The second guest blog post about social media and online communications predictions for 2009 is by John Breslin:

The two tools that I’ve found most useful for sharing information online this year would have to be the "Twi-ns" (non-identical!): Twitter and Twine.

I’ll talk about Twitter as my "favourite social media tool of 2008" and share some details of Twine, describing what I hope to use both tools for in 2009.

My Most Effective Online Media Channel In 2008

Twitter, the world’s favourite microblogging site, is great for getting a snapshot of what’s going on/interacting with your community or communities of interest. It’s a bit like what we had a few years ago in terms of Irish blog aggregators, where you could scan the headlines of all Irish blogs and have a feel for what was going on at a particular point in time, except on steroids.

One of the advantages of microblogs is that people can talk about a greater range of things, since they are more likely to talk about a variety of diverse topics in multiple microblog posts that are limited to 140 characters as opposed to a writing a longer single blog post (that would look ridiculous if only 140 characters were used!).

In fact, this also makes it a bit more interactive due to the back-and-forth conversations that result when someone looks for clarification of what is in those shorter status updates, but it is also more conversational because everyone is using the same service and there are less delays logging on or filling in profile fields as you would have to do to post a comment on someone’s blog.

A disadvantage is that the momentum of Twitter is now such that you have to keep checking back much more regularly to be kept up-to-date with everything that’s going on or to find those hidden gems of information or knowledge.

If you are subscribed to a few hundred people it makes it difficult (impossible even) to see all that is relevant since even the most interesting microbloggers won’t be talking about stuff that is interesting to you all the time. Also, the -bad.html" target=_blank>removal of outbound SMS notifications for non-US residents was a big blow to us here in Europe, just before those Bebo-addicted teens could figure out how they could blast all their friends with status updates for free!

(You can read my blog report of Tim O’Reilly’s interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams from the Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo last year here, and there’s also my recent blog post about celebrity twitterers and other famous tweeple.)

My Most Significant Learning In Relation To Online Engagement And Communications In 2008

I really like Radar Networks’s Twine, the "knowledge networking" application that allows users to share, organise, and find information with people they trust.

People create and join "twines" (community containers) around certain topics of interest, and items (documents, bookmarks, media files, etc., that can be commented on) are posted to these twines through a variety of methods. I personally find Twine very interesting, and as well as using it to ed-online-communities" target=_blank>gather information about SIOC for regular blog entries I write (the "tales from the SIOC-o-sphere" series is about the latest happenings in the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities project), I also use it to collect and publish personal interests that I think will be of use to the public, and for passing on interesting stuff to work colleagues via private twines.

As well as producing semantic data for reuse elsewhere (just stick "?rdf" onto the end of any twine.com URL), Twine features some cool functionality that elevates it beyond the social bookmarking sites to which it has been compared, including an extensive choice of twineable item types, twined item customisation ("add detail") and the "e-mail to a twine" feature, all of which I believe are extremely useful.

(You can view my blog report on a presentation that Nova Spivack gave about Twine at SemTech 2008 in May, and see the slides from his keynote speech during the BlogTalk conference.)

Areas of Online Engagement And Communications I Will Be Exploring In 2009

I intend to use Twitter a lot more to build a community of interest around the SocialMedia.net
blog I run, by using the @socialmedianet handle more in 2009 and also by connecting and interacting with the social media mavens and gurus on the site.

There is huge, huge competition for attention in the social media news space, with many people considering themselves social media experts, so it won’t be easy.

Luckily, I have some relevant experience, and I hope to add attract other senior bloggers to post on the SocialMedia.net website in 2009.

My Predictions For Online Engagement And Communications In 2009

On the Twine site, I think that there is great potential in the community aspects of twines. I hope that these twines will act as "social objects" that will draw you back to the service, in a much stronger manner than other social bookmarking sites currently do (due to Twine’s more viral nature, its stronger social networking functionality, better commenting, and a more identifiable "home" for these objects).

Of course, having more public users will also help Twine now that it is out of beta, but from experience I know that it was a good idea to do what they did and build on a core group of regular users (in Twine’s case, mainly techies) before increasing their user base too much.

ABOUT THE GUEST BLOGGER

John Breslin is a lecturer in the College of Engineering and Informatics (Department of Electronic Engineering) at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He leads the Social Software Unit at DERI, the world’s largest Semantic Web research institute, and established the SIOC project for interlinking communities via semantics (Ref: Wikipedia article on SIOC).

He is also co-founder of boards.ie, Ireland’s most visited social website (Ref: Wikipedia article on boards.ie), and the Irish Internet Association presented him with Net Visionary awards in 2005 and 2006. He has blogs at both JohnBreslin.com and SocialMedia.net, and microblogs under the handles @johnbreslin and @socialmedianet.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Access the first guest blog post of the 2009 online predictions series by Marc Congiusta HERE.

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