In February I wrote a blog post about FriendFeed, explaining why I thought it was not as wonderful as everyone many ten people say it is. I didn’t post it, because it made me angry all over again about the “OMG, best tool for science communication, EVER”-attitude. I didn’t want to unleash my frustration on the world, so I let the blog post simmer for a bit.
Several months later, I not only stand by all of my original points, but I have more evidence for you to prove my point, which is that Friend Feed is not at all a good tool for scientists to communicate.
Okay, let’s have a look at the start of the post I wrote months ago:
When I decided to leave FriendFeed, I didn’t think that the fact that it made me stressed and unhappy and utterly and completely frustrated and angry was good enough a reason to leave. I don’t do rash decisions. Surely there must be good things about FriendFeed that I wasn’t seeing.
A while ago, Berci Mesko started a Google Spreadsheet list of how FriendFeed is useful to scientists. Ah, there you have it. The reasons to stay. The things that make FriendFeed special and useful. The list is not very long [smirk], so let’s go through it one by one.
Okay, the list got a little bit longer since then, but I won’t go through all 20 items. There were 15 when I did it the first time, and well, you’ll start to see a trend quite soon, so I’ll stop after 10.
1. Funding for ONS challenge
Jean-Claude Bradley got funding from a grant he heard of on FriendFeed. That’s great! However, hearing about things is not unique to FriendFeed. You can hear about things lots of places. If there was no FriendFeed, he might have heard about it elsewhere. In fact, the poster, Bill Hooker, had heard about it elsewhere. FriendFeed is not the main channel of communication for exchanging science information.
2. Making the Wikipedia entry for Open Notebook Science
Okay, so you can use FriendFeed to start a project online and have people comment on it. That’s nice. I like collaborative things. You can also do the same with a blog post, a forum, or even with a wiki on which you can leave notes when you make an edit. Like on Wikipedia. Which, you know, would be the normal platform for people to start and edit a Wikipedia entry…
3. Expanding the reach of live conferences
Alright. I’ll give you this one. The ISMB 2008 conference in Toronto was actively reported on in the FriendFeed room for that conference. It made it possible for people who were unable to attend the conference to get live feedback from people there, even if they didn’t personally know anyone there (eg. could not be kept up to date by e-mail or other personal messages). It was much more coherent than having several people liveblog the event on their own site. Here, FriendFeed actually was a benefit. In fact it was such a success that the model of commenting live on ongoing conferences in FriendFeed has also been used in several subsequent conferences, although all of those were related to science communication, and either organized or heavily attended by people who were already into the whole “let’s use the internet to talk about science”-thing. ISMB was a little more special in that regard: it was a big international, data-swapping, conventional scientific conference. Still, only a very small number of participants used the room, but the FriendFeeders very clearly acknowledged this in the paper they published about it afterward. Overall, this is a new way of exchanging ideas that could not as easily have been done on another platform. The fact that there is a published article about this strengthens that this use of FriendFeed is new and special.
Spoiler alert: this was the only thing in the list that I thought was unique to FriendFeed, and it still is. But, oh, how sad… In the mean time, I have discovered something that makes FriendFeed suddenly a whole lot less interesting to use for note taking at live conferences. You see, when FriendFeed changed the layout of the site, I was finally able to find out how to delete my account. And when I did, all the posts and comments I had ever left anywhere on FriendFeed disappeared with me. Including the notes I took at conferences. HAHAHA!! Oh, sorry. I’m sorry, that my personal decision to delete my account has completely screwed up your brilliant system. How thoughtless of me. How rude to interfere with this well-oiled machine that is user-generated data. On the bright side, the FriendFeed-archived notes are so hard to find again that nobody will notice that some items are missing!
Okay, let’s continue a bit more. It will get boring very soon, but you can handle a few more just to get an idea of the general trend.
4. Quick CID to CAS lookup
This is an example of how you can ask a question on Twitter and then have someone else reply to that Twitter question and port their Twitter stream to FriendFeed, where someone comments on it with the solution. It’s kind of like how you can post a question on a message board or on your own blog or on Ask Metaflter and maybe someone else might accidentally run into it on Google or through a link from someone else’s blog and know the answer and be kind enough to pass it on to the original asker.
It’s just another one of those things that happen all over the internet and the fact that this time it happened on FriendFeed is not something that makes the site especially unique. It is, however, a nice example of how FriendFeed is very good at detaching answers from questions and splitting up conversations so that they are incredibly difficult to follow. But thankfully we’re not collecting those. That list would be unmanageably long.
