connection

The functional act of constructing a tweet or a status update is very similar. Produce text in roughly 140 characters or less inside a single line text box and click a button. Voila! Even the stream based ways in which the text gets consumed look awfully similar. Yet, the more I talk with people engaged in practices around Twitter and Facebook, the more I'm convinced these two things are not actually the same practice. Why? Audience.

An experiment by students at MIT has shown that they were able to ’successfully’ predict the sexuality of people based on their friends on Facebook. The so-called ‘Project Gaydar’* showed that by looking at information that a person’s friends share online (in this case, their gender and sexual preferences) they were able to learn something about an individual themselves, even if their profile had high levels of privacy.

People often describe Twitter as “Facebook reduced only to the status update”. I always found this a poor description, as there was always a significant difference between my Twitter updates and Facebook statuses. With Facebook I can only tell people about me; with Twitter, I can include other people and other topics in the conversation. This is what @ replies do on Twitter – they let me include other people in my updates and associate it with them as much as it is associated with me.

Mitch Joel shouldn't need an introduction, but in the event that you haven't heard of him, he founded a successful Canadian based agency called Twist Image, is a well known participant at the intersection of business, social media and marketing and speaks on these topics often. When Mitch reached out to me, I promised no softballs, and his thoughtful replies make a great case for why you might want to investigate his new book, Six Pixels of Separation.

by: danah boyd

I was talking with a friend of mine today who is a senior at a technology-centered high school in California. Dylan Field and his friends are by no means representative of US teens but I always love his perspective on tech practices (in part cuz Dylan works for O'Reilly and really thinks deeply about these things). Noodling around, I asked him if many of his friends from his school used Twitter and his response is priceless:

by: Will Lion

If you can’t imagine anyone linking to what you’re about to write, don’t write it.

by: Nancy Baym

Here, for your reading pleasure, is a PDF of the talk I gave at MIDEMNet last week titled Making The Most of Online Music Fandom. Bruce at Hypebot, one of the excellent people I met there, was kind enough to do a near-instant writeup.

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

For all of the news about Google's implicit threat to evict ad agencies from their traditional role as go-betweens for clients and their commercial content, now publishers of all types are getting in on the game.

by: David Jennings