Passing my eyes over a string of Tweets at the end of a tiring day recently, it struck me how exasperating they are with their fragmented phrases, awkward abbreviations and endless web links. Social networking, I thought, had gone too far.
I'm no Luddite. I've been a fan of LinkedIn ever since two contacts on my network helped me to get a job. On Facebook I've rediscovered long lost friends. I even use a genealogy program called Geni to keep track of an extended family that numbers in the hundreds. But when it comes to 140-character missives stripped of all meaning and emotion, they leave me cold.
It could be that all along I had been experiencing a decline in the return on my investment of time and energy on online networks and that Twitter was simply the last straw. There had to be a point, I had come to believe, when a new contact actually decreased the value of my network by making it impossible to sustain meaningful relationships.
I put the question to T.A. McCann, CEO of Gist, a Seattle company that sells software to help people manage their social networks. The software pulls together a "dashboard" of information about each contact that includes e-mails, Tweets and recent web mentions. McCann, not surprisingly, is in the more-is-better camp when it comes to social networking.
"There was a time when people only knew other people in their neighborhood. Was that ideal?" asks McCann. "When airplanes came along, did they reduce the quality of people's friendships?" As technology advances, McCann argues, people become capable of maintaining better relationships with more people. The problem, he argues, is not the abundance of connections, but the absence of proper tools, filters to find the people you need and the information you want.
McCann offers ActiveWords CEO Burton "Buzz" Bruggeman as a model of the modern connector. Bruggeman has 10,000 people in his address book. Like a fisherman, Bruggeman throws his net into the river of information that flows through the web. Some of that information is broadcast on Twitter to the several thousand people who follow him. Other precious tidbits go to important contacts he is cultivating. One influential friend told Bruggeman that he didn't use Gist because it didn't run on Lotus Notes. Bruggeman advised McCann to start talking to IBM, a move that proved important and timely.
"It's how I tell someone that I'm thinking of him," says Bruggeman. What does Bruggeman get in return? An occasional, often invaluable, recommendation for his company's productivity software.
In this increasingly competitive world, whether you're starting a business, promoting a product or looking for a job, the wider the net you cast, the better your chances are of finding something useful. So yes, as much as I hate those Tweets, I will read them, and sometimes write them. I can't afford not to.
Leslie D. Helm
Editor, Seattle Business