5. Collection of Scientific FriendFeed examples
This very list was collected on FriendFeed. That makes sense. I mean, if you’re going to reach the 12 people who honestly think FriendFeed is useful to science, then I suppose FriendFeed would be the way to contact them all.
6. Publication of conference report
Yes dears, this is wonderful, but I just gave you that one point already at number 3. I’m not counting it again. The resulting paper is because number 3 on this list was the only useful one so far. The paper itself is not an additional useful aspect of FriendFeed.
7. FriendFeed’s References Wanted Room
This is a room in FriendFeed where people who don’t have access to certain journals they need, can leave a message and others can check if they have it at their library and send it along. Ignoring the fact that this is possibly illegal, the concept itself is definitely useful. But. This can be done on other sites. This can easily be run as a forum, or MUCH much better at a dedicated website where people can send each other messages with attachments without revealing their e-mail address to strangers on the internet. FriendFeed is clearly a platform on which this can be done, but I don’t think it’s the best one for the job. Also, the entire concept relies too much on altruism. That’s lovely, but not likely to work well for anything in the long run. If this room were truly a popular place, you would soon notice it overflowing with needy greedy people who only want papers and are not willing to look them up for others. It’s not there yet, because in internet terms it’s not that popular. That is because it’s on FriendFeed, though. It’s not the best platform to be successful, but it works as a result of its own unpopularity.
8. Sorting PubMed articles on Impact Factor (also )
Okay, so you can use FriendFeed to start a project online and have people comment on it. That’s nice. I like collaborative things. You can also do the same with a blog post, a forum, or – wait, I have this terrible feeling of déjà-vu
9. Survey of the proteins on Wikipedia
Okay, so you can use FriendFeed to start a project online and have people comment on it. That’s nice. I like collab- wait, I have this terrible feeling of déjà-vu.
10. Finding collaborators to help with preparation of a beam time proposal
I have this terrible feeling of déjà-vu, again
And it just went on, and on, and on, and on like that.
FriendFeed does exactly the same as any message board or e-mail list or wiki or forum: it lets people communicate with each other. What it brings new to the table is the uncanny ability to completely rip apart any potentially coherent discussion into uncoordinated rambling in three to four different locations. They’re often the same people participating in all places, saying “for more on this, go here!” quite a lot. If you like clicking on links and going nowhere, then FriendFeed really is the perfect tool. You might be, too.
^ you must be this grumpy to be Eva.
{hugs}
No, she could be this grumpy and be me.
[insert logical disclaimers here]
*mutters about Twitter
Excellent work, Eva! I haven’t tried FF yet, but I’ve clicked through to it a few times without realising it (man, I hate those compressed URLs on Twitter. Yes, I use them too. I’m a hypocrite). There are so many Twitter links that direct you to FF, that in turn direct you to someone’s blog, that in turn directs you to the actual article that is being discussed.
SO. FRUSTRATING.
I’m biding my time for the Schadenfreude Feed networking application to be developed.
I was in high dudgeon of grump on Wednesday, but have since returned to my usual state of moderate snark and cynicism.
7. Correct on your second sentence.
In general, I agree with you about FF. Any user-generated platform is susceptible to some of these disadvantages – especially the one about archived content disappearing.
I personally like FF, mostly for a small book club “room” that I and a few other people who like reading the same kinds of books, share links (usually book reviews or each other’s blog posts) and conversations about the links. Some of us like having comments on our own blogs so we continue to do that as well, but the conversations in our FF room are very cheering and have helped me in deciding whether to read book x, etc. Maybe there are other places online to do this, but I haven’t found one with the user-friendliness of FF, despite the recent redesign which has dumbed the site down into a sort of Twitter.com clone, and is not an improvement. All the clever people of whom I am not one have written scripts to turn it back into the old format on their screens. (I have looked in at other book groups at, eg Yahoo, but the format is so confusing to me and so bitty – at FF you see all of one conversation on display, in order.)
I suppose that twitter hash tags are an equally good way to live-blog a conference, assuming you have a suitable application to view the tweets.
So, given that most onliny-type people are on multi-platforms and can share information and news on any of them, I think that the main use of FF is for small groups who don’t want to faff around with a wiki format to share info about a specialist topic.
