Over the past few years, I’ve used social media as almost a full replacement for real social interaction. It started out nicely enough and I’ve definitely interacted with plenty of people that have changed me. Some positively, few negatively, and the rest have been there. Unfortunately, with time what I, and others, want or need has changed, not unexpectedly; operating as if nothing has changed leaves me feeling somewhat empty.

July and August of 2008 was when I started actually using social media for purposes outside of just keeping up with friends on Myspace and Facebook. I ended up on Pownce, Twitter, Friendfeed, Ustream, Seesmic and others in rapid succession. That was also when I began taking blogging a bit more serious, in retrospect a very bad thing.  I decided sometime around then that I had to interact and add value on Twitter every day, no matter how small.  I kept it up for a few months pushing a motivational quote or video in the morning to try and lighten the increasingly gloomy situation.

Come March and April of 2009, Friendfeed rolled out their real-time site and I became instantly enthralled in the interaction on the service. It was so far superior to anything at the time, and still to most today, that I gradually stopped devoting time to the other sites. In between April and August of 2009, I interacted and got to know many people on Friendfeed, one in particular was Holden Page who people used to confuse with me and likewise me with him.

August 10th, 2009: The day that Friendfeed was lost; Facebook purchased Friendfeed and in the next few weeks, a large portion of the English-speaking community leaves. This push left only the most diehard lovers of the site and community there, but with the knowledge that it’s not going to get better and there is a chance the plug will get pulled. Every time something new has come along the question has been, “Will, or can, this replace Friendfeed.” The answer never an absolute yes, and nothing came by that could truly match the service with it’s community for nearly two years.

July 2011, the weary ship set adrift just a few years, yet a lifetime, ago finally scrapes against something that can truly match it, Google+. When Google+ launched it immediately became a haven for the reFFugees, and has thus sucked most of the remaining members of the community away. My community there is now gone; it’s not where I want to be any longer, as shown by my interaction recently. I guess I could try to embrace Google+, but it is not the site or community I want.

So for now, I’m checking out on actively utilizing social sites. Will I come back? I don’t really know. I’ve had fun over the years, but it’s mostly been for naught or worse. With the time I’ve recently had, I’ve had time to think about a lot of things that matter and those that don’t. I want to spend more time creating value that is going to last and less on the frivolous affairs.

P.S. for Friendfeeders: Right now, I don’t think I’ll be going Full-Cristo, but it could be a possibility in the future.

P.P.S. to Louis Gray: I know it’s probably your job, but please don’t encourage people to +James Fuller on Google+.

I haven’t thought it out fully, it’s only been a few hours, but using APMLs as the starting ground. You sum the weights, per topic, for all of your followers and then divide by #number of followers, to get the APML for your Social Graph, per network which I’m calling GAP currently. I see this as an extended OPML format for APMLs , handling not only weights of relevant interest, but also handling access to the APMLs monitored by the graph.

One thing that would conflict with the APML format, which the GAP could stay very close to, is what is deemed Explicit Data. You aren’t the one determining relevancy, so it isn’t necessary. I’d either use or replace it for something that handles the APML list being monitored, the list becomes the explicit data for the weighting, but it also allows you to weight the APML’s individually as well, I don’t know that this is necessary, but it allows accessibility to possibly increase relevance to your graph, based on who is likely to interact more with you.

So this is just a thought, about a open-method for sharing graphs and relevance between services, rather than every service handling a proprietary model of the graph, and a proprietary model of relevant data. First things first, is that we need support for APML, which we have Chris Saad to thank for, then we can handle how we manage our networks relevancy.

One final issue with the GAP is that it has a specific use case, is that it is a way to share graphs and relevancy to exterior networks, but the file size for the GAP if it handled all the networks simultaneously it would become quite large, implicit data would be 1 line per topic, per network, and explicit data would be 1 line per person, per network. For early adopters and people with large following bases this could become quite large, even for a regular user on one network it would likely be 300-1000 lines.

*= MyLikes already uses a similar model, influenced by clicks per ad and number of ads you share. MyLikes Influence Rank

Just the other day, Facebook, proposed an update to their privacy policy to allow third-parties to have access to your data, some point in the future, and with this comes, yet, another wave of criticism, some. People are jumping all over Facebook, because they feel people will be paranoid that their data is vulnerable, and that their data shouldn’t be given out willie-nillie to just any third-party site that Facebook comes to agreement with. You would think people would be used to this type of position coming from Facebook, by now, this is their fourth or fifth slip up, but still people complain for a few months and then calm down, until it happens again.

