A report from Forrester also finds that behaviors online are shifting-

The executive summary states (verbatim):

While social technology behaviors are at the center of many strategy discussions around the globe, the focus should be on the changes in consumers’ adoption of these behaviors. Consumers continue to sign up for and interact on social networking sites, but other social behaviors that require creating content have seen no substantial growth in adoption since 2009. In fact, some behaviors have experienced attrition. In metropolitan China, for example, Joiners saw an increase of 18%, while Creators decreased by 3%. This report uses the Social Technographics® Profile system to examine global changes in consumers’ adoption of social technologies.

Human nature changes gradually, so further growth in Creator behavior will come much more slowly than in the past.  This will cause marketers and those who produce social tools to focus more on how social content is consumed rather than how it is produced.  In fact, there is already evidence of this trend—look at Twitter’s new Web interface, which doesn’t change how people tweet but instead makes it significantly easier to consume others’ tweets. Look for other social tools to follow suit, offering new ways to make tweets, blog posts, product ratings and other social content easier to find, read, use, save and share.

There is one behavior that is not plateauing, nor is it likely to stop growing for some time: Joiners.  These are people who maintain a social networking profile.  While growth in other behaviors have stagnated, Joiners grew again from 2009 to 2010.  As social media has become a major communication channel for many people, it becomes hard to avoid for others.  Even those with no intent to share continue to join so they can keep in touch with friends, children and grandchildren. Today, avoiding social networks is about as easy to do as avoiding email—it’s possible, but it comes at a substantial cost in terms of relationships and knowledge.

Curate, collect, and prioritize online content with Curated.by- http://www.curated.by/

PSFK says:

Proposing to help resolve the need for real-time curation is Curated.by, a soon-to-launch Twitter curation tool that facilitates cataloging and sharing collections of messages on any topic. How it works: create a collection (say, ‘networked objects’) and drag related Tweets into it, or use the service’s new Chrome Extension to curate Tweets right from Twitter web pages. You can then share your collections, embed them on a web page and subscribe to the collections of other users.

Curated.by will let you mix multiple media together – not just Tweets – and an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface will allow for reordering and prioritization. It will also be embed-able in blog posts, so that content tracked by Curated.by can be distributed back into Twitter and Facebook.

Curated.by seems to understand how people use the web and current tools like Twitter to inform themselves, how they share this content with others – and the value to be found in curating a prioritized, organized and real-time pulse on a particular conversation. We’re curious for Curated.by to officially launch so we can try this for ourselves.

(content pulled directly from PSFK here)

Alix Co. extension: bundles/pods will grow to include: the latest, the greatest, trusted, today, yesterday, emotionally based, rationally based.

I awoke this morning to a newslettered note from The Cool Hunter (TCH). It’s a nice read and I thought I would share-

“Why do you read TCH? Does it inspire you to create, start a business, design a product, improve an idea? Does it make you want to innovate or imitate? Does it inspire you travel, or live in another city or country?

Do you need someone else to tell you your product/idea/execution/brand is great? We say don’t worry what anyone else thinks, trust your own judgment. When others doubt, be confident in your vision. Stop waiting for the perfect time to do what you want to do. Just go for it and do it now.

Don’t’ follow fashion trends. The most fashionable thing you can be is to be you. Travel the world, live in other cities, learn cultures. Learn because it keeps your mind young. You don’t need a university degree to be successful, although it may be helpful, but don’t do it because your parents – or you? – have status anxiety. Stop whining about it.

But what you do need is vision, tenacity and confidence in what you do. Do what you love now. Switch topics or schools now. Don’t wait till the last year of your education to realize that this isn’t your path. Listen to your heart, it knows what makes you happy.

If your job sucks, stop blaming others, your boss, your parents, the universe. Just quit and take responsibility for your own choices. It’s not about the sucky job. It is about you being in the wrong place. There’s never a better time than now.

Start doing what your mind has been ticking away for you to do for years. Take risks. Be in a relationship that flows effortlessly. Trust your gut feeling. Intuition is strong and powerful.

Stop smoking, invest in your body, get off your ass and exercise. If you’re an entrepreneur , don’t spend all night on your projects. Practice balance and time management and have a life. Your family and kids are wondering why you aren’t home for dinner, again. What a waste of your time.

Have the tenacity and focus to execute an idea no matter how daunting it may seem at first. Have the confidence in what you’re doing even when others doubt. Create opportunities for yourself. It is time for you to step up.

Here at TCH, we practice what we preach and we learn something every day. Everything we feature here on TCH, is based on intuition. We don’t care if you or anyone else don’t like it or agree with what we feature. If we did that, we’d go insane and TCH would be fake and boring and bland.

