Later.

But first, today’s 0.001% thought out message:

A tweet is in the eye of the beholder, so just to be clear, I fully subscribe to the power of what a retweet can do, and to a slightly lesser degree, nod to the effectiveness of a quick method of agreement registered by committing an act of “liking” which used to be “becoming a fan” and is also construed as “recommending” and given the Facebook rate of churn, in two weeks will be some other expression.

But as I become a GOM (Grumpy Old Man), I am seeing a trend perhaps of less reading and less writing. And there is nothing anyone can really do about it, the giant boulder is rolling down the hill. This is just my own periscope, but from where I sit there is less blogging going on, I am seeing less commenting in blogs (and in flickr). Retweeting and liking on heir own are things I can value (and do), but what happens if that is more and more all we do? To me, they are at the lowest end of the Read/Write food chain, they ought to be minnows.

The thing is, this interweb thing is always on the evolving path, and never quite stays what it was.

I remember my own first renaissance era of listserv communities, odd as it sounds, in the pre-web late 1980s and ea;ly 1990s were THE place of interaction and exchange.

There was flame wars and crazy free sharing, there were personalities and ful out debtates, all in plain text. It was the first place I ever “met” D’Arcy Norman, and in many ways it was as social networky as things could be then.

Second renaissance era was the blog days of the early 2000s- it was as exciting, we were all MovablePressing, than WordPressing (and other variants), and more, because unlike a hosted email list, these became places that individuals owned and created in.

It was magical, comments flew, links and trackbacks light up the nets. It was a golden era not fading into the mist. It seemed like it would last forever.

But it never does.

There is always some smaller, scrappier marsupial under your big, webbed feet.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Twitter too may be in or just past its own renaissance era, back in 2007 when it was still “the stupidest thing I ever heard of” (well, it can still feel that way).

Yet….

There even seems to be (and of course I have no stinking data, just a feeling in the gut) some shifts even in the pattern of twitter, as there is such a frenzy to push out tweets, that it feels like people are listening a bit less. I guarantee if you call me out with an @ as a question or a message, I will respond. I am all over my @s. Are you? Is it only if you see them fly by? Are you too @scoble to bother?

And here it is, my weary worry. There will yet be something else we dont know of, some new whiz thing, kid on the block, that will come along, and like now, when people are “too busy to blog” or “don’t have the energy to do the long form”, this new X will have people saying they are “too busy to tweet” or “don’t have the energy for 140 characters”.

And that thing just might be the blue logo-d monster that Tim Berners-Lee warned us about today

“The web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles,” he said. “The web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles.”

Or maybe not. I know there is a whole lot of read/write/webbing going on out there, a huge volume of it. It just somehow is starting to feel different in a way I cannot fully articulate. You can Like this or Retweet it for sure, or just ignore it.

But what do I know, I am just one node in the mix.

UPDATE: Lots of retweets on this plus, 1 person liked it (thanks Seth G!). I like that someone likes it (maybe I will retweet this)

Wouldn’t you give anything to be the fly on the wall in the Facebook boardroom as they scramble to put of the little sparks of fire? I’m not even going to dredge up all the links of people citing why they are quitting facebook, why they are not, why they are begrudgingly staying. I think danah boyd has truly nailed well the issues, which are not just privacy.

Facebook seems like that pathetic story of child with a growth-defect of abnormal physical size growth and not the corresponding intellectual development, hence the big blob of the visualization of Facebook privacy. Yet it’s not just this change, its the lack of awareness of its users on how to even understand what they are sharing, much less find it on a repeated basis.

The Facebook conundrum is that they have created something that is truly easy for everyday folks, cousin Ernie, Aunt Bertha, Freddy the dentist, that annoying kid from 10th grade with the post nasal drip… to do in one place, the kind fo social networking, blogging, photosharing, the pioneers have done on the open web for years. They made it super easy.

I can say that anytime I try to use Facebook to change a setting or enable/disable something, me, an IT professional– I get lost. Its screens are a labyrinth of false turns and dead end hallways. I usually give up. Underneath the hood, it is a spaghetti pile- who can really manage 170 different options to maintain?

Also, have you noticed the typical privacy setting? It starts at Everyone, goes more restrictive, well sort of… and there is no “None” or “Don’t Share” (you have to dig into the Customize option). I guess the notion is, why would you put something on Facebook and share it with no one? But there it is- the Facebook Way (well this year)- you are there to share it all, fool.

But I am no Johnny Come Lately Join the Mob and Bash Facebook- my gripe is more of a niche of my own– how Facebook is stingy with the open web, and I deemed it Stingybook more than a year ago.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

You see that facebook apps allow it to suck in your media, content from outside of Facebook, using open APIs from flickr, Youtube, RSS feeds from blogs- like a giant social media vacuum cleaner, it snorts in all the open media– and does not turn around and allows even the same media to be shared from other sites in the same way. It closes its content to be found by search engines. There was a name for the kid in kindergarten who hogged all the toys. Now we just fall him/her “Facebook”.

