Blurring Boundaries in Social Media - How Buzz should learn from FriendFeed
Unless you're a rather single-minded in your use of social media, you probably do more than one thing online. You might share your photographs on Flickr, your presentations on SlideShare, your status updates on Twitter, your books on Goodreads. You may "like" items on Google Reader, recommend TED talks you enjoy or share your current music track. You get the picture. You are multifaceted. We all are. But are you interesting in "all of" someone else. Most likely not.
Weak Boundaries around your Identities
I can put weak boundaries around my social media interactions. For example, I have a Flickr account and occasional conversations take place there. I have a different set of friends there, than I do on Twitter. I don't tweet each photo I post either. So what we have are weak boundaries around my presences on each site.
The boundaries are weak because my identities are open and these particular social media sites support aggregation. Anyone could aggregate these two streams of activity if they wanted to.
Boundaries as Context
Another way to look at these boundaries is that they provide context. When viewing my photographs on Flickr, the context is obvious. You're expecting photographs, not rants about my lack of hot water. The context provides you with expectations, informs you, and lets you choose whether you want to be part of that part of me.
"But it's the Whole Me"
Aggregation sites (and even Facebook, but that's a discussion for the future) let you aggregate your content from any number of social media sites. I think there's something compelling about these services. After all, by aggregating these various aspects of yourself, you're giving would-be "followers" a much more holistic picture of yourself - and isn't that something we all want to do? "I'm not just the web site maintainer; I'm a budding book author and I take killer shots with my Canon...." See me for who I am! I'm human, not just a service machine. And so on.
Is this compelling feature of social media sites such as FriendFeed and Google Buzz really the right way to go though?
Think about those boundaries and context again. By aggregating disparate streams, what we're doing is blurring boundaries, and blurring context. Unless the aggregation is coherent (your photos are about conferences you go to, the books are about the conference topics, your tweets are about your related research), or unless you're aggregating in a context where that mashup is somehow expected (Facebook comes to mind, see above), then what's really happening with aggregation is a destruction of context.
It's noise. It's also likely to set you up for interesting aspects of privacy and hierarchy. Your manager may follow your Twitter stream (context = I tweet about work). Your Buzz stream may contain your Twitter and your Flickr photos though (you work weekends in nightclubs). Aggregating these reinforces your identity, but it also blurs the boundaries and contexts, and I suspect that's more often than not, not a good thing.
FriendFeed had a nice little feature, as Mike Coulter reminded me. You can, as a subscriber of an aggregated feed, ignore the photos say. That's a useful feature - it lets me cut out the noise if i like, and ensure that the input has a context I want. I can prune you :-) Buzz doesn't have that - I hope it implements the feature. However, I suspect the rest of the concerns here still hold.
Postscript:
There are some interesting protocols around aggregation - see RWW on Activity Streams - which make this even easier. Somehow I'd like them to build in "context" as well though. Perhaps we can tag the items being aggregated as a first step (personal, work, etc.).
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