Goodreads, Twitter, Facebook & Asymmetric Follow
by Kevin
Tim O’Reilly articulates part of my frustration with Facebook:
Asymmetric follow is why I use Twitter regularly and Facebook much less often. With Twitter’s model, I can find people I’m interested in, whether or not they know me, and learn about them and their lives and thoughts. Others can include me in their lists. You become “friends” with complete strangers over time, by communicating with them (responding with @messages for example), perhaps by mutual following. In fact, Twitter’s wonderful system of @ messages means that anyone can address me – and so I find myself having conversations with complete strangers as well. I actually follow my @ messages more faithfully than I do my planned Follow list.
On Facebook, I’m expected to approve every request, and alas, I turn down far more than I accept. Amazingly, few people who I don’t know even bother to explain who they are and why they want to be my friend. I sometimes do accept strangers who make a good case for why I’d be interested in them, but I always ignore those I don’t know who don’t bother to even say hello. Ditto for LinkedIn and Plaxo and all the other greedy networks that are clamoring for my time and attention while requiring me to take explicit steps to approve or deny each request.
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Asymmetric follow is also a good way to boost viral growth, as it encourages people to try the service without having to be an active user. We learned long ago from Usenet and mailing lists that there are always more lurkers than posters.
My problem has always been the different uses I have for FB. I use it to connect with friends and family (including those I might have lost touch with) but I also use it to network. Those who want to network with me in the political realm dwarf my actual “friends.”
So at some point you have to decide what requests you want to accept and/or at what point it all gets to be too much. I haven’t found an easy way to manage the information flow. So either I don’t connect with people or I find my actual friend’s information frequently gets buried by all these other more prolific political connections.
For a variety of reasons I find myself using Twitter more and Facebook less. It just seems easier to follow people and actually have a conversation. I also use multiple Twitter accounts so that I can connect with people and provide content and conversations on common ground/topics. Sometimes this splitting of subjects feels strained but it seems to work best for me.
What about you? How do use various social networking sites and why?
I find that the conversations you have on the computer are more frequent then the converstations you have with me or others face to face. I imagine that is more common among people who work on the computer all day and can monitor all that is being said and is going on through out the day. I find it scary and at the same time wonderful that I use it to monitor what you think and do during the day. But being a visual person I think picking up on the ques of how one is really feeling is important to real life. Which all of you should get! ;)