First some good news: you can now share virtually anything through Twitter. Thanks to the efforts of Shea Bennett and the Twittercism blog i’ve been alerted to this new Filesocial thing that lets you upload stuff, link it to your Twitter account and Tweet it all over the place.

Shea has his reservations because of the ease with which people will be able to share bad stuff. Malware, porn, race hate files, you’ll be able to share that just as easily as any of the genuinely interesting stuff people are wont to show others using the network. Personally I’m less concerned about that; we all get time-wasting and inappropriate emails, it was going to happen on Twitter one day, we’ll deal with it.

No, I’m concerned on two fronts. First, Twitter’s great selling point has always been its simplicity - there’s an announcement, maybe a link, you have to be brief and you can chat and reply a bit. That’s it. I love the fact that a five year old could handle the basic idea. Add files in, then maybe later a bit of file transfer, and it starts to look like something else. This might not matter to many people and I could so easily be wrong, but abandon the simplicity of Twitter and for many people I suspect you’ll be abandoning its prime usefulness.

Second, it’s another step towards everyone expecting everything free of charge. I have no idea how the Filesocial people are going to make this pay. That’s their business and not mine of course, but like YouTube which currently doesn’t pay its way and so many other social networking ideas, there is no proven financial model that makes this sustainable as yet. I’ll be delighted when such a model emerges, but in the meantime do excuse my being a bit of a curmudgeon - I’m looking at this and many other things as free only temporarily. When it’s clear whether I’m going to have to pay or accept loads of advertising on my site or whatever then I’ll be in a position to evaluate whether I want to use them in the longer term.

Tags: twitter, twittercism

Reviewing other people’s books when you have one coming out in a very similar area - and for what it’s worth Penny Power’s effort outsold mine by a very considerable margin in pre-publication sales and I’m expecting very much the same thing when mine is actually released - can look dodgy. The temptation is to try, subtly, to undermine your competitor’s work.

It gets even worse as a pastime when you have to admit that your competitor has done rather a good job. Penny Power is of course the founder of eCademy, one of the earlier social networking sites and one which predates the ‘social networking’ name. As such the book she’s written is about a personal journey as well as doing business. She looks not only at how to create value online and how to engage with people (and let’s be honest, social media books that tell you how to do that are many at the moment) but also how we got there, the thinking that has made this new way of doing business possible and how she built her own company in this new environment.

It’s a very different approach from any I could have taken - only a handful of individuals could have written a book like this and I’m glad Penny Power has done so. It’s as much about cultural history as a business book and all the better for it. If you’re only going to buy one book on social media then, er, mine please! But if you’re going to buy two, this is definitely the other one you should get.

DISCLAIMER: The above link to the book goes through my Amazon Associates account. This has in no way biased my review.

Tags: social media