20 September, 2011

A thought about Facebook's implementation of "Subscribe" & "Acquaintances"

Facebook's recent implementation of "Subscribe" functionality -- mimicking Twitter's (which mimicked SMS blog feeds), and "Close Friends" and "Acquaintances" -- attempting to get users to more easily use their grouping features that Google+ did, brilliantly, with the latter's "Circles" concept -- is a bid for FB to become more relevant in the timeliness arena, a means for them to compete with Twitter and Google+ in the right-now world.  Fair enough.

Of course, with social networks now almost as prevalent as chat clients became ten years ago, the same issues exist that have been there since the beginning.  One must either be a member, of all of them, or have a client application that spans them all, or fear being left behind, or worse, MISSING SOMETHING.  {gasp}

This gives "we move in different circles" an entirely new, modern, and somewhat depressing slant.  Often, it is not through intentional exclusion that people find themselves out of the loop.  More often it is a result of them either not having taken the time, to set themselves up in yet another venue, or it is the posters, who wishing their company, failed to advertise where in the heck their space is.

And now, many of us have numerous email addresses, and few of us aggregate them into one email client, and thus need to remember to check multiple locations to get all of one's email.  Many of us also have multiple phone numbers, and our contacts often do not know which one of these is our preferred conduit, between us and them.  In our contact lists we may have three or four, for any given contact, not knowing which accept text messages and which are land lines.

And texting is really the universal "chat", but it's about as limited, as a tweet, for conveying useful information.

So, enjoy your new found freedom to blast your thoughts into the cloud, people.  Hopefully at least a few of your intended targets will see them.

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