Drowning in a sea of social bookmarking services.
Over the years online social bookmarking and social sharing services have become ever increasingly popular, with more services coming out all the time.
From Digg, reddit, and stumble upon, to Delicious, Google Bookmarks, Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, … the list goes on.
In fact looking at sharethis.com’s supported services, it lists 48 different social sharing services. 48!
Sharing across 48 different services is ridiculous, and obviously no on is expected to do such a thing, typically users will pick a few and stick to them. One of the bigest deciding factors on choosing social sharing services is user count; sharing to a small community isn’t necessarily worthwhile unless it’s a niche or private community like a forum.
So what are we hoping to get from these services?
Typically there’s 3 types of social bookmarking service:
- You have straight out bookmarking, like Google Bookmarks, Magnolia, Delicious, Yahoo! Bookmarks and so on. These typically involve saving an online-based list of bookmarks which follow the user across computers and sessions, so that they aren’t limited to one computer and one browser profile.
- Then you have Aggregation and site discovery services such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Slashdot and Yahoo Buzz. These typically aggregate sites based on user viewing habits, and popularity of web pages, allowing content filtering based on liking and disliking information, and thus narrowing the sea of information on the web into a more manageable user-filtered stream.
- Finally we have the social communication networks. These are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Instant Messenger services like Aim, Yahoo, MSN and even email. These are orientated on the users and the social cliques within them, rather than web content.
However, none of these services are black and white, the bookmarking services have the capability to make bookmarks public for sharing purposes. The aggregation sites have the capability to add “friends” and user profiles for linking to external web sites, making them not only aggregation services but also sharing services, and communication networks. Finally, people will always use communication services to share web urls, with twitter trends becoming a fairly mainstream methods of discovering web sites and news, and Instant Messengers being a pretty common way of sharing links to web pages.
So with all this blurring between types of services we confuse ourselves. Now in order to share a web page, you Digg it, then Bookmark it publicly, followed by posting it on Twitter, Facebook and a dose of Instant Messaging.
Who’s to blame for this mess?
Well the services are the ones cramming all this unnecessary functionality into their services, but it is to keep the users on their service as much as possible, so the users are to blame for using these services in ways they shouldn’t be used, the companies are just adapting to satisfy the users.
Do we need all these services? Obviously no, we need the users and the content, all these social bookmarking services do is create user personas storing every bookmarked and shared link, and that’s all they are – databases of links.
So what do we change? How should websites be shared?
These are the difficult questions. While it makes the most sense to keep bookmarking services as single purpose tools, one for bookmarks, one for aggregating/discovering information, and one for sharing we also run into the problem of sharing too much. A user may read dozens of articles a day on the web, and like and want to share most of them with friends. However doing do results in a list of sites per day, and when social circles grow, the more users sharing site, results in a bigger sea of sites being shared by each user. Suddenly we’re back at square one of too much information and not enough time to go through it all, only this time instead of it being spread across all the sites producing the content, we are now spreading it across social bookmarking services. Needing to read shared digg articles and sites shared on twitter or facebook, then we have sites coming through MSN or email, suddenly we’re overwhelmed again.
Ultimately not a lot can be done about this, while users continue to share across a number of different services we’re stuck trying to filter this information. The hypocrisy of needing to filter information coming from already filtered sharing services is ridiculous.
The primary type of social service is the social communication platforms, from Facebook and Twitter to IM, because this is where the numbers are, so the people we want to share with are there. The problem as a user sharing information is that we want to share sites because they have impressed us in some way, but if we share every site we find on a social communication network, we become spammer, submitting dozens of links a day, which then overwhelms the people reading the submissions.
Ideally we need to have a system that allows us to share every link we like over the course of the day, but to then have have these filtered to the other users based on their interests.
Instant messaging sort of takes care of this problem because communication is user to user, if you think the information will be interesting to them, you then send it, but for facebook and twitter, we’re sharing to groups of people, and so some people in those groups will not be interested in the same information as others in the group. We are sort of able to achieve this by creating lists of friends, so people you work with can be placed in to a group and people you socialise with after work can be placed into another group, and your shared interests will be better suited to these groups. However this is work, we just want to share the sites, we don’t want to overcomplicate the grouping of users because groups change as the subject matter of what you’re sharing changes.
The ideal solution is then to be able to share to groups of user or a selection of individual users easily and quickly. This is how email works, you can add individuals groups, all very easily. The problem is that email isn’t considered an instant communication platoform, and it also is frustrating to deal with due to spam and the fact that you are able to receive email from anyone, not jsut people on your friends list. Now this can be fixed fairly easily. Applying filters in gmail to block all email that doesn’t originate from a contant in your friends list is quite easy, but we don’t do this because no one else does this, and so email is not a suitable social sharing platform.
Google Buzz, a new service by Google is designed for this very situation, it has an email-like interface, allows sharing by group and a selection of users very easily, and already has a very large pre-existing usergroup.
The issue with this is that because it ties so heavily into your email address, which we are now trained to keep secret at all times to keep away from the spam, we are not willing to use this platform, whether it is the grand solution we have all been looking for or not. Twitter does allow the ability to send information to individuals and groups, but due to the public nature of the service, and the 140 character limit, there is only so many users you can send a message to before you run out of room to include the url because the entire 140 characters is taken up by including usernames you wish to share to.
So I guess we need this from Facebook, seeing as over 400 million of us are already there, we aren’t limited by character limits, and we are already pretty used to sharing websites there thanks for Facebook like buttons appearing all over the web, and Facebook Connect tying into everything. All we need is an easy way of submitting links to groups of individual users, like: To: Peter, Mark and Steve – visit facebook.com now
Unfortunately we’re unlikely to get this because Facebook is so big, that any small change they make requires hundreds of board meetings and user beta tests, that anything as big as a change in the way we submit updates will never be approved.
So then we’re stuck with the 48+ different social sharing services unless 400 million people decide to switch over to Google Buzz, which is very unlikely for reasons already mentioned.
But at the very least, we need to change the way we as users share information, if only to help our friends be able to read through all of it.
- Don’t share specific niche sites to large groups of users when you know only a few will be interested in it. This goes for sharing foreign sites to mixed language groups, and niche forum news to groups of friends that aren’t on that forum… etc.
- Use FriendFeed to aggregate all your social profiles so that instead of having to post every web page you visit, instead the ones you like are viewable by your friendfeed profile (which can be linked to a facebook tab for easy accessibility).
- Don’t turn News aggregation sites into sharing sites. It’s great that you are able to share news articles you like with friends, but don’t then use the same service for sharing pictures of cats or youtube videos!
Something that we can’t do as users, but developers should stop trying to do is treat their news aggregation sites as social sharing sites. All news should be content based, so users should be de-emphasised. Articles shouldn’t be hitting the front page just because they are a power user. Articles shouldn’t be submitted by the users. They should be indexed the the services and only voted on by the users. This would reflect the way the web works properly, with the focus being on content and origin of the news. All we can do to combat this as users is stop sharing digg urls and reddit urls. Submit the content origin’s address when pasting links into your IMs and facebook/Twitter updates.
http://nascents.wordpress.com/feed/
