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<\/p>\nTwitter opened a world to me. All the great educational technologists and teachers, posting links and talking to each other and to me. Often every day. It was riveting to follow the flow of conversation, check out the links. I’d post a question about an application, or Moodle, or which camera I should buy, and I’d get advice from several people whose opinion I trusted, within a few hours. Unlike many who use Twitter, I wasn’t posting what I had for breakfast and neither were they. This was cool professional development.
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But then I noticed, as the number of my “followers”, and those I “followed” increased, everything spread out. I follow 121 people. 394 follow me. But some of the people I follow, they follow thousands (like *Alec Couros, at a whopping 2,146). New apps (like <*Tweetdeck) were designed to help us sort the tweets, because they all scroll by so fast when following so many people. We could sort into columns by who we really, really wanted to read. Or use hashtags to follow topics we really, really wanted to follow.<\/p>\n
I notice now, over the past few months, that my tweets for help or advice are only answered by one or two people, usually none. If I don’t use an “@” symbol to talk to someone specific, I rarely get a response. One day I tweeted:<\/p>\n
I think there are now so many people on Twitter that no one can keep up — I’m getting great ideas, but few answers to questions now<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I received (one) response in agreement. People have overloaded themselves with followers, and in an attempt to preserve sanity actually only communicate with a few.<\/p>\n
I am noticing a similar pattern with many of the social networking tools used by educators. Nings and Facebook groups are established, then abandoned. Our RSS readers fill up until we give up and actually read very little (what, our readers don’t read for us?). Sometimes I scan for hours and find fascinating tidbits I don’t know what to do with. I bookmark them, socially of course, on Delicious<\/a>, but rarely go back to them unless I remember I did that.<\/p>\n
Although there seem to be new technologies every day, the basic formats are calcifying. Wikis are a great idea, because people can collaborate. But in practice, people don’t really want to work inside other people’s wikis (come on over and paint a wall at my house, will you?). Blogs, because of their post\/comment format, are most conducive to presentation, then commentary, not true conversations. There are also problems with the keys. We’re tired of logging in differently everywhere (yeah, that OpenID thing was a fine idea, but didn’t work), so we don’t bother to show up at all. The cocktail party goes on without us. We’d look it up later except that, in a desire to maintain individuality, no one is tagging stuff the same way.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Aggregation, which was supposed to make it possible for us to follow only the people and trends that were important to us, has atrophied. RSS is stuck in a phase where it is still overly visible and geeky to be useful to most people. It’s like a British hot water heater, requiring continual tinkering. “Friendly” aggregators like MyYahoo never advanced beyond their “customizable home page” idea. I can put everything on Pageflakes, but I have to log into everything individually anyway, so why bother? I could join a Ning, but each Ning also requires its own log-in.<\/p>\n