now, a year and a half later, my dynamic has shifted. I have about 1100 friends on facebook, but i have about 1450 people that i have circled and about 1350 people that have me circled on g+ – and between the two social network giants, less than 40 of those are duplicates – most of my facebook friends opted not to use g+ with any regularity, and of all of the new people that i’ve met on g+, only a small handful have turned into facebook relationships.

As a reader of social media, this is pretty great. my fb feed has always been a constant stream of posts, and my g+ stream is even busier even with how i attempt to control the “volume” of my stream through custom circles. i get a wide variety of content on both streams, ranging from broad topics that i specifically hone my g+ circles to focus on to more personal thoughts or life-happenings and sometimes intimate and close discussions on both facebook and g+.

But as a blogger and a social media contributor, this potential large audience that has little crossover on fb and g+ is incredibly problematic because of how it dilutes my online presence. Since my two blogs (this one and my livejournal) are separated loosely by “professional” vs “personal” content, there’s no duplication between them and each has a clear intent. By contrast, facebook and g+ right now serve as incredibly similar outlets of my microblogging expression to two vastly different audiences – and when i want to share good news or that cool article, i want to share it with everyone that i know – which means that i crosspost and duplicate posts across facebook and google plus more often than not. That may seem like it’s not a big deal since the audiences are vastly different, but to me it’s still a big deal because it means that people who circle me on g+ don’t have as much incentive to friend me on facebook and vice versa, and it also means that any potential dialogue on stuff that i post to both feeds is split and unfocused.

A part of me wishes that I could abandon facebook as a contributor and merely use it as a touchpoint to follow those who choose to use it as their main internet presence, but as someone who wants to share my personal life selflessly and promote my professional life selfishly, that’s simply not the right thing to do. I’m not so full of myself that i think that everyone should always listen to what i have to say, but i’m also self-actualized enough to know that i am a positive force in the lives of many people both casually and intimately, and because this also leads to people actually caring about me as a person and actually wanting to hear what i have to say, I have a strong sense of obligation to share my life and thoughts with those that are willing to listen in an effort to enhance our relationship and/or enhance their life, and subsequently enhance my own.

That said, I also know that in the grand scheme of things I”m a nobody. That’s not meant as a self deprecating statement any more than the previous paragraph is supposed to be egotistical and vain. Getting into that would be highly tangential to the point of this post; i bring it up because in reality (and seemingly in contraction to that last paragraph, but not really) the only reason that i matter is because people know that i matter, and if i wasn’t there, something or someone else would fill that void and i’d be forgotten, and that makes the idea of retreating from my facebook presence more viable – and if facebook or g+ ever reached a point where that strong sense of obligation were to ever become such a pressure on myself to cause me more emotional strife than emotional gain, i’d strongly consider it. But that’s not true, therefore not an option, and therefore the problem remains.

But as i go through the thought process that brought about the last couple of paragraphs, maybe the conclusion is that while I do see it as a problem, it’s not a huge problem, and the desire to address it is purely academic and self-masturbatory. I think it’s a problem because it feels inefficient for me who likes to have a very strong handle on how i present myself as a person and a brand, but the outcome of fixing that is a minimal gain for the amount of energy it would take for me to deal with it. That means that i should probably just keep doing what i’m doing, make slight adjustments as i see fit, stop worrying about it so much, and focus on what really matters.

Which is pretty funny, because it makes this whole post feel useless and self-masturbatory, and makes me feel like i’m living in a self-delusional dreamland. Which is probably true, so i can at least pretend to feel good about the fact that i’m self-actualized about it.

five things i like about facebook more than google plus:

1. degree of interaction on my own posts. Part of it is that i know that i’m quirky and i don’t try to conform posts in a way to get more hits, something that can be very prevalent on g+. Another is that i’m not an attractive female who works in a geeky tech industry. Whatever the reason, if i post the same thing on fb vs g+ (of which my readers are pretty much a completely different group of 1000 people each), many more people will interact with me on the fb side than the g+ side.

