As I wade daily through the deluge of tweets, messages, games, updates and other such information from social media sites, I wonder if the abundance of such sites and their information will detract from the message everyone wants to deliver or the conversations people and companies want to have. Is social media, in fact, poised for the same ill-fate as junk email and its arcane relative, the snail junk mail?
I use Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook for different proposes. May be because I use all of them actively I feel inundated with information. I keep up with friends on Facebook, professional contacts on LinkedIn and try to post something useful in each. I follow about 400 people on Twitter and can’t get through all of their tweets or follow all of their links on my daily visits. This is even after I started using two tools for managing the tweets, TweetDeck and SocialOomph.
On Twitter, some of the people I follow, in-turn, follow tens of thousands of people. how do they keep up with all the tweets?
What’s more, I see a lot of self-promoting messages on some of these sites. This is the part that made me wonder whether social media will become as annoying as junk mail or email. However, the answer is that it may not. After all, unlike email and snail mail, I can stop having someone as a Facebook friend, or a Twitter followee. I can quite easily stop all the chatter from those that provide nothing but noise.
What do you think?
Do you think we will eventually be as annoyed with social media as we are with junk email and snail mail? Feel free to send in your comments.
I still do not see the point of Twitter. Maybe I am too old and not wiling to accept new technology, but why would you want to follow someone's every move or their every thought? Is there someone that important that I need to follow and track continuously? I question is this the product of a younger generation where "texting" 24 hours a day is cool, rather being considered pathetic that they can not leave the cellphone behind. When I was a child I lived without "texting", "Twittering" or having to call everyone every ten seconds on my cellphone. Modern technology is wonderful, but is it creating a generation of children that will not know the joys of playing games like "tag", street foot ball or simply playing make believe games because they are too busy sitting in a chair Twittering?
I agree that Twitter, or any other type of social media, can be a distraction. However, social media is at its infancy.
I can see a microblogging tool like Twitter being used as a news feed, the same way we get public stock quote feeds that give us minute-by-minute updates online or on television. In the case of microblogs, you'd see streams from thought-leaders, like business professionals in your field, that you may wish to subscribe to. You don't have to read everything, but only the information you subscribe to and then only those that interest you at the moment. Then if you want to read more about a particular entry, you'd follow the provided link in the microblog.
You can take this a step further. How about if you're a large corporation and there are hundreds of projects, programs, and teams working on various projects. Each of those groups or individuals can then post short description of what they're working on and what progress they're making. This would be similar to status updates, but with meat that you'd get from news releases only found if you follow the links to the full story.
This is but only one example of where Twitter and social media are headed. There are many others that we can use professionally and personally once we accept microblogs, blogs, video feeds, and other social networking tools as nothing more than a medium to share information in the forms of opinions, files, and data.