The Facebook page lists about eleven billion examples of The Lick. Here are some of my favorites.

Miles Davis, “Two Bass Hit” — John Coltrane plays it at 1:15 and 1:39.

John Coltrane, “Impressions” — listen at 3:11.

Coltrane again, “On Green Dolphin Street,” at 1:32.

Freddie Hubbard playing “A Love Supreme” at a Coltrane tribute concert — 0:16.

Sonny Rollins on Miles Davis’ “It’s Only A Paper Moon” at 2:25.

Sonny Rollins, “John S” at 1:51.

Grant Green, “Nomad” — Bobby Hutcherson plays The Lick at 4:12, 4:46 and 4:53.

Charles Mingus, “Peggy’s Blue Skylight” — Joe Gardner at 1:34.

The Lick doesn’t just belong to jazz. Stravinsky uses it in “The Fire Bird” — listen at 14:43.

The Lick is a pop and rock staple too. Player uses a variant of it in “Baby Come Back” — listen at 0:13.

Santana plays yet another variant in “Oye Como Va” — listen at 0:17.

Akon sings The Lick right at the beginning of “Just A Man.”

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of four versions of The Lick, all transposed to A minor for clarity.

These few variations on The Lick only hint at the richness of explosive diversity you can find on the Facebook page. The Lick is one of those musical memes, like the Amen break or the “Egyptian” melody, that can adapt itself to a seemingly limitless variety of circumstances. There’s a lot of debate on FB about whether a given phrase counts as The Lick or not, since many of the examples stretch the time or alter the pitches, or both. These debates are a lot like the ones biologists get into around taxonomic issues, whether a given fossil is a dinosaur or a bird. The Lick mutates and evolves exactly like a gene in a population of organisms. You can think of The Lick as being like a single gene that codes for a single protein, functioning as part of a larger musical genome, a tune or a solo.

We come down hard on artists who use cliches too much, and praise others for originality. But if iconoclastic musicians on the level of Coltrane use The Lick so heavily, how bad can cliches be? Too much originality is an obstacle to creating emotionally resonant music. Coltrane’s last albums were by far his most original — you’re not going to hear too many cliches on Ascension or Sun Ship. But I find those albums challenging at best, and most people find them unbearable. Coltrane’s best art is based on familiar materials — showtunes, folk music, the blues. The best art doesn’t avoid cliches; it owns them, personalizes them and transforms them. I say, long live The Lick.

Facebook

I’m no great lover of FB, but I have a lot of friends and family who I can’t easily be in touch with any other way. For better or for worse, FB is a major center of social and informational gravity, a major feature of the landscape, and for all our complaints about privacy, I don’t see us abandoning it en masse.

Flickr

Despite Yahoo’s neglect, this continues to be the internet’s most wonderful image storage and sharing tool, bar none. All the graphics I create for this blog live on Flickr, and the community there continues to be a lively one.

Google+

I don’t really know what to do with this yet, or whether I’m all that committed to it. I mostly just repost my blog posts and music there if I want to widen their reach. I don’t follow other people’s posts either. Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Instagram

This frivolous-seeming iPhone app has turned into a steady source of creative gratification for me. Nine times out of ten I’d rather take Instagram photos than carry around a real digital camera. The iPhone is an awkward camera at best, but the pleasure of the filters and the instant sharing overcomes the app’s limitations. I automatically send all my photos to Tumblr and Flickr.

LinkedIn

I’m not as active in the LinkedIn groups as I should be, since Quora scratches that itch for me more effectively. But the news feed is intermittently interesting, the job postings are easy to use, and it’s a handy way to keep my professional contacts in one place.

Quora

My favorite web thing of the moment. It’s ostensibly a Q&A site, but it’s also been a rich source of blog inspiration, a networking tool, a social game and a bottomless source of amusement. It fills some of the hole left by the decimation of my Delicious network. Enjoy it now, while it still has a high signal to noise ratio.

SoundCloud

Out of all the music sharing tools I’ve tried, this is the winner. Its embedded player is attractive and elegant, the timed comments feature is a nifty one, and it has a lively community. It plays very nicely with Tumblr, Facebook and Google+ too.

