Please excuse me while I have a little tidy up. This blog post is in the process of being shunted over to my company blog.
Please head over there to read & comment on this post:
www.theawesomeweb.co.uk/blog/lgshout.
The irrepressible Dave Briggs has launched another really cute local government web app.
lgSHOUT! is a ’site that lets local government folk yell for help or holler about something fabulous’.
It’s very similar in concept to a much loved micro-blogging tool.
It’s tools like lgSHOUT! that will open up geek concepts like micro-blogging to a mainstream audience, making web 2.0 truly accessible to ‘normal’ people.
Good one Dave.
Please excuse me while I have a little tidy up. This blog post is in the process of being shunted over to my company blog.
Please head over there to read & comment on this post:
www.theawesomeweb.co.uk/blog/is-social-media-inherently-useless.
There have been a couple of posts commenting on the apparent uselessness of web 2.0/social media web apps recently.
Mike Ellis commented that:
None of these tools (Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr etc) actually adds anything… All of these tools do add huge amounts of noise, but to me none of them add signal… they’re not doing anything useful for me.
And then godofbiscuits79 commented that Google Reader is ‘not bad though fairly pointless’.
The last comment I’ll put down to web 2.0 naïvety (godofbiscuits79 is my little brother – it would be wrong of me not to take the opportunity to tease him a little about this) but both these comments got me thinking.
Genuine human relationships are essentially useless. Most of us don’t form connections with people because of a transactional value (apart from some business contacts perhaps). My relationships with my friends are based on shared interests or opinions or outlook on life. Sure, some of those relationships come with benefits (like knowing music industry people who can source tickets to sold out gigs ;) ), but these relationships still only last if there is some genuine connection between the parties involved.
At the moment, most of the ‘friends’ I have in online social networks fit into the description above – they are people I share interests, opinions or outlook with. This means social media for me is essentially useless as it facilitates relationships that are essentially useless. But that’s what I like about it the most.
