Begining to get the paradigm shift

If a week is said to be a long time in politics, imagine what twelve months means in social media.

Drew B is back with a review of what the trend spotters were saying a year ago. My comments of a year ago look cryptic; I was expressing my lack of excitement with the crop of new tools and environments. For example, I was cool on Second Life then and that’s now the tone of so much media commentary this summer.

But Drew’s question was about the social media tools we use and find invaluable. My ‘daily bread’ comprises:

• Google Reader: for news feeds (eg blog updates)
• Facebook: the great hidden advantage for me is that I don’t have to maintain email addresses for my ‘friends’; people can change jobs, move house, change names even and if they’re on Facebook I can still reach them)
• Email: it’s old tech but it’s still an important social networking tool, preferable to me to tedious texting. Googlemail has a good spam filter.

Like many of us, my blogging diet is changing. I’m still reading blogs daily but posting less. This could be because of the cycle of the university year; it could be because more chatter is going elsewhere (see Facebook, above). I have a hunch that my wiki will outlive this blog – but that’s operating as a simple website, not as a social media space. As Jakob Nielsen says, we’re mostly lurkers, not participants.