You Will See This Material Again

IT has it’s subcultures. However, there is one source upon which each depends. That’s money. Until our brains are able to organically connect to the Internet with all the proper filters and controls, we will need at least some technology to interface with it. These technologies come at costs, a subject too complicated for this post.

Social media is in a bubble, inflated by uncertainty and doubt benefits about how the technology will affect profits and losses. Unfortunately for the boldest of the social media advocates, Twitter and similar ‘revolutionary’ technologies are anything but, and time is marching inexorably forward toward the conclusion that the mobile texting phenomena is actually a techo-step backwards in terms of signal/noise ratio.

The real first wonder of the web was contextual hyperlinking, the progenitor of where we get the term ‘web’ to describe the International Network, the Wonder of this age.

Where social texting falls down is it’s inability, so far, to offer business value that is not already adequately covered by email and instant messenger clients, who’s price it cannot beat, since both are free for all intents and purposes, and who’s feature set is much more rich.

Try it for yourself and see. Compare your twitter stream with your email stream and your instant messenger stream. Look at the features available to each and objectively rate the business value of each. It should serve as a good reality check.

And as this blogger at Small Business Trends notes,

Words like tweets, re-tweets, trackbacks, comments, links, rss feeds, feed readers, news alerts, community members, community forums, conversations, vigilantes, blogtrolls, stalkers, spambots … organic SEO, are the words of an unintelligible language outside the echo chamber of social media experts.

And therein lies the rub. An industry built around the power of conversation, authentic conversation … speaks only in its own language.

~ by donlindsay on January 23, 2009.