Bix dot Blog

Simon Woods’ warranted drive-by of “button-based metric operator[s]” sent me off on an entire conversation with myself, partly aloud and partly internal. Not just the vigorous mental nodding, because I agree, and not just a lamenting that I don’t know how to get sites and services which use likes and dislikes, up-voting and down-voting, and the like to roll back such usage. I also got to thinking about one of the differences between the original social networking platforms versus the current social media platforms: the former’s central use of the individual profile page. Imagine if rather than letting you like tweets, Twitter let you add, say, five tweets from other people to a special pane on your profile page. Something like MySpace’s “top 8 friends” widget, but for tweets you’ve found especially useful, insightful, or funny. What if Twitter looked backward instead of forward and turned profile pages into destinations unto themselves where a person could offer a fuller bio, share more than just one of their own tweets, highlight five tweets from other people, and who knows what else. Remove some Twitter activity from the endless, scrolling Feed and put more Twitter activity into the personalized, semi-static Profile. This rattling idea isn’t about saving Twitter; it wouldn’t. I’m just drawn to ways in which, if we wanted to, we could turn back the clock a bit on social media and recapture some of the slower and more personal charms of social networking, even on existing social media sites.