A Twitterstorm of sorts is flurrying around tonight. I didn’t start it but I fueled it, somewhat inadvertently. (I can hear my mother telling me I really DON’T have to jump into every conversation… or my old boss telling me I had rabbit ears that picked stuff up from three offices away, or just knowing I’m easily distracted…)
The eye of the storm is attention. Or attention deficits, maybe. From a life standpoint, this is one of my best topics — I’m a master at not paying attention, paying too much attention, or dividing my attention, depending on the day and time. In this Twitterstorm, the discussion swirls around the question of gestures — what they are, how we make them, and what they represent.
It seems easy enough, right? But it’s really not, because attention can be divided up and expressed in so many different ways. Zoning out when my daughter is talking to me is a gesture. So is choosing to ignore a tweet that yanks my particular chain. Clicking on a link dropped into Twitter is a gesture, too. All of these add up to attention. Or lack of it, depending.
All of this seems simple, but it’s not. It’s complex, particularly when put into the context of social networks. On Newsgang Live a couple of weeks ago, I tried to make the case that using favorites would be one way to weight attention on Twitter. Steve Gillmor, who has spent a ton of time thinking and writing about all of this, pointed out that using favorites is too easily gamed, because the act of making something (or someone) a favorite is an explicit gesture that can be too easily duplicated.
Before I start overthinking this too deeply and lose my own train of thought to my short attention span, I should probably turn to the little Twitterstorm. It started with Steve Gillmor telling Rob LaGesse links are dead. This is a statement Steve has made many times, but I still don’t quite understand it, beyond knowing that he means that links as a measure of attention are like favorites — they’re explicit gestures that can be gamed too easily. They can mean attention or they can mean popularity, which isn’t the same thing. In the conversation that follows in 140 character bursts, I admit to not quite bending my head around implicit gestures; that is, gestures like sharing posts with Google Reader, dropping links into Twitter that are interesting, and so on.
Rob’s response:
realy smart people make really complex things simple. Like Winer did with RSS.
My mind started turning with that comment. On one level, I was feeling like it was a bit of a snipe at Gillmor, but on another, it just didn’t sound right to me.
Can anyone reading this tell me with any degree of certainty that they fully understand the power of RSS? If we did, all those great things that we don’t have now but want would already be built. Examples: Disqus, the commenting system used here, rolled out an incredible update that actually creates community around the blog comments here. If you sign up for Disqus and comment under your Disqus name, you become part of this, and other Disqus-driven communities.
Then there’s FriendFeed, which I like to think of as my personal kitchen sink. Friendfeed takes everything I’ve posted here, to Pownce, to Twitter, to Facebook, to Zooomr, to my other social networks I’ve added and puts it in a stream. Then it adds the conversation around those items, so looking at my Friendfeed means seeing a picture of the social footprints of me, my friends, and my contacts around the web.
Both of these are driven by RSS. Without RSS attached to Twitter and other networks, there would be no foundation to build upon. RSS has been around for what? 10+ years? Yet, it’s taken this long for Twitter to evolve, and Disqus, and Friendfeed and many others and all pivot on RSS.
RSS is definitely a really simple thing, but it’s so complex I don’t think any of us fully understand its power. Maybe Dave Winer understands it, but I think even he doesn’t really envision all of the ways it might be used. Dave’s writing apps using RSS as the foundation for his FlickrFan application — a “this year” brainstorm.
Really simple, but not so simple. Really simple, but so powerful we haven’t figured it all out.
The same is true of gestures, both on and offline. I’m sure my kids view my zone-outs while they’re going on about something or another as a gesture of inattention. I’m sure my creditors understand my forgetting to pay their bill as a gesture of inattention, and I’m sure the volume of posts on the other blog compared to this one over the past month or two also gestures where my attention has been lately.
It seems simple enough, but it’s really much more complex and powerful than any of us understand. If you feel so inclined, you can find and follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed. I will consider that a gesture, too, and pay proper attention.
Final wisdom from a Hugh McLeod tweet:
“Twitter is a river you live beside. You don’t have to [...] catch every fish to live beside it.” http://tinyurl.com/2futq9
Technorati Tags: networks, RSS, simple, complex, social graph, social networks, social web, attention, gestures
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