I get the impression that Twitter (and associated apps) has become a lot more popular over the past few months with scientists than FF. FF seems to have had its heyday about 6 months to a year ago, and I get a sense that people are moving on (particularly since that redesign?) and using FF as one of several platforms upon which to “broadcast” a post or tweet made somewhere else.
What I hated about the multiple links in multiple places, was that when I was still on FF, I saw everything THREE OR FOUR TIMES: The blog posts in my feed reader, the thing on FriendFeed, then automatically reposted to Twitter and Facebook (siderant about Facebook: Facebook to ME is a place to stay in touch with friends from all over space and time. I don’t want to see your effing blog posts there and neither do your neighbours/siblings/non-science friends/cousins, which are the kind of people who are my Facebook friends. If we are using the same services for totally different purposes, it isn’t working out for anyone.)
Maxine, our comments crossed. But they are remarkably on the same topic. So, question: don’t you find it annoying that when you go to FriendFeed you have two different groups of people there to deal with – book fans and science-geekery fans? And, vice versa, do you think the people who follow you from either group are overwhelmed or bored by the fact that half of your updates are entirely irrelevant to them?
I agree – my family and most of my friends don’t care in the least about my blog posts. The occasional science-related status update seems to go down pretty well and generate some questions and feedback, but the family members and non-scientist friends I’ve told about my blog have had one or two looks at most, and never come back! I have that blog application thingy installed in Facebook, but new posts don’t show up in my news feed.
I recently rejoined FF and find some utility in watching some conversations develop. But this is only related to the very few people who I choose to follow on FF. I use Twitter to follow a very different group of feeds. FB is only for friends and family stuff. My blog is for me alone and anyone who accidentally stumbles upon it. I linked to FF once just to see how well it worked but never chose to broadcast my posting on other sites.
I completely agree with Eva that most of the stuff FF offers can be found elsewhere, and in some cases in a better format. However, in mild defense of FF proponents – it works for them and that is great. I think it is wonderful that there are so many similar, yet slightly different, programs out there and we can learn from each variation the tools that are really useful to someday make the “killer app”.
Google Wave might just blow all these other services out of the water… at least until the next big thing comes along!
I did respond, Eva, but something crashed when I pressed submit. Basically, I filter them out, and know that on Friend Feed, they can filter me out. (Rather like on Twitter, where the secret is only to follow very few people indeed, but not to mind how many follow you. I think.)
By the way, I just saw an announcement on the FF blog (in my trusty old RSS reader, which I rely on heavily despite all these new-fangled tools;-) ) that they have now enabled document attaching and therefore sharing. That is something that does strike me as very useful (eg in a collaborative group), and not offered by Twtr or FB?
@cath, regarding compressed URLs in Twitter: If you are using Tweetdeck (I keep both Tweetdeck and Twitter open) you can set up a preference in Tweetdeck that shows a preview of the expanded URL. It is a click slower to get to the destination, as the first click (on the compressed URL) opens a popup with the expanded URL, which you must click as well to reach the referenced page. However, I like that. I’d rather know where I am going before my arrival.
I’ve been on Twitter about two weeks. I avoided it, avoided it, avoided it, fell into it and now it’s constantly there, with Tweetdeck chirping as news arrives. Will it be there in a year?
Also, on Friend Feed, you can do what I do and just go to the “rooms” – ie. books or science. I ignore the “general feed” pages. I think if you use FF this way (via the little bookmark widget they have) it is very easy to keep your worlds separate, and I presume for other people to do it to me if they want. (However, I am sometimes quite plesantly surprised to see “likes” on FF to my “personal life” posts from hard-core biogeeks etc!). Twitter is something else, which is why I have written “where my worlds collide” in my profile. I think that the only way you can keep things separate on Twitter is by having two accounts. There you are, I’ve just found another advantage of Friend Feed, without meaning to!
http://bit.ly
SRSLY: you get stats as well.
Mmm…but you’re using it no differently then than you would a good old-fashioned forum/group/newsgroup – where you have different groups with different people. I used to be all over Yahoo groups ten years ago (although I think it had a different name back then.)
Argh, with the cross-posting again. That was a reply to Maxine.
Richard, how is bit.ly helping Cath? You still can’t see where the link goes if it’s on Twitter.
I love this post. Friday isn’t Friday without a good rant, and this one is, as they say in Ohio, a doozy.
I think they say that here, too.
