Have you noticed that in the interests of making life easier, social media sites seem to be becoming ever more complex? This thought came to me recently as I was working to gain an understanding of several aggregating sites. I am already a member of Friendfeed, and although I had signed up for Socialmedian and Plaxo, I hadn’t really set up a profile. Once I began this process, I did notice that the sites which are supposed to help us to bring a whole lot of our activity together, can actually make things more difficult.
I am pretty social media savvy, but recently I have been teaching people who are only just starting out with social media. A question I get asked very often is how are people supposed to use these sites? And I know where the question comes from. If I were to arrive at Socialmedian, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Ecademy, Digg, Delicious or Facebook for the first time, I too would feel pretty overwhelmed.
Facebook has recently sought to simplify its interface, and there have been complaints that it is ‘too Twitter-like’, but the one thing Twitter has is simplicity. It does one thing – it broadcasts 140 character updates to a group of people who have chosen to follow you. Its interface remains in keeping with its mission, and it only takes a matter of minutes before you have figured it out. Unfortunately, they are not all like that.
Aggregation sites are vital, but we now almost need an aggregation site for the aggregation sites. By the time you have brought your Twitter updates into all of the aggregation sites available, you have already lost track of which ones you have signed up for. Not only that, but the sites are so keen to offer you ‘useful tools’ that they can become overwhelming and difficult to understand. Not everyone can work out whether the bookmark they saved in Delicious will be available to their Socialmedian network, or whether they need to clip it for that network as well. Or if they should save it to both their Google Reader Shared Page and Delicious or whether one will do. Or whether they should put the same status update on every site, or whether they should just stick with Twitter.
I sympathise, and I do my best to try and explain things out to my clients. Often, an hour session demonstrating the real benefits of a particular site can work wonders. But then when the next site comes along, all of that learning is thrown into turmoil as new tools are added which are supposed to make life even easier again.
I know it is sacrilegious to say it, but I can’t remember a pen and paper ever being this complex.
Thanks to kateyay for the image
If you like this post, why not subscribe to our RSS Feed. Or you can visit our main website at Tiger Two or follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed
Tags: Aggregators, complexity, Social Media