Our most personal data in the US, social security numbers, is insecure, especially if you were born after 1988. The numbers can be defined through 2 data points, date & location of birth, and a little brute forcing. So for the younger generation, nothing is private, not even our government provided personal identification. If we aren’t protected in that regard, should we really be worried about those images from last weekend or who our friends are, what our opinions are? I think Eric Schmidt said it best, in an interview where he discussed privacy, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

I know I jumped on Facebook, but they aren’t the only sites that have huge inventories of data on their users, in hopes of adding relevancy, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al. Facebook is the simplest site to jump on because of it’s repeated transgressions in the area. Google has faced it as well, though, when it didn’t take enough discretion in opening up their Gmail users privacy through Buzz. As the web keeps advancing, privacy options are going to be set to off on default, it will be up to the users to change the settings to keep themselves private, this has been called ‘publicy’.

Are you prepared for the next generation, the age of publicy? Are you ready to get dirty mucking around with settings to protect what little privacy, you will have in the future? Will you let everything go, and change how you interact on the web? These are questions that we will all face, but I think I’m prepared to be completely open in my environment when it comes to social matters, they aren’t anything compared to my financial information or my social security number, which can apparently be brute forced by a bot-net of 10,000 machines in ~1.27 seconds.

Update: Tyler Romeo’s latest post, Why I Dislike Facebook & Foursquare, makes a great point in contrast to the opinions I made here, I agree with quite a bit of what he has to say as far as respecting your users and offering secure protocols, to help protect your users. Take your time and go check that post out.

1. Listen First, Speak Later
If you aren’t listening to them, you have no clue where the conversation is going. If you don’t know where the conversation is headed, you don’t have a clue what you should say. You should hold your words back and carefully sculpt them to what is being said, that way you give credence to what the person is saying, even if you don’t agree with them.

2. Be Happy, Be Calm
You should never get upset in a conversation, because you will become short-sighted. If you become short-sighted you end up risking killing the conversation, or even worse destroying the relationship you have with the person. One thing I do, when I do get aggravated, is I pause the conversation. On the internet, I take a stroll through the house, before going back. In real-time interactions, such as over the phone or in person, I ask them to excuse me, to do something important or use the restroom.

3. Be Responsible
With great power, comes great responsibility. In a world that treasures the passing of knowledge, you wield the greatest power of all, your words. You should take try your best in making sure that what you say is accurate, and not offensive. If you do misspeak make sure that you remedy it, which leads to the next point.

4. Apologize Quickly
An apology might not right every wrong, but it shows that you understand you made a mistake. It is not an excuse to try to get people off your back, if you use it this way, you’re not being sincere. To truly apologize, you first have to state that you are sorry, then show proof that you understand why you wrong.

5. Be Accepting
Always be willing to accept someone’s ideas, even those you might not agree with. Being open to new ideas only leads to a more open and intellectually satisfying discussion. Acceptance is the first step in understanding something new.

6. Be Understanding
Once you have accepted external views, your next task is to step into the person’s shoes, as best you can, and attempt to understand what they are saying. Understanding what someone says makes you much more inviting to converse with, even if after understanding you point out where they have erred, which hopefully is reciprocated.

7. Offer Help
If someone is having a problem, that you can possibly help with, offer your assistance. In offering assistance, you have very little to lose, and much to gain, a new best friend, possibly. I’ve been through this cycle many times, and have made some very good friends by helping them when they needed it.

Here are a few bonus  tips for interacting in the physical world.

Smile
The best way to lighten the mood is to smile, you let everyone know that you enjoy their company. A smile is also a very attractive thing that can make you, and your ideas more appealing. This is the same as an apology, however, and if you aren’t sincere it’s not hard to figure it out, though it might take a bit longer with a smile.

Eye Contact
Eye contact is a great way to show that you are engaged with what the person has to say, and that you aren’t just shrugging off what they say. A few tips on eye contact, don’t stare, and occasionally break contact, for 1-2 seconds, to observe your surroundings.

I feel that the location services aren’t proper for expressing the story. They don’t describe the why and what is happening the majority of the time, and when they do the data is extremely condensed to fit within the minuscule boxes of Twitter or SMS. Twitter is hard enough to express a story through, though you can still manage to get it or a cultural message across in one tweet. Sharing a cultural message through one of these locations is likely even harder, with the exception of religious establishments.