In North Norfolk they use saltier language, especially when they find that some drunken yobs have smashed down the doors of their beach hut and nicked … buckets and spades.
But srsly, a lot of these services are stumbling around in search of something useful. When we did Cromer Is SO Bracing ‘09, Mr G. S. of Glasgow set up a FriendFeed room that was very useful as it allowed the various participants to co-ordinate their activities, and several people who couldn’t make it to follow what we were up do, in real time. I’m not sure that any other app would have been able to do this so simply.
I might play with the option Jon suggested – thanks, Jon! I can’t install TweetDeck at work, but maybe the iPhone version has a similar function.
I think the key thing is the ability to control how much/little you see in FF. If you subscribe to an email list or visit a web forum then it’s all or nothing. If some idiot keeps posting rubbish to the list/group you can leave altogether or just put up with it. With FF you choose which people you follow and if you don’t like what they say then you can stop following them. It is a problem if the same person posts on different topics that are not all of interest to you.
Yeah. But then you’re just dealing with problems that you can avoid altogether by not using the service in the first place. It’s such a juggle-act to be on all these sites, and is it really worth it all?
I like FriendFeed, but mostly because of the people and conversations that take place there. Some topics I’m interested are most widely discussed at FriendFeed. The technology isn’t that big a reason. FriendFeed has some interesting features, but most of the stuff could also be done in other places. And I agree with Maxine that a lot of the discussions seem to have moved from FriendFeed to Twitter.
But FriendFeed has features that would make Nature Network a better place for scientific discussions. Two examples: the like button is simple but really useful. And it is much easier on FriendFeed to follow several discussions at once, there is too much clicking back and forth here on Nature Network.
Sorry, bit.ly gives you lots of information if you put a ‘+’ after the code, which I find really helpful. But the really good thing about it is that certain applications interpret it for you before you click on it. I’m using CoTweet and I can preview the URL and get the stats before I follow it.
Martin, what I really want on FF is a ‘dislike’ button.
Eva – Having sounded off about Twitter last week, I feel I should have something sensible to say about FF. But I don’t. I am one of those people who has linked the two services (and facebook) and am therefore responsible for some of the clutter that you (probably rightly) complained about.
There seems to be more and more twitter stuff when I look at FF these days so, yes, the conversations are fragmenting. But I see this as a transitional phenomenon – people are experimenting to see what works and the results just aren’t in yet. Damn this ever-changing world…
(chuckling quietly)
From 26th June to 2nd July is the 17th International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB)in Stockholm Like many other Conferences these days, it’s being live-blogged. Additionally, they have also set up a FF Room for the event which is extremely active.
As Dr H.G. of Cromer mentions above, I set up this FF Room for the Cromer event which came in rather handy. I really enjoy using FF and I personally find it very useful.
That’s nice for you, Graham. Have a gorilla.
snorts
Going back to Eva and my little interaction above – I think FF filtering is different to other platforms, because you can filter out at the individual level, at the platform level (eg if you don’t like the double posting, you can easily filter out “everything from Twitter” or just “person x’s twitter”, etc. I find the Yahoo groups interface so annoying, clunky and counter-intuitive that I hardly ever use it, which is a pity for me as there is a very active reading group there discussing books I enjoy or would enjoy. But I cannot work out how to follow and assess a conversation, unless you get it by email with lots of extraneous matter.
I do think FF useful for “niche” groups, particularly liveblogging a meeting or for a group in which (as I’ve often seen in the Life Scientists’ group) people give each other advice on the minutiae of protocols, coding etc. So long as the right set of users are in the group, this is very useful. Twitter is probably better for gossip and general stuff (eg five million people giving you their personal reaction to MJ’s death – scream!), as I don’t think the # and all of that is as useful as the FF conference/special-interest group rooms.
International Society for Computational Biology
Computational. Yeah. There’s another thing. Some people seem to like new gadgets way more than others. I want the non-tech-geeks to be able to get a benefit out of the web, like they/we all did when all the papers moved online. Oh, hey, we don’t have to take an entire day to travel to a library at the other end of town to photocopy a journal only they have. That’s awesome. But the I don’t want to spend that same day weeding through babbling.
Synchronicity: the office downstairs called to say I need to come pick up a package, and it was a pile of “Front Matter”-s, the newsletter from Allen Press, with this somewhat related piece in it. I couldn’t remember if I blogged that already, but there it is.
