Don’t Waste Your Time on Social Media

Social media was the buzzphrase of 2008, it was “web 2.0″ before that, but that sounded way too geeky to catch on with most users and is soooo mid-noughties. So, is social media dead and buried and the semantic web just about to reach its peak? Probably not quite yet.

What do we mean by social media and should you be “doing it”?

Social media is all about using the internet and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information. That includes blogs (like this and millions of other sites) where authors write and readers can comment. It includes wikis, collaboratively edited resources including the seminal Wikipedia. It includes bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and delicious where you can share links to interesting, entertaining, and often useless pages, images, movies, and sounds you find on the net. It includes microblogging sites like Twitter, Plurk, and the soon to be defunct Pownce.

There are millions of people using these sites, sharing billions of resources, but to what end? I’ve already written about why bloggers should avoid social bookmarking, which was a tongue-in-cheek article for those who didn’t spot that, but there are valid reasons why one should avoid social media:

1. It is too easy to become addicted to any one of these sites and to waste more hours than you can spare keeping up to date.
2. Much of the information is duplicated, often with little original added thought and can be found simply by reading a small clutch of online newspapers rather than registering for dozens of different social media sites.
3. Too many SM users are simply pushing their own services and products and only friend you to get a foot in the virtual door.
4. 99.999% of the links propagating on these sites are simply advice on how to get more than your foot in the door and are for any by those users hoping to push their own services and products.
5. Users expect you to be nice and to help them in an instant, just because you replied once to a direct message on Twitter, for instance.
6. You can spend more time denying application requests and turning down requests to join unrelated niche groups, on Facebook usually, than doing your day job.
7. Much of the social media world is being gamed insidiously by spammers and does not reflect the real interests of the wired community regardless of the crowd-sourced filtering we hear so much about.
8. Finally, for all the effort being exerted in social media, regular traffic the web over is still driven 99 times out of 100 by the Google search engine.

So, what should you be doing instead?

• Well, leave your connectivity at home and get yourself outdoors for some exercise and fresh air, it does wonders for coping with information overload. At the least take long breaks from SM if you’re loathe to abandon the online world or really do depend on it for your everyday survival in the way that people depend on bread and water, then take a step back from all that activity.
• Ask yourself, do you really need to microblog your life on a minute-by-minute basis? Most tweeps don’t need to know what you had for breakfast and when you’re planning on taking the dog for a walk, they’re after your insights and wit not your to-do list.
• Consider the axiom – absence makes the heart grow fonder – do you think that your online friends would feel that your microblogging updates were more worthwhile if they came thin and slow instead of thick and fast? I believe so. Indeed, it’s a known fact that a blog’s feedcount will go up if you stop blogging for a few days. Maybe it’s down to search engine ranking, but it could simply be that visitors subscribe so that they get the first update as soon as it posts without having to visit every day to check.
• Avoid sticking your thumb up. Do you have to StumbleUpon that latest lolcat or would der world actually iz be a betta places w/o it?
• Those bookmarks you were going to share? They can wait. If they’re good enough, someone else is bound to have got there first and you’d be simply duplicating the effort. Your friends won’t think any less of you simply because you didn’t pownce on that latest news item.

Of course, there’s then the question of added value, that may negate my whole argument, especially when web 2.0, social media, online networking and those cursed applications can help you with a particular hobby.

Take wine, for instance. I recently covered the issue of poorly crafted terms and conditions on ecommerce sites and how these can be hidden by NoScript when you’re online shopping. So, it was quite timely that was alerted to a related research paper with the apparently obscure title “marService: multiattribute utility recommendation for e-markets”.

It’s the word “recommendation” that was immediately flagged in my mind. Wherever there’s recommendation involved that means potentially getting opinions from lots of different people, one of the fortes of social media and web 2.0 sites, surely? So, with wine recommendations shuffled to the top of the agenda and social media coming to the fore, with the semantic web hard on its heels, maybe it’s time to revise this post. As I said previously, where’s that corkscrew?

Nikos Manouselis, Constantina Costopoulou (2008). marService: multiattribute utility recommendation for e-markets International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 33 (2/3) DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2008.021940