My social media workflow

by Andy DeSoto on January 5, 2009

Now that Duncan Riley’s so-called “silly season” is over, it’s almost time to put the New Years Resolution-style posts away for the year.  Before I do that, though, I wanted to write a little bit about my social media consumption at the beginning of 2009 so that I can compare it retrospectively to wherever I might stand at this time next year.

I am particularly interested in hearing what you do that may be similar or different to my own routine.  Since social media consumption is one of those things that your friends normally don’t have a chance to witness, here’s your chance to share!

Yummy!

My social media habits can be basically broken down into three parts: a beginning of the day, catch-up phase, a midday working segment, and an evening entertainment portion.  Here’s how I do it.

Playing catch-up

As soon as I wake up (and admittedly often before I’m completely out of bed), I need to catch up with whatever news or conversation took off while I was catching my z’s.  My tool of choice for this is my iPhone as the web and application interfaces for the services I use make for more bite-sized (breakfastlike?) bits of news.  The routine normally goes like this:

  1. Check Google Reader.  The foundation of the day’s news, Reader provides distraction-free access to the newsmakers that are most important to me.  I share items I think my Facebook and FriendFeed contacts would like, star resources I know I’ll revisit over the next week or so, and mark as unread stories I plan on interacting with more deeply in the next phase.
  2. Check FriendFeed.  The Web gets a bit more personal as I move to the next layer.  I flip to FriendFeed’s excellent iPhone interface and immediately check the “Best Of” category to see which of the articles I just encountered are holding the most sway within the community.  I occasionally ‘like’ items, but normally just use FriendFeed as a social barometer.
  3. Check Twitter.  Even more social now, I look to see if anyone’s replied to me on Twitter or if any breaking news has gone down more locally that wasn’t caught by the wider nets of Reader of FriendFeed.
  4. Check Facebook.  Finally I have the opportunity to scan through news within the community that’s closest to my heart– my classmates, coworkers, and friends.  Anything of importance here is first to be dealt with later in the day.
  5. Check E-mail.  Direct to me and much more likely to be urgent, this step gets to wait!

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My perfect FriendFeed: a response to Paul Buchheit

by Andy DeSoto on January 5, 2009

FriendFeed flux.Earlier today, FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit eloquently responded to some of the discussion regarding FriendFeed that’s been flowing through the blogosphere.  Reminding us that any successful web service (e.g., his own Gmail) takes time and effort to succeed, he lets us know that he and the rest of the FriendFeed team are listening:

If you’d like to contribute (and I hope you do), I’d love to read more of your visions of  ”the perfect FriendFeed.”  Describe what would make FriendFeed perfect for YOU, and post it on your blog.  Feel free to drop or change features in any way you like. Yes, technically you’re doing my work for me, but it’s mutually beneficial because we’ll do our best to create a product that you like, and even if we don’t, maybe someone else will (since the concepts are out there for everyone).

I thought about this offer and realized my dream for FriendFeed is simple, even if abstract: I want to be able to sum up what the service does in a sentence or two and share this with my friends.

Now, when researching this request, I discovered FriendFeed actually does have a very abbreviated explanation, as delineated on its About page: 

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

Unfortunately, I’ve found the user experience is not quite as simple.  Sure, being a FriendFeed user entails what’s described above, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.  In order to successfully navigate the noisy waters of FriendFeed, you’ve got to navigate amongst the treacherous shoals of FriendFeed’s most popular ego-memeiacs, master the imprecise art of hiding sources and friends-of-friends, and more– FriendFeed’s raw power detracts from its ability to meet its well-defined mission statement.

“If another user is interacting with my content at chance, he or she will be just as likely to encounter the Tweet I took ten seconds to write as the blog article that took forty-five minutes. There’s something unbalanced about this.” 

I need to know what FriendFeed is and why I should be using it.  When I log in, there are immediately too many choices to make: I can scroll through my feed, peruse the “Best Of” categories, check up on specific friends, read content, comment on it, or merely “like” it, and so forth– it’s the sort of thing that takes too much focus.

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Five things I want to see in social media in 2009

by Andy DeSoto on January 2, 2009

Yesterday, I [somewhat] objectively made a set of 10 predictions I expect to see over 2009’s course.  However, what I expect and what I’d like to see are two very different things, so I thought I’d complement yesterday’s list with a wishlist of my own.  Here are five things I think would contribute to social media’s value for myself and others.

Ten things I'd like to see!

#1: More automation.

We’re getting there with devices like the Eye-Fi card and the upcoming Fitbit, but we can do even better: I want to see services and technology that limit the time I’m required to actively spend uploading, sharing, and tagging content.  I don’t ever want to see a Flickr upload screen again, choose tags for my online video, manually share my location on Brightkite, and so forth.  If it can be digitally “outsourced,” I want that option.  That’s why services like Tagcow appealed to me so greatly when they first emerged– I want to be able to spend more time creating and discussing great content than preparing and labeling it for the Web.

#2: Fewer options.

In a way, I’m fortunate that the tech economy is forcing companies to rethink their strategies and limiting the number of new startups because, as far as I’m concerned, there are much too many similar services in the same space.  Take a look at FriendFeed’s supported import list, for instance– most web users probably only know a quarter of the items on that list.   I don’t like this because the more spread out users are over different sites, the more effort I need to go to to engage with those users.  If you wanted to visit all of your old college friends, for instance, you’d have to spend weeks traveling across the corners of the globe to meet up with all of them.  The way users are scattered all over the net mirrors this difficulty, it doesn’t solve it, and it’s time for this to change. [click to continue…]

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