Oh, and there are two other pieces, from the two other panelists. They were more positive than I was, but neither of them mentioned FriendFeed. It’s just not on the radar.
And re: Martin’s/Maxine’s comments. I guess it could be fun to hang out on FF if you enjoy the conversations, but I did not like the conversations at all.
I think the mistake you made was to expect something else. Friendfeed is just another tool that you might use for screening useful information. Sometimes it’s the best site to use, sometimes it’s totally useless. It depends on your field of interest and on what kind of tools you use for filtering information.
See: http://scienceroll.com/2009/01/04/10-tips-how-to-filter-discussions-on-twitter/
Eva, I was so busy being mostly offline yesterday and today (gardening – it was wonderful) that I just saw this now. Thanks for the post! I have been struggling with FF – but am getting very annoyed with the splitting up of conversations you mention. It’s like having lots of other conversations off to the side while a big discussion is going on, and not everyone can (or can be bothered to) join. I have no idea why there are parallel conversations going on about blog posts in the first place – why don’t people just post their comments there?? Unless you don’t want everyone to see your thoughts!!
I don’t think Eva made any mistake, Bertalan.
Steffi, I find it bloody annoying when people comment on FF instead of here. Would be so bad once streamosphere is commonplace, I guess.
Ow, my body hurts today. Too much digging, weeding, and more digging to get tree stumps out. Anyway, I started getting worried whether my new blog posts show up on my facebook account – I need to go check now…
Berci, I was expecting what FF advertises it does: aggregate content from different sites so you can see your friends’ blogs and Flickr in one go. And it does that, but it turns out it’s actually (to me) annoying, because I still do want to visit the separate sites. So, okay…
What I wasn’t expecting was people to say that it was a good tool for use in science communication. I just signed up because it seemed cool, and I think that’s why anyone joined. “Because I like it” seems to me to be a better reason to like it than “because I found some collaborators”.
Ah, yes, aggregation of all these conversations in one place! That would be nice.
If I read a blog post I think is thoughtful, interesting and on which I have a comment to contribute, I do try to make a point of making the comment on the blog. This can be (but is not always) a minority pursuit. FF and Twitter make it so easy to comment, whereas blog software security settings are usually a nightmare of clunkiness to wade through. It just takes so long and is so frustrating, for a little comment! I use Open ID which is recognised by Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress etc, but blog platforms (esp Blogger) and OpenID are not always as friendly to each other as they could be. The FF platform, however, is very user-friendly in its interface.
I agree that there are some very uninteresting conversations at FF (to put it politely) and I now ignore those by using filtering, and stick to using the platform for what I like to get out of it. I do the same for twitter. It might mean I don’t discover new things as quickly, but usually anything important has a way of attracting the attention, and I am quite happy to be half an hour behind everyone else ;-)
Hope your blog posts are showing up, Steffi. And the gardening pains dissipiate soon!
Like this, Maxine?
@Maxine: The muscle aches from gardening started getting much better after a couple of cool beers yesterday afternoon. Nothing quite like the feeling of ‘having earned it’! And I am actually not sure whether I want my posts to show up in my facebook status updates, because Eva might be mad at me ;) Seriously though: I think a lot of my friends/family/acquaintances are actually interested in seeing the posts, and they wouldn’t pick up on them otherwise. But that’s going away from the discussion on FF – maybe I should start a spin-off discussion about this post there…
[evil smirk]
I’m sorry, I am greatly enjoying this. There is currently a conference being FriendFeeded (FriendFed?). It’s so awesome and popular guys, so many people are participating and collaborating to report everything live all the time from the conference! Woo, see, how awesome it is? See how popular?
This is how popular:
Oh yeah. Totally the right tool for conference reporting.
< / snark >
giggle
But you have to comment here to topple El Gee.
Yeah, I realized that right after I posted my comment there! I was working against myself!
Foolish one. Much to learn in the ways of the Dark Side, have you.
This post of Eva’s is but one of several things which amuse me on teh interwebz today.
[/evil, cynical laugh]
I know I’m late to this but I think saying that FF (or NN or a blog or a Usenet forum) doesn’t do anything new is missing the point. We could do all of this with a Fax machine and an address book. I saw something yesterday that made the point that the railways didn’t invent wheels, steam engines or locomotion. The truly disruptive technologies rarely do anything that is actually new, they just make something so much more efficient that they change the whole set of assumptions about how the world works. It’s very rarely about functionality.
