The Magic of the Feed and the Follow
With a stack of business cards in tow, besides sending follow-up emails, one of the next steps for those coming back from a tradeshow, e.g., the just completed Affiliate Summit West, will be to figure out where to add this person digitally. The vast majority of contacts will by default go into the virtual "Add to LinkedIn" box, while some others will receive friend requests via Facebook. In our industry especially, we have yet to meet someone who doesn’t use both LinkedIn and Facebook. It would be a fun experiment to see the overlap in contacts, because clearly it’s not a one to one correlation. While some people might send both a request to connect on LinkedIn and a friend request, we’d have to assume that more people than not segment their digital lives to a degree. All cards can receive LInkedIn requests but not all cards will receive friend requests.
Despite their differences, LinkedIn and Facebook share quite a few similarities. It comes as no surprise that as one figures out a useful feature, the other will integrate something similar if it makes sense. The two handle different audiences, but their core function remains the same – managing connections and creating tools for connecting, tools that when successful, increase our use of their site. One such feature is the feed. Log-in to either page, and you start by being able to see the activity taking place in your network. From where did this really come? The concept behind the feed, for us, owes itself to the blogosphere and the producers of long-form content. In our opinion, that world, started the trend we see today. The world of long-form content showed the power of syndication. If it didn’t create, it certainly enabled an alternate form of consumption.
Prior to syndication in this fashion, sites had visitors from search engines or, in certain cases, an email address with which to send a newsletter. Thanks to RSS, sites had a new way to share their updates with users, and users had a way to get content without feeling as though they had given up any personal information, namely the email. The problem, is that consuming content this way, while powerful and easy, is still niche-y. It requires some way to read the content off the site and a working knowledge of RSS. This brings us to Twitter. Twitter could go away tomorrow. It won’t, of course, but if it did, the folks behind Twitter did something to fundamentally alter the way in which we use the web and how other services structure themselves. They took the idea of a connection, which up until this point had either meant being friends or having the person join your network, and created a less personalized paradigm, the follow. (We could subscribe without needing a separate reader or knowing about RSS)
The difference between friend, connection, and follower are subtle but powerful. It’s exactly why we don’t add everyone to LinkedIn that we do to Facebook and vice versa. The advent of follow de-coupled the networking component. On LinkedIn or Facebook, it’s one metric. On Twitter, it’s two – who you follow and who follows you. Doing one does directly impact the other. What is so compelling out about follow is that it made expanding the network less personal. Follow is a soft-touch action just as clicking the "Like" button on a site is. Twitter’s model makes it even easier. Following doesn’t give a lot of access. It gives just one – the ability to see what a person writes. Unlike Facebook, connecting doesn’t mean sharing or having to manage what you do and don’t want to share. Also of note, follow creates a one-way relationship. It doesn’t equate to an ability to interact. In many ways, follow is RSS 2.0 but for short-form content. It’s the mechanism by which we can subscribe as well as syndicate. The brilliance of following is that it isn’t binary. A site doesn’t have to offer friendships or follows. LinkedIn still revolves around the network, but it has integrated following. Imagine if follow had been called "subscribe." That sounds like such a commitment. Follow was the perfect choice for what is no different than a subscription, but worlds apart from one in people’s mindset. That is what really matters, the capturing of human behavior and the understanding of the psyche so that people know what to do, and do it.
Feeds and following is not about the creation of some new technology; just the understanding of how to use them in new ways is what continues to evolve. Facebook took the concept of a feed mainstream. Twitter made it active. Now, others are taking the best pieces to make their services more informative, interactive, and powerful. Two amazing examples are Quora and Angel List. Neither will win any award for design, but all of these businesses have taken best of breed from Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn and added steroids. Just like Facebook, it’s function over form. These and the future winners have figured out how to unlock user generated content in a manner that avoids the original stigma. It’s amazing that something seemingly so simple could redefine how we use the web
