How Social Media Changed My Life

OR How I discovered how incredibly uninteresting I really am.

When I first started with Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, I really didn't expect anythign meaningful to come of it. I could see the possibilities that hte technologies presented, but I could also see the issues that bubbled beneath the surface.

My experimentation with MySpace didn't last all that long. In the time since I abbandonded the MySpace account (Sept 2007) to now, my attention has been paid to other services. Almost the same day, I created a Twitter account. About a month later I created an account on Facebook, about the day Facebook opened up the service to anyone and everyone.

Three years seems like a really long time to be using these services. And at times, each and every one of them loses whatever appeal they may have had.
Last March I used some tool and mapped out the connections between the various social networks I was using at the time. The point was to see and udnerstand how I was using them, and then use that data to help eliminate the duplicate postings that were occuring on some sites. On some days, this was annoying. On others it made the sites impossible to use. At best, people complained that their whole view was just one of my posts. At worst, multiple people replied to the posting, each one picking a different instance to post against. I don't know how much potential value (in terms of social utility and information sharing) was lost by this. But it did make some conversations hard to read.

My original intent was to keep enhancing the map, to keep track of the way the links evolved as new services were added and old services faded away. I was also looking for some way to assign personal value to each service and link in an attempt to determine the best way to prune the map down to just those services that actually returned some kind of value to me (whatever that means).
I never did figure out how to do that. But I did finally update the map with more current information.

Personally, I think this map looks like some kind of spaghetti monster.
Much like I original, I went from site to site recording the connections between them. That data was then fed into Graphviz dot to generate the map (yes, I know, it's more of a diagram, but I like MAP).
There were some changes to my proceedure. I added myself to the map. This was done to try to show which services I actually touch, versus those I just update via antoher service. I also combined some servcies under a single umbrella. Mostly this was just Google. I wasn't entirely sure how much value listing Google Talk, Lattitude, Mail, Docs, Voice and Wave as different services made. I did seperate out Picasa and Jaiku from Google. Jaiku isn't really Google anymore, not like it was when I couldn't get an invite to the service. Picasa fell into a different category.
Some services combined in other ways. Seesmic I combined seesmic.tv and seesmic.com/Seesmic Desktop together. Same for Picasa software with picasaweb.google.com. Sometimes the way I use a tool or site makes it feel different for me.
Kind of why I wouldn't want to combine Yahoo's Pipes, Fire Eagle and Flickr together. Or Google and YouTube.
In doing the map, I found a surprise. I had forgotten I had created an account with Virb. I was even more surprised I remember what passowrd I had setup. Of course, this means there is little value for me at Virb.
I did find out that one service had annoucned it's closure (Storytlr).
In looking at this data, the site with the most outbound connections is ping.fm. The most inbound connections is FriendFeed. In total there are 28 sites/services/tools and 105 connections between sites/tools/services.
I don't know what I'm going to do with this, other than just post it here.
But someone put my orignal social netowrk map in their Flickr gallery.

And this pretty much wraps up the interesting portion of this post. The rest of it is just me. And I'm thinking that how I use social netowkrs is going to have to wait for it's own post.