Facebook Figures Drop: Are WeTaking Our Balls and Going Home?

The Register reports today on a disturbing, yet totally predictable, trend: engagment in social networking sites is declining. Chris Williams sums up the comScore figures thusly:

The average length of time users spend on all of the top three sites is on the slide. Bebo, MySpace and Facebook all took double-digit percentage hits in the last months of 2007. December could perhaps be forgiven as a seasonal blip when people see their real friends and family, but the trend was already south.

The story year-on-year is even uglier for social networking advocates. Bebo and MySpace were both well down on the same period in 2006 - Murdoch's site by 24 per cent. Facebook meanwhile chalked up a rise, although way off its mid-2007 hype peak when you couldn't move for zeitgeist-chasing "where's the Facebook angle?" stories in the press and on TV.

Creative Captial read the comScore report and posts a nifty chart o'figures to explain it all...

Chris chalks all of it up to people getting bored with social networking--IMO, it's more about people getting bloody well tired (and in the old-fashioned, literal sense of the word) with having to chase around all the various social networkings and applications and other stuff, and *THEN* trying to keep up with all the conversations going on all over the place...

AND USUALLY AMONG THE SAME PEOPLE!!!

We're social networking all over the place, but we're not necessarily making new acquaintances--which was a big part of the "fun" of the old web. We're oftentimes just porting one group of friends from one network to another. Sure, when changing from LinkedIn to Facebook, we *might* add some folks to one that might not be on the other--but for many adults, there may be little distinction between friends on one network or another.

Even among young people I know, some will have a distinction between their Facebook friends (the preppies) and their MySpace friends (their "weird" friends) and will toggle between networks, but rarely meet new people online.

After awhile, even young people--who we *all* know are *so* much better at this online stuff then us old farts who've been here for well over a decade or more-- find it a real pain-in-the-ass to keep going between two or more social networking sites.

Yes, living a "double life" can be kind of tiring--no matter what your age...

And OpenID's not a *bad* idea--but maybe we're just over the whole thing anyway...(see Mashable's! highly unscientific poll and this great discussion of the subject at WiredJournalists and a post by Karen Christensen of the Berkshire Publishing group on the same thing--heh, go figure...guess that social networking burnout thing's kinda common...)

And not only are we not meeting anyone new, we're also not having any kinds of conversations, not exchanging much in the way of real information, not learning anything all that new, not even contributing to a particular body of knowledge (unless you consider contributing to marketers' stats contributing to a body of knowledge.) We're just sort of passively following various streams of our friends' thoughts....

Then again, what the figures *don't* show is a possible distrust of the web. Perhaps many people are heeding calls to watch out where you go online, and to not spread yourself too thin, lest you lose track of all that info about you that's out there.

Sometimes you have to pick your social networks as much as you have to pick your friends...

Perhaps forgetting-where-you've-been-lately is what happened to Arlington, OR mayor Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, who's recall was prompted by MySpace photos that show the mayor in a black bra and panties posing on a fire engine...

Brings a whole new meaning to the term "being hosed...."

They Mayor sez the photos shouldn't count because they were taken before she was elected....in true Pee Wee Herman "I meant to do that!" speech.

Then again, we *do* kinda consider past records of candidates when we vote for them. By her logic, Rudy Giuliani's two divorces and kid troubles shouldn't have made a difference in his low turnout in Florida--but I'd hedge a bet that they did...

So, you can never be too sure about what you put online, who might hold it against you, etc. And if you're just too darned tired or totally forget about all those profiles on all those social networking sites out there, you never know when one might come back and bite you in the ass...

Literally and figuratively...

Then again, maybe in the whole social networking scheme of things, we're figuring out that the best kinds of interactions end up being the ones we have face to face.

Just a thought...

Creating Community for NewsTrust

Blogging here's been a bit light lately, and some of that has to do with my new position as Community Developer for NewsTrust...

What's NewsTrust?? It's a non-profit, non-partisan social news platform--very different from sites like Digg and Reddit in that it not only aggregates a great number of articles from a wide variety of news sources (not just links to them), but what it asks from participants is a little bit more than just whether or not they think the story is cool or they like the person who's reviewed it....

