The Message > the media — Victus Spiritus

Don’t Believe the Hype

There is so much hype regarding existent and novel social channels that I wonder if many of us are missing the point when it comes to communicating. The quality and character of the message you are trying to transmit is of much greater importance than the specific implementation chosen to broadcast it. Yes, I’m excited about new social tools like Google Wave. But my reasons are somewhat selfish: the technology can be distributed, and wouldn’t necessarily vanish even if businesses liquidated (open source).

Facebook enabled me to catch up and chat with good friends from my university days
twitter introduced me to new friends, but to my chagrin, an even greater number of Multi-Level Marketing and Social Media experts. My signal to noise has been steadily dropping so in lieu of auto following back, I’m manually pruning my follow list to correct this
friendfeed connected me with people that like talking about the same topics I did. Posts of interest, spawned comment threads that brought life to isolated links. I was able to converse and connect with many different folks. Friendfeed has probably been the strongest tool in helping me connect to folks, but it’s future is unclear as it’s been picked up by Facebook
Js-kit Echo, and the new Disqus 3.0 enable real time commenting. This should boost comment interaction between readers substantially

Don’t Like What’s Offered, Build Your Own

The future of social media will host many different interfaces personalized by each user, but they’ll share common protocols to distribute information around the world instantly.

A great example of this is the RSSCloud by instigated primarily by Dave Winer (a classic trek fan when it comes to engineering).
Zee from theNextWeb has put together a pretty awesome status stream using only a few tools. The best part, we can all implement something similar .
And of course Brian Hendrickson’s open implementation of a status sharing social media.

There are a great many and growing number of social media infrastructure tools. Social media support products like Drupal, or sites like Ning want you to choose their solution for connecting people or forming a web community.

For my take on open social media, please check out this popular post from late July.