To me there are two questions:
1) Which services do what things better? And the presumption here is that none of the current ones are terribly good. Friendfeed for me gets two things right. It lets people interact around digital objects (blog posts, pictures, data, papers) in a way that other services don’t. Anywhere else you have to post something about something. You don’t post the object itself (exception perhaps being tumblr and similar things).
The other thing it does is funnels things towards you through a network. That is, you see things that friends of friends think are interesting. As Martin says above, the “like” thing is really valuable, particularly when the things you are liking are scientific objects (papers, data, grant notifications). So I can follow around 80 people but have somewhere around 2000 bringing things to my attention. The flip side of that is noise and there is a lot of that. Pruning your network becomes very important. Which brings us neatly to the second point.
2) The technology/service is almost irrelevant beyond a certain basic level. It is the community that matters. FF is pretty tech and bioinformatics centric would agree. Different community to over here. If it’s not the right community for you then it doesn’t really matter how good the service/functionality side is, it’s not going to do you much good. Not even MT4 can do that ;-)
I agree however that the fracturing of the conversations isn’t helping anybody. My personal belief is that we’ve got the whole architecture of the social web wrong and that until that is sorted out the fracturing is going to continue. I’m a bit conflicted about the whole aggregation/commenting on the blog only thing though.
At one level I agree it would be great to pull everything back into one place for indexing but on another it feels a little like someone saying that I can’t go and have a private conversation over coffee after a talk. Separate rooms can help pull different aspects of a conversation out and focus on different issues without them being swamped by a few loud voices in one big room. But I have no clue how to pull them back together again and prevent the echo chamber effect. Again though I think FF has made some progress along this route via the “related items” function that attempts to flag that another conversation is going on around the same object. It doesn’t work so brilliantly all the time though.
It’s funny though – the reason I don’t comment much here (as in NN generally) is that while I read a lot of the blogs I can’t be bothered rummaging through the comments. I do it from time to time when I need some fun because they are rather amusing and clever but I don’t do it often because it takes a lot of time and I don’t get much “work-related” value out of it. I wonder how much of that is just the way I am doing it versus the content itself? But my point is that the “noise” thing cuts both ways.
I see what you’re saying, and I’d be convinced if it came to just me (and I wasn’t so stubborn and stressed out about FF in general), but I’m always imagining “the average scientist”. For every online tool I’m wondering: “Would my former labmates be even remotely interested in getting their information this way?” Because never mind me, they are the ones doing research and needing ways to find information fast. FriendFeed requires you to have an existing network of people already being interesting online. And it’s barely worthwhile to sign up if you don’t yourself have a blog or twitter stream or whatnot to aggregate. I think I’d like to see something where someone who is usually offline can quickly go and find some new ideas. (It’s the 90-9-1 principle that I am trying to keep in mind, and FriendFeed just doesn’t seem to gel with that. Twitter does. You can follow people and never post anything yourself and still have a good time.)
So yeah, I gues that’s the “community” thing you mention.
Cameron, I see your point about the parallel conversations – what annoys me is the (frankly) bitching that is going on somewhere else about someone’s blog post sometimes. In that context, does the analogy with the conversation at coffee break during a conference really work? I don’t think so, because that would be only between the participants of that conversation – while FF rants about someone’s blog post are public…
I believe that we are still at the very beginning of building online science communities. Bioinformaticians and science librarians (by the very nature of what they do) probably already have a good online community, and there are many more examples. But I have only very few online discussions about the science I’m interested in (cancer research), and in this case the most interactions happen to be on Twitter.
The challenge is probably twofold: build an online tool that is good in what you want to achieve (and for me FriendFeed is a pretty good tool), and build a community, something which is far more difficult than technical aspects of the online tool. Journals and conferences (the traditional tools of communication among scientists) for me are the building blocks around which to build these communities.
Solution: shoot bitchy people.
Steffi, bitching is just impolite. I’m with Richard on that one but there is a fine line between criticism and bitching and I know I find it easy to stray over the line when I’m tired or irritable. But I think the principle of don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face (whether in private or public) is a good one.
Martin, in two paragraphs you summed up what too me most of a page…
Eva, there is an awful lot packed into one paragraph there. Going to need to pull that apart and give it some thought. One thing though that I am struggling with is that you feel you can “just follow” twitter but not friendfeed. I really don’t see the difference between the two in that mode. As for just dipping in. Go to the top page and try a few searches on all the content, depending on the subject you might be surprised.
