I was working on this post and read a timely piece by Erik at Techcrunch on the level of noise and our inability to keep up with the conversations online. Further comments by Alexander as well.
Clay Shirky, in his book "Here Comes Everybody" mentions how fame can come at a cost. The example he presents is that of a blogger with 10,000 strong audience, is interacting with each of his readers for 1 min; it amounts to almost a full-time job ~ 40 Hours/Week. Here the interaction can mean that someone has just created a link and you go check it out; someone has written a blog post in response; posted a video/podcast; just commented on your blog, sent a tweet in response to yours, posted a photo from the conference you attended or plain old fashioned email/phone conversations.
I tried to extrapolate this and see how it would work in a typical scenario. Lets say you are an average blogger who spends 30 Mins /post/day and your audience created 1000 items for you to responding to. Perhaps on an average you spend 5 Mins per response (this might include reading the comment, tweet, post, email; thinking time; writing time etc.) Then one would pretty much spend about ~25 Hours / Week for about 1000 responses/month.
This is the bane of fame! As you get famous, and receive more attention in your social network -- you cant respond to everyone. I can hardly figure out how Scoble can keep up his pace on his blog and Twitter! I think Tech bloggers are slightly better at managing how they use technology to their advantage and can keep up with a much larger audience than most people. Still, Shirky's book is a great place to understand how the attention economy is changing our social interactions.
That also makes me wonder if someone has seen any research on email/usenet usage patterns? Somehow that is one area that shares similarities and I am certain that usability experts would have done some such studies already. How do you think this would compare with Facebook and Social Media in general? There are people for whom Facebook is their default -- everything from email/IM to SN -- So it does not feel like they are trying to respond to requests from many different networks! I wonder what is the cost of context switching from one network to another and perhaps that is the reason why FriendFeed seems like a neat way to manage multiple information streams?
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