The coolest thing you can do is doing it.” – Bill Tikos

I’ve compiled some reading on this topic. All content in this post has been pulled or directed from Jeff Jarvis’ blog BuzzMachine.

Jeff Jarvis is hot on the topic presenting the benefits of publicness in his new book, Public Parts (due out in 2011). He believes in our current privacy mania we are not talking enough about the value of publicness. And, that if we default to private, we risk losing the value of the connections the internet brings.

He describes the value as including (and, I quote):
* Publicness makes and improves relationships. To make connections with people, you need to be open and share. When you decide not to be public, you risk losing that connection.
* Publicness enables collaboration. That’s the beta lesson: When you open up your process, you invite people to help you improve what you’re doing. It is also, of course, the lesson of open-source.
* Publicness builds trust. Secrecy doesn’t.
* Publicness kills the myth of perfection. That is, when we open our process, we are showing our faults and are no longer held at every moment to the myth of perfection that has come to rule our industrial-age processes.
* Publicness disarms taboos. Publicness was the daring weapon gays and lesbians used to tear down their closets. I’m not saying that people should be forced out of their closets; that is their choice. But I am saying that when they do, it faces down the bigots who made homosexuality a taboo; it disarms them.
* Publicness grants immortality. (Note to Andrew Keen: That’s a joke.) Publicness at least grants credit and provides provenance for ideas and creation.
* Publicness enables the wisdom of the crowd. If we all keep our information, knowledge, ideas, and lessons to ourselves, we lose collectively.
* Publicness organizes us. Cue Clay Shirky. Speaking and assembling go hand-in-hand as rights. When we stand up and say who we are, we can find others like us and do things together.
* Publicness protects. This will be controversial but the knowledge that one’s actions could be public have an impact. That’s why I’m not against cameras on Times Square to thwart the next bomber.
* Publicness is value. This is an argument I’ll make that what’s public is owned by the public — whether that’s governments’ actions or images taken in public space — and whenever that is diminished, it robs from us, the public.

Also, on topic is an article from Time (Web Privacy: In Praise of Oversharing, 5/20/10):

“Fundamental, privacy is about having control over the flow of information,” the social network scholar, Danah Boyd, argued in a much-discussed speech this spring at Austin’s South by Southwest conference. “It’s about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul.”

“…talking to strangers is different from handing over a set of your house keys. We’re learning how to draw the line between those extremes, and it’s a line that each of us will draw in different ways. That we get to make these decisions for ourselves is a step forward; the valley is a much richer and more connected place than the old divide between privacy and celebrity worship was. But it is going to take some time to learn how to live there.”

Lastly, is a seven minute audio from an interview on The Takeaway on the topic ‘Privacy in the Time of Facebook’ (5/20/10) with Jeff and Amber Case. Amber is a cyber-anthropologist and tech consultant. She explains how social networking sites have redefined privacy, identity, and the way we interact with others.

I recently signed up for the SmartBrief on Social Media and already I can tell that the timeliness of my social media know-how is increasing. Here’s a taste of what you’re in for if you subscribe to the SmartBrief…

First:
Twitter plans to roll out a free real-time analytics dashboard in the fourth quarter. The phased rollout will show users information about how their tweets are spreading and who is influential in their network.

Alix Co thought: It is going to be much ‘easier’ now to understand the pods and nooks and such. I’ve begun to sing, “…come together, right now, over me.”

Then:
Seeking to throw cold water on a rumored “Facebook phone,” Mark Zuckerberg has given a lengthy interview discussing his company’s mobile strategy and plans. Facebook will put more resources into mobile social tools but aims to create a cross-platform layer of social tools, rather than enter into direct competition with any particular hardware or operating system, Zuckerberg said. “Our goal is not to build a phone that competes with the iPhone,” he added. “… It is really important for us that people understand what the strategy is and that the real approach is to make everything social, not to build a vertical approach.

Alix Co. thought: Ah ha! If social is horizontal then it has the potential to be everything to everyone. The guardrails have yet to be established. This resonates. We have to be mindful though that these guardrails will eventually be established. The segmentation snapshot will then look like those of newspapers or today’s TV channels. Breadth does not mean depth. The depth comes from the connection. Today, we are establishing and building latent connections. We’re gaining more ‘across’ than ‘down’. Potential of such connections is to be realized.

Also:
“Our strategy is very horizontal. We’re trying to build a social layer for everything.” -Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, as quoted by TechCrunch

Alix Co. thought: Is everything social?