Oh, yes, there are news story reviews by people--that's the social part (hence: social news.) But what's asked of NewsTrust members requires a bit of media literacy (one of NewsTrusts aims is to promote media literacy) No, one doesn't have to be a former journalist, journalist in training, academic or any other certified smarty-pants to be part of NewsTrust. But, if you're concerned with what's going on with the news, think about what you're reading, whether or not stories are high quality journalism or just a bunch of opinion-mongering, and want to contribute to a bit more serious discussion and rating of news stories from mainstream and alternative publications, then you might want to consider joining and contributing to NT...

I've even made it easy for ya by providing a widget in the sidebar displaying stories that are just *waiting* for your $.02....

Along with hiring me, NT has also brought on David Cohn (one of my partners-in-crime from Assignment Zero) for the role of Contributing Editor. I liked what David had to say about NT and how it's different from other social news sites:

"Rating a story on NewsTrust is not a game - it is an act of journalism because it is a way to determine, socially, what the most accurate, reliable and trustworthy account of a news event is."

Indeed!

Actually, I'm pretty lucky to be teamed up with the guys at NT. Last year at We Media Miami, I met Executive Director Fabrice Florin and award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Rory O'Connor, who's part of the NT management team. Being one of those people who doesn't run out and google someone shortly after meeting them (in hopes of finding out how important that person might be), I had no idea who these guys were--which gave me the chance to just hang out with Fabrice and Rory (and a few other people) and find out about NT. I kept in touch with both of them through the year, and when Fab called and wanted to talk with me about taking on a role with NewsTrust, I was surprised (but then again, kinda thought it might happen.)

When it was suggested that I'd be working on building the community over there, of course I wanted to do it! As I said to Fab, "well, I wouldn't be talking with you if I wasn't interested." (I'm not one to waste people's time--mine or theirs. blowing smoke doesn't help anyone.)

For me, a site isn't "social" unless there's some kind of interacting--and honestly, so many paradigms for interacting online are horrifically masculine. There's lots of popularity rating and ranking and sometimes not so subtle ways of proving to the crowd that one is either Top Dog or Girl With The Most Cake. Is that important? Not really IMO. Sometimes it isn't about being the most popular (aren't we supposed to leave that behind in High School?) inasmuch as it is being able to contribute something insightful to a community.

The short-term goal is social--but the overall, long-term intention is to contribute to something greater than one's own ego....

And, in the grander scheme, that's what NewsTrust is trying to do--build a community that will become a trusted group of folks who know where quality journalism resides on the web. Through our reviews and comments, we can be part of the news in a new way...

I've got lots of ideas for building the NewsTrust community--including opening up for some spirited cross-talk(in a future app,) better interaction through the new NewsTrust blog (which launched yesterday) and on the Facebook group...

And as for this blog--yes, I'll still be blogging here :-) (as well as having other announcements in another week or so--busy me!) But take some time and come over to NewsTrust and see what we're up to. Come, and be a part of the news!

Is it Blogging--or Chasing Popularity--that's Hazardous to Your Health?

First, let me say that I wish Om Malik a speedy recovery from his Dec. 28th heart attack at 41. Yikes! But for some silly reason, Dan Fost at the NYTimesseems to think that it's only bigtime bloggers like Om that could possibly get so stressed as to have a heart attack...

Well, Dan, get a clue. It's lots and lots of bloggers who get stressed--esp. about popularity and rank and all that stuff--esp. if you're trying to build some kind of career out here that is in some way linked to your online presence.

Which is why I'm totally against the idea of making journalists earn their keep by their pageviews....(which started becasue Penelope Trunk, someone who writes for an entertainment portal and not a news organization, got canned....)

Seriously...nobody understands the ratrace of online journalism/publishing/etc. better than bloggers. And I'm talking bloggers of *all* levels who desire to earn something from their blogging--whether it's creating a publishing empire, or income directly from their blogs, or furthering their careers through their blogs. Keeping popularity as well as creating content *daily* (if not several times a day) is a lot of work,....

