The rise of social media usage has undoubtedly changed the way we communicate, but does it mean that the art of conversation is dead?

Paul Harrison gave his views on this to BBC Radio this week. He believes that rather than social media tools hampering our ability to talk, we are now able to participate in a more global conversation. Yes there is a certain amount of inanity on social sites (Paul too was questioning the value of his beer-related tweets during a bbq this weekend) but that aside, there is a tremendous amount of value to be found in our wider online conversational abilities.

Paul also discussed how we unconsciously give away private information on social sites. As we mentioned in a previous blog, we should be mindful of our privacy settings and ensure that we think about the impact (preferably in advance) of what we post online.

You can listen to Paul’s interview with BBC Radio in full here, from 49:11 into the broadcast:

Over the last few hours we’ve seen the newish Twitter lists feature disabled and vanish from our screens only to return again apparently completely back to normal. It caused ‘Twitter Lists’ quickly became a high trending topic and quite a lot of concern for many.

During the outage I spent some time meeting with Brenton Cannizzaro from an amazing digital agency in Adelaide, enpresiv, which came about entirely from a Twitter connection and my inclusion on one of his lists. Whilst I’ve now got his business card and therefore his personal details, prior to that, the only place I had stored his details were on Twitter - if they vanished, so too would Brenton from my database.

All is obviously good now with Twitter Lists and it was only a tiny window of downtime but, it got me thinking about what would happen if:

a) Twitter lists never came back

or

b) Lists returned but some of the people on it had been deleted or altered in some way

All that hard work categorising your friends on Twitter, creating a list that had just totally vanished and there’d be little you could do about it because you don’t have any control over Twitter.

It also reminded me I’d promised to post some highlights from Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith so this first one fits perfectly:

The authors talk about the importance of social networks and working at connecting with people on the web as a means of increasing opportunities for you / your business / organisation.

You Live or Die by Your Database

This section discusses your own personal database of connections, the representation of your personal network in a searchable form. Even if you’re a cog in a corporate machine, if you’re not in the business of building your own database of contacts, then you have to start. Now.

…one’s personal database was an asset as valuable as gold, if nurtured and maintained.

However, they stress it is important to maintain your own database away from online platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Why?

Because you can never fully trust that your database online will be accessible, that your account will stay up, and that your data or account won’t become corrupt.

To us, storing a local copy ensures that you control the database at all times. If, as we say, you live or die by your database why would you trust a third party with its ultimate intergity.

So, the short lived AWOL Twitter Lists are back but what would happen if your LinkedIn contacts vanished? If you’d like to start your own personal database, here are some tips from the book that might help you get you started:

What should go into a personal database?

• First name
• Last name
• Title
• Company
• Email
• Phone number (preferably cell phone)
• URL
• State/Province where you reside
• Notes

Written by Sarah Thomas, Managing Director, Carve Consulting (Australia)

I just discovered Gary’s social media count (when I saw his tweet that it has, quite literally, been an overnight success - 400 RTs in last 24 hrs). The awesome little app shows just how amazingly fast the social web is constantly and rapidly growing:

Here’s a bit of background from Gary Hayes blog post about the count below:

More about the Count - I quickly built and coded the app based on data culled from a range of social media sources & sites at the end of Sept 2009. The design will be finessed and I will be adding extra functionality (such as week, month & year lookahead/backs plus dynamic data input).

The social web has exploded in the last year and below are some of the key data points that the ‘Gary’s Social Media Count’ is based on (many will be updated!).

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)

• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)

• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)

• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)

• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)

• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)

• UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!

• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)

• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)

• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)

• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)

• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)