The more social Google Reader gets, the more it vindicates my tendency to eschew the blogs everyone else is reading. All my friends are reading Scoble, so when he says something interesting I know it’ll trickle down — like it just did:
So, the other day when I signed onto FourSquare for the first time in a while I found 442 people waiting for me. As I looked through the names I saw the same names that had first added me onto Twitter. And Dopplr. And Google Reader. And Facebook. And FriendFeed. And others.You see, there’s a gang of about 2,000 people who really control tech industry hype and play a major role in deciding which services get mainstream hype (this gang was all on Twitter by early 2007 — long before Oprah and Ashton and all the other mainstream celebrities, brands, and journalists showed up).
It so happens that for lately I’ve been thinking about such bellwether types, although the group I have in mind is larger and more heterogeneous than Scoble’s Gang of 2,000. These aren’t just the first to discover the next big web app. Among them will be some of the earliest discoverers of just about any cool new thing on the internet. For lack of a better term, let’s call them “the cool kids.”
A few years ago, all the cool kids hung out at del.icio.us, and made it the nerve center of the hive mind. I never really took to tagging my pages. The main way I used del.icio.us was to reap the bounty of other people’s discoveries.
Aside from its critical mass of cool kids, the most powerful thing about del.icio.us was its metadata structure. Not just that it let you find sites filed under given tags. If anything, I was more interested in the ability to work backwards, finding people who had bookmarked interesting urls — and then see what else they bookmarked.
Though a lot of people still use the (now capitalized and dedotted) Delicious, there’s little doubt that it’s no longer the hot spot for the cool kids. There’s a new nerve center of the hive mind: Twitter.
But Twitter’s a different clump of neurons. In some ways, it’s better for keeping tabs on the cool kids. There’s more information, you can track it in really real time, and it’s freeform — not just links. But the flip side of this freeform nature is that it lacks even the minimal structure that has made del.icio.us Delicious so easy to navigate. Hashtags began as a hack solution to this problem and still are, even if Twitter has embraced them as an official feature.
There’s a lot of talk and work going on about analyzing Twitter trends, including trending links. But trends were just a small part of the utility of Delicious. Is it possible to add some structure to the links people tweet, to make Twitter a more useful tool for finding things in specific categories — rather than just popular stuff and general trends?
