Laura Hale has a great post on the Fan History blog (via Kaplak Stream), which deals with Twitter fatigue. Among other things, she writes :

I really wish that as Twitter exists now, that I felt like I was getting more out of my relationships that use Twitter to facilitate them. They don’t. I’m tired of trying to make the effort while feeling like I should be getting something out of it. I’m tired of people following me for no apparent reason who never communicate with me. I’m tired of the idea that I should be getting more connected with people as I feel even less connected.

I’m tired of the hype. (…) CNN talks about Twitter. FaceBook changed to look more like Twitter. News people talk about how Twitter will change how news is reported. Newspapers print Tweets. Twitter will change the world! Celebrities tweet from everywhere. Entertainment Tonight covers people who are tweeting while they are being interviewed. I get it. This is like MySpace about 2 years ago. (And we know where MySpace is going.) I kind of just want to be left alone in a world where I can use it with out everyone and their neighbor going on about how great it is. If we could get back to reporting the news instead of reporting on how people are sharing their news, I might be less tired.

In my particular case what Laura describes goes a long way to describe the love/hate relationship I have with most proprietary social networks (if in doubt, see this piece on why we don’t really like social networks). It would best be called social networks fatigue in general.

On Twitter in particular, I tire excessively of the countless outright attempts to game the system, of which this is only the latest I’ve bumped into. I like experiments and new ways to approach the Twitter API – but I dislike manipulation and being treated like a fool.

I would maintain that it is possible to use these tools to create and sustain meaningful relations, although like Laura it is probably no more than a handfull or at most a few handfulls which have come out of my personal use of Twitter. I haven’t calculated it rationally in terms of how many hours I’ve put into it, and if I did the numbers probably would not look encouraging.

But I don’t look at it in those terms. I see it more like a big learning experiment which helps me dress myself and others up for whats coming – and what will be _more_ the real thing. More peer-to-peer driven, more sharing, more caring and much more powerful (as in the Wikipedia meaning of the word). More so than say Twitter, Facebook, even Google, which are all young wild proprietary experiments trapped in the “old” economy.

I never forget the wonder of encountering Wikipedia in those early years, in 2003 and 2004. I and a few others worked on the Max Stirner article in the wiki and we built what we thought was a pretty decent encyclopedic article on Stirner. Since then, our work has been completely destroyed, mashed-up and remixed into an obscurity of an enormous and unstructured piece of writing. Great, because our work was not so sacred it couldn’t be demolished, and the lively activity on the article suggests that a lot of people find Stirner’s thinking interesting – which is great. Great, because the friendly environment and cooperative spirit which nurtured and built Wikipedia in those years laid the foundation for a global phenomenon we have yet to fully understand and appreciate. Great, because Wikipedia shocked me. It woke me up! In the Lessig meaning of those words. Sure there are problems. Lots of them. One of these minor quibbles may be, that the article which at present introduces Max Stirner to the uninitiated is not as good as the one we once wrote. But when all comes to all, it is a minor quibble. What shocked me and appeared to me as truly revolutionizing, was the power of people coming together, from different parts of the world, working together towards a meaningful goal, if just an encyclopedic article, we wanted it to be the best article it could be. And this stays with me. A lot of people these days use services such as Facebook and Twitter and marvel at the opportunities of connecting with other people. Most coming in via these online services have not learnt how to connect. They are easy targets for the “make a quick buck”-promoters who will sell their old grandma for +10.000 additional followers on Twitter.

There’s a big job in educating ourselves on how to communicate. The real power of tools like Twitter is not in the meaningless “what are you doing right now”-nonsense (except these may sometimes be good conversation-starters) but in the ability to reach someone beyond far distances, who shares your concern, your problem, your interests. Who may be able to help you. Whom you may be able to help. Not in the “shouting” and “selling your products in the face” way of “helping”. Forget the products. Help because you care. Because you share passionate common interests.

I like when I can see the person behind the connection. “It is the real you I want to see, behind the imagery”, I once described it somewhere. In that context, I spoke about the importance of crafting films with authentic messages and stories which resonate with oneself and one’s audience. But it is no less true when connecting with others using internet tools. To have something important to say, something meaningful to communicate. Something to ask. Something to think about, to be concerned about. A piece of information which makes my life richer, in the deeper sense and not the monetary sense.

We don’t always know what that is, and if we can’t write and post a message without thinking deeply about the deeper meaning of it, we would write and post a lot less. Which may be a good thing, some might say. Something which I repeatedly find very embarrassing myself, is how despite all precautions, you can’t easily hide the less flattering sides of yourself when engaging in online conversations. Some of it doesn’t look very pretty. Misspellings, impatience, frustrations, childish blabbering, pride, just plain rudeness. I’m a big fan of civil online behaviour as I am in civil offline behaviour, but still sometimes things slip out, which are less than flattering, sound a little too blunt than it was meant etc. And it doesn’t all have to be flattering. I’m also a great fan of filtering tools and I hope those who read what I have to say take note and learn how to use these to their great effect. As we’re still only learning how to handle and filter our in/out information streams, the noise levels of our online communication are inevitably rising as we try and deal with the problems of communicating with people in different contexts, on different platforms, and using different kinds of filtering tools.

Those of us who learnt how to communicate and work together building the early articles of Wikipedia, and did it the hard way, by connecting with others and discussing page up and down with complete strangers how best to do it, we’ve got a long way helping the many others coming into this world of online connectedness much less well prepared. And most importantly, whether we use crude (but working) wiki talk pages or sophisticated tools like social messaging or multi-platform microblogging, we need to make our passions shown. To help deliver the shock.

