by: Roger Dooley
One question online community operators wrestle with is how many communities (social networks, blogs, forums, wikis, etc.) one individual can participate in. Sure, people are spending more time online these days, but there’s a limit. If a person is spending an hour or two a day posting in one forum, is he likely to do the same in two or three others? If an active member in a community decides to launch a blog on the same topic, will she still devote an hour to creating a detailed, thoughtful post or will that content end up on her blog? While until now, the rising tide of total time spent online (number of users and hours per users) has lifted a lot of boats, but inevitably online activity will become a zero sum game. People who spend more time on one activity will cut back other online participation by the same amount. A couple of blog posts highlight this issue.
First, in The Attention Crash, tech-savvy marketer Steve Rubel predicts that our collective ability to process new information is soon going to hit the wall:
However, there is definitely a bubble and therefore a crash coming. It’s not financial. It’s not related to the level of noise or startups. This crash is personal. We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.
Those of us who have been early adopters and spend much of our lives online don’t need to be convinced - I know that I’ve been fairly ruthless in trying to limit my inputs, and have been actively cancelling things like free newsletter subscriptions that don’t quite hit the mark for me. And I delete a whole lot more without even a cursory read.
The second post that fit this megatrend was by Colin Nagy at PSFK, The Showdown: Facebook vs. MySpace. Nagy referred to an analysis at Mashable, Facebook Hammers MySpace on Almost All Key Features. As the title suggests, a fairly detailed feature comparison suggests that MySpace has stopped innovating and that Facebook has a chance to eat MySpace’s lunch.
Features come and go, but I think all of these high-growth social networks have to realize that online time and attention span aren’t infinite - far from it. The communities that offer a combination of quality interaction with others and, in many cases, an efficient and time-saving interface for keeping in touch with both the community at large and with individual friends will be the long-term winners. Communities that seem to waste time and make it hard for their members to get done what they want to will suffer as those members start to make the hard choices about where to cut their online time.
Original post: http://www.rogerd.net/articles/facebook-myspace
This blog reflects the personal opinions of individual contributors and does not represent the views of Futurelab, Futurelab's clients, or the contributors' respective employers or clients.
RSS
Matthew Loxton says:
22 Sep 2007, 11:39
I think it is mistaken to think that humans are presented by more information than at any other time in our evolutionary history. I think that the information content of the natural world around us, including other humans streaming out psychosocial information, is far higher by orders of magnitude than what the media â including the web, are capable of generating,
There are also dimensions of information like somatosensory, that the web doesnât touch at all (yet?).
What has changed, and I think most importantly, is the artificiality of it.
We are highly evolved to live in âmiddle-worldâ as Dawkins puts it, but unless the web and computers evolve faster to suit our needs, they will increasingly provide information streams that are poorly structured and delivered to suit us qua hominid species.
Our informatic inventions lack the power and ergonomic fit needed, I hope that folks like Richard Saul Wurman will bring them closer to us.
Olin Tichy says:
17 Jul 2007, 20:41
What was interesting to me about this article is that it made me realize that yes we do spend more time socially on the internet, but I would take it a step further. As is mentioned in the blog, Facebook is steadily beating out Myspace in terms of functionality and quality of presentation. I am relatively new to the blogging community, but I would have to say that more and more people are gonna start to move away from these interactive pages and start to ask âwhereâs the beef?â I have been asking myself why I waste time on pages such as Myspace and Facebook? The content and information available is so superficial and non substantial. Where is the quality content you find on blogging sites such as futurelab, emergency marketing, and shop talk marketing. I hope users begin to consider posting more quality content rather than how sexy their page looks. For now it seems that these popular social networks will have to be slightly detached from interesting topics that have been brought up by quality bloggers such as yourself.
Chris Paton says:
22 Jun 2007, 04:00
What is needed is better cross-platform tools to save 're-inventing the wheel' and give users access to the widest interested audience for each of their contributions.
People are using Social Media to learn but also to inform. Google makes it easy to find the information from a wide range of blogs, wikis, forums, etc but we now need tools that enable us to publish to this audience.
RSS feed readers are a good start but are very simple tools which require a lot of searching and sorting.
There is still room for growth - I don't think that we are any where near as efficient as we could be using the web as a social learning and communication medium.
Christian says:
22 Jun 2007, 13:30
People certainly don't need another 5 general interest social networks. But I see continued opportunities for targeted niches with specific needs (e.g. sports lovers or pet lovers), sites that facilitate real-live interaction (such as meetup.com) and aggregators (e.g. multiply.com) that help people facilitate their online presences.
Dimitris says:
22 Jun 2007, 11:49
I'm inclined to agree with Chris. Obviously there's only so much that we can take in. But there's also quite a lot that can still be done in terms of automating, sorting, integrating and in general making more efficient when it comes to handling our inputs.
We also need to accept the fact that such a process of filtering will definitely reject some information - and we need to learn to live with the fact. But all in all I think there is definitely room for an all-encompassing tool that will put the volume of information under control.
Mark Schoneveld says:
21 Jun 2007, 19:22
You hit the nail on the head. I'm getting very near 'full capacity' and I wonder how others do it. Some people seem to be online 100% of the time!
Add your comment