As while ago I fed my Tumblr – which acted as my scrapbook of web postcards – into Facebook for a straight win. I carry on posting to Tumblr but now it reaches friends who I know wouldn’t see it otherwise and who jump on the chance to comment on it. When I spotted a familiar comic on a friend’s Tumblr I headed straight over to Facebook to comment, on a good hunch they also imported.

The case with Flickr is not so simple. By importing those, I’m also sharing my stuff with people I know. Those not on Flickr can give me flickr-esque feedback but it’s become detached from the source where I’d much prefer it. However, I know that Flickr isn’t everyone’s preferred photo biscuit. Since I’m Flickr faithful, I put up with this fracture even though it’s one more little nudge towards the Facebook vortex.

Reader seems to be chasing Facebook with the sharing and liking (formerly starring). Its far smaller user base seems to be mitigated by its users tendency to be reading the same sort of stuff as me. Of course, it’s also where I scan through recent photos from my Flickr contacts.

My Twitter posts rarely seem appropriate as Facebook updates somehow. Not only are they are lighter and more ‘disposable’ but they’re generally read by a different crowd (probably the one also using Reader). A better place to ‘host’ Twitter is probably FriendFeed which nicely integrates and enriches it with built-in friend lists, proper conversational support, inline images and expanded links.

Mine’s a complex, messy setup that doesn’t seem to have some about by design but really as an incremental series of reactions between what I want to do and what is available at the time. It’ll doubtless carry on evolving as the options multiply and I try to bind it all together in a way that makes sense.

home.html

I abused the computer science web server in 94 or 95 with multicoloured buttons and blinking text.   Along with my geeky friends I could see a future in which everyone had their own home page on Geocities.

Then Myspace came along and Facebook chased it up.  I was late for both.

e-mail

It was an introduction to Hotmail from a non-geeky friend in 1998 that weaned me off university e-mail accounts and onto webmail.  I later shelled out a couple of quid on eBay for a Gmail invite wanting to beat the inevitable rush.

Hotmail still trumps Gmail for numbers although ‘Facebook mail’ may ultimately bypass both.

web 2.0

From the Summer of 2004 I was tagging my photos in Flickr and bookmarks in del.icio.us.  Both were giving me stuff of real quality and motivating me to contribute.

I got the Blogger hoodie when they sold out to Google and paid off their paying users in 2003.  Five years later and most hardcore ‘bloggers’ are using WordPress (without switching to ‘pressers’).

Before Twitter had sprouted it vowels, I’d registered as the 3018th user.  A couple of years — and SXSW events — later and I am now able to follow a selection of the local digerati.  But most of my geeky friends are declining to tweet, or even blog.

Facebook is a one-stop shop mail, photos, videos, status, sharing are all made supremely simple whilst actually being technically sophisticated.  Yet my adoption of it is only marginal at best.

my point

If I search for “welcome to” in the subject line of my inbox I get 130 hits.  I’m a serial tinkerer.  An inveterate fiddler.  A compulsive invite-requester.  But I’m clearly not an early adopter.  Rather than being further down the road I’m actually off the beaten track. Instead of being ‘ahead of the curve’ I’m actually zipping off it at random tangents.

There’s a small swarm of us in Brum who wouldn’t be without Flickr, Gmail, Delicious, WordPress, Twitter et al.  We all get fantastic value out of these tools which connect, organise and inspire us to create.

Now, I don’t expect ordinary users to join us later on.  And I don’t find that a problem.  We adopt these apps whilst Facebook apps are adopting everyone else.  We are motivated differently.

So what does this mean for the ‘social web’?

There’s a funny little phenomenon in biological evolution that makes it possible for very cool things to happen. And most people have never heard of it. I’ll introduce it using mitochondria.

Mitochondria are the power packs of your cells turning oxygen into energy. Without them, getting out of bed in the morning would be impossible. They are rather self-contained and even have their own DNA (which you only get from your mother’s side). The mitochondria enjoy the comfort and reproductive advantages of the cell while the cell gets a boost that would put Red Bull to shame. It’s a cosy arrangement but it raises the question of how it evolved, since of course it DID evolve. Current thinking suggests that rather than the mitochondria popping into existence inside the cell via mutation or crossover it actually had a previous existence outside the cell and was swallowed up at some point. It’s one example of the major transitions in evolution.

Evolution by sticking simpler things together rather than messing up complex ones.

I just installed the Firefox plugin that integrates my favourite ToDo list app with my favourite webmail app, Remember The Milk and Gmail respectively. When I say ‘integrates ‘ I mean seamlessly. If Google themselves had just added this feature they would have renewed my respect but the fact that it comes from two guys and a monkey demands awe. The juxtoposition of the ToDo list with the inbox is blastingly obvious with hindsight being as that is a major source of tasks and now I can’t see myself doing without. Clearly Google needs to extend this gift to all users (regardless of browser) but how?

Flickr shows an alternative to a straight acquisition. It has always been deficient of any photo-editing tools such as the excellent Picnik. This was until Flickr did the smart thing and integrated them. Picnik now gets a bunch of exposure to be converted into premium accounts and Flickr gets slick editing functionality without much extra work. This is a fascinating approach to building complex applications that is distinct from parasitic ‘mashups’. Two standalone applications which complement each other are brought together to major effect.

You might argue that what RTM manages by hacking and Picnik gets from partnership is freely available on the Facebook platform. For example, the Scrabulous Facebook app — sucky though it is — is actually more usable than the mother site in my experience and so I was forced to induce my Scrabble-fiend mum onto Facebook in order get a game. The only contribution of Facebook in this case is that it forced Scrabulous to streamline its interface. It doesn’t add any actual functionality in itself. It’s an environment rather than an organism, albeit an adaptive one. I’ll avoid a huge tangent by pointing you at The Triple Helix by Richard Lewontin here…