2. visibility of interactions on pages and groups. when someone comments on something on the TUMB page on facebook, i can see that as a little notation-number on my main feed, so i get notified even if i don’t actively visit my page. on the TUMB page on g+, i need to navigate to that page first as an admin before i see whether or not i’ve gotten any interaction, and that’s an extra step that can be easily neglected, and thus make me lose some of my audience unless i’m actively diligent.

3. currency of contact information. a lot of my real-life friends and acquaintances keep their information up to date on facebook and use facebook regularly enough that it has made it possible for me to travel anywhere and know how to get in touch with someone to hang out. particularly for holiday travel, i’ve been able to touch base with people who i’d otherwise have no idea how to contact to get together with them. contacting people privately on g+ is clunkier given that it’s much closer to a twitter paradigm than a facebook one, which makes it more difficult to have quality private interactions.

4. there are less spam accounts on fb than g+. There are many times when someone circles me on g+, i go to look at their profile page and their stream, and it’s either a spambot whose entire stream is filled with links back to some fishy and phishy website or it’s a real person, but they’re using their personal account mainly to push their own marketing and otherwise has very little original content. With a few exceptions, all of my fb friends are just people being people and not trying to be a business, knowing that if they want to do more of that sort of marketing business it should be more in the context of a Page.

5. …okay. i can’t think of a number 5.

five things i like about google plus more than facebook:

1. quality of posts on my stream. hands down, my g+ is much more interesting for me to read. What flows through my stream is a combination of personal things by awesome people, posts about similar interests to mine, quality images taken by some phenomenal photographers particularly in the realm of world architecture, and other shares of some incredibly innovative technology ideas, deep political analyses, awesome recipes, or whatever. A lot of this comes from my very direct ability to control all content that appears in my stream through circle management – i don’t circle people who post an insane amount of #caturday posts or use their stream to just share their favorite music video of the day or are too anti-Apple or anti-facebook (which can be prevalent).

2. image quality. photographs and pictures are just better on g+ in what people opt to post and share and how those images are dealt with on g+/picasa. if i upload a 1440×1280 picture on g+ i can redownload it at the same dimensions and same quality as what i uploaded. If i do the same on fb, the only download i can do is the version that fb has compressed and reduced in pixels and quality, and although i’m no professional photographer, i do consider myself an amateur and boy does that irk me.

3. trust in google over facebook there’s a faction of anti-google people out there for whatever reason, people that see it as Just Another Huge Evil Corporation. Google has made its share of mistakes, but in general the quality of the products they put out is outstanding and the mission of the corporation from the top down is something i think is pretty amazing. I’m not a huge google fanboy exactly, but i do believe in the company, particularly since i soemtimes talk to my brother about it (who is a google employee) and i trust his judgement a great deal. I trust how they do their business, what experience they try to bring to the world and the reasons behind it. I have no such trust in facebook. i believe that zuckman is pretty much just out for #1, and the decisions that are made regarding data privacy, how they try to change the user experience, and the general integrity of the company do not make me trust it.

4. google plus promotes embracing a larger community and meeting new people in a way that facebook doesn’t. With the Prolific community on facebook being the noted exception, facebook is comprised 99% of people that i know in real life whether casual acquaintances or close friends. It’s not a platform in which i can discover new people easily. On g+, almost everyone in my circles is someone that i met only through g+, and some of them have become very good friends. In that way it reminds me much more of the way that livejournal used to be when that was the dominant social platform – strangers discovered each other, interacted with each other, and could have meaningful relationships and interactions. g+ is designed to foster that same sort of discovery, and has resultantly exposed me to a wider new orleans community as well as a like-minded base of people from everywhere across the world that i feel absolutely comfortable hopping into a google hangout with and just shooting the shit.