Tumblr

I initially regarded Tumblr as a toy, a source of amusing internet memes and pictures of strange animals, but as I follow more people there, it’s becoming steadily more substantive. I’m starting to find full-blown essays and news there that I don’t see elsewhere. Also, the steady stream of science imagery is a daily pleasure. Effortless one-click reblogging is still the killer feature. Not too many people I know in real life follow me on Tumblr, so I automatically send all my posts there to Facebook — I wouldn’t anyone to miss a silly internet meme or picture of a strange animal.

Twitter

While Facebook is good for being in touch with people I know, Twitter has been the best tool for me to get connected to people I don’t know. I’ve even made some valued real-life friends there, as well as a bunch of valuable professional connections. But mostly it’s a hub for ideas, news, gossip, hip-hop slang and pop cultural amusement. As the saying goes, Twitter is the golf course for geeks. I mostly access it via Hootsuite.

WordPress

This blog continues to be the hub of my online life. I might post fragmentary or partial ideas elsewhere, and then they mature into complete thoughts here. Quora has been a really good source of blog fodder recently, and my old blog posts have been getting new life as Quora answers. A happy synergy.

Miscellany

I use Instapaper constantly, and not just for offline reading — it’s a good way to make web pages more readable on the iPhone, especially Wikipedia articles. I didn’t list it here because it’s not really social, and I don’t publish anything on it.

I still make nominal use of Delicious, but it’s fallen far out of the regular rotation.

I stream everything to FriendFeed, purely for SEO reasons.

My wife is addicted to Metafilter, and I look in on that from time to time, but haven’t had the brainspace yet to participate. I get a ton of traffic to my blog from Stumbleupon and Reddit, but again, don’t have the bandwidth to participate in those sites.

I started out using Delicious for its intended purpose, bookmarking. Then I discovered that between the tags and the notes field, it was a spectacular notetaking tool. Over time, I built up a network of around a hundred other people. My Delicious use became 10% archiving and annotating links I planned to refer to later, and 90% social linkblogging. The experience became almost Quora-like.

Not that Yahoo ever did anything to encourage the social aspect. Some people made it easy to identify themselves, and I was able to connect with them on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. But most people didn’t, and to this day there are users whose writing and linkblogging I followed on a daily basis, and who I have absolutely no way of contacting.

At some point, an informal tradition emerged known as “Delicious whuffie,” named for the reputation-based currency in a Cory Doctorow story. People started tagging their bookmarks “via:username” to indicate the source of the link. Someone even made a whuffie bookmarklet that automatically added the via tag. Then Yahoo made some behind-the-scenes changes, and the via tags stopped working. The social aspect of Delicious was at that point pretty much broken beyond repair.

Meanwhile, the social web continued to evolve. I now have some other tool for almost every Delicious use case. I use my blog to gather and annotate important links. I share trivia and amusing ephemera on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. I network with like-minded strangers on Twitter and now Quora. But none of them have totally replaced my Delicious network, which has been scattered to the four winds by Yahoo’s ineptitude.

One of my favorite finds on Delicious is C. Maoxian, an American finance guy living in China. Every day he posts dozens of items relating to finance, investment, real estate, and expat life in China. Just from reading the headlines of his posts and his witty comments, I get an excellent overview of these topics that I know little to nothing about. Every so often I’ll click through a link and read the whole story, but mostly Maoxian’s summary is enough. Since he uses the same handle on Twitter, I follow him there, too, but it isn’t the same — 140 characters just doesn’t do it for his style of writing.

So what do I want the YouTube guys to do? Make Delicious more like Quora. Make it social. Make it personal. Make it fun. Introduce voting and reputation. Make it like Twitter but with depth. Introduce archiving of pages you link to, so if the original page gets taken down you can still access its contents. Let us log in with Facebook or Twitter or Quora identities. Keep innovating and iterating. Be the anti-Yahoo.

Original post on Quora

You have one identity… The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

How nice for Mark Zuckerberg that he doesn’t feel the need to keep any part of himself private. Zuckerberg doesn’t have an identity outside of his work, which is common enough in Silicon Valley startup culture but is neither possible nor desirable for most of us. When family members have illnesses, or friends are feeling down, or I’m thinking or feeling something that doesn’t reflect well on me in that moment, how is that any of my coworkers’ business? Zuckerberg understands human psychology very well within the context of college and startup culture, but Facebook is an increasingly poor fit for the complexities of my social life.