How social can you really be with these applications? These applications all have tiny user bases, even after quite a bit of promotion on large blogs and a period of time. Foursquare, which is one the most publicly discussed ones, only has half-a-million, even after breaking out at SxSW, last year. Compared to Foursquare, few of the other services come close in size comparisons. The problem with low user adoption is that without your friends, how relevant can the product be, which I’ll discuss a little later.

The barrier to entry for nearly all of these services, is that they are limited to internet enabled phones, or smart phones. In fact, only one service of the several that I’ve looked at, had a entry level that wasn’t quite restrictive of it’s base, and it’s none other than Foursquare, with SMS check-in’s, which still appears to be hit or miss. If you’re reducing your initial growth capabilities, immediately, in a social market, you’re damaging your product.

The services use the location data, in their own ways, but I don’t know if they are applying it where it would actually be of value, as an addition of context. If you can take the data from these products and connect it to events and people as they occur, you simplify the enrichment of the story. It’s still pretty easy to just say where the event’s took place, with the addition of maybe 2 dozen key strokes, as I write this at my house.

Another issue is that the product might not be relevant to users, especially, when people begin using them to check in as they leave. If I were to use these services, it would be to let my friends know where I am, so now you have users undermining the principles of your product, way to go. You’re app actually ends up being even more irrelevant than it already is. The likelihood that your friends are even on the service is an anomaly in the first place, unless you live in a metropolitan area(e.g. New York, San Francisco, LA, Portland, Miami, etc.).

I give all the people who work on these applications props, though, because they discovered a great system. They created a user-promotion based advertising system, which you encourage by having deals with various venues to reward the heavy users, and little trophies for reaching little milestones for the rest of the users. They have also brought the idea of geo-location to the fore, which sometime in the future will be used to add context to real stories or cultural messages. So I would like to thank all the people, who work on these apps, for their work, but you guys apparently don’t understand geo-location, it is better served to add context to other mediums, than as an independent social medium.

I’m good at two things, making people believe in me, even when I know they shouldn’t, and continually learning. The first is disturbing, the second is nice and provides a way to make myself more appealing to others. Like I said in my post about social media experts and masters, the only thing you need to be considered an expert, is more knowledge than the person you’re giving you information to, that’s it. I don’t need to know much to know more than you as a regular person to be considered an expert, so long as I can provide even a minute amount of proof. Once I have you,  I just have to keep my story straight, and avoid experts who know more than me A contrary action to the education.

In order to learn anything you must break the topic down, and interact with those who are knowledgeable. Since the help of a mentor, or other expert, is beneficial, I love getting in to arguments or seeking out the experts to have conversation. I take their word as solid advice and information and break it down so that I can more easily understand it. This is occasionally easy and more often very complicated, but if you endure and have one skill, which will be mentioned in just a second, it becomes much more simple. Education is all about gaining access to the  information you want and need; there are two simple ways to find the data you want, discourse with an expert, or searching for it.

The one skill that you need to  make this all work is listening. If you can listen and understand others,  it will make you much more likely to learn something from them. I realize, I need to turn the tables and re-analyze what I project, because I’ve had a few people ask me questions about myself, that I don’t feel capable to answer without exaggeration or lying.

If they’re was ever one person, above all others, to listen to, it’s yourself and your’ gut reactions, they let you know what’s right and what’s wrong. I’ve been lying by omission about what I know for too long, and now it’s time for me to listen to myself, and even more importantly everyone I interact with, because I haven’t for too long. If I get schooled, I will admit defeat and ask for assistance. I’m tired of creating tension, so I’m going to begin bowing out  gracefully, rather than turning my face and walking away, like a coward. I need to listen, and I hope you  understand this and will allow me to be someone who you can trust.

P.S. If I interact with you on any service, I invite you to step up and slap me if I ever seem out of line. We all need it, at some point.

You don’t have to know everything about a category to be an expert. You just need to be more experienced and knowledgeable than the person who is looking for an expert. If they don’t really know what they are looking for, besides maybe a few buzzwords. You can be an expert to those people, because they know considerably less than you.

To be an expert though, you have to know who you’re talking too, and if they actually know more than yourself. Never call yourself an expert in front of someone who knows more than yourself, unless you’re an amazing bluffer. Of course, even a bluffer will be found out a fool if he continues to talk about the topic, and the person discovers this. The best thing to do, is not self-label yourself an expert, unless you’re truly or near being a master.

