A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a restaurant that would be a good local place for a longish meet-and-greet meeting*, and I reached out to my social circles on Facebook and Twitter.

* In the end, we ended up at Paul Martin’s American Bistro in El Segundo.  It was a suggestion from my friend Paul.  Great choice!  My pork ribs were very tender and tasty, but the real star of the night was the halibut with creamed corn and bacon that I kept stealing from Lynn’s plate.

My question generated over a dozen comments on Facebook, but got exactly zero responses on Twitter.

That’s interesting.

I don’t think it means Facebook is better than Twitter for getting questions answered, but I did find it interesting that the same question generated such different results.  I have a few thoughts on why the difference.

I don’t have a very large group on either account — 250 or so friends on Facebook, 250 or so followers on Twitter — so this is by no means conclusive.

1) Different types of social graphs

My Facebook social graph reflects my real life graph better.  I only friend people I know in real life (have met face to face) or work with closely (have had extensive contact).

So for my particular question about a good local place, Facebook was more likely to give me a useful answer because a lot of my friends on Facebook are local folks.

2) Facebook is designed to be  more intimate

I find that people use Facebook for more personal sharing — true personal status updates.  That makes updates more mundane, but because only your friends see them, they are also much more compelling.

I use Twitter more like a broadcast medium.  I find that a lot of the people I follow do that too.  It’s hard to have a real conversation on Twitter.  Personally, I get bored of Twitter streams that have too many @replies, and I don’t like doing it myself.  I’ll usually DM or email someone if they ask me a question on Twitter. I don’t think we need to bother everyone else with our little conversation.

I don’t understand this revamping of the search UI by Yahoo.  I’m pretty ambivalent on whether their selling out to Microsoft is a good or bad thing. Yeah, it sucks that the search space is down to two players, but whatever. Yahoo’s never been that great at the engineering side of things.  They are, however, a great content/media company.  They should just embrace their strengths and stop trying to fiddle (unsuccessfully) with the geeky stuff.

So this is what happened today:  idle blog reading, leads to following link in the comments, leads to finding material written 4 years ago, leads to learning lots of new stuff.

I’m finding that this happens more often these days.  Gotta love the blogosphere!

I’ve learned more from idle blog reading in the years after college as I did in the years I spent sitting in those lecture halls at UCLA.

45% of employers check social networking sites before hiring (NYT)

I’m surprised the number isn’t higher.  An employer is doing themselves a disservice by not checking online for mentions of a potential hire before offering them a job.

The survey mentions social networking sites, but doesn’t say what percentage of hiring manager just do a simple google search.  I wouldn’t specifically go to the social networking sites.  I’d google a potential hire’s name and see what comes up.  Their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles should be on the first page, unless they have a very common name.

One of the commenters on the NYT article says,

Why don’t HR people try doing their JOBS instead of using stupid social media sites to screen candidates?? Spare me. What laziness.

I think the HR people who are doing Internet searches as part of the screening / hiring process are actually doing their job better.

Compete’s July newsletter highlighted the explosive growth of TweetMeme in the last 3 months.

Aggregator site Tweetmeme crushed it in July, ramping traffic by 85% month over month to 11.8MM UVs, suggesting that there is some real value in combing through the noise and offering consumable information.

I’ve been hearing for over a year now that Twitter is the social news killer.  That the future of sites like Digg and Reddit is to succumb to Twitter.

TweetMeme’s rapid growth is the first real evidence I’ve seen of it.  But this evidence is compelling!

TweetMeme provides those retweet buttons that bloggers can embed on posts so readers can quickly RT the link.  TweetMeme also tracks how often the link is retweeted.  On their homepage, they show the hottest links being tweeted.

Looking at the Compete charts below, there are a lot of people are going to tweetmeme.com to find interesting news/links. In the last 6 months, TweetMeme has gone from basically zero to nearly 12 million unique visitors.

(Click the images to see the full size.)

Tweetmeme.com Unique Visitors Last 12 Months

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s compare TweetMeme’s 12m visitors to Digg. They still have a long way to go, but if TweetMeme continues on this trajectory, they could catch Digg in 6 months.

Tweetmeme.com vs Digg.com Unique Visitors

Just for kicks, let’s compare some other social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Delicious and Stumble.

The Reddit and Stumble lines closely overlap. (I don’t know if Compete tracks the Stumble toolbar. Probably not. These numbers look way too low.)

Look at how TweetMeme has already surpassed Reddit. And it’s growing like crazy and the other social news sites are staying relatively flat.

TweetMeme vs Digg vs Delicious vs Reddit vs StumbleUpon

I just watched this quick 20 minute video of Clay Shirky from TED.  It’s a talk he gave titled “How social media can make history“.  Or how it already has made history.

TED is doing an awesome job with their video presentation (in a technical sense).  I love that there’s a transcript to the video on the video page!  Even better, it’s interactive! You can click on a phrase to jump to that spot in the video. Very very neat.

The video itself also has subtitles.  You can click the “view subtitles” link in the embedded video player to see it in action.  Again, very cool.

Watch the video below or click here for the video page.

Couple of interesting points I want to remember, so I’m writing it down here.

1. Only five bona-fide revolutions in media.

1. printing press: allowed mass dissemination of information.
2. telegraph / phone: instant voice communication.
3. music / movies: recording of audio/visual for mass distribution.
4. radio / television: control of the air waves. Instant mass distribution of audio/visual media.
5. Internet: mass distribution and instant feedback/communication.

2. Boring technology.

It’s not the cool tech that’s changing the world.  It’s the tech that has already become boring.  In Africa, instant communication isn’t happening on Facebook or on Twitter.  It’s via SMS.  Everybody has text messaging, but not everyone has an Internet connection.

It’s humans that make changes.  So the tech isn’t useful until it’s commonplace and is accessible to the masses.

Flat World Knowledge is a really cool implementation of Creative Commons. They publish textbooks that instructors can customize and students can read for free online.

The textbooks are written by experts. Instructors can customize them for their own classes. They can add, remove and rearrage chapters and even sentences.

Students can read them online for free or choose to pay for other options like print, download for self-print, or audio books. Prices are around $40 — much less than the $150 college students are currently paying for textbooks.

The UI for reading online is pretty good.  Nice use of javascript.

Unfortunately, there are few titles available. There is currently less than 20 textbooks in the catalog, and they’re all business related. There are another couple dozen slated for this fall and next year.

Hopefully they can put the $8 million raised this spring into many more titles soon. Even though I’m no longer a student, I can’t wait for more textbooks to come online.

(Bonus: the site is powered by Drupal.)

Dave Winer said:

Everyone should start a hyperlocal site. It’ll give you fresh eyes for: 1. Blogging and 2. The place you live.

I completely agree!

The second reason — getting to know the place I lived — is why I started Culver City Beat.

I think hyperlocal is where the next big wave of probloggers will go.  It’s a huge global market with thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of municipalities that don’t have local bloggers covering them.  Besides, it’s a lot easier to be noticed writing about your town than writing yet another blog about iPhone apps or problogging.