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Facebook Hollywoodifies Our Lifes. And it Shortens Them.

I read news from a friend diving in south africa, participating in the famous london gorilla run and celebrating his daughters fith birthday. – what a life.

 Another Friend is posting pictures from Bali, New Zealand, Australia – that are his three holiday-trips in one year.

And friend 3 posts in his statusnotes that he just arrived from Shangai after a short stop in Berlin, is now having food at Vienna airport, shortly before leaving for Barcelona.

Very glamourous lives.

Everything is so spectacular, it’s happening at breakneck speed – and watching makes you feel really poor.

Some distance puts a lot of shine and glamour on many things. So many nice things are happening so fast – it’s really impressive. If you look at the good things only, that is.

Doing that in real life, too, is plain bullshit bingo. But we could look at it as another benefit of using social networks: they make us clean up our lives as if we were attending a party and having a nice conversation.

That’s a pretty good reason to use them anyhow.

Gain Twicksize

Jeremiah Owyang returned from a 20 day twitter hiatus. To be honest, I did not really realize he was away – there is so much noise going on. And exactly that was his experience: A lot of things are just noise, you will not miss them.

The noise keeps going on, not matter if you care about it or not. Sometimes there is some positive impact, sometimes not.

What I’m really curious on are some efficiency discussions around twitter that started in the past weeks: The topic is not what you do on twitter, not even why you do it – but who is the most powerful Twitter-User.

Twinfluence.com works around three main values: Reach, Velocity and Social Capital.

Reach is defined as ” the number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers), plus all of their followers (second-order followers). This is by necessity a crude maximum estimate, since there will definitely be duplicates and overlaps that could only be eliminated by up to thousands of API calls. Reach is a measurement of potential audience and listeners, a best estimate of the number of people that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.”

Velocity “merely averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence. Of course, this number could jump significantly with the addition of a few high-profile followers. Velocity is scored from “very slow” to “very fast” relative to other twitterers at your network size.”

Social Capital indicates ” indicate the average first-order network of a Twitterer’s followers. It’s essentially a measure of how influential are a twitterer’s followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer’s followers have a lot of followers themselves. Social Capital is scored from “very low” to “very high” relative to other twitterers at your network size.”

Toplists can be viewed, you can also search and compared user-profiles or rate your own twitter nick. The values all care about reach and impact – how far can your tweets reach how many people – to really get business value out of it, you still need some idea what the impact is good for.

Twicksize.com has an easier approach. Size matters – that’s it. The criteria are not defined any closer, but the visualization is impressive…

Much of it is fun, but what we can see is that the criteria are generally still in discussion – as with any kind of social media or even online media. Twinfluence ranks Barack Obama and Guy Kawasaki as the post powerful Twitterers, but Jerermiah Owyangs Twick is bigger then both their Twicks (and there are even bigger twicks around…)

Even if it’s not serious, any kind of measurement and kpi-definition can help us to answer some of the most important questions coming up in 2009: What is all that stuff good for, what’s the use of our media universes and where do they turn in to money? – A good answer to that will be the #1 quality sign for media projects.

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Mash ups and the single page

It’s great to just casually collect information, bookmark something here and there, add a few tags. Highlight things in your Google Reader, add a note on Netvibes, store it on Secondbrain, read a few lines, open some more links and just continue.

That brings a lot of information, it really helps to create a big picture and it is a lot of work.

It actually meets many requirements we have in daily work (flexibility, global orientation, speed, always being ready for an alternative) and it fits to your working style if you are collecting requirements, shaping products, evaluating solution scenarios or doing other rather creative work.

Once you’re used to that style of working it gets really hard to forget the always growing always open network attitude and to focus on one idea on one piece of paper.

• First of all it is hard, because you have to exclude so many things. You can not touch on this perspective or that point of view – focus on one thread and try to make it understandable.

• The second reason why it is hard is because we also have to focus on one targetgroup. To whom are you talking, which of your many ideas and what part of that one idea is it that might be really interesting for them? You have to decide, you have to exclude the rest and you can not just start somewhere and wait for comments.

• A third source of trouble is: We have to get it done. We actually really have to finalize it. We can not start it, leave it open for discussion, add a few links and hope for people to use it as a starting point for their own thoughts. We are expected to tell a fully flavoured story, and we are expected to sell something. Most audience want to have a clear proposition and the end: what am I supposed to do now, what can I get.

A clear, compelling and competitive vision, neatly designed and written on one piece of paper – that’s what is expected in most senior management meetings.

If you can not deliver your idea in that shape – then it’s either you or your idea who is probably not worth listening to.

But are our products like that? Do we have a onedimensional linear backbone in our ideas that can be easily followed and tells everything?

Should we have that?

Is actually our reality still like that, is there anything we can describe in a distinct, not misunderstandable way?

And (here comes my alltime favourite question): Does it matter?

Does the grade of reality of what we describe as reality matter? Does it matter if everything is covered by what we say? And how do we want to know if the reallity we want to describe is also the reality that our counterpart is able and willing to understand?

We don’t know and we can’t control it; we probably only talk of the same thing when we say nothing at all. – Ok, that’s pretty philosophical.

I’m convinced that open, unclean, unfinished mashups describe way better what we are up to and what happens out there. But I’m also positive that it are the very simple stories that sell – they are the only thing you can buy; everything ellse is so undefined that you can not even attach a price tag to it.

So again: It does not matter. Don’t try to reduce complexity in your thoughts or in the way you look at things.

But find a single and simple storyline that tells a good story. That can be reused in many different ways. Tha can be understood by several audiences.

If it’s a really great story, it seems to address only a very limited part of your idea. But you can reuse it in every way you need and as often as you need it.

That’s economic, far more economic then one sheet of paper.

And it leaves enough space, spirit and energy for what you really want to care about.