An ongoing discussion at Column Five HQ is ”What if social media manifested itself in real life?” It’s a question that addresses much of our personal and professional lives and can be characterized as constant noise, new trends, and the occasionally absurd, among other things. And while most of our commentary tends to evolve into abstract tangents, we decided to focus on one application of the hypothesis. We settled on the idea of “What if you lived in an apartment building with social media?”, but that proved to be a mouthful. So we simplified this title to “What if social media sites were your neighbors?” Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts.
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In their 1991 Pulitzer-winning book The Ants, E.O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler described an ant colony as a super-organism – a vast social network. The ants in the colony communicate with each other by following chemical trails left by other ants. As we browse the web today, we are provided with social proof of quality by sites that let us know what our trusted friends have liked or shared recently.
When we made some of our first forays into the social web, in an attempt to promote a now defunct blog, we did what most anyone did in 2007 – we tried to figure out how to leave enough bread crumbs around to entice people who we certainly don’t consider to be ants to actually come to our site and then share with their friends to point the way back to the content, and all signs pointed to one place. We heard exciting mythical tales of a beastly site known to send enough traffic to wreak havoc on servers (which sounded like fun for some reason). Back then, if you figured out what worked on the mysterious creature known as Digg, you were able to send your content for a cascading ride to linkbait glory.
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Twitter adoption among U.S. Internet users has increased by leaps and bounds. A recent Pew Survey of 2,277 adult internet users reveals exactly who is tweeting.
