Music identification app Shazam has announced big feature updates to its iPhone and iPod touch music discovery apps. There are now customised settings for ‘tagging on start-up’ make the process of identifying a music track faster, a new UI, the ability to search for ringtones and videos on iTunes and better video. You can also share tunes you find via Facebook and Twitter. Shame it doesn’t own its name on Twitter then.

Just as I was reading Paul Carr’s latest column about quitting social media, my husband looked at his phone and broke into a huge smile. He is a graphic designer and has long been a fan of Chank Fonts. Earlier that day, he’d taken a picture of a retro-looking podiatrist office, posting it on Twitter with the word “Font-o-licious.” It didn’t go viral. It didn’t become a trending topic. It didn’t get him 1,000 new followers or even attract much attention at all. But it was noticed by Chank Diesel of Chank Fonts who Tweeted “I’m gonna dedicate my next font to that type-savvy podiatrist” and started following my husband. Here in front of me was one of those serendipitous moments of social media collapsing  space-and-time. These moments don’t change the world, but they’re exactly what made social media so addictive in the first place. Imagine an industry hero of yours who seemed untouchable creating a product just because of a random picture you posted on an ever-moving stream of colliding information that he happened to see. Here, in the guise of my beaming husband, was the perfect articulation for why I think people—even my close friends— who declare dramatic social media bankruptcy were just doing it wrong. What made social media a phenomenon were moments like these. Passively connecting in-and-out of a persistent conversation with people you know and see everyday, people you know but have lost touch with, and people you don’t know but share interests with. People who in a more efficient world, you might have known. It’s about making relationships more efficient. My parents know what I’ve been up to by reading my Twitter feed, so when I call home I don’t have to answer a vague question like “What have you been up to?” I answer a specific question like “What country are you traveling to now?” If a friend is looking for a job at a given company, I can’t always remember who I know who works there, but with LinkedIn, I don’t have to. And seeing what an old flame looks like on Facebook never gets old. If these selling points sound horribly cliché it’s because they are commonplace reasons most everyday people use these sites, and indeed, the same reasons why the founders of most social media companies started these sites. But the sites worked too well at amassing fans, friends and followers, creating micro-economies where people sought to cash in on their would-be fame and influence. And that is when the problems—and inevitably the fatigue— started. People competed for how many friends and followers they could rack up and how many RTs they could get in a day, seeing it as evidence of how cool or smart or influential they were. That’s when social media got mercenary and soulless. Here’s a clue: If you find yourself saying “(Fill-in-the-blank-social-media-site) used to be soooooo much better before everyone was on it”– you are using the site wrong. You are following too many people, you are using it too much, you are strangling the pretty, little bunny. The beauty of these sites is you control how many friends you see, and how many of them see you. So if you used to love it and now hate it, well, you know what they say about when you point a finger. Three are pointing back at you. Sometimes metrics can be a bad thing and beware of any so-called “social media consultant” who tells you otherwise. What’s the value of a Retweet or a Like? It’s roughly the equivalent to sitting next to someone during a keynote who nods his head at a salient point. Someone hitting a button in front of them is hardly a heady endorsement—nowhere near the impact of someone calling you to tell you about a story he read. That actually takes more than one-second of attention and work. Everyone touts stats showing that recommendations are the most trusted form of advertising. That’s because in the old world recommendations were inefficient. I had to be so moved by, say, the service at a restaurant, that I proactively called people to tell them about it, or it stuck in the front of my mind solidly enough that when someone asked “Where should we go to dinner?” it came flying out. The power of personal recommendation doesn’t carry over in a world where it’s as easy as clicking a button because the caliber of that recommendation is necessarily lowered by taking out barriers. Of course not everyone becoming fatigued with social media whored themselves out to anyone who would follow or friend them, bartering likes and retweeting anyone who said something nice about them. Indeed, Mr. Carr locked his account and only followed a core group of friends. His biggest complaint was simply that he used it too much—updating any thought in his head so that he didn’t take time to mull and form that idea or joke until it was perfect, and that he was distracted. That’s a fair point. But I wonder whether the flood of apps may be making the problem worse, not better. You can have too much of a good thing. After some early security glitches when Twitter desktop apps published direct messages, I decided to only use Twitter.com and update by text message to interact with the service. That’s downright luddite in my TechCrunch/iPhone world, but by going to Twitter, rather than Twitter always flooding to me, I forced myself to keep my Twitter feed as manageable to keep up with as email. What’s more, when I travel to places like China or have a big deadline, I don’t log onto Twitter for weeks. When I come back it’s still here. Both Twitter and I continue to go about our lives without one another just fine. I don’t think changing an avatar to green saves Iran. But I wouldn’t say Twitter is making us all more detached and stupid either. I just like life with social media better than life without it, for silly little moments like the one my husband had with Chank Fonts. Same thing I’d say about email or a mobile phone or TiVo or a Blackberry. I realize that doesn’t make gripping blog copy like Twitter-democratizing-the-world or Twitter-totally-sucking, but I think for most of the average users out there, that’s the Twitter they know and the Twitter that will continue to steadily grow, all this hype and backlash aside.

