The Haystack

Apologies to any attendees of my presentation for Logeion who expected to find the slides on this site. You might have had trouble, because while I did add them to the site, I was flaky enough not to add them to the Presentations page. Somehow I doubt anyone lost sleep over it, but you can find the slides there now.

Well, from home, at least.

This has nothing to do with the web, but I thought it might be helpful to share. After being plagued with calls from telemarketers between about 6pm and 10pm (the nerve!), my partner and I decided to change our voicemail message. We’ve seen the amount of calls drop dramatically. And when someone does call, we never need to pick up if the phone display shows a “number unknown/hidden”, or if we don’t know the number.

I’m sure this isn’t a new idea (people have screened their answering machines for years), but it’s still pretty cool and works well, at least here in Holland. Call it a lifehack, if you will. Just change your voicemail message to something like this:

“You’ve reached [your number]. We are either unable to take your call, or you’re calling with a hidden/blocked/unkown number, in which case we will never pick up. You can leave your name, number and reason for calling. Calls from friends and family will always be returned. Thank you.”

My own message isn’t this exactly, but that’s the gist of it. It seems kind of cold to do at first, but after all, you should be able to decide who you want to talk to during your evenings at home.

I’ve been curious lately about the apparent social stamp collections of some Twitter users, after being added by these people as their friend. When they first added me, I thought they might have somehow been following my work and wanted to keep tabs on what I’m doing. But one guy had about 20,000 friends. Others had lower amounts, but still several thousand.

I’ve been collected. My thumbnail is now a stamp.

I’ve worked on the web since 1995, but there’s an obvious gap here. Something I’ve missed. Which I found strange at first, because I do as much as I can to keep up with All Things Web. Frankly, I often join or use totally stupid sites and apps just to see what the fuss is about and keep up with the DigiJoneses. But it’s not the applications I’ve overlooked. It’s the way people use them.

A recent Social Computing Magazine article, The Psychology of Social Computing, explores this weirdo collection type of activity within Facebook. Actually I think MySpace is worse, but I can imagine that there aren’t many people willing to look at it long enough to write an article about it. In his article, John Kirriemuir offers his view on the reasons for Facebook’s success. Particularly interesting is the collection factor. The more friends you’ve got, the higher your status. Or something.

This seems juvenile to me. But then I’m 37 years old, so maybe that’s my problem. I use these apps mostly as an extension of my real-life network. I’ve actually met about 80% of my friends in person. Of course, these sites can be a way to make new contacts. But that can only happen if my collection of friends remains manageable. Otherwise, it’s just noise.

I’d like to see the term friends be replaced with a choice of various relationship categories (why not use XFN as a starting point), so that I can easily see that the guy with 20,000 contacts only has three friends. As a matter of fact, that’s what XFN is for, isn’t it?

Call me crazy, but in the real world, aren’t fame and status more related to how many people collect you, if you will, instead of how many people you collect? Why is this different in Twitter or Facebook? I’d rather have 50 friends and 20,000 admirers. Wouldn’t you?