No more need for the “cool” kid
The ‘internets’ is my school lunchroom, providing laughs, a place to meet with friends, substance and occasionally wisdom. (okay, maybe my actual school lunchroom didn’t provide much in the way of wisdom, but I do know that a ball of tuna fish WILL in fact stick to a drop ceiling. Thank you Jim Heffernan.)
So what does this cafeteria look like today and why write about it? Well, a new tool released last month has changed how my web works and transformed the experience to a more “real”, more “tailored” internets. I now get news much more like I would from a table of friends and less like reading off of the bulletin board or profanity carved into a table.
A year ago I was getting news and laughs from sites like Digg, in essence leaning in to hear what the coolest kid in the cafeteria had to say and then scurrying away to relay what he said to my friends and check out all his links blindly because he told me to. But the problem was the kid and this experience eventually became stale and gamed. The user base shifted and the comments and jokes were no longer “mine”, the “frist” meme was missing and all the jokes that made it fun were gone. Digg became a broken experience for me and no longer reflected what I would want to go back to my table and talk about. How many John Stewart clips and legalize weed articles do you really need?
TimeLine by MicroPlaza has totally shifted how I get my content; this cool site culls and categorizes hyperlinks in Tweets from Twitter, but more importantly I can chose to see just those from people I follow. Cool kid be gone! TimeLine is a “what’s hot” list for the particular corner of the web that matters to ME (!) and ultimately isn’t that what’s important? This new application of Twitter further shows the importance of micro media, not only has it driven the shift closer to a real-time web, it has also furthered the cause for a customized web experience.
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Implications? What if you could tap into these networks and analyze what resonates among which groups? Is it content generated within “the circle”? Is it content that comes from outside the group? What is of value? It’s going to take me a while to get to those answers, but for the time being I’m going to happy with having found a site that will better cater to the web experience I want, oh, and keep Shaq’s (@THE_REAL_SHAQ) Twitpics coming.
I have 5 beta invites to TimeLines left, let me know if you’d like one.
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