What if social media went away?
By AndrewBoyd • Dec 18th, 2007 • Category: Promoting Australian BlogsAustralia wakes this morning to a world without Twitter.
The scheduled outage started at 5PM AESST (Sydney/Melbourne/Canberra time) yesterday and while a few tweets got through at around 11PM AESST, we’re still seeing the following as I write this at 6:30AM the next day:
So what are the implications for Australian bloggers? I’ve written in the past about Twitterpimping your blog and Facebook 101 for bloggers, so I can’t say that I’m a stranger to advocating social media as a means of blog promotion. We literally use this stuff every day - it is an important part of daily life for would-be probloggers like myself.
I’m looking at how to use social media to promote Intrapreneur Blog as part of the Flagship Blog Project this week. If Twitter is dead (or Facebook dies, or MySpace went bust, or any other thing went away that is outside the normal blog network) then life will change. For a start, metabloggers will have one less marketing channel to recommend 
I think that there is also a dark side to social media: I wrote a piece last night for Social Cult that suggested an odd possibility - that we are being exploited by the social media industry in much the same way that cigarette and fast food companies predate upon their steady users. While there is a touch of paranoia in there and the comparison isn’t entirely fair, there is still some truth to it - both Twitter and cigarettes have a strong peer pressure component, both can be addictive, both markets exist to add share value rather than inherently advance the lives of the users.
UPDATE: Twitter came back at around 6:50AM. A lot of people are a bit shaken by the unexpected additional outage. My guess is that they will soon forget the pain and be twittering away like mad things.
AndrewBoyd is a consultant by day and blogger by night. He loves good food, good wine, and discussing faceted classification schemes with friends.
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Andrew, Get a life!
Seriously I just can’t keep up with all the social media possibilities. It is just overwhelming. I think that I will go and mow the lawn.
Hi Colin,
thank you for your comment.
I could certainly use a life
There is this compulsive early adopter syndrome - it seems like every five minutes someone is telling me words to the effect of “hey, check this new social platform out!”. I do use Twitter perhaps more than I should, keep up with Facebook sometimes, and read blogs when I can. I’ve certainly talked about using Second Life more than I have used it of late.
Who knows where this is taking us? Will our children be suing Facebook for causing relationship breakdowns? Will there be social computing addiction self-help groups opening up all over the world?
Best regards, Andrew