Why Mag.nolia and Reddit are going distribuited?

Muhammad Saleem of Mashable thinks that Mag.nolia open source move is a clear sign that bookmarks are dying. Saleen carries his claim as far as to saying that “all that is to say that bookmarking as a social activity is soon to become a thing of the past”. However, for him social news sites like Digg and Reddit should do better:

“As people move away from the rather passive activity of sharing bookmarks to actively participating in the submission, promotion, and propagation of news and networking on the basis of their interests, social news and networking sites are bound to replace bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia and Delicious”.

But then news came that Reddit also is taking the open source route. According to Reddit co-founder, Steve Huffman, users are demanding more transparency: “Social news in general has hid behind algorithms, which has caused some consternation amongst users. Users don’t get why things aren’t showing up on the front page” (via – mashable). So now what we have are the two second place players in each sector going open source. They both bet on a distributed model to generate the critical mass that way two leads, Digg and Delicious, have. Clearly, Mag.nolia going open social cannot be in itself a sign of social bookmarking decline.

Yet, the discussion between social news and social bookmarking is still pertinent. Evidently Digg, the lead in social news is significantly bigger than Delicious, the lead on social bookmarking. There are probably several reasons why this is the case, but as far as I can tell this are the main ones:

1. It is easier to consume content at Digg that it is at Delicious. On the long run one must expect 1% of users creating content, 2% interacting with it (voting, commenting) and 97% reading it/consuming it. Unlike Delicious, at Digg content can be partially read on the site and comments are one click away. Also at Digg the interface makes it easy to scan and skim through various headlines.
2. The primary purpose to “digging” a story is to have it read by a wide audience. I have the impression that the primary reason people bookmark on delicious is to (a) keep their bookmarks online (not social related) and (b) to share it with their friends. At the most you may want to check out someone´s delicious page if you think he is a qualified influencer, but that´s about it.
3. People can game Digg easier that they can game Delicious. There is a clear and strong structure of incentives to ask others to “Digg” your stories, hence driving traffic.

None of the handicaps Delicious suffers are structural in a technical level. Rather, the first two are user interface related while the third one is “in-built viral mechanisms” related. All of them can be added to the Delicious without changing their core offering. Hence, we don´t see Digg size as a strong enough proof that social news will thrive and social bookmarking will be doomed.

Still, if Delicious where to upgrade making it easy to “consume” content, could Delicious generate the critical mass the Digg has amassed? Other way of putting this is: what is the value differentiator of social bookmarking when we compared it to social news sites?

Digg is a popularity contest while Delicious is re organizing the web. The first has the challenge to remain a cool way to find interesting news while the second has the challenge of adding value to the “passive” user. The value differentiator for Delicious is that it is simple and more versatile. Digg, as it is now conceived, is restricted to novelty and freshness. Delicious, if widely adopted not only as a bookmarking site but as a content (source) discovery destination, it can provide an alternative “information organizer” on the web.

Certainly the buzz has gone from social bookmarking to other places, but I still hold high hopes for this sector.

The 140 characters restriction on Twitter

The two main things I find myself doing on Twitter are ”Status interaction” and Socializing through short text conversations.

The first is the flagship text on the home page of the site. With Twitter I can share with others (friends and strangers) what am I doing and find out what others are up to.  My other main activity on Twitter is what I called socializing through short text conversation. I often find myself jumping  into conversations with users I follow. I also look forward to getting feedback on my open questions from both friends as well as unexpected Twitter users. In this realm,FriendFeed is providing a good deal of competition.

The service, as you all now, is often accessed via web, desktop client applications as well as SMS, which seems to have been thought of as the main destination for content creation and consumption. Hence, the 140 character restriction.

But the 140 character restriction runs deeper than a mere technical restriction. I believe that it is a response to the way we generate and consume content nowadays. It is also why I think Twitter is a killer application.

During the first months of 1882, Nietzsche bough a Mallin – Hanses typewriter to help him easy the bare of writing with such debilitated eyes (via – Virtual Philosopher) . On what I find to be one of the most compelling posts on information overload, Nicholas Carr (Is google making us stupid?) explains the impact that the typewriter had on the author:

(…)the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The point here is twofold: the first is that SMS has changed the way we write. With SMS we have learned to express ourselves in a discrete but constant stream of short blurbs. And it works. What´s more, there are things that are better off saying via SMS. Voice mail or email won´t do. It is part of of what seems to be a movement towards lightweight communication schemes that a far as I can tell had their first significant manifestation on the Internet with the IM emoticons and that now have found to be extremely popular on social networks (with the Facebook Poke as well as with SMS, not only we found an ideal medium for specific messages but also we created new layers of socialization). Twitter took two way short text communication strings that where taking place via cellphones and placed them on the web to be indexed (e.g, made searchable) and shared on top of users´s social graph.

The other point worth mentioning is that SMS and the Web not only changed the way we write but also the way we read. We now scan. And for that new reader, Twitter short message offers a format that is easier to consume.