Steve Cheney writes:

Facebook is no longer a social network. They stopped being one long before the movie. Facebook is really a huge broadcast platform. Everything that happens between its walls is one degree away from being public, one massive auditorium filled with everyone you’ve ever met, most of whom you haven’t seen or spoken to in years.

In her essay “Facebook and Radical Transparency,” danah boyd articulates the disconnect between Zuckerberg’s values and everyone else’s.

Silicon Valley is filled with people engaged in self-branding, making a name for themselves by being exhibitionists.

In internet startup culture, typically you’re extremely proud of the work that you do, and you commit to it completely, immersing yourself in it. By the same token, you work so hard that you don’t have time left over to have other aspects to your personality. If your whole identity is wrapped up in a product that you’re proud and eager to get the word out about, what could be the harm in total personal transparency?

The problem is that most of us don’t completely identify with our jobs. We have aspects of our lives that we aren’t eager to share with everyone we encounter.

A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping.

If Facebook wanted radical transparency, they could communicate to users every single person and entity who can see their content. They could notify then when the content is accessed by a partner. They could show them who all is included in “friends-of-friends” (or at least a number of people). They hide behind lists because people’s abstractions allow them to share more. When people think “friends-of-friends” they don’t think about all of the types of people that their friends might link to; they think of the people that their friends would bring to a dinner party if they were to host it. When they think of everyone, they think of individual people who might have an interest in them, not 3rd party services who want to monetize or redistribute their data. Users have no sense of how their data is being used and Facebook is not radically transparent about what that data is used for. Quite the opposite. Convolution works. It keeps the press out.

This sounds exactly like the privacy policy for the social networking tool I’m dreaming up in my head. And I’d rather just charge users money up front so there’s no financial incentive to share data.

In his essay “Confusing *a* public with *the* public,” Jeff Jarvis takes Facebook to task for not understanding that there are many different degrees of “public” and “private.”

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg seem to assume that once something is public, it’s public. They confused sharing with publishing. They conflate the public sphere with the making of a public. That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private. Therein lies the confusion. Making that public public is what disturbs people. It robs them of their sense of control—and their actual control—of what they were sharing and with whom (no matter how many preferences we can set). On top of that, collecting our actions elsewhere on the net—our browsing and our likes—and making that public, too, through Facebook, disturbed people even more. Where does it end?

I disagree with Jeff Jarvis about Twitter.

In Facebook, we get to create our publics. In Twitter, we decide which publics to join. But neither is the public sphere; neither entails publishing to everyone.

Twitter does entail publishing to everyone unless you set your tweets to private. Each tweet is a page on the open web, indexed by Google. It’s a short-form blogging tool. That’s what I like about it. I’m intending my statements there to be read by any stranger who cares to tune in. I love Twitter, I enjoy it and derive tremendous practical benefit from it. But I also want something private, something for home truths and expressions of heartbreak and anxiety and frank discussion of medical issues. Twitter certainly isn’t that. Facebook could be tediously configured into that using lists, but even if it’s technically possible to use it that way, it feels wrong. It retains flavor of the dorm room, and that’s not a setting that I feel comfortable using for serious emotional issues.

I want to build something better, maybe on top of Diaspora. Who wants to join me?

The images in this post are visualizations of my Facebook friends by Ivan Kozik’s Nexus app.

Kirkpatrick had one significant advantage over the makers of The Social Network: participation by Mark Zuckerburg. Kirkpatrick loves Facebook and reveres Zuckerburg, so his book isn’t exactly a hard-hitting expose. Techcrunch accompanies their review of the book with this image:

I don’t think Kirkpatrick is wrong; Facebook is an undeniable phenomenon and Zuck is a remarkable guy. I just don’t love FB as unreservedly as Kirkpatrick does.

