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Managing social media
I'm considering creating an academia.edu account; I've already parked a placeholder there, but I'm reading conflicting reports about the site's usefulness and slow, uneven uptake (the reports remind me a bit of the perennial discussions about the Landing, actually).
In the meantime, I'm also considering deleting my Delicious social bookmarking account. Around the time I read that Delicious was to be decommissioned, I started doing all my social bookmarking here in the Landing, and my Delicious account is right rusty now.
Adopting and using Internet applications, especially social tools, isn't really a zero-sum exercise (I'm curious about what the forthcoming e-lab can do), but this feels like an opportunity to do some digital housekeeping, or at least trading up. Anybody with an opinion on the affordances of academia.edu or the fate of delicious, feel free to weigh in here. I'd be curious about what other heavy users think before I make a further move on either front.
("Heavy users": got to love the language shared by the scenes of high technology and getting high.)
- Sets, nets and groups revisited
July 3, 2024 - 10:41pm
Jon Dron
Mark A. McCutcheon
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Comments
I've been a member of Academia.edu for a few years. Can't say that it has been really useful, and the setup- with uploading some papers or links (duplicating what I do with AUSpace), is time consuming. But I do regularly get notifcations, that people are searching for me on Academia (I didn't know I was lost :-)
Like many social networks it has taken years to reach critical mass, but they may be getting there (like the Landing!!)
Terry
You could of course use our new RSS import tool to suck down your del.icio.us feeds and, for that matter, anything you put on academia.edu.
I've had an academia.edu account for some years and get the odd notification of people following me on it, but I've not been motivated to add anything to it so there's not much value for them or for me on the site. Way too many tools to play with, way too many identities to manage.
While I'm very fond of the Landing and am obviously a bit biased in its favour, I don't think it's the end game here. Data on the Landing are, unlike those on most commercial sites, owned by you, and it has some capacity to interoperate with and export to other sites, so it's a good alternative to commercial systems with some neat tools and services that are, in principle, available to be used by other sites, with (rather mixed) support for standards like RSS, OpenDD, FOAF, OpenSocial and its own service APIs. However, what we really need is the means to completely control our own data, and any centralized system is going to be flawed, even one with a lot of hooks into it like Twitter used to have, Facebook pretends to have (its 'open' graph is a sick joke designed to farm you) and Google Plus nearly has. I had some hopes for Diaspora but that has turned into another Elgg-like me-too that doesn't work as well as Elgg and still strongly retains the centralized model. Too much hype, too little intelligence. OneSocialWeb was a good idea that seems to have dried up. AppleSeed is moribund. I really thought OpenSocial would sort things out but that is failing in spades. Even simple protocols that perform basic tasks like OpenID seem dead or dying in the water. Most of these failures are down to Metcalfe's Law being ruthlessly exploited by the likes of Facebook and RenRen. I'd really like those systems to catastrophically fail as soon as possible because, until they do, the incentives to innovate and give people back their data are pretty minimal.