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Category social media:

In the last couple of years, Facebook has eclipsed MySpace as the world’s most popular social networking site. Facebook now has 95 million active users, compared with only about 65 million on MySpace.

What’s more interesting than these numbers is the way that users of the sites appear to break down along demographic lines. In an NPR story that aired on 10/21, students at an elite private high school in San Francisco explained that Facebook is “safer and more high class” than MySpace, which is “trashy.”

Another group of San Francisco teenagers—the mostly Latino, mostly lower-income students in an art class at a community gallery called Southern Exposure—had a different take on the difference between the two sites. As 19-year-old Diego Luna put it,

“I have friends who are white . . . They are my white people friends and they are mostly on Facebook. That’s why I use Facebook. My brown people are on MySpace.”

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I’ve been doing some reconnaissance reading about Twitter—why people use it and what they perceive its value to be. I am interested in what seems like an inherent paradox: Twitter is so widely and gleefully embraced as a tool for self-promotion (boost your audience, boost your sales, build your personal brand), and yet the prevailing wisdom on how to be an effective and popular Twitterer always seems to warn against being too . . . self-promotional.

The truth is, your followers want more than reminders about your upcoming public appearances and links to your glowing publicity (or merchandising tie-ins). In other words, they don’t just want to consume your product, they want to be connected to you. It seems they want what London-based blogger Leisa Reichelt calls Ambient Intimacy:

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible [. . .] Twitter tells me when [the people I follow are] hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.

Who cares? Who wants this level of detail? Isn’t this all just annoying noise? There are certainly many people who think this, but they tend to be not so noisy themselves [. . .] There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances.

Knowing these details creates intimacy [. . .] It’s not so much about meaning, it’s just about being in touch.

In keeping with this idea that the most appealing and satisfying Twitterers are those who offer their followers some form of genuine two-way engagement, plus thoughts, ideas, and content that are not directly related to the Twitterer’s personal gain, check out this Mashable mega list:

Literary Tweets: 100+ of the Best Authors on Twitter

*As a side note, it’s great to see that two of the general fiction authors mentioned are not-so-distant graduates of the MFA program here in Missoula, Montana.

Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Story of a Marriage (2008), The Confessions of Max Tivoli (2004), The Path of Minor Planets (2001), and How It Was for Me (2000):

Amanda Eyre Ward, author of  Love Stories in This Town (2009), Forgive Me (2007), How to Be Lost (2005), and Sleep Toward Heaven (2004):

 

 

Humans seem to be attracted to visions of great change, whether social, religious, or economic, especially during periods of instability. Publishing is not immune. With people reading fewer books and spending more time on the Internet, and with paper books, long the preferred container of long narratives, beginning to give ground to ebooks, there is a lot of speculation about what is going to happen to publishing.

Among the most interesting publishing visionaries today is Richard Nash, formerly editorial director of Soft Skull Press. Nash is one of many people who think traditional publishing is broken and needs to be replaced by the new tools and social habits of the twenty-first century. In Nash’s view publishing has to stop selling books as objects (wholly opposite to the current fetish of the object in literary publishing) and consider a different way to get writers and readers together, especially on the Internet.

Nash outlines that different way in a recent Publishers Weekly article. According to Nash, except for the 500 best-selling books, which will be published on the Hollywood blockbuster model, the future of publishing will be based on niche social communities. Reflecting this vision, Nash is starting a new publishing venture, Cursor, which will contain a “portfolio” of online membership communities to which people can subscribe. The first two will be Red Lemonade, a “pop-lit-alt-cult operation,” and charmQuark, a “sci-fi/fantasy community.” Nash explains these communities in Publishers Weekly.

Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions—and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Nash is looking for investors, so we’ll have to wait a while to see Cursor in action.

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