Louis Gray recently wrote a very thoughtful post on Friendfeed’s new simple sign-up tool for Twitter, Gmail, and Facebook users. In it Louis reasoned the reason more Twitter users had not joined FriendFeed was because of complexity. And, I agree.
But, as Rick Ross would say, it’s deeper than that.
You see, Twitter, anyone who can touch type with an email address can do. They can. However, FriendFeed means Social Media. Blogging. RSS. Social Bookmarking. SEO. and on and on. FriendFeed means a slide down the rabbit hole to the subculture that is the blogosphere, with all the trimmings. And those of us who belong to said subculture need to check our egos at the browser and start sharing this knowledge with the world. (Yeah I said it.) The truth is, many of us have been “smelling ourselves” (Southern term for cockiness) thinking we are digital superstars, not realizing how famous we …aren’t. Face it, mainstream America wouldn’t know Guy Kawasaki or Jeff Jarvis if they knocked on their front doors.
I just feel like we’ve made this thing so socially proprietary, we’ve created apprehension that isn’t necessary. Biz Stone was on The View last week talking about Twitter, so I watched. Judging from the protests she put up about trying out Twitter,I got the impression if you showed Whoopi Goldberg FriendFeed, it might push her straight over the digital edge! Think how many businesses, in this recession, would be empowered by social – the cheapest, most measurable form of demand generation ever – if they knew about it. How many children could express themselves and get inspired to learn if we showed them what social media can do.
Let’s resolve not to just make things easier to join, but let’s reach out to the rest of the world and show them how to use these tools.
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