DISQUS

Karl · 1 year ago

Your best post in a long time Scott. Folks keep getting wrapped up in features that - based upon how easy it is to enable them on your site - are commodities.

The one thing that's not - the people - is what counts.

funDiva Christy · 1 year ago

My friends started using facebook, so I started using facebook, I had registered a year ago but never cared. Then I saw some people's updates "were twittering" so I dug up my twitter account, same thing, signed up but never used it.

I am finding twitter to be it's own animal, some people twitter w/o fb, but I like the integration. If I see interesting tweets, I follow, I check out the profile site and if it looks like a person I'd like to know, I see if they are on fb. If they are, I send a note about what I found interesting about their tweets or site and a friend request. And I include an invitation to check my sites too and see if there's a match, business, hobbies or just common interests.

So far it works for me, so I have no desire to jump ship to another lifestreaming or social network because I've put effort into developing these.

And lifestreaming is a funny term, if you're always reporting in, are you really living?!

Nick · 1 year ago

I'm sure that the user base is an issue, but this situation reminds me of when there used to be a healthy market for third party spell checkers and thesauri add-ons around Word, Multimate et al. The host applications were new and smart developers spotted opportunities. However it didn't take much work on behalf of the vendors to plug the holes and the users didn't need much convincing - in most cases, close enough was good enough.

Once the main social platforms have all the main technical features and Open Social erases the walls, aren't we just going to end up back where we started except our "email" application will be more powerful and address book bigger?

Marc Dierens · 1 year ago

I agree, it all matters where your friends, or colleagues are. I have to admit that before Twittersync I was not using Twitter at all, and all of a sudden now I use it daily. But if all of a sudden al my contacts would move to another site, then I would probably go there as well. After all, what is the fun of Facebook without your friends? Cheers, Marc

Terry Finley · 1 year ago

Blogging used to be just plain fun;
now it's fun and complicated.

Bobbink SEO Blog · 1 year ago

Scott, I think there are enough social networks at the moment. They have to copy eachother to have their users satisfied. Users are not willing to change too another network because all their friends are on the same network. But to have them satisfied you need certain features to bemore unique then other networks.