Social networks have always existed. The web just supplements existing structures for maintaining them. Online platforms led by Facebook, Orkut, Bebo and Hi5 are doing the job of coffee mornings, playground games, church meetings, etc. They provide a lightweight way to maintain and develop interaction with the people that you know, directly or indirectly, and you go by your ‘real world’ name.

Social media (as I understand it) is qualitatively different in that it isn’t based on an existing relationship. It means that you are more likely than not to have never met your followers. Many are brands, bands, organisations or bots.  As such, you generally follow them because of what they post rather than who they are (unless they are a celebrity, in which case they are really a brand). Asymmetry rules. Myspace and Twitter are the biggies here. Blogging was always social media.  With social media, you address the world and not just your friends.

Twitter is interesting in that it’s adapted from a social network pitch to a social media one. Their original front page pitch:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

…is now social media simple…

Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.

Of course, there is always some overlap. Social groups form around a shared interest and if you’re into social media then that can be the focus for a social network just like anything else.  Phenomenal social offshoots like Twitpanto wouldn’t work for Facebook.

Conversely, the most desirable place for brands is the voluntary endorsement across social networks — online or off.  This ‘tell your friends’ marketing approach has always been the golden strategy and online social network platforms only put a rocket up it.

If you are not sure whether a social web platform is social media or social network then a scientific, quantitative test might be to check the structure of the graph; if it’s heavily clustered around a minority of publishers then you are looking at social media. If it’s more evenly distributed then it’s more like a social network.

If you don’t have time for this analysis, perhaps a facetious snap test of whether something is social media is whether someone can make a living explaining how to use it

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.

Conversely, I’ve gotten into the habit of tweeting geeky, brummie, webby stuff because, well, most (but not all) of my followers are brummie social media types. If I were a celebrity (or more involved in the local scene) things might be different but right now I can’t bring myself to tweet my caffeine levels to Birmingham Bloggers.

Having said that, there’s enormous value in being able to dip into this crowd to pick up the vibe or lob an idea out there. It’s rather like wandering around a friendly convention or themed festival. You overhear stuff and can strike up conversations on anything that snags your interest.

I’m looking at getting my long-overdue second camera lens and it feels very analogous. I want to take in more of the picture but I also want to get the detail of my actual friends. The obvious Twitter hack (twhack?) is to create a new account under my actual name. This’ll be selective but get all notifications. Meanwhile, the @sixball account gets notifications toned down but I’ll add anyone who catches my eye and — best of all — no-one has to suffer an unfollowing.

Twitter earned support by offering something for free that previously wasn’t, essentially paid for by VC funding. Buying in a decent search engine must have left them strapped last month.

As bounder put it:

no SMS? Am I going to have to start using my phone to text? Gawd.

Why the UK networks no want to play ball? It might just be that they want to protect their revenues. They still just about manage to charge for txts and they’d now like the masses to also take mobile internet packages.

Let’s be clear. SMS is a dead-end, legacy, push mechanism for messages that demand your immediate attention. It was always going to be a temporary catch-all for old phones and habits until mobile internet gets a grip.

Bluemilkshake sums it up:

Twitter is just a site that doesn’t have as many features as Facebook.

Twitter was always much more formidable in its community spirit than its feature set. Now it doesn’t have any features that your average freelancer couldn’t roll into their own home-grown app. When APIs mean I can update Twitter/Facebook/RandomApp from anywhere then status sharing becomes a service where the only real difference between each app is that it can represent a different crowd to share the update with (the problem of duplicates remains unsolved in practice but trivial in principal).

If Facebook could let me restrict my updates to subsets of my friends (like Plurk and Pownce) and even optionally forward them to Twitter then I think I could have a second honeymoon with them.

I don’t own an iPhone (woefully) and I’m only an occasional Facebooker, so I’m just squatting here on the fringe and speculating.   But the latest post on the Facebook blog seems somewhat significant.

It notes that 1.5 million people regularly use the Facebook iPhone website since it launched a year ago.   Then it announces a Facebook Application for the iPhone (see left) which — along with a speed increase — features instant photo uploads and live chat.  Location sharing is in the pipeline.

