The other day someone asked me why I am not as active on Twitter. My answer was simple – I don’t have time!
Twitter is an interesting service. Neato-completo examples of how I used to use it:
1. Hoo be listening to music?
2. Reading the news, what’s next with Microhoo?
3. Hoo in DC, holla @ me.
Although the applications of the service are undoubtedly broad, it seems like many of the use cases for Twitter let people know what you are up to in a broadcast manner. This is not unlike the use cases for the away-message on AIM. As with AIM, although it is fun for people to know your status, it quickly gets old because you have to keep freaking changing it manually. So what’s the answer?
Recently there has been a whole lot of activity around – well – activity feeds. Services like SocialThing and FriendFeed are getting crazy attention as the next phase of Voyeurism 2.0 takes flight. These services aggregate your activities from across MULTIPLE services, enabling your subscribers to take a peak at your life. Why is this cool? Well, each of my examples above can be replaced with an ‘activity update’ from a service I use.
Let’s try it!
1. Hoo be listening to music? COULD BE –> Hooman is listening to Pandora (via Pandora)
2. Reading the news, what’s next with Microhoo? COULD BE –> Hooman bookmarked “Hello World” on del.icio.us
3. Hoo in DC, holla @ me. –> Hooman is in DC COULD BE –> Hooman is @ Club Awesome via MyLocation on Google
Much of my life involves using networked services. In fact, I would argue more people use networked services than not. Texting, calling on the phone, chatting on IM, are all examples. All of these could have activity status updates and be integrated into a feed for consumption. This automation is abillion times better for me than Twitter because I am LAZY!!!
Now, does that mean that there is no use for Twitter? No. It’s still rad and they could even update it to do all these things. Also, for now there is no online service that collects my random thoughts and impulses and outputs them in an automated fashion with some humorous tweaks. For now. 🙂
Anyway, that’s my two cents. The activity ‘space’ is really interesting. More to come on this and the other 4 Pillars of the Social Web (you, your friends, your activities, your services), later. Still chewing on this.
@ World: getting food. yay.
