Technology

SXSW: Social Networking Fatigue

AUSTIN (CBS 11 News) ― CBS11TV.com Web Producer Anna Gonzalez is attending SXSW. She's there covering it as a journalist, but she's also a fan of a lot of the stuff there. These reports are her impressions of what she's seeing. 


I think I have social networking fatigue.

That's a buzz phrase I've heard floating around the Austin Convention Center.

Social networking sites like Facebook.com and MySpace.com are great because you can connect with people in new ways. But some people feel like they are obligated to stay connected.

Keeping up with each person can get overwhelming, especially when you have hundreds of friends on multiple different sites. That's when people can start to develop social networking fatigue.

During the "Global Mood Ring" panel, Drew Davidson, program director for the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon, said he was obsessive-compulsive about replying to every single request he received on his favorite networking site. It consumed a lot of his time.

That's why Davidson said he and his friend Charles Palmer, also from Carnegie Mellon, developed HowDoYouFeel.org (the site is not live yet). Davidson said they wanted to create an "anti-social networking site." They asked themselves, "How can you connect to your friends with just one click a day?"

Davidson wanted something that had a low time commitment, but was still highly rewarding. That's when they brought in Patrick Curry, a game developer for X-Box 360. Curry suggested that people should earn points for keeping up with HowDoYouFeel.org.

Here's how the concept works: If you tell the site how you feel, just one click a day for ten days in a row, the site will start to get to know you. After ten days, for example, it will ask for your gender. If you choose to answer, a whole new data set will open up to you. Now you can see how all users are feeling that day based on gender.

Once enough people start using it, users can see, for example, how the whole city of Dallas is feeling on a particular day. How is the world feeling? How are your friends doing on a Monday? How are 45-year-olds feeling today? And so on.

So far they said they have noticed the general mood on the site is low when the weather is bad. The idea is just to have fun and to develop a data set based on emotions. They call it "an experiment in art and technology."

When it was time for the audience to speak, what I found interesting was that most people wanted it to be more like a social networking site.

One man asked if there could be a blog associated with the feeling so he could explain why he was feeling a certain emotion on a particular day. Another person wanted to be able to connect with his friends who, for example, were all feeling blue that day.

And I found the same to be true on a panel of successful bloggers and political movements. People in the audience who gave public feedback said they still wanted the same social networking tools available to them on every Web site they frequent.

So even though we like to throw around words like social networking fatigue, I think that the bottom line is we're still trying to figure out how to effectively use the web to better communicate face-to-face. People are starting to learn that you can't spend all your time in front of a computer, but how do we jump out of our comfort zone?

Can the internet help us become more outgoing? Can it solve social anxiety? Should we just scrap it all together and start over?

The truth is, no one knows what we're doing online. But we're all learning together, as an unseen community. 

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