I tried a test with that example. My flickr photo is tagged with usage credits that say it must be shared under SA-BY license- share with attribution and it must be shared with thee same rights as the source. Facebook does neither. It has been violating Creative Commons? (I guess the counter is not, since it is my photo?)

But the Content Sucking Facebook really began to get under my fur with this blog. I had set up Facebook (I think), with a Blog Reader app that brought all my blog posts into Facebook (or is it under Notes? who knows?). What I saw was a lot of comments coming on my posts were being posted in Facebook, not to my blog, so there was no connection between comments and the content. I think that is stingy, especially as pings and trackbacks have been around as a working technology for years. Facebook does not want to share back the same way, and to me, craps on the Sharing Golden Rule- Share Unto Others as they have Shared with You.

I also hated that thing where you comment on someone else’s status, etc, and that signs you up for email notifications (by default yes) to everything people post afterward (yes, I know finally there is a setting to turn this off).

Even more so, the stuff in Facebook seems to fall of the bottom of the wall and goes into some no longer to be seen or accessed basement (except for the miners of social data).

My use of Facebook has been pretty low all along. I am among the group that thinks the open web is the only social network we need. I actually did make a move (and tweeted) that I was de-activating my account. Like those who have asked to remove the account, like the gooey sticky floor of a grimy movie theater, Facebook just does not let you go that easily.

I do have one of those staying issues- we have some FB pages for my work at NMC, so I need an account to post updates there. Sure I could create another account.

So I am one of those hypocrites who bash Facebook but don’t kill their accounts. Yet, I have likely 20, 30 other dormant social media accounts where I have a username and something there, but give it no attention or updates. I don;t think a group of techies leaving Facebook will make a dent in its giant pool- it is really built for cousin Ernie, Aunt Bertha, Freddy the dentist, that annoying kid from 10th grade with the post nasal drip… who like it there.

My approach has been to neutralize all the settings I could fine, reduce the sharing to nothing, killed all the apps and group memberships, shut off all the email notifications except a direct message.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Sherwood411

I would not say Facebook is my best friend, but I have done what I could, all 170 options, to neutralize it- don’t call Tudor Glen, try to find your way through.

I don’t place any value judgement on quitting versus not quitting Facebook; I think the bigger lesson is what happens when a simple system overlies something quite more complex and unfathomable. I am not naive to the information I give Google, because Google gives me back useful things, tools, information, yet Facebook feels somehow more sinister, more untrustworthy, more a murky fog covered minefield.

So if you are still active in Facebook, do what you can to help people try and understand what they really are sharing, do what you can to inform cousin Ernie, Aunt Bertha, Freddy the dentist, and that annoying kid from 10th grade with the post nasal drip….

It seems pretty simple. If I post an image on flickr, I go there (or get an RSS feed) to see what comments have been added. If I want to see what people said in response to my blog posts, I go here (or again, read my own feed). Same for YouTube.

Any place online I post some media, it makes sense that that is the place to find out what people (in my case, I am just hoping that someone notices) say in response.

Not anymore when media gets reposted in other places via feeds.

For example, the networking Plaxo (which I visit about 4 times a year) subscribed to my flickr feed, so all my photos are republished in Plaxo, like this one originally posted in flickr:

What is really shoddy, and actually violates my flickr creative commons license (by attribution). is that plaxo does not provide a link or credit to the source image. But that’s beside the point- when someone comments on my flickr photo as published in Plaxo- the comment stays in Plaxo. The source media has no connection to the comment made on another site.

More? In Facebook, where I have no idea ever how I set things or enabled them, somehow I managed to have my blog republished there as Facebook “notes”

Unlike Plaxo, at least Facebook provides a link at the bottom for View Original Post– though it does pass it through a Facebook redirect URL where it is storing those micorbits of your click activity for who knows what purpose.

But again, should someone post a comment to this “note”, which was not created in Facebook, the comment is kept inside the Great Wall of Facebook. The original source of the content, my own blog, does not know of any comments posted on it in Facebook.

The same goes for FriendFeed, where you can generate a stream of content from many of your online publishing sources:

Like Vegas, comments made in FriendFeed stay in FriendFeed. I’ve not been plying too much time in FriendFeed, but it does seem to provide something close to a place to see the comments on your content in one place.

So while content is easily ingested into other sites by the elegantly simple format of RSS, there seems to be little in the way of structuring or feeding of comment data back to the source (yes, I know there are feeds for comments from a few places).

It just seems wrong to me that commentary on my content is not connected back to the source.

So I dream of an internet perhaps invented by Tony Hirst where all the data is structured, interchangable, and flows back and forth in smooth motions.

Until then, we have commentary/conversations/comments about media as detached orphans and likely need some Hirst-like hacks to coalesce them (how’s that for a request, Tony?).