Facebook as revolutionary tool

Kirkpatrick sees Facebook the way Clay Shirky and other tech utopians see Twitter: as a tool for overthrowing dictators. FB was conceived as a way to organize meeting your friends at the mall, but Kirkpatrick observes that it can be used to organize them to do more ambitious things too. Events in Egypt would seem to bear him out. However, Kirkpatrick later mentioned that FB is every bit as useful to law enforcement and other government entities. Detectives go to FB as their first investigative stop, and Mubarak’s secret police used FB to monitor dissidents and spread misinformation for years before the protest movement took off. So it’s a little simplistic to see FB purely as a way to stick it to the man.

Kirkpatrick sees FB first and foremost as a broadcast medium. A normal person doesn’t have, or want, the kind of genuinely public profile that suits Twitter or blogs. Most people are only writing online for an audience of people they know personally. FB is the first broadcast medium that automatically distributes content across your social network — you just post stuff and an algorithm handles the rest. FB’s algorithm has become opaque lately and it’s hard to figure out why a given item appears or doesn’t in my newsfeed, but the essential point remains valid.

Facebook games

FB is the biggest game platform in the world, by an enormous margin. Zuck and company were apparently quite surprised by the success of games in FB. It didn’t surprise their investors, though. I went to a talk by Reid Hoffman a few years ago and asked him if FB would ever charge money. No way, he said; the big money is going to come from in-game purchasing of virtual goods. While it seems insane to me that anyone would buy a nonexistent cow in Farmville, buy them they do. Facebook’s cut of Zynga’s revenues currently comes to about a million dollars a day, and there’s no reason that number can’t grow dramatically.

Facebook ads

Zuck doesn’t much like advertising. According to Kirkpatrick, the movie does get that aspect right; Zuck resisted introducing ads into FB early on, and even now, the ads are much less obtrusive than you might expect for a commercial web entity. FB is the most targetable advertising platform of all time. Zuck apparently hopes to have FB ads be so well-targeted that they’ll actually be a welcome presence in your life. That’s sweet.

I don’t know that FB ads will ever be useful, but I do expect their targeting to continue to get more precise. Google’s inferential targeting methods are comparatively blunt; they don’t even get your gender right a quarter of the time. FB knows your gender, age, relationship status, profession and more, and they know all that information about your friends too. This enables the kind of laserbeam demographic specificity that marketers have long yearned for.

What is Mark Zuckerburg trying to accomplish?

Kirkpatrick understandably wasn’t too impressed with The Social Network. He thought the “Mark Zuckerburg” character in the movie was a more accurate portrayal of Bill Gates. If anything, Kirkpatrick thinks Zuck is even more focused and ambitious than Gates, and while Zuck isn’t as profound a technical thinker, he does understand psychology a lot better. (I was unsurprised to learn that Zuck’s mom is a shrink.)

Zuck wanted to change the lives of college students, and there’s no doubt he’s accomplished that. Zuck now wants to change everyone’s life. Kirkpatrick doesn’t say why, or to what end. He means to be admiring, but he ends up making Zuck sound like a Bond villain. I think Zuck has done a great job making it easier to keep touch with your acquaintances and other weak ties. But FB isn’t the medium I’d use for any serious connection with people close to me. Pushing FB’s users to make their posts more public and more accessible to advertisers doesn’t exactly foster genuine emotional expression. FB is a staggeringly effective way for me to share witty banter and mass announcements, but I wouldn’t want to carry on any serious intimacy there.

I have no doubt that Zuck will get his wish to see FB become ubiquitous. The US has the most FB users because it has the most internet users overall. But there are other countries where FB users represent a much higher percentage of internet users. These are the countries where the internet is first and foremost a cell phone experience rather than a computer experience, and FB is one of the big drivers of smartphone sales. In Asia, you can get an FB-branded phone, and there’s been discussion of introducing something similar in the US.

Whatever is motivating Zuck, it isn’t (primarily) money. He’s certainly had ample opportunity to cash out. Three years ago Microsoft offered Zuck fifteen billion dollars for FB. Now, of course, Zuck will end up being worth a lot more than that, so maybe he is motivated by money after all, but still, imagine turning down that kind of cash before you’re twenty-five.

In the village, there is no privacy

Kirkpatrick cites the startling fact that as of a year or two ago, a majority of humans are living in cities for the first time in history. He sees FB as a way to return to village life. My early months with FB were a surreal and thrilling reunion with people I knew from every age and stage of my life, many of whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years. It’s nice to have mobility and freedom to come and go, but it means that my friends and family are scattered around the world irretrievably, and that can be hard on the emotions. FB brings us back together like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.

