You need to use social services to understand them

I thought this was going to be about social services like welfare and food stamps, and how people don't understand the reality of those services unless they've been in a position to really need them. That could be a great article.

I was one of the people that was very gung ho about Twitter's role in the Iranian Election brouhaha. I recently got an email from a friend linking the Gladwell post with the underhanded "Look at how wrong you were" statement.

There's nothing wrong with being wrong (albeit in a very public way), but my response was this: Even though Twitter may not have played as direct of a role as the media was portraying, it was the open, decentralized nature of new social media/communication that made it so much harder for the Iranian government to strangle what got out. These sorts of protests have been going on for a while in Iran, but those of us in the west have never had such an intimate, play-by-play look at it until the 2009 elections. That's how we got pictures of Neda shot to death, stories about the Basij wreaking terror at night, and so on, practically in real time.

Sure, most of us have forgotten about it and moved on (I haven't; most of my extended family is in Iran), but the level of coverage and fostering of connections just means the next time something happens, support from the rest of the world will be stronger (which I can personally say is extremely encouraging to my friends/family in Iran -- they've felt isolated, until now). Yes, I wasn't on the streets in Tehran, but I was helping some of them coordinate and communicate with shells/proxies/tunnels/etc.

I think at this point, a better interpretation of the phrase "The Revolution will be Tweeted" would be that in this day and age, if anything is happening anywhere, it will be tweeted about as close to real-time as possible. Iran is "lucky" in this sense, they have a fairly modern communication system. Imagine if live streams of the atrocities in Darfur or North Korea were up on Twitter. These causes could emerge from being momentarily trendy to actually being a subject of intense worldwide criticism. And then maybe something good will become of it.

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This seems to me to be one of Apple's key weaknesses right now: who among Apple's top folks is involved in social? There was a big furor when @forstall joined Twitter... he's up to 33,000+ followers, still with zero tweets. Does Steve check his Facebook all the time? I don't get the feeling that he does, based on what I see from Ping.

I've worked under too many decision makers who think that placing a Like button on something is a pivotal business model move, or adding a share button will magically make content go 'viral' -- these concepts are best understood by those who practice them, not by those who create a blog or Facebook account as a point of presence.

I use twitter extensively all day long, and I still agree with Gladwell. The author of this post seems to misunderstand Gladwell's point. Of course you can make new friends and business contacts online, including via twitter, which become strong real life bonds. But can you get 6,000 of your followers to face down riot police ? Not likely. Gladwell is not talking about establishing a few dozen close contacts a year. He's talking about motivating vast numbers of people to make serious sacrifice and commitment around important issues. As it stands we can barely get enough people to vote.

I remember a time I was sitting in a restaurant run by some Egyptians, watching a satellite channel aimed at the middle east.

There was a show on that was something like "American Idol"; they listed numbers that you could text to, in different countries, to vote for your favorite music videos. One country was Iraq... And i'm thinking, the majority of these people must be really pacified, not jihadists, if you can get them to send texts to vote for music videos.

This is the exact reason that I ignore any article or blog post announcing that the author has quit Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or any other social service. If you're quitting you're not seeing the benefits. The people who continue to use the services are reaping the benefits.

Since starting work for CompassLabs, I find myself using more social networking sites as a learning experience.

There are two social networking sites that I have been using long term: Twitter (I follow people who post very interesting links) and LinkedIn (for me, just because it is fun: I have reconnected with a lot of people who I used to work with).

This is necessary but not sufficient. I use facebook but I still don't get what is the point of using it.

Aside: I initially misinterpreted the title in that I thought "social services" referred to public welfare programs. However, it brings up an interesting question: does the statement still hold? Is it necessary to use public welfare programs to understand them properly?

When I last checked, my main account (@TweetSmarter) had more retweets (lifetime) than the main New York Times account (@NYTimes).

The real reason why? My wife and I offer Twitter advice through that account to anyone who asks...and a lot of people are really confused out there.

Chris makes a good argument, but there are counterexamples. It's well known that Ron Conway doesn't use these services. PG's a pretty good counterexample too, though he did finally dip a toe into Twitter. Ok, two toes.

I was sold on social media when I asked a friend about Square's encryption via twitter (he was ecstatic about it), and got an answer directly from the top in response.

My friends always ask why I pull out my phone whenever we go somewhere. I'm hesitant to explain "oh I'm checking into Foursquare" because I don't want to get them hooked too

Basically I agree 100%. There's no reason to tweet or check-in places but once you start it's pretty difficult to go back. Although maybe I'm just a secluded Twitter addict

And you need to be poor to understand and effectively help the poor. And you need to be a minority to understand the problems minorities face.

Yes, participating in something or belonging to a group helps one understand it, but participating and belonging are not pre-requirements to help and understand.

When I first read this title, I thought "Why is Chris Dixon on welfare?"

You can make distractions for the masses or you can consume them; ya can't do both. If you have a thousand telephones that won't ring, then social networks are a great way to get suckers to sell your garbage to each other with as little effort as possible. They're the internet equivalent of reality TV: The content creates itself, so it's cheap to run; product placement through aspirational, voyeuristic relationships are the paradigm; topics are vapid, memory is fleeting. Gen X mostly understands this, but we're basically irrelevant to the marketers -- actually, in most cases now we ARE the marketers, which might explain why we have a better handle on it. But Gen Y seems to have an impossible time grasping the idea that they're being used by all these neat little tweets and likes. They've got an insatiable appetite for short-attention-span candy. It's easy fishing if you want to profit off it; they're like a bunch of trained goldfish in a perfectly transparent tank. Total advertising saturation has apparently done to our culture what it was intended to do: Replace genuine interaction with a series of tailored sales pitches, in a Truman-Show-like fashion.

I guess the question now is, what do we do with 30 million kids who can't write a complete sentence? And the correct answer is: War.