This puts Facebook ahead of Google’s Jaiku in the mobile social network stakes for now.   Both have converged on the ‘status stream’ model which has massive room for innovation.

For instance, I can see Google allowing posts to reference places in Google Map.  If your friend is at a bar, Google will want to show you where that is.

Facebook will take a big step forward when it allows the targeting of updates to specific circles of friends (like plurk).  A lot of diversity in your recipients is a natural consequence of a general social network (rather than a niche one like Twitter) but is damn inhibiting.

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’?

So, OrangeJon and myself decided to run a little experiment to see whether we were actually early adopters or just a little freaky.  We approached Vale Festival which pulls in several thousand students for a day with much going on and offered our services in order to answer this question:

Given the very specific context of a large, diverse festival, what is the viability of crowd-generated postings via mobile devices?

Can we turn happy, ordinary students into twitterers, basically.

Setup

To maximise participation, we realised early on that it should require minimal effort to contribute. We are, after all, talking about students drinking free beer in the sun. Flat-rate data plans and iPhones were presumed to be thin on the ground.

We reduced registration to nothing, making it retroactive. Students could text their messages straight to an advertised number (standard txt rate) which would automatically register them (returning the details by SMS) and post their message on the event-specific page. This page was mobile-friendly and hosted under Bodder.

To make it even more real, we grabbed a 1.5m LED scrolling display off eBay and rigged it to show recent posts from the crowd (accessed via a generously loaned 3G dongle – thanks Pete!). Visibility was reduced in direct sunlight but it was still usable.

On top of this, we had a big poster, some t-shirts, a stack of business cards and a funky blue parasol (which later went ‘walkies’).

Results

The raw data is reproduced below for the record.  It shows the message in the order they were posted. Each post is preceded by a nickname and user id.

Si#1 is testing all Bodder systems, live at Vale Festival! [6 days ago]
Carys#120 Carys rocks [6 days ago]
anon#121 Vale fest is awesome! [6 days ago]
anon#122 Get you SLIT out darling! [6 days ago]
Si#1 is being threatened by a large slice of lime! [6 days ago]
Alex#14 is happy that Bodder is going up in the world [6 days ago]
OrangeJon#2 Carys is blonde. Oh so blonde. [6 days ago]
anon#123 hi mum [6 days ago]
anon#124 Fifty Quid to the first person who jumps in the lake. Holla at me. You know you want it. [6 days ago]
Carys#120 check out DJ Cro in the dance tent [6 days ago]
anon#125 Gta rule myspace.Com/gtaunderstand!!! [6 days ago]
anon#126 If you are reading this after party at mine for the sexually adventurous. No uggos. You will be denied entrance. 10 downing street ask for chima. Add me facebk [6 days ago]
anon#122 I’m bored, text me on 07912 482088 [6 days ago]
anon#127 Shout out to everyone at yoonee. Woohoo [6 days ago]
Si#1 kinda likes those toffee apple beers. can someone bring one over to the blue hairy brolly? [6 days ago]
anon#128 What is point bodder.com? [6 days ago]
anon#129 We’re all doomed and you hippies can’t do anything about it. [6 days ago]
anon#130 hey finnn^ [6 days ago]
anon#131 Shit and piss mate. [6 days ago]
Jonny#90 Shit and piss. [11 days ago]
anon#132 Paninis and baguettes [6 days ago]
anon#133 The jd kicks butt [6 days ago]
anon#122 Hannah lewis, text chris on 07912482088 x [6 days ago]
arjun#134 The red n blue clown is scratching the singers beard. [6 days ago]
anon#127 Get your freed beer from yoonee! RIGHT NOW! [6 days ago]
arjun#134 The red n blue clown has gone missing. [5 days ago]
arjun#134 The red n blue clown is snoggin the roman guy wearing a leaf with an ice cream in his hand. [5 days ago]
OrangeJon#2 wonders if anybody can really be Boddered [5 days ago]

Notes

• Carys was helping us out. At one point she misarranged the letters on a banner to spell ‘BODEDR’.
• Yoonee was a stall adjacent to us which was busy handing out free beer in exchange for marketable personal details.
• The messages tended to come in salvos, often triggered by personal introductions by us.
• We managed to hold off from censorship at this 99% student event.
• One guy asked if he could use our connection to check Facebook.
• Out of interest, we texted #122 with an offer to buy him a beer. This sparked a lively SMS conversation in which we established his name was Chris, certainly drunk and seriously besotted with the individual he subsequently named.
• The ‘red and blue clown’ was with Misty’s Big Adventure.  This was the closest to live-blogging.