A master knows the ins and outs of the system in which he works. The master’s knowledge of the system allows him to do things that regular people and even the majority of experts wouldn’t be able to understand it. The master is efficient with his work, he has the answers or knows exactly where they can be found rapidly. The master is at the top of his art along with very few.

If you seek a master for help, quality is guaranteed, but an actual response is not. A master will teach you everything, but he will always hold one kernel of knowledge back. The master is not fooled by experts, even if he trained them; he knows that they might try to take his claim. The master uses his withheld knowledge as a way to maintain the upper hand.

The truth is I’m just sick of “Social Media Experts”, self-labeling themselves, but I’m also sick of people bitching about it. The reason the people are bitching however, is because they are just as or more capable of discussing social media, than the people that are self-labeled. Some of these people, may even be very close to being a Social Media Master, but they choose to be named by their peers and not by themselves. Of course, the “Social Media Experts” are experts, we just aren’t their audience, so stop bitching.

Introduction

Commonality
A shared interest in similar items, friends, or favorite places to hang out or eat. It should be easily distinguishable to find a similarity to begin with as your mutual friend introduces you or you end up at the same location at the same time. You may both go to a place to enjoy a hobby you both share, and make a connection from that.

Mutual Experience
You have both being through an incident or event in which you share similar experiences, this could fall under commonality, but it is something that isn’t common enough that you would normally share with a stranger. It could be your profession, a disease that has affected your life, or going to an exclusive event. It is a personal connection that randomly comes out and creates an initial connection.

Notable Interaction
This is the kind that is often used in movies, but occurs quite often in life also, the cliche in films is when someone drops there books and gets assistance from someone. It’s just an accident that creates an opening for introductions. In real life this could be any unplanned event where people share some information about each other, whether it be a car accident, being stuck in an airport due to a delay, or any accident that causes people to offer assistance.

Acquaintance

Re-occurrence
The event that any of the aspects of the Introductory Field reoccurs often enough that you begin to know each other on a more personal level, than you would on a one-off meeting.

Mutual Shared Personal Knowledge
The information that most people don’t want you to have if they don’t know you very well, their birthday, their relationship status, where they’re from. It’s the most basic of info that provides accessibility to each other and also a little detail about one’s current state of affairs.

Caring
The use of Personal Knowledge to express yourself to the person. You can wish them a happy birthday, with out it being to awkward, or provide condolences when they lose something/someone very dear to them. It is the ability to express without being perceived as fake that you are willing to be there for the person in the moments they need support.

Friendship

Deep Interaction
The point in which you can discuss things that matter to you, that you might not share with people you don’t know very well. Discussions which involve personal knowledge to be gathered that isn’t public information. It is the ability to trust the other person with more personal information.

Experience
The effect of Deep Interaction is that you are begin to know more about the person. You have inside jokes, can pass on interests, and know how to change their mood for the positive or negative. The insight that comes with being a friend allows you to interact more fluidly with the other person.

Ease of Access
The ability to start a conversation with a person relatively simply, you make time for each other to have a discussion. It can also be, likely is, the provision of multiple channels to reach the person for such discussions. Having such ubiquity helps further and accelerate, the relationship.

Catalysts

Real-Time Discussion
By now we should all understand what this means, but I will clear the meaning up for those that don’t know. Real-time discussions are fluid interactions that happen rapidly enough, within a short period of time, that they can be seen as a seamless conversation.

Randomness
The spark that can ignite a friendship. It is the driving force of introductions and fosters connections. You see someone grasping something that you like as well, you have an accident, you trip. It is the key to mutual experiences, and notable interactions. It also keeps everything interesting, you may come across something new, at any time.

Currently, I haven’t found an online service that offers all of these qualities, but the top few have hit some sweet spots that make it much easier to manage socialization on all levels. Below I posted a chart of what factors Friendfeed, Facebook, and Twitter have become useful for. And I’m not saying that they don’t have ways to do all of this, it’s just not simple, if it’s not simple to manage the social factors, it’s useless.

Facebook is a home, or more like a group of homes where all of your friends live and the door is always open to you. You can drop in if you like, make a comment about what they’re doing, remark on how they look, chat for a bit, or play some games. The only problem is it’s generally easier to do that in person or on the phone. I’d rather go hangout a restaurant or even just go for a walk. I don’t want to sit at their place all night, that’s not fun.

