Social media is making people specialists

People in internet are quite often stuck in subjects. People are either being serious or being funny, talking about business or about environment, politics or sports and so on. That's not the case in real life. In real life some of the most professional guys can be the most funny ones and politically aware people can be really into sports.

Blogs are often focused on certain subjects by nature so maybe those are not the best way to evaluate this situation. Twitter proves my point much better. Twitter is personalized and it is concentrated on the actual person and he's or she's tweets. There are companies also, but mainly it's still actual users. Most of the Twitter users I follow are sticking with quite limited area of subjects. Some of them have taken the role of sharing high tech news, others tweet about social media, some about sports and so forth. Really rarely you see these really mixed.

I'm wondering why is that. In the real life, almost all people I know are willing to discuss, are interested and knowledgeable in multiple different subjects. At least in much wider range of subjects than common Twitter user is (according to my limited experience). Are the tools that make people being stick with subjects they feel most close or is it because the audience?

Maybe it's those combined. Way internet is currently used, creates niches and specialists. People tend to find information from services and places which are specialized in one area and then other information come from another source. Then the same logic also applies to Twitter. I've noticed when I have tweeted about books I've read, I'll get some followers who unfollow me after couple of days when I'm tweeting about something else. I'm not sure if that is a pattern, but I've noticed that to happen often with book blog posts.

Will internet change people so that they will be focused on fewer subjects or will internet actually adjust to meet the needs of generalists also? I think I'm one of the latter ones and that's why I care about this. There's so much interesting stuff all around the world, that I'm not willing to enjoy only a part of it. I know I will lose followers and readers because of that, but social media isn't my job in any means and I prefer being myself than attracting followers with something else.

I find this subject interesting. I just can't believe that people would be that focused really on certain subjects, but maybe they are just using different means and tools for different subjects. That just sounds bit boring, I'm waiting internet to fix it for me.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Elevator speech of the web

As you might know elevator speech or pitch is short marketing speech of your product or service. I just realized that there is often elevator speech for web content also. It's is this part, the first 3-4 sentences where you either get the reader or lose it.

Sure elevator speech has much other meanings in business world than just attract the person to continue with the subject, but I think the basic idea is the same. You try to in short time period convince the other to either stick with it or not.

In the web this stand most when you are using RSS, Twitter or some of news services. I notice that I usually give every article about 10 to 15 seconds. So normally bit over the first chapter. If it doesn't seem interesting I usually jump to next one. So if you were me, now I would be either sold or lost already.

Twitter is a perfect example of how to attract users fast. I think that part of Twitters popularity bases on that it makes people to really shortly introduce what their content (or the content they share) is all about. It makes people to shorten the key message of the link they are sharing to bit over 100 characters. Some are much better than the others in twitter. It would be nice to see if actually some people get more hits for their shared links than others for the same content with different introduction. I bet they do, but I haven't seen any data on that one.

I think this is relevant for this type of services. You only have small amount of time to get someone to read your content. In blogging and many news services, pictures, videos and overall UX of the site also help. These give some more time to attract person to check what the content is all about.

Maybe there's something to learn for all bloggers in elevator speeches.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Is Facebook usage changing ?

Is it just me, but I have this gut feeling that amount of Facebook status updates has been going down. At least amongst my friends there used to be much more status updates during one day than there has been in last month or so.

I tried so search from web some tools or websites, which could prove my point, but there wasn't any. Almost got the impression that this is information Facebook is not sharing with us. Or then they just don't store old status updates.

Also I haven't received any new FB friend invites for some time and also the amount of others making friends are calming down. Could it be that now in FB usage has calmed down. Most of those who will join have joined and rest won't join due to principle.

I'm not saying that FB is in any ways dying, but maybe the dynamics of usage are changing. I would say there's bit more interaction, meaning more comments on posts and then there's much more links shared than previously and discussion is going around those.

Maybe this is specific to Finland or then this is just my imagination, but let's see, if this is one ff these silent signs on social media usage changing. If my guess on this usage pattern is correct, next step could be Twitter having easier way to follow up tweets related to specific links somehow. Kind of like comments on blogs or comments on FB or Buzz updates.

I'll keep on following if this is really a trend.