5. i completely control my stream content on g+ and it will never involve ads. One of the big differences between g+ and facebook in this regard is that g+ is just an aspect of a larger company that already has a hugely successful model for generating revenue, so there’s no need to put ads into g+. Especially since facebook’s IPO, Zuckman is under a lot of pressure to generate much more revenue and at a much higher pace than before facebook went public, and as a result facebook has seen more intrusive advertising on both the website and the mobile app. This is absolutely the right thing for facebook to do from a business sense, but it creates a tainted user experience which can already feel cluttered as it is as well as biased with the introduction of Promoted Posts.

The Bottom Line

Facebook and Google+ are different experiences. facebook is where i go to see what my friends decide to randomly post and is also my largest audience for personal and business content. google+ is where i go to meet strangers and read content from around the globe from fascinating people that have embraced google+ as their conduit, and it’s also a much more open platform where strangers from anywhere across the globe aren’t afraid to video chat together and find some amazing connections. They both have their roles and these days i’ve been embracing both accordingly.

That said, one thing that sticks out most between the two social media platforms is my attitude about migration. As in if all of my friends on fb migrated over to g+, then the only reason i would keep my fb is to administer the TUMB pages i control for my work. By contrast, if all of my friends on g+ migrated to fb, i wouldn’t give g+ up – i would go out and find more people or different content and likely use that as my primary place of internet surfing because there’s always new stuff to discover in a way that i can tune however i want.

So okay, now here’s what i want to do:

1. Start a Hangouts on Air broadcast in Room A on computer A. Something that’s roughly 5-10 seconds in length.
2. Quickly move Hangouts on Air broadcasting set up to Room B that has computer B in it that is broadcasting the Hangout publicly.
3. Train Computer A’s camera on Computer B’s screen, and feed in the audio of Computer B into Computer A. So now the live broadcast is picking up the 5-1o second delayed thing that i had done earlier – which will recursively add upon itself both in video and audio format ad infinitum.

I wonder what would happen.

In the time since i’ve done this, this has had two significant effects. First, it’s given me some clarity as to how Circles drives content with a different flavor than facebook (and consequently twitter) now that my g+ stream is getting a more comparable steady flow of content like my fb feed. Second, it’s given me a stronger idea of how to create my own circles in a way that takes the most advantage of Circle’s power of flexibility – both as reading circles and as content filter circles.

First let’s deal with content. I think two things contribute to how g+ content works. First, it employs the more twitter-like paradigm of non-mutual circling rather than the facebook-(pre-subscription)-like model of “you have to be my friend in order for me to be yours.” Second, circle creation succeeds at being simple to understand and flexible in how they’re created.

What this creates is a powerful paradigm for content versatility that fb and twitter can’t match; it has the ability to be “broadcast” in nature for public and extended circle sharing, but also has the ability to be content specific or personal/intimate for small circle sharing. A few power GPlussers state in their introduction what kinds of circles they want to be included in and/or what circles they have set up for content that you can specify to be added to, and i think that this is a great way for one person to filter another person’s content to their liking, especially if that person is a very prolific GPlusser.

From a content filtering perspective, i don’t know exactly how this applies to me other than the filter i’ve already created for students vs. non-students which is a necessity of my work paradigm. If my posts start to have certain kinds of trends that i feel need to be circle specific (right now most of my posts are public or all circles) i may start to employ that model, but right now i don’t think i have the need.

From a reading perspective, adding the NOLA circle and seeing how the circle valve concept works helps me get a great grasp of how to create circles from now on. It shouldn’t be defined by things like “we all play DDR” or “everyone from my old days at West Chester”. Sure, those circles can exist if i want to hone on specific topics or a specific moment (i’d click on the DDR circle if everyone is at a tournament that i can’t attend but am intersted in, or i’d click on the NOLA circle during mardi gras to see what everyone is up to during Mardi Gras), but what defines what i want to read from people on the primary stream is a combination of how well i know them and how much i am interested in them.

