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17/01/2008

Comments

Allison Miller

I've only had one holiday romance -and I'm still married to him after 10 years, a mortgage & 2 lovely children (tongue in cheek).

So will we experience the same 'holiday romance' with Twitter - or is it easier to build stronger and more long term relationships in this social networking site?

Trina

This is an interesting way of thinking about it. I've seen several similar migrations over the past few years in the online communities where I spend my time, so undoubtedly more migrations are to come.

There are definitely some applications I'd love to behead, though....

Andy Shaindlin

This is well-said, I think. One thing that remains to be sorted out across all social network sites is WHY people join. I think you can boil it down to two approaches:

1) people join because the site might help them do something they need to do/address a need they have;

2) people join because...well...everyone else joined, didn't they?

People THINK sites like Xing or LinkedIn will be in category 1). (Whether it ends up being true depends on their needs and savvy in using the sites). I think Facebook (like Friendster before it, Classmates.com, MySpace) is in category 2).

I don't Twitter, so I can't say anything about how that relates to all this.

Thanks.

Martin

Allison - yes, I guess some holiday romances do turn in to the real thing! I'm not sure about whether Twitter will go the same way - it has a more focused function so maybe not. However when lots of people sign up it may become unusable.
Andrew - good comment - I hadn't considered the initial motivation. I think your suggestions are right - I wonder if the initial motivation influences how you then use it and whether you stick with it.

Andy Shaindlin

Well...three and half months later and no sign of fading from Facebook, despite regular screw ups. Martin, are we still falling out of love with the site?

Sebastiano Mereu

Thanking back a couple of years, I can come up with at least 10 couples which I have met that fell in love online. Not all met on Facebook, but two of them actually did and are even married by now. An Ecuadorian friend sent me a message (through Facebook) after hearing the song "Fallin' in love on Facebook" saying in a nutshell that falling in love online is a common thing these days for teens and tweens. And why shouldn't it be? Times change and so do means of communication.

Andy Shaindlin

So Facebook is still going strong and we're well into 2009...it will yet fade into something else, but the "falling out of love" prediction is yet to come true.

martin

Andrew - that wasn't my point - yes it's numbers will grow as it hits the normal distribution curve, but the 'we' here meant bloggers and edtech. We don't really talk about FB much now - certainly not the way we talk about Twitter, so people have fallen out of love with it even if they still have an FB account which was the point I was making.

Keith Harman

There's nothing too revolutionary here. The S curve of Innovation (as Roger discovered) tells that adoption comes in waves and we now understand about disruptive technologies.

Having used ICQ, AOL IM and the IRC from MSN in the 90s it was interesting to see all the shifts occur.

So what's the next big thing? I think Google wave is a candidate or Twitter morphing into more than just a host of people usually speaking at each other. Real time, visual interface on a low scalability platform will make a big dent.

Andy Shaindlin

I like checking back to this posting to see what has developed in the comments...just one or two posts a year, but still a really relevant topic! That's a sign of a good blog post.

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