7:32 am - Thu, Jul 14, 2011

2 notes

Automation Killed the Social Network

I was watching my G+ stream yesterday and last night and enjoying the conversations.  I was thinking that this was what twitter was like a few years ago.  It was what Facebook was like about 5 years ago.

Then it hit me… it was like any social network “BA.”

What is “BA”?

“Before Automation.”

All my social networks were wonderful places of interaction, interchange and social intercourse (love to use that word when it isn’t “dirty”) when they first started.  

Then - to make things “better” the services released their APIs and allowed third parties to provide services not built into the social app.  And in many cases, the new apps were ways to automate updates.  

Automate updates to twitter from my blog, automate updates from twitter to Facebook.  Automate and schedule updates to twitter AND Facebook from my blog.  Automate updates to twitter, Facebook, AND Linkedin from my blog.  Automate updates from Instagram to my blog, twitter, gowalla, foursquare, Facebook, Linkedin, AND my blog.

You get the idea.

Automation killed the social network.

When people have to exert effort to put their stuff on a network they inherently make sure it is worthy of posting.  They put thought into it.  Manual updates equals better quality.

Automation killed the social network.

I really hope google figures this out so they limit the way in which their API will work.  I don’t want automatic updates to G+.  The manual labor involved with posting, linking, commenting, etc. means I get better stuff.

If google really wants to make their platform the defacto social network they should allow and promote the ability to automate posts FROM G+ TO the other networks but limit the ability of other networks to update G+ automatically.

In that scenario - G+ gets better content - and the other networks get noisier and noisier until they are no longer valuable.  

What do you think?  Is automation the social network Achilles heel?