another thinkpiece: automatic presence vs. real presence

On August 6th, 2008 Henriette Weber wrote:

So I have been thinking about yet another thinkpiece - and when Mads posted this morning about real/unreal - I couldn’t help myself starting to write it.

I think what we look at here, is a question between “automatic presence” vs. “real presence”…

Automatic presence is where apps aggregate all your content (basically you can put everything you have in there)… there’s some new lifestreaming stuff coming up as lifestream.fm, ping.fm and identi.ca…

These are good for - if you need to have all your content in one place… and you don’t want to add it all yourself.

the great thing about this is that:

1. as a person it makes a “real” impression of who you are
2. as a company it really makes sense to use this as a form of marketing - it’s great for that..

the bonus is that you don’t need to do anything to be present there.. But they are still aggregators, and in my Point of View aggregation works best if you have something that you also aggregate in your mind.. ( thoughts - putting the best of you out there etc)

Anyway - as I have argued before, these apps are not a community - they are status messages and they show your presence. Nothing more…

now “real presence” is something where you actually need to contribute with something else than your statusmessages and yourself to actually gain whuffie and to be a part of the community..

which is something I preach a lot - you can’t be a real part of a community if you are not present, no matter how many of your RSS feeds you drag into it.

and Whuffie is possibly what we can measure automatic presence vs. real presence in. You don’t get that much Whuffie for automatic presence- unless - I would say, you combine it with real presence…

Real presence = whuffie… real presence + automatic presence = more whuffie… automatic presence: not that much whuffie =)

[aggregation, aggregators, automaticpresence, community, identi.ca, lifestreamfm, pingfm, real, realpresence, RSS, status messages, twitter, unreal, whuffie] [1 comment]