Not to mention that, sometimes, popularity is contingent on *who* you are as much (sometimes if not more) than the quality of your writing....

Sometimes, too, popularity has something to do with on how quickly you can pounce on a link, if others see you as an expert or not, on who's willing to give you a lead, on how much hype you're willing to swallow as well as generate for yourself....

With so much riding more personality than on prose, is it any wonder that someone out here was bound to have a heart attack??

Is it any wonder that making reporters pay more attention to personality than to journalism is a bad idea?

just a thought.

The New York Times is Full of Crap! (mostly....)

So, this late Sunday morning, I'm renewing an old Sunday morning ritual: reading the New York Times while watching something on TV (today it was Words and Muisc by Jerry Herman...) In the last century, I'd read the old inky paper version of the Times--now, it's the slick and annoyingly busy digital version that I get on my laptop.

Above the brave new electronic fold, we're not too bad. The ads are part and parcel for online content, so I don't find them too distracting.

At least there are no dancing aliens/zoot suiters/impossibly fit disco women like in those ubiquitious low cost mortgage ads....

It's when I get below the fold that I'm greeted--kinda but not really subtlely--with a dazzling array of multi-media news:

I can get a video of John McCain in New Hampsire (with a link to more "multimedia"), or a slide show of 36 hours in Melborne Australia, or a wedding video of a handsomely white couple, as well as another slide show on party girl Kelly Washington (wow...that's a story I don't want to miss....)

I have to go below the below-the-fold to get to the list of other news stories and sections where I might find news. The online New York Times is really something of a quadruple-fold as it takes four full screens for me to see only a fraction of the dazzling array of content held within the NYT digital version...


Should I be impressed or overwhelemed? Neither? Both? Although I wonder how much this version would weigh, and then cost, if it were in print. I can see at a cursory glance that I'll hardly have enough time to peruse the entire thing--and if I did, I'd get a serious case of dry eye from staring at my laptop screen for hours on end...

Wandering over to the Technology Section, I find that it's very easy to get Pogue'd to death over here. There's Podcasts of David Pogue, and videos of David Pogue (if you're not careful, they will play in sequence, without stopping). Yeah, there are a bunch of articles by a bunch of other probably important tech journalists....

Technology at the NYTimes is full of multimedia Pogue. And I don't know, really, what to make of Pogue, as he seems so much like so many of the over 30 tech guys I know: kind of boyish, slightly immature, making lots of money...

Beyond Pogue (who truly tries to amuse as well as inform) is the
"Technology Headlines from Around the Web" a kinda widget powered by the NYTimes own Bloggrunner aggregator.

Funny, I thought Bill Keller hated blogs.....

Then again, lots of the blogs that are aggregated on Blogrunner are the blogs of other newspapers or magazines, with a few token A-listers thrown in for the heck of it. I guess blogs are OK if they're blogs by the people you believe should be writing blogs--mainly other journalists or folks who are popular enough that you can't ignore them....

Going back to the NYTimes main page, I'm takes by the headline for A User's Manual for Seat 21C by Wayne Curtis, which is by far the best (as well as most hysterical) description of life in the cheap seats of any air carrier you can think of. Yes, these seats are a sardine's nightmare, and Curtis captures this quite welll...

What I don't get, though, is how the NYTimes has created Jet Lagged, the section Curtis' piece appears in, as a blog. Why? What's the point? Yes, the readers get to chime in at the bottom of the entry/opinion article, but there's really no interaction except among themselves.

What the Times has done, essentially, is put their Forums in with their opinion pieces and called it a blog. Unlike the Forums (where I spent a good portion of my social life from '98-01) where your comments would show up in real time, all comments to said "blog" are held for moderation.

Yes, maybe this is a good idea when people don't need to "register" in order to leave a comment. Then again, when there's no interaction on the part of the author of the post, I begin to wonder if the author of the post even cares about what the people are saying in the comments.

Which makes me think: Does anyone really care what's said in the comments on *any* of the NYTimes "blog" posts?

