Every shiny new application that emerges from Silicon Valley nowadays is always greeted by a flock of early adopters eager to try it out.
I don’t exactly consider myself an early adopter (imagine - I only started blogging recently, long after it was the cool and “in” thing to do so), but I do sign up and try out new services from time to time which I feel may fill a particular productivity void for me. (Still waiting for my Soocial invitation… Got it! Thanks!)
Some select applications, like FriendFeed and Toluu, instantly demonstrates that they has staying power for me. Most other applications? Not so much unfortunately.
Here are three social media applications which I recently gave up on and I’ll briefly explain why:
Identi.ca
Yes, I know some folks like John Hunt sing praises about open source microblogging, and it’s true that distributed architecture does wonders for scalability. However, my decision to leave Identi.ca boils down to one simple reason:
From a user’s perspective, it just doesn’t offer me any more value than Twitter.
For me, Identi.ca has exactly two useful features which Twitter doesn’t have: Auto-follow anyone who follows you, and OpenID support.
And in exchange, Identi.ca, users need to live with an inflexible content license, lose out a larger ecosystem of 3rd-party applications, and most importantly, don’t get access to the humongous network of existing Twitter users.
Now that Twitter’s scalability problems seem to be more or less under control, there is no reason for me to use any other Twitter clone, unless it brings something new to the table (like Plurk).
Also, additional minus points to Identi.ca for not allowing you to completely delete your account.
Brightkite
Brightkite is actually a pretty cool service, and I do believe that mobile-enabled and location-aware social networking applications will be the next big wave once we can agree on how different phones can automatically - and with consent - send location data to applications. (Google Android, perhaps?)
The reason why I deleted my Brightkite account was simply because there are not enough users in Singapore.
As Metcalfe’s law states, the value of your network is proportional to the number of users in your network.
If you have lots of friends and followers on Twitter or Facebook - you can gain tremendous value from your social network.
If you don’t follow many people on Twitter and not many people follow you - you gain less value from your social network.
If you have no friends on Brightkite because virtually no users live in the same location as you on a a location-based social network - it just gets downright depressing.
After diligently checking-in my location on Brightkite for a couple months and never getting any replies or notifications that someone is around me, I pulled the plug on the whole thing.
Maybe I’ll sign up again when there are more than 23 new user check-ins a month in Singapore.
Atomkeep
I thought Atomkeep was the holy grail for solving the problem for people like myself who need to maintain personal profiles in like 18 different applications and services. However, at the end of the day I deleted my Atomkeep account for three reasons:
- The performance was piss poor for about a whole week while I was trying it out. It’s one thing that Twitter doesn’t scale because of it’s gazillion users, but a new startup? FAIL.
- At that moment, it didn’t support all of the applications that I used (ironically, Brightkite was one of them), and I would of still needed to maintain my profile in multiple locations.
- The biggest issue for me however, was the incomplete vision and poor execution. I would of imagined Atomkeep having some slick GUI-driven capability to do basic field mapping and transformations so you can truly integrate all of your profiles together in as few data fields as possible. Instead what we got was basically a huge aggregation of all of the profile fields from all of the services. That provides no value for me. And there is repetition everywhere also. In order to synchronize my LinkedIn profile with my Twitter profile properly, I need to provide my home page (i.e. blog) URL in at least two fields. Why not give me the option to map both of those fields onto the same data?
Folks, maintaining multiple profiles may be a pain, but it’s hardly a deal breaker. A profile synchronization service really has to bring something unique and new to the table. What about pulling your profile photo from Gravatar? What about custom privacy settings so that some sites will receive your birthday and other sites won’t?
See Also:
- Why I am Giving LinkedIn a Second Chance
- Shoplette: Twitter Meets Shopping
- Do Startups Stand a Chance on the Open Web?
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Sorry to hear you’ve left Identi.ca, but I guess the importance of the site doesn’t resonate for you. We’ll see you when you come back.
Question for you: you mention the “inflexibility” of the license (the very liberal Creative Commons Attribution license — extremely applicable for sharing messages across the Internet and beyond). I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you on another microblogging service that has flexible TOS and copyright rules? Or that lets you choose among licenses?
Surely you don’t mean Twitter or Plurk, neither of which lets you change your relationship with that company, and both of which control your posts after you post them.
Also, are you aware that Identi.ca supports the Twitter API? Many desktop clients (Twhirl, Posty, Spaz), third-party apps (Twitterfeed, Tweetscan), and other parts of the Twitter ecology also support Identi.ca.
Letting users delete their account is a feature that’s been requested a lot. It’s something I need to get to, but there’s lots of data scrubbing involved, and we need to leave some kind of audit trail so that people who were subscribed to you, or you were subscribed to, know what happened. It’s not a trivial feature to implement correctly, and nobody designs database schemas for that kind of thing.
Thanks Evan, for your frank comments. It’s very encouraging to see startup founders like yourself directly interacting with your users and addressing their feedback. I wished every startup founder was like you.
Don’t get me wrong - I certainly realize that Identi.ca has a unique value and importance to it (being open source and distributed), but from a user experience perspective it just doesn’t provide enough value for me personally… yet.
I do know that Identi.ca has an API, and kudos for making the API compatible with the Twitter API, so that it lowers the barrier for other apps to support your microblogging service.
What I was referring to is that if you take a look at a lot of the social media services available today - Brightkite, Toluu, and countless others who can extract your Twitter contacts to find users - all of them support Twitter and not Identi.ca. Now, obviously there is no technical difficulty for them to support Identi.ca, but the bottom line is they don’t… yet.
Deleting user accounts in my opinion is a must. It gives users an assurance that, “no worries - there is an easy way out if you don’t like what you see.” That, in turn, makes folks more likely to try out your service. They are after all, providing their own user generated content (which they own) on to your site! They must also have a way to remove it at will. Both Twitter and Plurk offer this.
Speaking of content, let’s talk about licensing. And perhaps you can correct me if I’m wrong - for this is not my strong suit:
The CC 3.0 Attribution license allows users to remix and redistribute your work as long as they give you credit. They can choose whatever license they want to use for their own derivative work, and they can use if for commercial use. Even if your content is deleted from Identi.ca in the future, once the content has been out there, you can’t reign it back in again - the CC license assures everyone perpetual use.
Both Plurk and Twitter explicitly state that you and only you own the IP for your content. You can license it however you want. You preserve your content rights even after you delete your account and content from their service. Only exception is that Plurk states that they have the right to reuse your content perpetually, but only “on their service”.
I’m a proponent of CC-style licenses (you do realize my blog is CC-licensed), but objectively speaking, isn’t Identi.ca’s CC license more restrictive than Twitter and Plurk’s TOS?
Now, it’s true that they reserve the right to change their TOS at anytime. But once they touch the part on who owns your content, I’m sure they will experience a drop off in users. So I doubt that will happen anytime soon.
Eventually, no doubt I will probably go back to Identi.ca again. I mean, social media early adopters are notoriously fickle-minded aren’t they?
And I’m optimistic that Identi.ca one day will be able to show me a better or more unique user experience than it’s competitors, but the day is not here… yet.