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So many social networks, so little time
In recent months I've noticed that StumbleUpon is referring more
people to this blog than any other single source. Richard McManus'
recent interview
with Garrett Camp, along with the reader commentary,
nicely sums up what StumbleUpon is about and how it can complement a
system like del.icio.us. This comment echoes my experience:
I use SU [StumbleUpon] to dig around and just explore. Del
[del.icio.us] though offers me my giant bookmark container and a very
easy way of correlating that data through others' data. At this time I
wouldn't use Del for SU stuff and I wouldnt use SU for the way Del
works.
Although I'd tried StumbleUpon several times over the past few years,
it never really stuck. But since Stumblers are evidently interested in
me I thought I'd try to learn more about them, their software, and
their network. So I rejoined, reinstalled the Firefox extension, and
started stumbling around.
At this point, a couple of weeks into the experiment, I'm again
ambivalent. In principle, I would use SU for a daily dose of
serendipity. In practice, although the sites it suggests are often
noteworthy, they're all pretty heavy-handedly based on the categories I've
declared interest in.
Now I do understand that the system expects me to refine those
interests by rating a few sites a day with a thumbs up or thumbs
down. And I haven't done much of that. What I have done, though, is
import the 1600 thumbs ups I've recorded in del.icio.us over the past
few years. My hope was that this would provide the kinds of
collaborative recommendations I was working toward in some experiments
last year. So far as I can tell, though, the importation of my
del.icio.us bookmarks into StumbleUpon hasn't influenced its
recommendations. If I've got that wrong, I hope somebody will chime in
here and set things straight.
The general problem, for me, is that I refuse to invest in closed
social networks. Life's too short to participate actively in LinkedIn,
StumbleUpon, Flickr, and all the rest. When I met Gary
McGraw this summer, he said: "People keep asking ask me to join LinkedIn,
but I tell them I'm already on a network: the Internet." I feel exactly
the same way. I'm a citizen of the Internet, but beyond that I neither
have nor want an allegiance to artificial communities defined
arbitarily by particular software and network architectures.
However I do have, and would like to strengthen, allegiances to
natural communities defined by common interest. Those natural
communities don't respect the borders of arbitrarily-defined artificial
communities. But if you want to behave as a citizen of the Internet,
and affiliate with others in your natural communities on those terms,
it's a hard slog.
Once upon a time, Kim
Cameron pioneered the idea of a metadirectory. Today, he's laying the foundations for the
kind of metacommunity that the Internet has always needed to be. We'll
get there, I hope. But meanwhile, please don't be offended that I
haven't accepted the invitation you sent me from StumbleUpon or Flickr or LinkedIn or
any of the others. Sorry, but life's too short.
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