I came across a new tool, a couple of days back. It helps you make an interactive profile card, and is called retaggr. Its got widgets for StumbleUpon, Gtalk, Twitter and many many more, and can be linked to your profiles on del.icio.us, LinkedIn, Blogger and a few dozen others too. In essence, its like a signature that keeps in touch with whatever you’ve been doing in social media – whether its tagging a photo on flickr or commenting on a blog post, and just like a signature, you can use it on the social media to ensure that other people know what you’re upto. Interesting?
Yes, but it also showed me a glimpse of the expanse of social media. There are conversations happening everywhere, on Facebook, twitter, blogs, Friendfeed ranging from meaningful discussions to trivial chit chat, but all of which are important to users. Is it possible to keep track of all the conversations you’re interested in? More importantly, how much of filtering does one have to do to keep track of only the things that interest him/her?
I really don’t think its as simple as choosing your friends or followers. Yes, it helps a bit, and in time, some calibration can be done to receive exactly the kind of alerts, tweets etc that you want. But in the end, conversations can go anywhere, and need not be restricted to your circle. Is it really possible to connect all the threads, because in the end, we are dealing with people here. People have conversations, a germ of an idea happens, and they carry the conversation somewhere else and forget about the original conversation.
People are also not uni dimensional, they have multiple interests. Even after i figure out who i want to be friends with or ‘follow’, not all the stuff they talk about would interest me, and unfortunately it takes time to figure out the conversations that interest you from the ‘noise’.
Speaking of time, it flies, its been a year since I started this blog. How have i been doing, my dear one and a half readers? 🙂
until next time, don’t even think of saying GTD