So that’s the good. The not-so-good is Zuck’s outspoken commitment to forcing transparency on our internet interactions. Since secrets are increasingly difficult to keep in the internet age, Zuck no longer sees a point in trying. This is the exact point where I depart from him. Zuck has the chain of causation backwards — FB is one of the major factors making it harder to keep secrets on the web, but I don’t see where that gives Zuck permission to unilaterally change people’s privacy settings to make it harder still.

Of course, no one has to join FB. But surely there must be some happy medium between having everything I type into the internet be public and not typing anything at all. I can reasonably expect my bank account to be private, and my e-mail. Is that naive? Maybe I’d like a forum to be able to talk about what’s going on in my life in a way that people close to me can access easily and that others can’t. I thought FB would be that forum, but I was wrong.

Strategic self-commodification

Jacqueline Maley, writing in The Age, observes:

[N]othing that occurs in people’s lives, as represented in social media, is disappointing or mediocre or even just neutral. Indeed, life, as reported on websites like Facebook and Twitter, is never merely good or mildly pleasing. It’s fabulous. It’s wonderful. It’s amaaaaazing.

The more people I get connected to and the more public my posts are, the less substantive my activity on FB becomes. At this point I mostly only use it for innocuous jokes and trivia. I can’t imagine using FB to write anything vulnerable, or self-doubting, or angry, or really anything too personal. That severely limits the usefulness of the site for me. All my interactions on the site are starting to feel like advertising, of myself, my associations, my ideas. I don’t like that feeling. It’s not that I have any problem at all promoting myself online. I’m perfectly happy to practice strategic self-commodification on LinkedIn and Twitter and even on this blog. But being surrounded by my fellow villagers, slick self-promotion feels weird. It certainly is annoying when my friends use FB to market at me, and I’ve had to unfriend a few of the pushiest ones.

Resistance is futile

Whatever my misgivings are about my privacy, I still use FB every day. It’s an effortless way to share links and news, and much as I love Flickr, if I want a photo to get seen by people I know, I’ll put it on FB. (They get fifty million photo uploads a day right now.) I like seeing what my friends are doing and thinking, and I enjoy bantering with them. And for my loose ties and casual acquaintances, it’s easier for me to write FB messages than to try to keep track of email addresses, much less snail mail.

I know several novice internet users for whom FB is their entire online experience. FB likes that idea and they plan to run with it. Right now FB search is pretty lame, but Kirkpatrick expects them to dominate search someday. They’re planning some sort of tremendous e-mail service that would gather every interaction you’ve ever had with someone into one big thread. (Yes, but will it have BCC? That’s all I’d ask.) FB evolves constantly and fast, and so its growth is unpredictable. All I can say with certainty is that the growth isn’t going to slow anytime soon.

Back in the nineties there was a thing called groupware. Kirkpatrick astutely observes that groupware was the business precursor to FB, and that it had tremendous potential to change the nature of business. In studies, Lotus Notes and the like were shown to meaningfully improve productivity. But groupware never really took off on a grand scale. Kirkpatrick thinks it’s because middle management felt threatened by the hierarchy-flattening properties of social tools. Now social media has arrived in the enterprise, whether middle management wants it there or not. Plenty of big companies block FB on their intranets, but that doesn’t keep people from using it on their phones. Smarter organizations are trying to bring an FB-like functionality into their workflow by rolling out tools like Chatter and Yammer.

FB isn’t likely to dominate enterprise settings, but I do expect it to become omnipresent elsewhere on the web. For all my skepticism about FB and privacy, I’m relieved when I arrive at a site and discover I can log in using my FB profile, rather than having to create yet another login/password pair. I’m even happier when I can use my Twitter handle for that purpose.

Kirkpatrick doubts that any company poses much of a threat to FB. Google might dominate search right now, but social search is going to be more important in the coming years than algorithmic search, and Google hasn’t shown much adeptness at getting people to tell them about their social connections. While the Goog might be jealous of FB’s ubiquity and possible future search dominance, the two companies need each other. FB is going to sell a lot of Android phones in the next few years. Kirkpatrick describes a lot of “3D chess” going on between Google and FB, and Microsoft and Apple too. But he doesn’t see anyone seriously rivaling FB in the social world. A bigger challenge will come from governments, who may decide that they want control over their citizens’ online identities, and that it’s time to crack down. Until then, I, for one, welcome our new social network overlords.