StockTwits has built a business out of people tweeting their thoughts and actions around various public stocks. SecondMarket has built a business out of people interested in the buying and selling of various private stocks. It seems only natural to shove the two together. Which is exactly what they’re doing today with a new partnership. As you may be aware, to send a tweet to StockTwits, you have to append the “$SYMBOL” syntax to your tweet. The same idea will now work with these private stocks that SecondMarket tracks. For example, if you’re interested in TechCrunch stock, you’d tweet your thoughts with “ $TCRH ” appended on to the tweet. For Facebook, you’d use “ $FBOOK “. For Twitter, “ $TWIT “. And so on. When you do this, these tweets get pulled into the StockTwits system and you can see a stream of what people are saying about these stocks on individual pages there. SecondMarket then pulls in these curated tweets as well from StockTwits to supplement their own pages. SecondMarket currently tracks about 500 private companies that aren’t yet public but have interest from outside investors in their stock. The company has made their own proprietary symbols for each of these, and those are the ones (as shown in the examples above) that StockTwits will be using. As more are made by SecondMarket, StockTwits will add them to their system. SecondMarket has completed some $300 million worth of transactions involving these private stock sales. And there is currently over $30 billion in assets available on the market — thanks largely to companies like Facebook and Zynga which will undoubtedly go public sometime in the next few years. Those two companies and others — like Pandora, recently — have fueled the explosion in interest in these non-public tech stock markets. And StockTwits is smart to attach itself to this wave. Get tweeting about that hot $TCRH stock. CrunchBase Information StockTwits SecondMarket Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase

A couple days ago, I wrote a post wondering if it wasn’t time to change Facebook’s social graph dynamic ? Specifically, I called for a simplified system that had two layers: your friends and your followers. I think that their current social management system which relies heavily on friend lists is highly flawed. And guess what? Mark Zuckerberg agrees. Tonight at a Facebook Developer’s Garage meeting at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg fielded a question about the service’s privacy controls. He said that the ideal solution for sharing different things with different people is to make a friend list. “ But guess what? Nobody wants to make lists ,” Zuckerberg admitted. Exactly. While the idea behind friend lists is great, for the average user (in other words, 99 percent of Facebook’s 500 million users) it’s simply not something they’re going to do. Or even if they make them at first, it’s not likely something they’re going to keep up with. Facebook has tried to lower the barrier to entry a few times ( most recently a couple days ago ) but they are still simply too time-consuming to set up and maintain. My solution is the two tier system: either someone is a friend and you have to accept them as such. Or they’re a follower — meaning they can opt-in to following your public updates without you having to okay them. When you update on Facebook, there would then be a big switch to decide if you want something to go to just your friends or to your followers (which would include your friends). I see no reason why there couldn’t be an option to use lists that further filter things beyond that. But friend/follower would be the main list/function that everyone used. Zuckberg is clearly thinking a different way to solve the lists issue. He thinks it still has to be something like friend lists, but done a different way. He noted that they have to come up with a way for people to control each thing they want to share, but do it in a way so that the tools are really easy to use. Again, even with such a vague statement, I’m worried that this is going to be too complicated. To be fair, it’s an insanely difficult problem Facebook is facing — and Zuckerberg knows it. He notes that after over six years of adding various privacy controls over features, things became “really hard to use.” But he still believes in the idea of sub-groups of friends because the average user has something like 50 friends now — and people who use Facebook more often, have a lot more. Those users might not want to share all their information with even just those people. Or worse, he noted that ” the people who you are most afarid of seeing [some item] are on your friends’ list .” He also spoke to the fundamental idea of friending someone and them accepting it as what they need to look toward going forward. He also believes the problem may simply come down to design. Again, the idea behind friend lists is correct in his mind — it’s just the implementation that isn’t. I still like my idea. CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase

Up until a few months ago, I was using Facebook the same way I was using Twitter. That is, I was allowing anyone to follow me. But it was different. With Twitter, anyone can follow me without my approval. On Facebook, everyone needs my approval. Though perhaps ill-advised, I was simply blindly approving anyone. Then I stopped. There was no single reason why I switched my Facebook habits, but I decided that I was going to start using the service the way Facebook made it seem it should be used: befriending only actual friends. I was a bit more lenient — I friended anyone I’ve actually met in person. Everyone else? Gone. I purged several hundred people, cutting my “friends” in half in one day. But now I’m realizing that’s not good enough. With the launch of Facebook Places, there’s a lot of talk about it being creepy or a potential security nightmare. I think all of that is and will continue to be