So that’s how i think my main circles are going to be defined – i create 4 Main Reading Circles – one for each valve level. The people who i know personally and care about combined with the people who i am most interested in goes in the “push all content to main stream” circle. People who i have some interest in but am not invested in completely go in the “push most content to main stream” circle. People whose content i’m into but post lots of rapid things that are just straightforward reshares of things i find on my own or don’t care about go in the “push occasional content to main stream” or “push no content to main stream” circle. Things that are NSFW go into the “no content” circle. When i add a big group of people such as the 350 NOLA people all at once, they start in the “few content” circle and then can individually get shifted to one of the other circles. And then anyone can get shifted from one circle to another as time progresses, and sometimes get removed entirely.

That way, my main stream is comprised mostly of people and things that i’m interested in mixed in with a flavor of random things that may not be the most interesting to me but is still manageable. The circle valve is brilliant in this; i could easily add a circle of 1000 people and just stick them in a single “few content” valve and slowly manage where those people really belong as time progresses in a way that would be much more difficult to deal with on facebook and is impossible to deal with on Twitter.

Additionally, I’ll probably have some other reading circles that are more content specific that are just muted on my main stream; things that if i’m interested in it i’ll click on that stream to grab that stream’s specific content. Again, the DDR circle or NOLA circle comes to mind here, as well as a specific NSFW circle for the people that tend to post more risqué content that i’m interested in.

This feels like a good base model for Circle management; i’m sure it will evolve as i start to build the model and see what the effects are. As this is still early development, i’m open to any commentary or suggestions about the whole thing.

The piece was originally going to be about five minutes long, but now i think it’s more likely to be eight to twelve minutes long because it’s going to be in three sections (but one movement). I haven’t quite decided what the piece is going to be stylistically exactly, but it’s going to be more improv/cell based than standard music notation based. Part of it depends on what happens with the Transmitting Station described below, mainly how that station is being used to manipulate audio.

Performer Space and Receiving Stations

There are three “receiving” computer stations that are going to be placed at hard stage left, hard stage right, and hard stage front. Each station is connected to the internet and has a camera/microphone setup that can transmit video/audio to the web via the google hangout. The performer stands in the middle of the setup, facing one of the receiving stations depending on the section of music – in the first section, the performer will face the stage left station, in the second section, the performer will face the stage right station, and in the last section, the performer will face the stage front station.

To avoid the feedback loop issue, the three receiving stations will have their computer volume muted (but their microphones on, otherwise the video effect doesn’t work).

Transmitting Station

The fourth computer station is the “transmitting” station. That computer will also be connected to the Google Hangout, but its video and audio connection to the google hangout will be muted so the only thing that it does is receive the hangout video and audio from the other three stations.

Physically, this station’s video out will be transmitted on a projector screen that will live behind the performer. The audio out will also be connected through the recital hall’s sound system. Originally i wasn’t going to do this because of the fear of feedback loop issues based on where the speakers are located in the recital hall at Tulane, but to add depth to the performer’s performance, the sound screams to be manipulated and to restrict that based on a particular space when i want to have this performed in other locales is silly. The speakers can be moved to a place where feedback isn’t going to happen without any real issues.

From a software perspective, I want to take the audio signal of the performer playing (from a microphone, not from the google hangout audio) and run it through an audio manipulating program. Ideally i want it to run through Max/MSP to make it truly interactive and to create a UI that makes it easy for the performer to start in the middle of the piece and also monitor where things are happening in the piece and to have effects manipulated more precisely, but that might be out of scope for this project because i’d need to buy a new copy of Max/MSP and it would take time for me to program the piece during a period where i’m going to be incredibly busy. So instead i may opt for something different, either through Ableton Live or through Lisa.

Additionally, the Transmitting Station is going to put out its own audio like a standard “tape piece”, which will be used to create atmosphere and also help give aural clues to section changes. Depending on what sort of software is being used, those sections can be determined by what the performer does, either by landing on a particular pitch or controlling a MIDI trigger.

Style of Piece

I’m not sure what the piece is going to sound like yet or what the logistics are. In my head it’s pretty minimalist and is also more “cell” based or improv based rather than standard music notation. This is partially to avoid logistics of music stands because i don’t want to add that to the setup, particularly since the stage is going to be dark. If it’s going to be three sections, those three sections need to have some distinction to them, or at least be an ABA sort of format. The tone for that will be set by the audio that accompanies the solo performer.