I mean: why would someone who doesn’t have a blog or Flickr or Twitter account, and no friends who have these things, even sign up for a service that aggregates it? It kind of assumes that you already have a presence elsewhere. (And who would they follow?)
For exactly the same reason as you sign up for a twitter account and don’t tweet? Or indeed the same reason you’d sign up to a Nature Network account and not comment or blog here. To follow a specific subset of people with the built in functionality. Or to have a set of favourite searches constantly running for you, the same way some people use twitter.
I don’t see the difference between having a friendfeed account and not aggregating things and having a twitter account and not tweeting is what I mean.
Very good discussion, Cameron, Martin, Steffi and Eva.
To me the benefit of aggregation is of having parallel conversations “linked” – I agree that one or two themes or people can dominate a discussion, but equally it is annoying to know that you have seen a relevant conversation somewhere and know that it will take you ages to find it to bring the link in. Streamosphere is a promising step in the right direction, as far as I am concerned – in that it seems to be aggregating independent conversations on a topic, rather than merging them into one giant conversation.
For me, Twitter is lacking coherence and archive. It is fine for real-time stuff, but not good for a focused conversation cluster (eg around a link). I suppose someone will say there is some application I am not aware of. I use Twitter to follow a very small number of individual people or accounts – see what they are saying in real time, that’s it.
FriendFeed, on the other hand, I find helpful for the “rooms” or “groups” as they are now called. The conversations around a link in a room/group are much more interesting than Twitter, because a logical thread develops on FF which you can join at any time (does not matter if you are busy for a few days, you check a room and see new links/conversations) whereas Twitter is based on flashes of the here and now.
Nature Network is different again, in that it contains genuine new information via blog and forum posts, rather than simply linking to what is out there. So it is more flexibly person- or theme-based. However, NN is not an IT platform like FF or Twitter, it is a social website of a publisher, and hence is more focused on the thoughts of the users, than on the IT aspects.
I think I am thinking more of an audience that doesn’t want to be online but just uses it as a tool. That just uses the web like you would use a phone book or encyclopedia, rather than like a 24-hour news broadcast. The audience that knows about Twitter from mainstream media mentions.
I made a bunch of people sign up for Nature Network a while back, and some of them use the forums but only very scarcely. Still, they seem to get e-mail updates of threads they like, and leave messages there once in a while. They go whenever they want to, and don’t care if they miss anything. That’s kind of the audience I have in mind when I argue against FriendFeed. I just don’t think they would be able to “get” it.
Cameron, I don’t want to get hung up on the bitching, but I think this is a very crucial aspect of a) building a functioning community and b) keeping people from being completely put off the whole idea of going online (e.g. Eva’s former lab mates). As of right now, my impression is that those involved in online science still need a pretty thick skin, and that’s not everyone’s cup of tea – simplifying and following basic rules of politeness should take us a big step further (but I’m not saying anything new here, of course).
I wonder whether we’re waiting for something that might not ever happen with The New Fantastic Application That Will Fix Everything?
I endorse Steffi’s view that “those involved in online science still need a pretty thick skin”, based on my own experience.
Some online platforms I know contain some wheat, but the chaff is so hideous I can’t be bothered to waste time and emotion sifting through it.
Other group platforms are almost entirely petulant and naive.
I do think it is an important aspect – too much of the online world is not grown up, and too many people are proud of their lack of impluse control. It is off-putting to the majority, and unlikely to convince them there is any merit in trying some of these very valuable online services and tools.
Steffi, Maxine, definitely agree with the thick skin bit. There’s too much just plain rude behaviour around. But equally I think there is an awful lot of overly precious behaviour amongst scientists as well. But I think we’ve been around this conversation before as you say. Maybe we just need to wait for the internet to grow up?
But I think the main point is that no application is going to solve a social problem – maybe make it easier to handle but never solve it. The central social problem of the need for people to be able to engage in real critical conversations, both accepting criticism and providing it a useful way, isn’t going to go away. At least not if you are in a public forum. My personal view is that it would be a shame if we had to retreat into walled enclaves though.
This blog post is now featured on the NN home page “most commented” – second of three!
Oh, wow, and that while staying on topic!
Adds fuel to my theory that there is nothing that bloggers like doing more than blogging about blogging ;-) (or twittering, or ffing, etc)