I really like Twitter, Facebook and all but there one thing they all miss out on…
There’s not just ONE me… nor you!
As a family-relative, friend, Christian, developer, geek
… I send updates on apps, webdesign, my family, church, fun stuff
… sometimes in English, but mostly in Dutch.
I doubt you’re interested in all of these roles and topics. I could personally do without some of the boring and Spanish (sorry for that) posts I find in my timelines.
But the question is “to follow or not to follow”
… that’s all there is to choose from.
I hear you say: “Come over to Google+, it has circles!” And “Don’t you know about Facebook’s friend lists?” Besides for the fact that nobody but Google is really using Google+, both approaches are not what I’m looking for. Only the followee can define and populate these groups and decide which groups to target for in a post.
“Ah… it’s Twitter’s lists your looking for!” You’re right that with Twitter it’s the follower who manages it’s lists of interesting people he or she wants to follow. But you will still get all posts of the people you follow, not just the posts on the topics you decided to follow them for.
I’d rather have the best of both
… where I as a followee tag one post “apps,english” and another “family,dutch”
… but it’s my followers who should be able to see what tags I use…
… and follow not just “me”, but me-as-a-english-speaking-apps-person.
As a bonus it would be nice to be able require permissions for selected tags, like family or company, while others remain public.
Discipline… oh discipline
As with all things, there is small print. For this to work, as a followee you need to be disciplined in selectively tagging your posts. If you use too much tags, your followers will not be able to make a choice. If some tags are rarely used, your followees for these tags may never here from you and unfollow you. Th
Cross-network
And then how about using multiple networks? I don’t feel much for organizing and maintaining this for all my networks. I don’t really like all these different networks anyway! They’ve replaced e-mail and the long forgotten IRC chat networks, but they miss one key principle the old ones did… interchangeability. Why do I have to maintain the same type of information for so many networks with so many overlap?
Please Facebook, please Twitter, please Linked In and all you others…
Please find a way, a social-network-independent standard, that allows me to define my different profiles or ‘faces’, my persoanl and professional followers and followee and share this and my activity between whatever social network platforms I choose to use. Don’t try to bind me to your service by locking stuff down. Throw it all open and then fight each other on being the best platform to aggregate, publish and connect.
Amen…