading a book were rarer than black leather on a vegan bus.

I got off in New York exhausted from watching all this – and headed into a bar. The beer was great, pity it cost more than the bus, especially as I was late and had to bolt it down.

Social Media can easily become an addiction, and like all addictions heavy users look for easier ways to get their “high, and casual users are completely bemused by the paraphernalia that the heavy users grows to rely upon.

The reality is that we are having simultaneous conversations with more and more people in parallel, and those conversations are getting shorter and shorter, and more and more frequent. They are also getting alot more public, with people happy to share every detail of their lives with their “friends” and strangers. The tools are evolving to match this trend – making older tools look positively lethargic.

So as you can tell from the length of my postings so far, I am a long way from the 140 character “hit”, but I could not resist seeing what life would be like if I lived it on Tweetdeck – probably the most well known of the SNS authoring tools. Then I could not resist trying Flock, which bills itself as the world’s first social media browser. In between all these experiments I answered my email using Microsoft Outlook, and surfed the web using Flock.

I started out really confused – once you have Tweetdeck setup to monitor a variety of search terms and user status messages on a couple of social networks, you have got yourself a massively noisy piece of software. At random intervals there are competing popup messages that jump in front of everything – like three years olds on a sugar high at the birthday party. Each one screaming “me, me, me” and demanding cake or a bathroom break. Like three year olds, you have to pretty quickly triage them into “about to leak – from either end” and anything else. Alas Tweetdeck does not allow you to set particular alarms and triggers, so pretty soon I became overwhelmed and went off to look for a place to hide.

Just like a kid’s birthday party where you feel cut off from the real world, you feel the same thing with Tweetdeck. The application is a window into the Social Networking world – but only for your fingers. If you want to connect to any other application on the desktop, you are basically out of luck. Yes you can click a link and have it launch a webpage, but anything more than that, like printing or saving to a file, is totally beyond it.

Flock is a far calmer place. Familiar to those of us who still need more that the screen of a mobile phone in order to communicate. Its like a street party – everything is pretty familiar but there are alot of people around, who drift in and out of conversations. None of the flash and excitement – none of the noises when a message arrives, nor the pop-ups. It is really a web browser – and that provides the familiarity.

Then there is Outlook. Outlook is like a pint of Guinness in the pub. Drawn slowly, there is plenty of time to reflect upon the feeling as the foam kisses your lips and the dark, cold, liquid flows in. One pint at a time. Remember to order the next before you finish the one you have, as bad things happen when you hurry the barman. Long slow conversations with one or two people around you. No hurry, no interruptions – except for the regular trip to “see a man about a dog”. Outlook is exactly the same. One email at a time – you work your way down the list of new emails. Don’t hurry the application, or else you will get a glass of foam. Don’t ask to see other emails by the same person, or on the same topic unless you too are planning a long leisurely trip to the bathroom. But plenty of time to draft the reply. In fact all the time and space to write an entire novel in response. Then attach a Powerpoint presentation for good measure, schedule a meeting, and make a note to buy some leeks.

So what do I conclude? Well the future looks alot more like a kids birthday party than it does an afternoon in an Irish pub. While Tweetdeck probably does not need to add email functionality – Outlook certainly does need to switch from Guinness to vodka shots. Both need to tie more tightly with a web browser. And Flock? You would think that it was in the ideal place, and perhaps when the next generation of web browser technology appears it will, but for now it can’t match the flash and sizzle of Adobe Air (or Microsoft Silverlight) that power Tweetdeck and its competitors.

So go on – download Tweetdeck and play with it for a day. I guarantee you will come away with icecream down your shirt, crumbs on your lap, and a strong desire for a quiet walk in the woods…. after you have taken your kids to the bathroom for a leak.

So the Financial Times met Facebook this weekend with the headline;  ”Facebook becomes bigger hit than Google“.

One interesting point they made is that in September MySpace was bigger than Google, but that lead faded. Perhaps that should be the subject of this post, but the more interesting point (for now) was made by Lucy Kellaway – and she made it in the headline to her column; “Generation game plays out on Facebook”.

For those of you that were not watching British game shows in the late seventies “The Generation Game” on the venerable BBC involved two family members of different generations having to work together to compete against three other families to win a bunch of prizes that rolled off a conveyor belt, and as far as I can remember consisted mainly of cuddly toys and hair curlers. It also probably included flared jeans, Donny Osmond and “Saturday Night Fever” LPs – not to be confused with “Saturday Night Live”.

The seventies was the time of “Telephone Booth Stuffing” in case you wondered what else people did without social networks – basically an older version of adding people as (very) close friends.

Anyway I digress. What was funny (if anything besides the platform shoes) about the TV game show was the inability of people from the same family, but different generations, to understand each other sufficiently to even organize a phone call in a phone box.

This is the point Lucy makes in her normal, understated, style; “This isn’t a small thing: it’s a ginormous non-meeting of minds between two generations over what is not just a different way of communicating, but a different way of living”.

As she goes on to say that from her perspective (and from mine, if I am honest – after all we both drank far too much Pimms at the same University at roughly the same time, so it is not surprising we have similar social norms); “By contrast, the idea that communication becomes a random broadcast to 500 “friends” about what you were up to last night is perfectly incomprehensible.”

But seriously, in the same way that an older generation did not understand the impact of email (“what is wrong with writing a letter, or picking up the phone?” – the Lucy / David generation risks completely missing the impact that training an entire generation to share everything with their “friends” – at least when I shared a phone box with a friend or two I did not tell them with whom I spent the previous night. Each generation is having shorter conversations, more frequently, simultaneously with a wider and wider circle of “friends”.

If you are running a global software development project – perhaps this is the best news ever, as social media become the new collaborative platform?