The panel:

• Moderator: Jeff Leeds, Editor in Chief, Music, Buzzmedia
• Angel Laws, Founder and Editor in Chief, ConcreteLoop.com
• Jessica Suarez, Writer, Stereogum
• Tamar Anitai, Senior Editor, buzzworthy.mtv.com
• Rob Bonstein, Senior Director of Digital Marketing, Epic Records
• Sarah Weiss, Head of Markting, Bowery Presents

The panel is taking place in the Buzz Media office, a grungy downtown space. The walls are hung with art made from stuff found on the ground. Being here makes me feel like an old, old man. It doesn’t help that I have a job interview later today, so I’m wearing my most conservative suit. Meanwhile, Rob Bonstein may be a Senior Director, but he looks like he’s about twelve.

Nevertheless, here I am. The setup in here is distinctly less slick than yesterday’s presentation at JWT, which is a colossal, gleaming midtown ad firm. This is a grungier downtown space with a flaky PA and flakier internet.

As far as this panel is concerned, social media is coextensive with Twitter. The word “Facebook” isn’t uttered once in the first hour. When someone finally does mention it, it’s in the context of driving traffic to Twitter. The panel considers Facebook to be like MySpace for adults, except without the music-playing functionality.

Transparency vs mystique

Should bands have separate personal and professional Twitter presences? The panel can’t agree. On the one hand, transparency is the fundamental social media value. Who doesn’t love behind-the-curtain access to their music heroes? Mystique seems like an outdated concept in the social media age. On the other hand, when rock stars reveal the mundane reality of their lives, they run the risk of puncturing the whole fantasy we’re trying to project onto them. There’s a reason you don’t see Lady Gaga posting Twitpics of her wearing sweatpants.

The panel is unanimous that a musician’s public persona needs to be “on brand.” Otherwise you get too much cognitive dissonance, like M.I.A. and her infamous truffle fries. It makes sense to expect musicians to have a consistent persona, but it asks a lot to ask someone to equate their personhood with their brand. The idea frankly creeps me out. Kanye West succeeds at admirably at inhabiting his persona at all times, but he’s either a hyperdisciplined virtuoso performance artist or a complete lunatic, or both.

Meanwhile, sometimes artists do their most meaningful work when they go “off-brand.” Miles Davis was way outside the bebop identity he helped invent when he put on his sequined lace-up bellbottoms and made Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way, but that was the peak of his commercial (and arguably cultural) impact.

Regardless of whether musicians are supposed to be playing characters or just being themselves, social media best practices are the same as they are for any person or band. Self-promotion is follower repellent. Show the fans love! When they write to you, write them back. Wish them good luck on their math test or whatever. The panel cites Ciara as a good example of the personal and interactive approach. More surprisingly, the panel also mentions Ice-T, who loves to publicly argue with his critics. Just retweeting praise is as boring as any other kind of promotion; Ice-T’s stream is interesting because he’s real and unpredictable.

Planet Kanye

Angel Laws says that when she met Kanye, he told her, “I don’t need Twitter, I’m Kanye West!” That was then.

Kanye’s Twitter is a must-follow. One look at the grammar and spelling and you know that his feed isn’t written by a publicist. It’s constantly “on-brand,” but that brand is so eccentric and self-mocking and over the top that it couldn’t possibly be calculated. Maybe the specifics of Kanye’s life aren’t very relatable to the average hip-hop fan, like his difficulty in selecting the right marble table for his conference room. But Kanye’s Twitter voice is so idiosyncratic and heartfelt that I find it totally endearing.

The bottom line

Twitter is very amusing, but does it actually drive album and ticket sales? It certainly helps get you press attention, and attention generally. The journalists on the panel say if you want to get on their radar, at-replies work better than press releases. As for sales? No one really knows why people buy one album and not another, much less this panel. No one knows specifically whether a given social media effort will make anyone do anything. But attention can’t hurt, and a close connection to the fans can only help.