Tags : awakening, Facebook, Lawrence Lessig, making meaning, Max Stirner, peer production, Twitter, wiki, wikipedia 

Last year I discovered Twitter, inspired by video blogger and online infopreneur Raymond M. Kristiansen. Raymond worked very hard during the national election last year to introduce Video Blogging as a serious campaigning tool for the candidates of Radikale Venstre, the Danish Social-Liberal Party, of which both Raymond and I are members. I met him briefly then, and was tremendously inspired by his rigourous online activities.

Twitter allows you to post short (below 140 characters) messages about anything, and to follow others who do the same thing. One can send and receive messages via mobile phone as well as directly via the web. What is this useful for? Well, I’m still investigating. The constraint and mobility creates interesting results. Twitter can be anything from an individual’s stream of consciousness, two people exchanging mood swings or girl trouble or interesting links, or a group brainstorming ideas and theories. Twitter is a funny little thing. I haven’t quite figured out yet what to use it for, but today an occasion arose, which makes sense.

I’m participating in Oplevelsesiværksætter, a course in project leadership and investor relations for startups in the experience economy. The course runs for the next 4 months and focuses (unsurprisingly) on project leadership and investor relations. I decided today to use Twitter to share notes and thoughts about the course in relation to Kaplak. It fits perfectly with the way I write notes. I usually write things down to learn them better and reflect about what I’m doing. I don’t throw my notes away after such a course, but I very rarely read them again. I may as well share some of these thoughts and ideas online, while I’m at it. It tells a much less filtered story about Kaplak, as it unfolds from my perspective as leader of this project, which could be interesting for other entrepreneurs. All the time, everyone reading (other Twitter users) has the opportunity to comment and engage in the process as we go along.

Using Twitter for this kind of intimate log is also an interesting method of providing value to our company. Why can this be? Answer : it helps drive relevant traffic to our site. In this case, we want to attract potential “first” customers for Kaplak who are visionary and adventurous enough to seek out information on how to meet their online distribution challenges. Or simply feels the financial pain of imprecise distribution methods much harder than anyone else, because their market is too thinly spread for traditional retail systems.

On a related note, I’ve never experienced something as hard to explain to people than this, the intimate relation between hyperlinks and value. For most people it somehow seems utterly incomprehensible, that a hyperlink can be worth something. But in the end, this is what we at Kaplak is going to create our product around. Links matter, and it matters where you find them. The context the hyperlink appears in makes meaning. I’ll be very happy for any inputs on how to illustrate this connection between a “simple” reference and value.

I also want to say a big thank you to all of you, who have linked to Kaplak.com. It really is a great deal and means a lot to us, if you link to Kaplak.com from your website, blog, forum or email signature, or from your Facebook account.

Tags : attention, experience economy, hyperlinks as value, making meaning, Raymond Kristiansen, Twitter 

The internet is used for lots of spam, scams and tricks, which aim to make a quick buck and nothing else. Most tricks are easily seen through, however reckless they may be, and can be dealt with. There are also online businesses, which are less blatantly destructive than outright spam and scams, but yet fail to contribute constructively to what the internet is and could be.

By this I mean to hint at entrepreneurs (some even apparently successful) who dream of finding some magic way to repeat the ‘Google trick’, i.e. the golden solution, or more likely, a shortcut, to solve the problems of the net, and become the millionaires of tomorrow, like Larry Page and Sergei Brin did, when they launched Google, or more specifically, when they launched their Google Ads program.

Paradoxically, these are companies and entrepreneurs, who blindly go where others have gone before. They follow the latest trend, be it social software or video-blogging, in the hope of repeating the successes of those who went before, but without really thinking about internet users’ problems. What is at stake is money to be made on the traffic. By exploiting the vast masses of free information online in some way, one may earn a quick buck from all the ad clicks.

This model leads others, more careful types of entrepreneurs and businesses, to carefully seek to uphold and preserve intellectual rights (if any), or worse, to stay away completely from the internet as a serious avenue for business. By withholding and safeguarding information, if necessary with the help of Digital Rights Management (DRM), one can maintain greater value for those few, who can afford to obtain it. Theoretically, that is. This, of course, is the ‘Intellectual Property’-road of businesses of eons before us.

Guy Kawasaki talks here about making meaning for a business :

How does Kaplak want to make meaning? We want to make information make meaning.

We want to create sense in the world. In this sense, business secrecy (in the way of hiding information) makes little sense. It also makes little sense for us to decrease the value of our products for our customers, by adding technological restrictions which regulate their uses.

What we (and you, in your business) want to do is create value for customers and visitors, which make it worth their while to come by our particular spot and accept our particular offering.

This is quite different from tricks and ways to ‘figure it out’. Creating a surplus of value comes from hard, sustained efforts to deliver a service, which creates actual value in the other end of the economical food chain. This you can sell. Which makes your end of the food chain make money too.

There are no tricks to keep secret (at least, not forever) in a world abundant with information. Indeed a world in which the amount of accessible information increases exponentially each month, there is and will be a desperate need to make sense of all this information, in order to find anything.

The challenge we face, then, is how to create sense and surplus value, not in our end of the chain, but in our customer’s end.

One obvious way to do this in the information trade is to attribute greater value to the context of finding information, rather than on any particular piece of information. The strategy here is not to withhold information, but to create a valuable context, which makes it easy to get what you need. In this case, you’re willing to pay, because of the ease and comfort, by which you can obtain something, which would otherwise be a hazzle, and not the least, time-consuming and expensive.

Tags : business, Google, Guy Kawasaki, making meaning