It would be pretty easy to create the audio completely through Live’s instruments, but i want to add some sort of more traditional “sample” as well. One option is to try to take the DAT recordings i have of bowed crotales and put that into the mix (although i’d have to find a way to get them off since i don’t own a DAT player). The other option is do some instrument recordings of clean clarinet/saxophone notes or find some online somewhere, or find some other sort of atmospheric sound such as riding on the streetcar and manipulate the audio like i did a long time ago with my I-5 piece.

Now that i feel a lot more comfortable with how the setup of the piece is going to work, the actual musical conception will start to write itself. I’ll probably start to write musical material over christmas break with the intent of realizing the tape part and the big picture structure through january with the intent of trying to rehearse an initial draft of it in the beginning of februrary, then polishing it so that it’s ready for April.

I had put some thought into allowing people outside of the concert venue to be a part of the hangout also, but that adds a variable that i don’t want to deal with with this project. Maybe in Shifting Signals II.

(This is a follow up to the piece of music i want to write based on this blog post. This is also more of a workbench entry as opposed to a real entry because i’m still sorting out a bunch of stuff in my head.)

In order for the piece to really be effective, there needs to be a minimum of four accounts logged into the hangout – three that are picking up the video and audio signal and one that’s being used as a broadcaster. The reason for this is because one station never chooses to display its own video as the primary video pickup, so in my three station setup, station A only ever swapped back and forth between B and C, station B only ever swapped back and forth between A and C, &c. Having three receiving setups makes for a more interesting video presentation, and really it would be better if there were five or six, but i don’t want to spend that much money on this project – yet.

An important thing that i discovered was that the actual computer volume had to be down almost all the way or muted or else the feedback loop even from a single snap would build to clipping levels. But if those hangout sessions have muted audio, then the video never swaps, so the hangout machines need to be picking up audio signal even if they don’t need to broadcast it.

What that means practically is that i can’t really have any audio coming from the hangout session getting fed through a system that also outputs that signal which means that if there’s going to be any audio manipulation then it needs to happen outside of the hangout session context or any of the computers that are being used for it. Again, maybe for this particular performance, i don’t try to make it that complicated – maybe just have a CD playing in the background with sound effects that will hopefully *not* trigger the google hangout video swapping and have the live performer be completely dry.

Or, maybe i can have the background track sometimes put forth stuff that’s meant to jar the google hangout as checkpoints.

hmm…

I’m going to start experimenting and creating the piece of music that uses google hangouts that i blogged about earlier. I just bought myself a Mac Mini that should get shipped to me by the beginning of next week, so between that, my main machine, and the work laptop i have three video/audio setups that i can play with to see what i can do.

Originally i had thought i was going to make the piece a percussion piece, but i think i’ve decided that instead it’s going to be a solo clarinet or saxophone piece because it’s possible that i can manipulate the live video feed a bit better if the sound gets directed in a particular direction. The new feature of adding in phone conversations doesn’t really play into this piece, but one thing that it has done has sparked an idea of maybe trying to program or create some sort of live audio manipulation. That might not be in scope for this particular project unless it’s done in a very simple way – the way that i’d want to do it for a future piece is using Max/MSP and i don’t have the money or the time to learn that on top of everything else going on right now. One thing i *could* try to do is to have some accompaniment in the background, but i think that would add fussiness to how audio signal routes to the laptops and changes the video focus. I need to get my feet wet with the base concept first before i start embellishing too much.

