Content creation and Social Networks

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Content creation and Social Networks both fulfil our need to communicate with others. In one case we are working on the long form and creating content in blog form, photographs, well produced videos and more and through certain social networks we do the opposite. On twitter and facebook we spend most of our time writing two or three sentences at a time. These posts are quickly out of date.

Content creation in the form of article writing, blogging, well produced video, photo essays and more take time. You need to think of an idea and you need to think of a narrative. You need to find 300 words of content. You need to find at least two or three minutes of content if not more. If you challenge yourself to create this content then you see why facebook, twitter, vine and other short or quick social sharing platforms are so popular. It also explains why Geocities and other platforms eventually implode.

According to recode Twitter is making a huge video push — and tweaking Vine’s six second limit in the process.

The move is also symbolic of Twitter’s willingness to change elements of its product that have become part of its identity. Last month Twitter tweaked its iconic 140 character limit to get people tweeting more. Now it’s tweaking Vine’s six second video restriction, too. Former Vine boss Jason Toff (who left in January for Google) told
Recode last fall that Vine’s video limit was not “overly sacred.”

Vimeo differentiated itself from other video sharing services in that it showed that it wanted high quality edited videos rather than rushes like we used to find on Google. In the last few months the quality of videos on youtube has really increased. There are a number of gameplay, engineering, fitness videos, how-to instructional videos and more. Finally Youtube is a source for serious content. We will see when Vine, Snapchat and other video services establish the same reputation.

Letter writing and blogging are similar. Recently Documentally started letter writing again. These “letters” are newsletters written every friday and sent by e-mail to a small number of people. I too have started “letter writing” but as blog posts. The beauty of “letter writing” is that we can write when we have time rather than when people are available. As these are asynchronous people can read what we wrote ten minutes or ten years from now. Now that instant messaging style social media conversations are sent back to the history books we have a greater freedom to choose where we share content.