Twitter and Us

A few weeks back, I wrote about how we'll share content-- video, music, photo, text, etc.-- as social technology evolves, and I made the point that among our primary validators will be our friends.  I'd like to expand that a little, to say that, already, our primary validators-- the people who we let tell us what's worth looking at-- are individuals, rather than institutions.

In the past, for example, newspapers editors were the people who decided what was important, and it was the brand of the newspaper that lent credibility to their recommendations.  In the online, socially networked world, in which we all have incredible new capabilities to personalize the content we see, the validators are increasingly individuals, and it's the individual's brand that people are drawn to.  You might read Ezra Klein, but not the Washington Post; you might follow Alec Ross on Twitter, rather than reading what's being written about the State Department; and you might hang on Ashton Kutcher's every musing. It's all about individual people.

All this is to say: my Twitter handle, @GlobalMobileNDN, has felt increasingly irrelevant and out of step.  So I'm switching exclusively to my personal Twitter handle, @swdp. I've done a little switcheroo, so if you follow @GlobalMobileNDN, you'll now be following @swdp.  If not, I hope you'll become a follower!