On a drawing book, Internet could be described as the flower of knowledge exploration, a place to explore mankind’s knowledge virtually, and contributing to that. What a useful contribution to our lives! However, our Internet is a lot less boring. After merely 36 years of development, Internet became the quick-fix for boredom at the office. Forget about knowledge, who doesn’t want to see a cute kitty or discuss breakup words to end your relationship?
In my opinion, there has been an staggering trend going on with the social media sites. While Slashdot is still (and probably always will be) moving along with it’s core crowd discussing tech, Digg grew from being a tech site, to… a tech site – adding images of cute little kitties and latest Failblog in the process. For quite some time, Twitter has been THE place to discuss, well… Twitter, a topic that merely expanded to ‘fail wales’ along the way. More recently, interesting contributions came along, which made the platform interesting, but in the post-Oprah Twitter-era, the network seems to have evolved to a place to discuss “lies girls tell” and “breakup words”. (read more)
twitter need trends per country nor per global …
Filtering twitter trends using a per country/language option is indeed an interesting idea…
You’ve got to take it from a different angle: Social Networks are at their heart… social. If you walk around a crowded city in the *real world*, you find hundreds of people sitting in cafés and bars discussing the exact same thing. Sharing holiday photos. Exchanging the latest tabloid news.
What we see is that Social Networks replicate real-live mainstream communication behavior.
Whether that’s a good thing or a bad one, is purely opinion.
This is exactly what social networks are. People communicating with people. About everything, about nothing. But in the midst of all this are people who have something to say to you and something important you are saying to them. And then you both move on.
You can use these networks to talk about your kids or your portfolio or anything else you want, maybe buy something from soneone too. Didn’t your mother send you clippings from the newspaper years ago? So people are doing that now via links.
Social media is not a specific thing. It’s barhopping all night. And you go to a new bar some nights and drop an old favorite. And when you’re tired you go to bed and then do it all again the next night.
I like that graph!
Thank you for the responses. To me, I wanted to raise the thought for social networks to stimulate (not censor their way) their way to interesting topics and discussion. It seems that average programmers can raise a functioning network, but it takes a completely different job to stimulate the right discussion. Why is this important? Read the article again :-)