Experimentation for this is going to start probably in the next couple of weeks. i’m pretty excited about it, i want to see what i can do.

the three people who were on the other end were in a restaurant (Shari’s) and they tried to do this thing where Adam sat on one end side of the table with his laptop set up and Rus sat on the other side of the table with his laptop set up. What they didn’t anticipate was the resultant echo created from the fact that both microphones would pick up one person speaking, plus the resultant feedback loop created from the close proximity of the laptops so the microphone would pick up the speaker signal which had to be loud to hear me talk because they were in a moderately loud restaurant.

that in itself isn’t terribly unusual (although it sounded awesome), but add on top of that the fact that google hangout has an auto-detect-who-is-talking-feature. As in, everyone who is in the hangout is set up on the side of the screen as small windows, and the person who is actually talking is in the main part of the screen as a big window (unless it’s you), and hangout switches who belongs in the main screen by detecting who has the strongest audio level or something similar. So the whole echo-feedback thing resulted in the screen starting with, say, Adam when he tried to say something that would switch over to Rus after a couple of seconds and then switch back as Adam was still talking and then switch over to Rus again until it would randomly settle somewhere once they stopped talking because we were trying to get the feedback loop to subside.

It was fantastic, and it makes me want to create a piece of music that replicates those conditions more deliberately. Like, have three or four laptops that are all signed into different googletalk accounts in the same room, all trained on a performer, and that performer plays music. All laptop audio and video feeds get recorded, and the best one out of all of them gets used as a performance video.

i don’t have enough laptops to try to get that to work, but i *can* try it with two to start and see if anything fun happens from it, then see if a few friends are willing to experiment with it more. Then maybe i can create some sort of piece together to put on my spring concert using googletalk as a conduit.

it has promise. We’ll see what happens.

We’ll start with the two blogs that i maintain, because although those are already pretty defined in my head, i’m going to adjust and refine the role that my blogs have to be an even greater separation between my professional and “conceptual” entries which will live on mendellee.com versus my life entries and “specialized” entries which will live on my livejournal. Before, my LJ served multiple purposes – it involved things going on in my life, but i also used it as a “short thoughts” blog, an “ideas” blog, a movie/game/tv review blog, things of that sort of nature. I still feel like it’s more appropriate to house my life and any random movie/game/tv reviews in that context, but i’m going to shift most of my “short thoughts” and “ideas” content to here, as well as some life stuff that may involve my schedule as it relates to creative projects or creative processes.

I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. One, I feel like this site needs to have more activity, that this should become a more important hub for my public presence, and hopefully shifting some of what used to be LJ activity will help with that. Two, I’m trying to encourage myself to write more about my Actual Life on my LJ which wasn’t exactly the idea when i first started my LJ but has leaned more towards that in the past year and I want to continue. There’s a multi-layered motivation for doing this related to a couple of events that happened over the summer which i may discuss in a separate post on my LJ.

That’s the easy stuff. Now we come to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Each of these needs to be addressed in two respects – as a contributor and as a reader. I’ll address each service separately.

Twitter: Originally I created a Twitter account as a means of shifting the concept of “status messages” from facebook to a paradigm where i felt it better fit. (in case you missed it, i wrote about why.) I then ported over selective statuses to fb by using “Selective Tweets.” Since that time, I’ve activated some privacy protocols that makes Selective Tweets not work, and i’ve relaxed my stance concerning the value of fb statuses as it relates to my fb page. So Twitter became a more nebulous space as a contributor, and with the inclusion of google plus, i started to use my twitter less and less, seeing g+ as a preferred method of posting random microblog bursts.

A part of me feels like I could abandon Twitter altogether, but a greater part of me feels like that’s the wrong thing to do. Twitter is a great tool with some key sets of expectation that isn’t met by any other social media. So in order to make myself more proactive in that realm, i need to create a definition for how i want to use it and brand myself in its use.

There are a few common paradigms for twitter use, and many of them are ones that I reject. I don’t want my twitter to be a personal advertising space. Neither do i want my twitter to be a conduit for my other presence on the web or for the “check-in” concept that’s promoted by the likes of foursquare or yelp.

So i think i’m going to use it in the way it used when it first existed: as a space for short life bursts. I’m also going to experiment with tweeting exclusively from a smart phone, considering it more of an on-the-go kind of thing.

