I Need To Get Out More

June 20

Are you using Twit­ter? I actu­ally have an account but I’ve never really looked into it. This morn­ing I was lis­ten­ing to the lead devel­oper being inter­viewed on The Web 2.0 Show and I got the feel­ing that Twit­ter may be some­thing worth look­ing into.

To be hon­est, I’m not really an active social­izer on the inter­net and I barely even use IM any­more. How­ever, there are some good rea­sons why I’d like to become more active and prob­a­bly will now that I start work­ing with stuff I’m pas­sion­ate about.

It’s all about net­work­ing which is a pretty stiff word for mak­ing friends. Using the word we make it sound like you’re con­nect­ing with peo­ple you can use but it’s of course much more than that. I cer­tainly hope so, at least.

That’s the rea­son why I stopped hang­ing out at places like MyBlogLog. Peo­ple make it all about busi­ness, attract­ing traf­fic, and it’s just got that false feel­ing all over it. So what do I want to get out of social­iz­ing? I mean, ideally?

The key­word is “inter­est­ing”. Of course, attract­ing more vis­i­tors would be nice but it can’t stop there, that’s just dull. What I’d like is to meet inter­est­ing peo­ple who give me inter­est­ing com­ment on my stuff, which pro­duces inter­est­ing ideas.

This goes both ways. Online social­iz­ing should take us to inter­est­ing peo­ple and sites where we can gather around crazy and inter­est­ing thoughts. This is the ideal from a per­sonal standpoint.

Today I switched the side notes at my Apple blog for Twit­ter updates. As I men­tioned, I’ve never actu­ally used Twit­ter before but it seems to make sense. Not because I want to draw vis­i­tors by social­iz­ing but because the blog itself social­izes with it’s users and becomes more dynamic.

Social^(Users*n) + Dynamic = Web 2.0 and a more inter­est­ing internet.

Some­thing along those lines. How­ever, there’s an aspect of online social­iz­ing that I don’t like, which is that we ulti­mately end up depend­ing on all these sites, such as Face­book, Flickr, Twit­ter, Digg and so on.

Let’s say you upload and tag your pho­tos on Flickr to have them in a cen­tral acces­si­ble loca­tion where you can show them to peo­ple. You do the same thing with your book­marks on del.icio.us. It all looks fine and neat but before you know it, you end up los­ing con­trol of your own stuff.

That may not be that bad after all if we put our trust in these apps. I’m a great believer that online ser­vices and appli­ca­tions will grow insanely the next few years and that they’ll become a large part of all our lives. I’m just say­ing that I’d much rather be depen­dent on a tech­nol­ogy than a service.

There’s a big dif­fer­ence here. When we use what I call a tech­nol­ogy, like email or an IM pro­to­col, we can switch appli­ca­tion as we go along. A ser­vice, on the other hand, is just a service.

Any­way, that goes beyond the scope of this blog post, which is by the way com­ing to and end. Basi­cally, what I wanted to say is that I’d like to become more active on the inter­net and hope­fully we’re soon going to see that happen.

  •  
  • <a href=“http://www.facebook.com/share.php?v=4&src=bm&u=http://www.mrnordstrom.com/2008/06/20/i-need-to-get-out-more/&t=I+Need+To+Get+Out+More” rel=”” title=“Share this on Face­book” onclick=“javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outbound/article/www.facebook.com’); window.open(this.href,“sharer’,‘toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′); return false;”> 
  •  
  •  
  •  

Posted in | Tagged , ,

2 responses to “I Need To Get Out More”

  1. K
    K
    December 4 at 11:35 PM |

    “net­work­ing, a pretty stiff word for mak­ing friends”?

  2. Mr. Nordstrom
    Mr. Nordstrom
    December 5 at 1:17 AM |

    This is what I’m talk­ing about when I’m say­ing you never stop. A dis­cus­sion is not an obses­sion, it shouldn’t be. As long as we’re not talk­ing about Apple.

    Net­work­ing is ulti­mately about mak­ing friends for pur­poses. This doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean it’s purely about busi­ness or for other pur­poses pur­poses. If you do what you really love, busi­ness and plea­sure will coex­ist in some sort of har­mony. But if you’re just shop­ping with a friend, w/o any sort of busi­ness in mind, I wouldn’t call it networking.

    You of all peo­ple should under­stand this. I’ve got busi­ness (and plea­sure for that mat­ter) on my mind 24/7. You’re not like me that way. You can have fun with­out think­ing about the next step — I can’t. Still, I believe there is a dif­fer­ence, how­ever sub­tle, between net­work­ing and just hang­ing out.

    Surely, there is an area of “social net­work­ing” reserved for the pur­pose of find­ing “friend­ship”. Look at Face­book and there you have it. But call­ing our never end­ing café tours in the UK “net­work­ing” some­how sounds wrong.

Leave a Reply