Guilty pleasures

This doesn’t have anything to do with social media per se, but it’s worth mentioning. Tamar Anitai from MTV kept invoking the concept of the “guilty pleasure.” This is funny to me. America is so puritan, even the hipsters of the pop music world. I love the idea that if I enjoy Justin Bieber, I’m being immoral, like I’m harming someone. Tamar Anitai breaks up the band gossip on her Twitter by talking about TV shows, and she “confesses” to “hating herself” for watching Dancing With The Stars and such. So I’m supposed to believe that that MTV’s marketing team and their Twitter followers are so highbrow and cultured normally, and that they’re being deliciously transgressive when they reveal the dirty secret that they watch crappy reality TV? Didn’t MTV give us Jersey Shore? So many contradictions.

Odds and ends

Facebook isn’t the only big social platform to be conspicuously absent from the presentation YouTube also doesn’t get mentioned until near the very end. It seems surprising, since YouTube is by far the biggest music search engine and discovery tool on the web. I guess no one’s talking about it because it isn’t much of a revenue stream for the music industry. Though how could the labels and music press not be capitalizing on it somehow? I don’t understand the music business. But apparently, neither does the music business.

Erykah Badu live-tweeted giving birth! No real comment there, just, wow.

At this point, artist web sites only exist to direct Google searchers to the appropriate social media profile or item for sale.

The panel doesn’t see much value in requiring people to enter email addresses to hear tracks or do other kinds of interaction. All kids have multiple email addresses now, one that they actually use and the rest to put into web sites to collect marketing messages and spam. Organic social media interactions, word of mouth and TV are the only way to actually get a kid’s attention.

The panel sees a bright future in the use of Foursquare check-ins as a celebrity marketing tool. Ugh.

Social media is all well and good, but no one is buying albums. If you want to make money from recordings, your best hope is to get something placed in a TV ad.

On a brighter note, the panel loves Soundcloud. So do I. No better music-sharing service exists on the web. The panel especially loves the within-song commenting. Show Soundcloud lots of love, internet, we want them to succeed.

This is (mostly) a music blog, not a movie blog, so I won’t be doing much heavy criticism of the film, except to say that I thought it was an extraordinarily well-made work of art. I’ve heard all the complaints about how wildly inaccurate it is, and I do wish Sorkin had hewn a little closer to the facts. It would have made Zuckerburg a more complex character. My biggest problem was the one Jesse Walker points out, which is that Aaron Sorkin is a way bigger misogynist than any of the people he portrays in his script. Still and all, the movie is spellbinding in its writing, acting, cinematography, editing and so on.

A big part of the movie’s pleasure is the music, starting with the trailer. It uses a gorgeously unsettling choral arrangement of Radiohead’s “Creep” by a Belgian Women’s choir, called, incongruously, Scala & Kolacny Brothers. This song isn’t in the actual film, which is too bad because it nails its mood perfectly. (The trailer is mildly NSFW.)

The Radiohead original is loaded with angst, but it’s a particularly hard-rocking kind of angst. There’s a little too much swagger to convey the wounded feelings of a wallflower. Real Radiohead fans disdain “Creep,” ostensibly because it’s so popular, but I think really because it feels like a betrayal of the band’s basic geekdom. The choral arrangement feels more like a social anxiety sufferer’s inner life.

There’s a lot of tension and anxiety in the movie: class anxiety, social anxiety, the misery of former friends on opposite sides of a lawsuit. The score is tense and anxious too, but in a subtle and restrained way. It isn’t like the wild dissonant violins from a Hitchcock score. As befits a movie about technology, the music is heavily electronic, but it isn’t club techno like in Fight Club or the Matrix.

Most of the music is by Trent Reznor and his frequent Nine Inch Nails collaborator Atticus Ross. I’m no great NIN fan — I admire the craftsmanship but I’m just not angry enough to keep up. The Social Network score works great, though. It sounds like continuous loops of the quiet parts of NIN songs, which are always my favorite parts. Like a lot of heavy musicians, Trent Reznor is most powerful when his touch is lightest. “The Gentle Hum Of Anxiety” is both the title of a track and a perfect descriptor of his score’s mood. And by the way, huge props to SoundCloud for these groovy embeddable mp3 widgets.

