Monday, December 20, 2010

The @Mention Cloud

Many social aggregators have mined citations to produce digests of trending stories and multimedia. Google Reader support in the new Flipboard and Delicious' apparent folding are two sides of the same coin, a last ditch effort to ignore the impact of the social stream on the InBox. Where RSS used to capture so much of the flow of information, now social signals determine not only whether but when items reach the InBox. @mentions win the race to the InBox. You might think just focusing on @mentions would produce a fatuously egocentric view of the stream. But in fact that?s exactly what we all do. Techmeme, for all its technology and human editorial, is still Gabe Rivera?s view of who?s talking about him, his issues, his view of what constitutes interesting material. And judging by his continuing success, if it?s all about Gabe, it?s all about us too. Us is remarkably stable in its basic parameters of interest. So-called tech news is really about the architecture and evolution of the technology that @mentions us.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/g1A92HiuMr4/

Tara Conner Tara Reed Tara Reid Taryn Manning