I’ve had the mixed blessing today of being home sick and bored — so lot’s of time to watch the new real-time FriendFeed shimmy and scroll down my screen.
I’m not suggesting the new FriendFeed is itself at the centre of the “new world” in the title; I’m using it as a point of reference: it represents the moment very well.
Starting with the design, people who pretty much stick to Facebook could be forgiven for assuming FriendFeed copied the more popular service. It isn’t accurate though. The idea of displaying the users’ pictures beside every item is from Twitter. The comments and “like” features were already on FriendFeed when Facebook adopted them.
Quick introduction here: a bunch of guys who made Gmail and Google Maps left the mothership and founded FriendFeed in 2007. It aggregates all the stuff you do online into one “lifestream.” Recognized for being the best new startup of 2008, it has a core group of high-activity users (the kind of people who would overwhelm your Facebook news feed with dozens of shared items per day) but the non-tech media and advertising industries haven’t taken to it like they have to Twitter.
Onto the new design: TechCrunch said it’s “simpler, faster, better (maybe too fast)“… Here’s more… And check out the videos of FriendFeed’s founders in discussion with select tech journalists.
So much for the basics.
Now I’m not going to presume to be an expert on FriendFeed (not by any means) nor social media in general. My interest here is where the technology intersects with more general cultural concerns.
The big idea of this post is that at some point the focus of change is going to shift from the technology itself to what we do with it. The FriendFeed redesign probably isn’t the pivotal moment but it’s certainly a significant one.
There was a lot of chatter today — much of it in the form of complaints — about the difficulty of keeping up with it. Some people are looking for barf bags.
(I’m imagining a group of self-satisfied Luddites standing on the sidelines saying “told you so” — pointing out that these complaints resemble the complaints they’ve been making about the web as a whole all along.)
Jeremiah Owyang made a few suggestions for contending with the greater speed and volume:
“Anchors We need more anchors to slow it down and make sense of it, Friendfeed offers a ‘pause’ button that actually freezes the stream, allowing users to navigate the content. “Dams and Distibutaries Dams will stop the flow of content (users will unsubscrbe) and distributary are rivers that split off from the main river, as a result you’ll see a need to use filters and lists to group people in smaller categories. “Maps and Compasses are needed to help guide us to what’s important. Expect digests, analysis, and those who boil down what matters to matter more than ever. Traditional reporters will help make sense of thousands of opinions.”
We’ll start to see more focus on recommendations like the latter. Instead of automatically asking, “What else can we invent?” we should be asking, “What can we learn? — and how?… What can we become? What new roles can we fill?”
I’m tempted to extend the water metaphor too far (“we need to find sailors who don’t get seasick… and learn to swim,” etc) but I’ll rush a few points I want to make and then leave it open for comments or future followup:
- Neural plasticity: look it up and check out The Brain That Changes Itself… And if the human species can learn to read and write and do math, who knows what else we’re capable of?
- Memory: the internet doesn’t make memorization redundant, it makes short-term, temporary, multi-task-specific “random access memory” even more important than before. I think we have capacities we’re not taking advantage of it yet.
- Professionalization: formal education and institutions will develop around this stuff. It’ll happen one day just as it happened with radio and the horseless carriage — not to mention the manufacture of personal computers. Even if social media is already professionalized (I think the roots have been set down but not much else) it hasn’t become thoroughly organized yet — which it will.
Eventually a new ecology will evolve. People are lamenting the loss of this-and-that but they don’t appreciate the power of people’s creative initiative to compensate for the losses and go even further to create new opportunities and enterprises.
It does take time though — measured in years, if not decades — a scale many people aren’t used to using anymore (ironically!).
We already know that younger generations naturally gravitate towards new uses for technology than what were originally intended — new activities that weren’t even conceivable before. It’s hard to know how we’ll adapt — and we will adapt — but we can guess.
So maybe I will extend Owyang’s metaphor (to an absurd degree): if we’re getting swamped by information, maybe we’ll grow gills — maybe we’ll make our way back into the water from which our ancestors evolved.