Conclusions

This was an incredibly useful exercise for us in a bunch of ways.

Apart from the hassle of having to take our power cable up through the trees, we had no real technical problems.  People posted and their messages appeared as we checked them.  We even found time to streamline the moderation process on the fly.

The eye-opener for me was the social aspect of the model.  We’d believed that, given the ability to address the crowd, people would jump on it.  Conversations would be sparked.  Wry observations made.  Although we saw some of that, we were prepared for more.  I can’t say for sure, but this is how my interpretation breaks it down.

Awareness.  It was a big festival and we only got properly involved close to the day.  It was quite possible to spend the day out there and not check us out.

Familiarity. This is a novel mash-up of technologies, texting to an LED display via a mobile-friendly website is a trickier and more alien concept than the Wishing Tree (pictured above) or Tent of Hope.

Motivation.  The above are comforting since they can be worked on.  The big, hairy hurdle may simply be disinclination – why bother? People are either with their friends at the festival or just a text message away.  Everyone else is just eye candy.  Whilst they enjoy being where the action is, they don’t feel the need to interact with it in a big way.

The fact that many of the posts came from personal introductions suggests that a real social connection is important.  Essentially, most people like to know who they are addressing before they show themselves since it shapes their message.  Posting to the world (i.e. a lot of random people) doesn’t make sense.  They have nothing to say to the world and they don’t presume the world to be interested.

I also suspect that the relative anonymity of posting devalues it.  Where’s the social pay-off when you are not easily associated with your message?  Facebook walls are hugely popular exactly because they deliver the social pay-off of targeted visibility so effectively.  You friend sees the message and their friends can see the message (and your mutual friends see it in their news feed).

Getting the message out is easy.  Matching it to the right context – getting it in front of the right people – is the fiddly bit.  More thought required…

Plurk has attitude and attitude counts.

It counts because it’s so easy to knock up a status logger (heck, I even rolled one myself). Whereas I never took to the minimal asthetics of the Twitter bird, the headless quadraped of Plurk (a dog?) somehow does it for me. The blog is spiky, witty, philosophical, informative and also cuts to the bone. I give you:

Don’t get us wrong, we love to eat our own dogfood, but we put real effort to ensure that our dogfood tastes good to all breeds of dogs around the world, and not just some small band of cliquish poodles who gather for crumpets every afternoon while sipping on their macchiatos and waxing philosophical on things that don’t matter.

Feature-wise, the timeline may be kind of a gimmick which I can’t see being easily reproduced on a mobile (where all the action is). Plurk also features karma in an incentive to drive recommendation and can embed video and pics from third-parties like Flickr and YouTube. Oh yeah, and threaded comments. No more hacky tracking @s.

The most significant feature for me is ‘cliques’, although I’d call them ‘circles’. With a clique you define an audience, allowing you to separate you personal from your professional from your whatever without all that messing about with separate profiles. Trying to work out the appropriateness of an update for a particular diverse context like Facebook gives me headaches. If Plurk could similarly let me target my cross-posting to sevices like Twitter and Facebook then I would be utterly, utterly sold. If a whole bunch of other people feel the same, is Plurker going to hit the same scaling issues as Twitter? I think not and here’s why:

Twitter’s scaling problem is not the Interweb’s problem.

We don’t need a monolithic status logging any more than we need a universal webmail provider or blogging platform. Users should be able to pick the one that suits their style and receive updates from the others, probably via some kind of pinging mechanism between services. Beta bloggers are likely to continue to hang out on Twitter. College kids will update their status on Facebook. The niches of different crowds will be met with myriad different services yet to emerge, all with a different take yet all working with each other.

It’s just starting to get interesting.

join me on Plurk