I’m sorry to say that not long ago, my personal life hit a Web 2.0 saturation point. Not because I’ve ceased to find interesting applications, but because there’s a finite limit to the number of things you can effectively maintain.
This seems to be the hidden cost that underlies Web 2.0 technology. As Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out two years ago, truly useful apps are few and far between:
Tons of new Web 2.0 startups are being released every day, I can’t even keep track of the social bookmarking sites alone (I came across three new ones yesterday, seriously). And some of the better Web 2.0 apps that are coming out are for laughably obscure vertical markets.
The biggest problem of course is that these services don’t actually talk to each other, which is kind of ironic considering that much of it is called “social” software. Even those companies who design apps to integrate with other 2.0 platforms, have yet to truly make the disparate parts communicate with one another.
For example, if you want to track you’re reading and share that with your friends, you might choose to join Goodreads. If you’re on Facebook, you could then add the Goodreads app that will pull your list of books into your profile. But if your friends are using LibraryThing, iRead, or Shelfari, then the only problem you’ve solved is displaying the results in a specific location. Facebook doesn’t allow any of these services to talk to one another, nor do any of them support a seamless interface with any of the other applications.
As Michael Hirschorn theorized last April, “the third rail of social media may ultimately come down to that most old-media of issues: ownership.” For users though, it comes down to a question of manageability: how many services can you reasonably manage before they become a liability on your time?
My profession has been grappling with this problem for years. While all of us are attempting to plug our collections into various applications in order to get the most out of our libraries, if we’re asking our patrons to join (yet another) service, how likely are they to take the offer? And at what point does every user wind up hitting their saturation point?
I share your frustration. I’m a writer (who used to live right down the Hill from you in the River Lofts, by the way!), and my first memoir was just published. The outlook for sales for first-time memoirists (who aren’t famous and not children of celebrities) is bleak, and authors are encouraged to build a “web presence” for cheap & easy publicity. With all the different reader apps, I’m finding this task to be tedious at best. Your shelf, my shelf, the shared shelf…maybe we should go back to the wooden ones.
Elizabeth,
I almost wonder if you’re better off just making a bunch of static “presences” that are tagged with the keywords that describe your memoir. This way you at least funnel Google traffic to your book without having to interact ceaselessly with people on various communities. I can see why that would be a drag on anyone’s time. Though we’re all supposed to go where the people are, I still believe the least amount of effort is best for writers/authors – that you should focus on what you do best. Which is a) write your books; and b) write creatively & passionately on a blog, and let those static or minimum-effort presences (Squidoo, del.icio.us) help people find it.
I work with almost exclusively with authors, helping them navigate all of this, so I do feel your pain. Resources, both financial and in terms of your time/energy/interest, are limited.
Tim,
You’re absolutely right. I can’t tell you how many times a friend on Facebook has shared his or her shelf with me, and in order to see it, I have to add their particular application to my account. This clutters up the profile page and is just generally annoying. Cross-network conversations should be allowed to happen, but that’s not in any of the startups’ interests, since they seem to only be able to make money off ad revenue and private investment in the hopes that they will horde members and eventually be able to sell out to Google, MSN or Yahoo.
Congratulations on getting your book published Elizabeth. I can understand your frustration with all the 2.0 apps that deal with books, and I agree with what Kristen is saying. Make your own site your true “electronic home” and let all of the people come to you. Even though we tend to think of the 2.0 world as inter-connected, it doesn’t stop us from looking for people (and organizations) in other places as well.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about Kristen. In fact, even with Facebook’s new design (which I’m not sold on yet), it still comes across really messy; almost to the point that my “aesthetic sensibility” wants to delete things in order to make my profile neater, which is contrary to the site’s purpose!
Now the social apps have bled over into the ipone’s territory. it’s the same story – no integration, just another app on the platform. you’d think jobsy’d come out with an ipone friend finder, unique to ipone’s and own the space, so to speak.
Thanks to everyone for all the helpful advice. Kristen, you are so right. All the electronic socializing gets to be an extreme drain. Plus, it just seems so transparent to me. Signing into community after community, interjecting random props for your own product, and begging friends to do the same (which is essentially what authors do on the book apps)? Seriously, would you go into a cocktail party you weren’t invited to, wearing a sign advertising yourself? You might just annoy a few people. I’ll take your advice and focus on my site.
Elizabeth,
Agreed. Unless you can mingle with meaning and depth (which you probably don’t have a lot of time to do), it comes across as a sales tactic, and the returns diminish pretty quickly. I think involvement in a community is a more effective tool for people who need to repair their images rather than establish them.
Good luck with your book and your site!