Out of all of my social media, twitter will probably be my lowest priority when it comes to reading. I have a manageable list of people that i’m following, but some of the regular twitterers use it more as a conduit space than a speaking space, and that sort of tweeting to me is clutter and pollution that I don’t like filtering through. Check-ins are annoying because i don’t really care where people are. redirects or link postings are annoying because without having context that twitter can’t provide it’s a coin-toss whether or not i’d find the link worthwhile. Not that i’ll never read twitter ever, but i don’t feel an overwhelming need to stay on top of it.

Facebook: i was a relative latecomer to the facebook generation and have never been afraid to voice my opinions about what i feel are the big positives and negatives of facebook. I don’t hate it, but i am always mindful of some of its huge pitfalls and approach my use of it both as a contributor and a reader with a high degree of wariness.

what value i get from facebook as a reliable virtual rolodex, the kind of created culture that it represents, and the role it plays in my social presence as a personal broadcaster and a professional broadcaster through the marching band is too important for me to abandon facebook despite the fact that I don’t actually like it all that much. The recent facebook release in particular is problematic because there are now too many decisions about visual design and priority of content that are made for me behind the scenes, and those decisions are deliberately designed to be difficult to change. (i addressed this in the latter part of the aforementioned “social identity problems” post if you’re interested in the specifics).

What does this mean for me as a contributor and user of facebook now?

As a reader, what i want to happen is to be able to capture a slice of time of whatever happens to be on my news feed of the time of all 1000ish of my friends and be content with that. This means that i should probably do a similar thing that Mark did with his and do the painstaking work of changing all of my friends subscriptions to “all” posts instead of “most” posts (which i can unfortunately only do one friend at a time).

As a contributor, honestly, i still don’t have a great answer. I’ve decided that I still want my facebook to be pretty much All Surface and start to conceive of my google plus as being a potentially more intimate social atmosphere, something that can be inbetween facebook and livejournal, but exactly how that plays out practically is still yet to be defined. It still feels right for me to use fb as a conduit for my other social presence, but google plus has that place too, and i’m not sure how to achieve balance in how that could be used across both social mediums. It could be something as simple as “LJ entries go on fb, mendellee entries go on g+”, but with the power of g+’s circles allowing for more flexibility in that, that feels like an easy-but-not-quite-right answer that with a little work could be better defined and honed.

speaking of which.

google plus: in comparison to both twitter and facebook, my google plus feed is somewhat of a ghost town, and contrary to this being a deterrent, it’s rather a nice breath of fresh air. The problem is that if i want to try to shift more of my contributions and reading to google plus, it could easily end up feeling as unmanageable as facebook can be, both in the way i choose to write and the way i choose to read.

This is where i think careful manipulation of my circles will come into play. Right now i have a lot of incredibly impractical circle definitions that all need a complete revamp. At a basic level, i need to create two kinds of circles: “reading” circles and “filtering” circles. Reading circles don’t need to be defined right now because my traffic isn’t high enough, but a part of me is starting to feel like the best way to deal with reading circles has to do with the frequency of a poster. Prolific posters will get one circle, once a week posters will get another, once a month will get another, and some levels in between based on the amount of traffic. The main purpose/function of this would be to ensure that amidst the regular g+’ers i don’t miss something from a user that sticks a singular post within the busy throngs, which is philosophically closer to how i treat livejournal (everything that’s written on my friends page/circles stream is important) rather than twitter or facebook (all i care about is what happens to be going on at the moment).

As far as filtering, the only one that’s currently important to define is current students versus non-current students to help create that necessary separation between personal and professional. Beyond that, defining filtering circles is more difficult because a part of me feels like it should be as much in the hands of those who are reading me as myself. It may be that i won’t mind sharing more intimate details with person A and B, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to actually hear it, and i want to be able to respect that.

Practically that’s a difficult thing to address. It’s fine if i just deal with the people who are in my “reading” circles now, but when someone new comes along, they don’t have a conception of how i could be using circles well enough to know how to fit in mine, and it’s counterintuitive to me to put someone who just added me into their circles through a equivalent of a detailed questionnaire just to put them into my circles. That’s just obnoxious.

