Social Media – are you noisier than you think?

Nov 10 2008

Posted by Martin as Friendfeed, Internet, Twitter

In recent months it’s become apparent that a lot of people find themselves overwhelmed by too much information. Subscribe to too many RSS feeds and follow too many people of Twitter and FriendFeed and suddenly you find yourself struggling to keep up with what is mostly irrelevant nonsense. Louis Gray wrote a commonsense post on his blog this weekend: “You Control Your Noise Velocity“. Louis’ straightforward point is that rather than complain about too much noise, you should just make sure you only subscribe to as much as you feel comfortable with.

That’s all well and good but all that noise comes from somewhere. Why not kill it off at the source? Sure, some of the “noise” that people complain about is perfectly useful stuff for someone, it’s just that one person’s news is another’s noise. The real problem is the stuff that’s pretty much useless to everyone. Social Media content that’s created for no reason other than because it can.

One example of this comes from FriendFeed. They recently launched the ability to stream every single thing you do on their site to your Twitter account. I very quickly had to unfollow a couple of people of Twitter who decided to stream every FriendFeed comment, ‘like’ and shared item onto Twitter. It was noise that was useless to everyone. If someone wanted to know about all this stuff they’d follow the user on FriendFeed too. All these FriendFeed items on Twitter simply clogged up my feed, making it difficult for me to see ‘genuine’ tweets.

Another example of pointlessly created noise comes from one of my pet-hate Social Media apps; BriteKite. The idea of BriteKite is location-based social networking. Don’t get me wrong – location-based apps are very exciting and given time and mainstream acceptance they’ll be very useful.

For now though, the main way people seem to be using BriteKite is to ‘check in’ at locations. This simply means telling the service where you are. BriteKite can then let your Twitter followers know where you are by posting a Tweet saying “I’m at Wormwood Scrubs” or whatever. The tweet is accompanied by a full address for the location. Now, this has its uses but I think that sometimes people “check in” just for something to do. Do I care that someone is at Rochdale Station or on 5th Avenue? No, and neither do at least 99% of their followers. It’s just irrelevant noise.

I’ve probably been guilty of creating some pointless noise myself but I’m certainly careful these days to ask myself “Do I really need to broadcast this?” before I sign up to a new Social Media service. So, maybe its time to ask yourself “Am I noisier than I think?”

Tom

Good point well made: we're finding that with unlimited capacity to pull digital media to yourself most of us users of social media are eventually discovering the need to filter what we consume to manageable levels - and I think Louis' point is spot on here.

With unlimited capacity to share and interact, can we learn to limit the noise we produce? See it as more of a curating job? It's been interesting using Sweetcron as my blog software - there's a lot of stuff on there and every time I tweet, upload or share, I do think "am I happy with this being on my website?"

julianlstar

I think a lot of apps like to shout out that you use them to everyone else. I left a post on 12seconds about it being useful to switch the Twitter function on and off when needed. But I suppose it is it's not what they want. It's going to become even more of an issue as Twitter changes from being a notification and information tool to a social blogging tool, as more members of your social circle sign up. I can foresee that this might eventually be the downfall of Twitter.

Martin Bryant

It really would be a shame if that happened. People abandoned Myspace when it became a useless heap of junk to anyone not promoting their music/film etc. I suppose the upside is that there'll always be something else round the corner for us to jump onto! I think we're still a long way away from the ultimate Social Media toolset - it will no doubt evolve over time...

Eyebee

I run an Internet Radio station, and MySpace is useful for networking with musicians, but I detest using it as the interface is horrible, and it is almost always so slow...

Louis Gray

As noisy as I may appear to be, I try to be aware of where my noise is going, and I actually do restrict both the services I sign up to, the number I send in each direction, and specific activity.

For example, the simple act of posting a picture or a link on FriendFeed now posts it to Twitter and that subsequently updates my Facebook status. So if I don't want to update my Twitter, I shouldn't post FriendFeed items, and I've held back at times.

I also know that my Disqus comments (like this one) will hit FriendFeed and be archived on BackType, so I want to be sure to deliver context rather than a simple "I agree" or "LOL", for example. I also haven't signed up to BrightKite, and I don't pipe in Wakoopa updates, for example.

At one time, I absolutely considered Twitter noise, and avoided it. But it's become essential, so I've limited my actions as to not annoy my followers. Earlier this year, I set an internal metric so that my total number of updates would never exceed my number of followers, and so far, that's happened. The thinking there is that if I get too noisy, I'll see unsubscribes, and I can measure using Twitter successfully as to whether folks stick around.

There are two ways to limit noise - on the way out and on the way in. I talked about the consumption side and you have a good summary on the production side.

Martin Bryant

Thanks for the comment Louis. As you mention, effective use of these services is down to personal discipline. As long as we keep the media we create under control - and useful to others - we're helping ourselves maximise our audience and minimise our annoyance.

Eyebee

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Martin Bryant

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Eyebee

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