When you post a comment to the average blog, penned by the average, un-MSM affiliated and more than likely independent blogger, you can bet that the comment is being read, and more than likely means something to the blogger.

Still, when I looked at the sidebar to read the profiles of the folks contributing to Jet Lagged, I got that same unease when I first saw the Huffington Post's list of bloggers--these are all people who can publish in any other medium they so choose. What, then, could "blogging" possibly mean to any of them?

In other words, seeing "blogs" on the New York Times, which are merely substitutes for the old-fashioned op-ed pages with filtered comments, doesn't necessarily give me the warm fuzzies about the NYTimes beginning to understand blogging.

Then again, maybe they don't need to. Maybe, for them, a pseudo-blog is a way for them to get free user-generated content, in the form of comments, which then gets monetized via ads that are already in place on the blogs.

Should we, then, be more careful about leaving comments on sites like the NYTimes, IF our comments will become the UGC that they may help them generate more revenue?

Well, I don't know if there's a need to boycott comments on the NYTimes site, esp. if they aren't doing much else than allowing them to stand as is. Comments as on the article/"blog" post about rich American women paying poor Indian women to be surrogate mothers create a deeper understanding of the issues presented and are very valuble, even if the author isn't doing any cross-commenting herself.

Yet to me, the Times is being somewhat insincere, given Keller's position on blogs. His publication is using populist new media tools for its own ends. What, then, is the Times creating? A group of 'good' bloggers because they are learned journalists? Are they teaching old dogs new tricks? (probably not if there's no author responses to the comments...)

Still, it seems that, right now, in a time of massive upheaval in the worlds of journalism and media, the New York Times, like many of its counterparts, is filling its site with as much crap as possible--perhaps to see what resonates with its various and sundry readers. "Throw it on the wall and see what sticks," I guess would be the way of explaining the method to all this content-generating madness.

Sometimes, though, all this content becomes distractions--rabbit holes where readers can tumble down and have trouble escaping: like when I ventured over to the Fashion section's "in Motion" blog and couldn't find my way back no matter how many times I clicked the Back button--"there's no place like Homepage....there's no place like Homepage..." And it was kind of annoying to have to go back to the status bar and type in the homepage url again. Then again, I don't know if that was any worse than a continual loop of David Pogue videos....

If anything, all the new multi-level, multi-folded, multimedia New York Times is an entertainment experience. It's not as much news inasumch as it is a lot of fluff that probably guarantees that you'll stay on the site longer than you might if it were just chock full of stuffy old news. If you stay on the site longer, you might click on an ad or two. Maybe. And generate some income.

Maybe though, I just like my content simple. Give me a well-written article, like What is it about Mormonism? from the magazine section, uncluttered with any slide shows or additional multimedia explaining John Smith or the Mormon Tabernacle, and I'm pretty much satisfied (although they do have a link to some multi-media of Mitt Romney.) I don't need to be entertained at every step of the way, and I'm perfectly capable of searching for more information if I want it. I also don't need a podcast of writer Noah Feldman reading the article to me, as I'm perfectly capable of reading it myself (something the Times has done with other pieces that became "hot"--it's kind of like overkill, actually. I appreciate journalists for their ability to write well, not necessarily to be compelling personalities in multimedia presentations.)

And maybe I don't really like opinion pieces with comments being called "blogs." Perhaps if it's a blogging cms that's being used, well, I've got no choice but to accept that it's a blog in the most mechanical sense of the word. But if there's no interaction, then what's the point?

In that department, newspapers have a very long way to go...

So, yes, the New York Times if full of crap--crap that may mean nothing in the future, crap that may work to dumb-down lots of folks who should be reading rather than watching their news, lots of crap that isn't necessarily helping journalists communicate better with readers (no "creating conversation" here, except among ourselves), and lots of crap that might be totally unsearchable to future generations looking to research information on the '08 Iowa caucuses.

Then again, maybe it needs all this crap to survive...

Let's see if this NYTimes can endear itself and renew my old multitasking Sunday ritual...