It's hard for me to believe it's been so long since my last post - coming on 3 years. I was such an early adopter (or so it felt like at the time) blogging in 2003 and just when the biggest wave hit, I walked away. Why is that?
Well, they say that for every social networking situation, you have the contributors and you have the lurkers. Lurkers observe and appreciate the dynamic... maybe they throw the occasional comment in like dipping their toes into the pool. But they don't jump all the way in. Meanwhile there are so many folks out there who are doing laps and throwing pool parties.
Part of me shared in the luddite cynicism of the poolsiders. Why would anyone care about relatively random thoughts shared by a stranger? It took me a long time to "get it" with Twitter too - something that many in the field of user experience take as the leading channel for networking. It is a great tool, but we can't lose sight of the fact that the great majority of the users we design for still don't understand or use Twitter - and sometimes even scoff at it. We can say they're behind the times, but so were the people who weren't using 8-tracks.
We don't know for sure how long blogs and micro-blogs are going to be so popular. I'm guessing that we'll reach that saturation point sometime and long for the days of fewer choices or flock to aggregators. In the meantime, there's a giddiness to seeing the pure overwhelming breadth of opinion and thought leadership available so easily now, and the intimacy (or at least the appearance of intimacy) with some amazing people. Some aspect of that will never go away, but the pendulum is going to swing towards some consolidation at some point, and I'll be very interested to see what form that takes.
In the meantime, I'm finally jumping into that pool. Ready for a swim?
