The ICWSM conference opened today with a talk by Evan Williams of Twitter, and formerly of Blogger fame.
My takeaways from his talk:
Functionality is becoming a commodity.
You used to use a service because it did what you need. Now there are a million services offering the same functionality. (Think of all the Delicious, Digg, YouTube, etc.. clones.)
Twitter is about Ambient Intimacy
Great phrase to describe it.
The more casual a social media system is, the closer the ratio of producers to consumers.
This is rich. So blogging made it easier for people to produce content, and a fair number of blog readers converted into blog producers. But blogging isn’t that easy–HTML, permalinks, wordpress installs…not to mention the effort of forming well structured paragraphs. Twitter is even easier.
I suppose this works in the opposite extreme as well: The ratio of TV show viewers TV producers is huge. But video sites are making it easier, thus lowering that average.
And at the other extreme? Hard to imagine anything easier than typing 140 characters. Maybe something that reads your physiological state directly (e.g. level of arousal). Or something that involves choosing nubmers between 1 and 10 like Buster McLeod’s Morale-O-Meter. I’ve been tracking my morale for a while as you can see here:
More on the conference as I find time…
“And at the other extreme? Hard to imagine anything easier than typing 140 characters. (…) Or something that involves choosing nubmers between 1 and 10 like Buster McLeod’s Morale-O-Meter.”
Well, close enough, check out http://www.inpowr.com where you can build a “mandala” of your well being and track your progress. It’s “serious” stuff in a way, but presented lightly.
Disclosure : I workpart-time for Humanix, the company behind the inpowr product, but I really felt it was relevant info in regards to the last part of your post.