The attention bubble
Today I got an email from a friend who closed his LinkedIn account. He (like me and Pascal a few days ago) considered the time it takes to be part of this community vs the reward he gets, and decided it was not worth it.
As our time becomes the most precious resource we have, the millions of web pages competing for our attention are becoming a problem. Early adopters – the canaries in the coal mine? – are reacting, arbitrating between all their time consuming actions. When I lost my mobile phone two month ago, I almost didn’t renew my subscription. It’s only after I got blamed by a client who was trying to reach me that I decided to re-order a mobile. Email? I am increasingly forcing myself to only answer them once a day. I let the flow of information get in anytime, but I stack all the answers together, trying to get in a more productive flow once a day to answer. Best practices are coming together to counter the overflow. We just need to create them.
But there is something here, and it’s big. Will the masses ever reach this point of saturation? Will this crash web 2.0?
Update: Steve Rubel is describing the same phenomena today on Micropersuasion in a clearer and more elegant way of course.
June 11th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Laurent … Hear hear …. I cancelled my Twitter account for similar reasons. Scoble has been writing about this, as has Marc Andreeson. Then there is the “4 hour work week” book, from Tim ?.
I read recently about Dunbars Law, and the theoretical max number of contacts one person can manage.
June 12th, 2007 at 1:40 am
What i notice is simple: Dopplr comes, it’s private but there is some buzz and suddenly i have 8 contacts in one week. None of those fellows has contributed to Dopplr of course. Just some simple contact requests. It’s clear that it doesn’t help to cool down things. Why is it such a situation. WE WANT EXCELLENCE. And you want it too. So don’t say that this attention is not value, experience & satisfaction. What will crash web 2.0 is the economy, the global economy. That’s all.
June 12th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Colin: yes, there is a physiological limit somewhere I’m sure. I heard we could manage up to seven threads in our brains, not more. And that seems a bit high already.
Raphael: no idea what you want me to say but ok ok, cool down, I’ll open a new Zoomr account to stay in the quota to deserve web 2.0 coolness ;)
June 12th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Lau – you don’t mention RSS here (and I know you’re almost as addicted as I am). How do you deal with this huge time-sucker when the trade off to reducing it is being less informed (and therefore potentially less effective in your business)?
June 12th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Marco: my experience is that when I missed reading my RSS (like when coming back from vacation and not reading 10’000 items) I didn’t really miss much. I think being less informed is not a proble, as it usually means you are better informed.
June 14th, 2007 at 7:27 am
Funny and not so funny. As time goes by I ignore all the nice bit-gadgets (twitter et. al.) and what not more and more, and then again have my sporadic attacks of broadcasting overflow every once in a while just to blow off some steam.
But I am also not opening up my bloglines or endo everyday. I read the newspaper occasionally. When I need up-to-date information it is easy to get and I get it quickly.
To me this is simple, the novelty is wearing off, the enfatuation is gone, and now we are getting back to that which matters to us. Gee… surprised to find out that it is not xing or facebook?