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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.

Too much socialising is quite antisocial

When I’m not sure if I like a website or an application I think of it as a persons who is talking to me. Sometimes that helps to make up my mind.

When I look at twitter, there is a multiple personality talking to me. Or somebody who is just namedropping, without actually saying anything. The more people you follow, the less communication is happening: you don’t see your real friends anymore you hardly care about what all these guys are saying it’s just noise going on…

This turns twitter from a communication to a publication media – the same antisocial stuff as your old tv station.

This tells me

• it’s in the responsibility of the user if a media is an information-, publication- or communication-media. That’s quite a lot of power and can also influence business models.
• I will unfollow all professional twitter users; they just waste my time for too little benefit.

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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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Does all this new media stuff take us ten years back?

Sometimes I feel like ten years ago: We are creating directories again, portals are as much distibution services as they are integration layers and there are a lot of newbies around, who think that all that is quite interesting, but don’t really get it.

There is also an ugly side in this nostalgia: The veruy old ROI-discussions are coming back, not in terms of “How can we make this more efficient?”, but in terms of “Do we need this at all?”

When I was asked to justify why I recommended this or that media or if I really believed that wikis were something useful a few months ago, I just took it as business as usually: nobody bus anything at first glance, you always have to add some extra spice or – actually more often – you have to give the customers the feeling they are adding some spice, so that it fits their taste.

Now there is more to it: People want to see measurable ROI again, they want to count short term successes in money. Up to how, we had been used to the fact that online media, ecommerce and email are business basics that don’t have to be justified anymore. Now, as short term efficiency rules and social media are complex, diffuse and not easy to understand anymore, I feel more scepticism in companies. They wont tell you that online is crap (actually, some people did already, #anlorenz), but they do already tell that they have to focus on the important stuff now

That’s one of the reasons that gives me the feeling of ten years ago.

The other side is that I’m convinced we have a vast lot of opportunities in corporate media and ebusiness, but also in consumer media. The high amount of communication and media options we have now ask for orientation and moderations – at least for the high number of newbies we have. Where do they come from? In fact, everybody is a newbie. We all can learn everyday, we will always find a lot of new things – and we can easily admit that, because it does not make us look uninformed, but actually very smart.

So I hope to see the rise of some new online magazines soon also in Europe, covering the area of media, their social and theoretical implications, the lifestyle and the business.

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