There seems to be a growing backlash against email. Anne Zelenka certainly is not a big fan. So while I disagreed with Anne at the time, I’ve been watching for indications that she may have been right - and perhaps she was (and is).
Nick O’Neill from allfacebook writes:
I think that perhaps Facebook will slowly become the place where I do most of my communication with friends and email will be used for my less close contacts. Jeremiah Owyang commented on this today. His younger sister says that she “only uses email to communicate with old people.” Bottom line, Facebook messaging has become a more effective way of communicating with people on a daily basis. Additionally, they have a great way of threading conversations just like Gmail does. Have you had the same experience of using Facebook as an alternative to email messages?
I would have to say that even as a newcomer to Facebook, I have had long rambling conversations that could well have been and email thread. Scary stuff. Between BBS netmail and email I’ve spent untold time in the last fifteen or so years having similar conversations.
Matthew Hodgson and I were discussing the difference between the way we do IA and the practices of some of the process-centric user-centered design crowd.
An analogy that I drew, rightly or wrongly, was that we looked beyond the accepted thinking into the realm of meta-thinking, we are a little like Neo in The Matrix - while the process-centric crowd see the building, we look beyond the obvious, and see the code that makes up the building. I’m not talking about programming code here (although Matt and I have both been paid to code in the past), but an understanding of the true nature of things that goes beyond methodology or learning.
It sounds egotistical and perhaps it is. The wider IA community sometimes creates solutions that appear complex - some who do not know how they got there look at the solution and are impressed by the apparent complexity, and we who see beyond the walls look at the solution and are impressed by the elegant simplicity.
Stephen Collins has been telling me to get onto Facebook now for a while. I finally succumbed last night after Steve mentioned the Facebook group for the Canberra Coworking Space concept.
I invited everyone I know who I thought might be interested.
Paola Kathuria and I correspond via the SIGIA-L list every now and then. In asking who I was and how I came to Facebook, she and I started a conversation on the true worth of Facebook. I think between us we decided that we weren’t quite sure of the true worth - whether it was a truly valuable thing or not. In the end, I suggested that Facebook was a flag that showed us where the social computing wind was blowing this week.
So here is my extrapolation of this: Boyd’s Law of This Week’s Hottest Social Computing App - social computing applications are massive social experiments that provide us with data so that we can understand the nature of social computing, and anything else that we get out of them is a bonus.
This definition is a little bit existentialist - the thing exists to prove the existence of the thing, and allow analysis of the thing. In this case, the thing is social computing. Whatever the thing is, we’re out there creating it - and just as Altavista gave way to Yahoo, and Yahoo to Google, so MySpace will give way to something like Facebook, and Facebook to the Next Big Thing. Will LinkedIn be replaced by the new business-oriented Facebook applications? Probably.
Published at 13 July, 2007
in About.
This blog started life on Blogger.com hosting. Then it moved to Blogger on the humaneia.com domain. Six weeks ago I resurrected it on Movable Type 4 beta.
I liked Movable Type - it had a lot going for it as a professional blogging platform. And while it wasn’t Movable Type’s fault, I’ve transferred HumaneIA to WordPress because that is what I am used to, and what I can easily post on. That is the bottom line, really, it is just going to be easier to post here now that it is on WordPress.
