Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and all that

I've been diving deep into social networking in the past weeks and learning a lot.

Twitter. The key to Twitter is that to be followed, you have to be informative, helpful or entertaining. Sure, people use it to market themselves, but self-indulgence just leads to "unfollow." I follow Stephen Fry (@stephenfry), who is very witty and tech-savvy. Also Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) because of his cancer survivorship and leadership. He's also witty and informative. My husband wonders why I follow them. Because I can!

Twitter is at its beginnings. So we have opportunities here that we may not have later. To follow celebrities, to be in at the ground floor of something - but most importantly, to shape the community. Already, there are certain standards - like # to signify a topic and @ to signify a tweeter - indeed, the word tweet to signify the 140-character tidbits that are published - that have been generated by the community and adopted by Twitter.

The requirement of being informative, helpful or entertaining is also community-generated. All generate value, as corporations have learned. Twitter is the next generation of customer service (as well as being an example of "flat-earthedness").

Facebook. Okay. I am a baby boomer, and I am on Facebook. I am enjoying it - I'm in touch with old friends, and I get to see what they're up to. We get to have conversations (asynchronous, to be sure), but we're in more communication than we were before we were all on Facebook.

But I, and all my friends, have made Facebook uncool. See Time Magazine's article "Why Facebook is for Old Fogies." As recently as August 2008, blogger Nick O'Neill wondered if Facebook would go the way of Friendster.

The answer is YES. My 16-year-old niece thinks MySpace (which enthralled her for years) and Facebook are booorrrrring. She's moved on to Tumblr.

Tumblr. I'm just starting on Tumblr. And it looks like it's been commodified already. Wine Library's Gary Vaynerchuk is on Tumblr - with an ad asking for followers! But it allows a lot of creativity - not as structured as MySpace or Facebook. You can mash up different media, and so, I think to teenagers, it's a way to creatively express themselves. My brother, who is an artist, has a Tumblr account, too. So even though he's an old fogie, it speaks to his creativity, too.

So it remains - the same as it ever was. People like their friends, they like helpful people, they like useful information, they like to be entertained, they like novelty, and they like to be creative. What a great time we live in, that we have so many avenues for all of this.