FOTE 2010

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New social software services come, many go, some stay. Do those that stay, those that are sticky, fill a pre-existing gap in our social experience?

Most of us know that, like the British, the Chinese talk of losing face. Maybe the language geeks amongst us know that “to lose face” was only recently introduced into English from Chinese. Unlike most other loans from Chinese where English borrowed the actual word, so including a sense of exoticness and remoteness (chopsticks, coolie, lychee), losing face we imported the concept because it expressed succinctly a meaning that, before the British heard it from the Chinese, we had no concise expression for in English.

So much of a need did it fill that English speakers used “losing face” as a building block for concepts – like “face-saving” – that have no exact analogue in Chinese. Although we can’t agree on how to spell it, email (e-mail, eMail?) similarly filled a pre-existing hole in our working lives. How our ancestors BCE (before the computer era) did work, flamed one another, circulated dirty jokes, virus scares, and “corporate communications” is lost in the mists of diminishing productivity.

We early adopters, abandoning last year’s iPhone for an Android even as we swipe through the day’s feeds on our iPads, bemoan the benighted mundanes – those users who “don’t get it”: the hapless, clueless academics who didn’t take to the VLE as quickly as they annoyed the PVC with caustic all staff emails, the benighted commentators who sneer at the vapidity of the Twitterati, the people who buy iPads because they want an easy to use computer rather than score earlier adopter points. These poor mundanes might not be able to use Outlook if their lives depended on it, but they sure “get” email.

Me, I got Twitter right after it came out of private beta, and I stuck with it, even though I had almost no one to talk to, because, as well as having precious little evidence of a business model (and let’s face it, watching VCs burn cash never gets old), it had the look of a general purpose communication tool – something that asked little (or, rather, 140 characters) of me, and yet offered so much pregnant possibility. Possibility was all it offered until the day Twitter became the 21st century’s upgrade to passing notes in the back of the class.

I attended a conference one day, and, wow! I was on the “backchannel”. Your mum and dad’s bad manners all of a sudden got a hip name and became the reason you lugged your laptop to conference in the first place. You’ve forgotten those oldskool pre-Twitter conferences now, haven’t you, where you actually listened to the presenter? Twitter, pointless, vapid, I’m not interested in what you had for breakfast Twitter filled a hole we never knew we had. And like email, one day the mundanes will get that too.

Last year, my Twitter stream filled up with people announcing themselves mayors of local Prêt-à-Mangers. Should I un-follow these deranged megalomaniacs with expensive tastes in sarnies? There was an odd, repetitive quality to their tweets that’s the signature of a machine. So I discovered Foursquare: the most transparent attempt I’d seen so far to induce you to give up your location so advertisers could monetise you. Meh. I didn’t get it – perhaps because the “mayor” business didn’t sit so well with my instinctive anarchist tendencies. Maybe I’d want people – friends – to know where I am, but I don’t need points and titles (or free cups of coffee with a catch).

Do you care about the location-based web? Do you get it? This is the beginning of realtime metadata about you. Technology has put into the hands of the private sector information about you that was formerly only available to the police – with a warrant. Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt talk, insouciantly, about the end of privacy. Using their services is a bargain from which we can extract many benefits. For their respective corporations, though, we are all money-spinners now. When we ask “what can this technology do for me?”, we should also ask, “and what do I have to lose?”

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Tags: guest post, location, privacy, socialsoftware, society