That side of it is full of conjecture anyway because i’m not sure exactly how intimate of a space i can put myself into online in the first place – even in a relatively comfortable setting like livejournal i tend to hold back on things that make me feel weak or vulnerable. There’s a couple periods of my life where i went through some intense emotional trauma that still impacts my life outlook today, but to most of the world that trauma is invisible – as well it should be. That sort of stuff is not meant to be publicized no matter how close or intimate a “circle” can be. But as with all things, there’s a wide spectrum between extremes that can be explored and toyed with, and google plus is where that potential can be.

The other potential choice of “filtering” circles has to do with conduits. As in, if i start to use g+ in a conduit way like i use fb to publish videos, LJ posts, and mendellee.com posts, i can create circles specifically for those so that those who have no interest in being a part of my conduit world won’t see that stuff. So if you have absolutely no interest in seeing when i post up LJ posts because, say, you’re already my LJ friend or you just don’t care about my life in that sort of detail, you don’t go into the LJ circle which is the only way that you’ll see that stuff appear on my feed. Of course, this leaves out “lurkers” from being able to see whenever i post to LJ, and highlights one of the other issues of filtering circles in general which is that filtering circles necessitates a mutual relationship when maybe i don’t want it to be. If a stranger decides to follow me on g+, adding them to a circle kind of means that i’m following them back; sure, i can stick them into a circle full of people that i’ll never read, but that reeks of subterfuge to my virtual nose and i don’t want to be associated with that sort of virtual smell.

We’ll see how all of this develops; in any case, it’s a starting point, a way to more clearly define my roles in all of these mediums and start to use all of them to their fullest potential (at least for me). As these roles take shape over time, i’m sure some small and big adjustments will be made. If it’s significant and interesting enough for me to talk about, i’m sure another entry will pop here.

Very recently google came out with an iPhone app. it’s a pretty basic no-nonsense app that i like much better than the facebook app for loading time alone. But probably the coolest feature of the app is the ability to see an incoming stream of what is defined as “nearby”. As in, g+ figures out where you’re located, grabs public posts from the nearby area, and puts into its own custom stream.

So okay, g+. now i want that or a better variant of that available on the web version.

A version of this already happens in limited ways on fb. i have a slice of 100ish friends from PA or who used to be from PA, and at certain times, say, during a Philadelphia Phillies game or an Eagles game or similar, my fb wall explodes with people’s reactions to what’s happening in real time. It’s a strange “mob mentality” capture on the internet which at first i found to be one of the negatives of fb but now i kind of like even if it can be annoying when it’s something i don’t give two flips about.

The UI i picture is something like this: you click on a “map stream” button and it takes you to a google map with a circle on it defaulted by your current location and a radius/diameter that’s defined by you. Click OK or Submit and it gives you a stream of any public g+ posts within that circle. Those defaults should probably be saved as “home stream” or something. But then i want to be able to grab any slice of a google map in a circle and do the same thing. Suppose i live in new orleans and i just heard about an earthquake in san francisco, or i’m a big SF 49ers fan and a game is going on. I want to be able to go to my map stream, highlight a circle around the bay area, and see what people in that area have been posting about it.

It has some great novelty value, but also has some meetup/gathering potential if, say, i’m looking for something to do in town or generally want to know if there’s anything happening and want to get a flavor of that from people not necessarily in my own circles. So i use map stream to grab my area, see if anyone is posting about happenings, start a conversation about it or just show up to where the action is.

The other interesting potential is what happens if i select the entire world map during, say, coverage of Obama doing an international speech or during the World Cup. There’s fascinating potential there to observe and analyze social networking behavior that right now isn’t easy to capture using twitter or facebook.

Area streams/feeds are an area that i feel is an untapped potential, one of the more interesting things uncaptured by the current social network paradigm. How about it g+ developers? Seems easy enough to implement since you already do it on the iPhone app. Develop that puppy.