largely overblown . That said, I’m also sure there will be legitimate causes for concern with the feature — but mainly because people aren’t using Facebook the “right” way. Nor do I think Facebook actually wants them to. You see, Facebook really did used to be all about friends. As in, your real-life friends that you could connect with online. But in their drive to be the center of the social web and promote sharing (of links, of data, of information, of everything), Facebook is mutating. The problem is that the original social graph isn’t built for this mutation. And we’re going to see that very clearly with things like this new location element. Facebook wants us to share things more openly, but with Places, they have launched a feature that most people will want to keep close to the vest. They can’t have it both ways, right? Well, actually they can. But they need to fundamentally change the way their social graph works. It’s a move that would be controversial — but hell, all Facebook moves are controversial. I think ultimately, this would be very beneficial — to both Facebook and the users. Facebook needs to adopt a friend/follower system. What I mean by this is that there needs to be a two-tier system for Facebook. On one level, you have the things you share with your friends. On the other, you have what you share with your followers (including your friends). To some degree, you can already do this. But it involves befriending everyone and using Facebook’s convoluted lists to distinguish your real friends. No regular user is going to do this. Ever. Or, you can use the “everyone” setting (now the default) in your status updates. But I’m still not clear that anyone ever looks at these “everyone” updates besides Facebook, advertisers, and search engines. Facebook needs to allow you to have followers to make this data meaningful. There should be a simple switch or button on the Status area (and not in some drop-down) that lets you determine if what you’re about to share should be with your followers or with only your friends. And the default should be to share with only your friends (unless you change that in the settings). Basically, this would morph Facebook into Twitter on one level, and back into the old Facebook on the other. I’ve brought this up before — but again, things like Facebook Places are making this more important. And it needs to be simple. Currently, the Facebook privacy settings remain a nightmare. Things need to be simplified further — into a followers or friends sharing scheme. All people would be followers unless you marked them as friends. And again, all updates would be done with a big, clearly-labeled switch in the update area — do you want to share this with FRIENDS or FOLLOWERS? It needs to be crystal clear. Others actually have this sort of system in place. One perfect example that isn’t widely used is Foursquare. The app has a little-known “celebrity mode” feature which allows famous people who sign up for the service to have both friends and followers. Followers are people that you don’t have to explicitly approve, they’re just following you if they choose to. Friends, you still have to explicitly approve. With each check-in, you can chose whether to send the update to just friends or to all those followers. It’s so simple that I almost can’t believe Facebook isn’t doing it. Since my great Facebook purge, I’ve noticed interaction on the items I post to my profile has gone way down. This is obviously because I have half as many people reading these updates but also likely because many of the ones I purged were followers from Twitter or elsewhere on the web who were more accustomed to the idea of interacting with stuff I share. I miss those people. But again, I wasn’t actually “friends” with these people, so I’m not sure I want them seeing my location updates or pictures from my vacation. I’d like them as followers, that I can interact with if I chose to. I know, I know. Fan pages. Facebook fan pages are bullshit. Pure and simple. The fact that Facebook makes you create another profile page that you have to update entirely separately is just lazy. Worse, these pages are crippled. There’s no good way to bring tweets into them (though you can pump them out from the page), nor is there a good way to share your content. They’re just awful. A hassle — nothing more. So again, why not just befriend everyone and use the lists to managed who can see what? Because that’s also a hassle. And there’s the ridiculous 5,000 friend limit. Can you imagine if Twitter had that? It’s simply time for Facebook to evolve the social graph. If they want to be the social center of the sharing web, they could do that with such an option. Forget the silly “everyone” button — move to the follower model. Allow people to opt-in to following others but allow that user to determine if they’re actually a friend, and as such, open to more information than a regular follower. Obviously, this is more complicated than I’m making it seem. But it really doesn’t seem all that complicated. It would just mean a changing of the social graph once again. It would be messy at first. It would mean backlash. But ultimately, I think it would truly make Facebook the center of social sharing. Until then, all these other networks are going to stick around and continue to grow. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I like the idea of Facebook taking it to the next level. I like the prospect of a network with over 500 million users being open to the concept of following. We would all gain a lot of new followers and also find a lot of new followers. More importantly, we would all gain and share a lot more information. It would be a better-designed Google Buzz with 500 million users built-in. It would be a richer Twitter with five times the users. It would be a preemptive Google Me-killer. It would be great. CrunchBase Information Facebook Twitter Google Information provided by CrunchBase