FriendFeed is like a bar, filled with people that you can interact with, but discussions generally are just 2-3 people. The conversations are short and somewhat random, showing just a sliver of who a person’s identity, if you share an interest on the subject it’s a nice way to connect. You just slide on in to the discussion, and when your ready to move on you just stand up and pass on to the next conversation. Most conversations are amiable, but that doesn’t prevent the occasional fight to flare up and turn into an all out brawl. In general it’s a fun place to just go and hangout, if you visit often enough you’ll begin to recognize the regulars.

Twitter is like walking down a street, filled with people you kind of know. You can hear the chatter from all of these people at once, some of them pitching ideas or trying to sell their wares. Occasionally, you might walk down the street with a friend or group of friends and have a discussion, though it will be drowned a bit by all the noise. The interaction and people are there, but it’s not always the best place to have a discussion, especially if you don’t want to be distracted.

Now a quick list of a few I’m not going to get to deep as this isn’t the point.

Myspace is like a back alley or a subway, sure you might get mugged, but at least there is an

artist playing his music for free, and sometimes they’re great.

Digg is like a newsstand, it carries today’s latest news not exactly the freshest source, but it’s the headline news of the day.

Google is like a massive library index helping you find what you were looking for on the internet. Wikipedia is like a library filled with information, but then again the whole internet is filled with information.

Amazon is the department store, most likely you can browse through it and find what ever you were looking for, plus you might end up picking up some random items.

Hulu and Youtube are like movie theaters, except they constantly have new film to watch.

The point is if you can figure out what kind of data you’re looking for and in the mood for, you can find it quickly. The issue is that if you are new to town, it will take a while to build up your friends in the area, and also find you’re way around, it might take a week or two. The majority of the time people don’t give websites more than an hour or two of poking around, because they don’t know what they are supposed to do.

Most services leave the use cases open to the users’ interpretation, like a playground, we can run wild and have fun with what they have provided us. The opposite is also true you don’t want to have a service where you’re telling the person exactly what to do, people want ideas and examples, they want a clear means to what they can and should do. But the number one thing we have as users is the ability to choose where we want to be at any given time and which one we prefer the most, sure I take my walk through the street every day, but I always end up where I enjoy it the most, and for me that’s at the bar. Where do you like to spend your’ time?

That was the realization I had watching Wanted, when Wesley releases the rats into the mill. He provides them with peanut butter, albeit laced with gasoline, in order to have them help in his mission. Several dozen dogs couldn’t have presented him with the return that he received for the hundreds of rats that went out to return his favor. So maybe you should follow his lead and seek the little guys that want you to help them out, not the big guys that you want help from. How do you think they got big, they helped the little guy out, and he let his friends know about it.

Look at how the successful social-networks grew. They all start with a small focused market, Myspace with Musicians, Facebook with College Students, Twitter with texting and the Early Adopter. Each of these small markets had one huge thing in common, they were set in a location where they could expand to the general population, Myspace to fans, Facebook to older Alum and the general public, Twitter to marketers and people looking for an audience. Then they expanded to the mainstream audiences through word of mouth and the necessity for people to have friends on the network to interact with.

They did 3 things and they did them well.

• They decided on a market.
• They expanded their market into a natural evolution of the original Market.
• The focused on the large groups, of small people, to help spread the message, not small groups, of big guys.

Far too many people have the wrong perspective. They seek to become a giant by standing on the shoulders of other giants, rather than building a self sufficient community that helps each other rise up to the sky. I’m going to show you a perspective variation of the King’s Chessboard, a parable in which a king offers a peasant a payment for his services, the peasant simply asks that the king give him double the amount of rice that he gave the day before, until he has covered each square on a chessboard, starting with one grain of rice. The king soon realizes that he can’t honor this payment as it’s too much for the kingdoms granary.

In my variation, I’ll have the king offering 2 different rewards to the peasant, he can receive 1 billion grains of rice each day until each square has been covered, or he can take the option from the original story of 1 grain of rice and have it doubled everyday for each square. Most people would be blinded by the large sum that they are told they will receive each day and wouldn’t quantify the fact they will actually lose a large sum by taking the larger initial choice. In fact, you will receive only ~.0000007% of the total had they chosen the doubling.

So remember, sometimes it’s better to go with the small people and to take time for the little things in life. They will pay off much more in the long term than always trying to do something that involves the major points in of focus. Take your time and if someone needs help don’t be greedy go and help them you never know the power to change your life they might have.