The Gentle Hum of Anxiety

Soft Trees Break the Fall

On We March

This last track is my favorite. There’s a nice balance between the warm acoustic piano on the one hand and the icy 808 drum machine and unearthly synths on the other. It mirrors the struggle between the characters’ feelings of loyalty and the demanding logic of the tech business.

Here, by the way, is my Nine Inch Nails story. My late grandmother saw them on David Letterman at random one night. She was so appalled that she called me the next day to demand an explanation. I guess she thought of me as the cultural ombudsman for Generation X. She said, “When I was young, we had the Great Depression, a world war, the Holocaust. And yet, we listened to happy music: Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, Artie Shaw. You kids have everything you could want and you’re so angry. How do you explain that?” I had to really think about it, and I still haven’t resolved the question fully for myself. Part of it is that we expect more emotional truth-telling from our popular music than the Greatest Generation did. That said, there genuinely does seem to be more anxiety floating around my age cohort than there was with my grandparents.

Anyway. There are two conspicuous pieces of music in The Social Network not by Trent Reznor. One is a semi-ironic electronic arrangement of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Reznor says that David Fincher insisted it be used to accompany the tilt-shifted regatta on the Thames. It’s the one really cartoonish moment in the movie. The Winklevoss twins are apparently that absurdly Wagnerian in real life.

The other major non-Reznor song in The Social Network is by the Beatles, and it plays under the final scene and credits. I won’t spoil the ending; suffice to say that the tune isn’t one of the best-known Beatles ones and it’s hilariously appropriate. The licensing must have cost a fortune. It was worth every penny.

Update: Zadie Smith reviews the movie at length in the New York Review Of Books. Well worth reading.

Oh, Delicious. I was so excited when I discovered it a few years ago, and it’s been kind of a heartbreak since then. I started out using it for its intended purpose, as a convenient way to store my browser bookmarks online. I still use it for that, though now it’s become more of a public-facing place for research and note-taking. My bookmarks all go to my Facebook profile automatically, in case someone there might find them useful. The particularly interesting ones I also manually post to Twitter.

The heartache comes from the way Yahoo has been managing Delicious since they bought it, or more accurately, not managing it. After a halfhearted redesign, Yahoo has mostly just been ignoring it, especially its rudimentary and poorly designed social features. This is a shame, since I have yet to find a better source of news and items of interest than other users’ bookmarks. I’ve assembled a list of about a hundred people in my network, and their collective posts have a dazzlingly high signal to noise ratio. When I want to see what’s going on in the world or on the net, my Delicious network feed is the first thing I look at, before any news site or blog reader.

Flickr

I don’t take a lot of snapshots, so I’m not putting many actual photos on Flickr. I mostly use it to store graphics like the one at the top of this post. For a while I was also using Flickr as an image blog, a convenient repository for images I found on the web. Now I mostly use Tumblr for random image blogging. But I do love the way Flickr lets you tag and categorize things, it lets me gather and sort research materials in an intuitive way. Flickr is extremely well search engine optimized, and it supports a robust ecosystem of secondary aggregators and rebloggers. If you put something on Flickr and license it Creative Commons, you’re guaranteed to get a bunch of clicks on it.

Everything I post on Flickr goes to Facebook automatically. When I mark someone else’s image as a favorite, it goes to my Tumblr, and from there to Facebook, the logic being that these pictures are likely to be interesting to my friends. Since Yahoo owns Flickr, bookmarking the images on Delicious is elegant, with automatic thumbnail generation. Even so, I don’t find myself bookmarking images too often. If something is that fascinating, usually I’ll find a reason to work it into a blog post.

Tumblr

I mostly use Tumblr for stuff that’s too random or trivial to merit a full blog post. It’s an effortless one-click process to reblog someone else’s Tumblr post, so I do that a lot. I stream my Flickr favorites here because their randomness fits the Tumblr vibe well. Everything I put on Tumblr goes automatically to Facebook, because why not, and hopefully it’s not so many posts that it’s annoying to people.

Facebook

Yes, it’s evil. But all my friends are on there, and increasingly my relatives too. My policy is to only friend people I know in real life, though I’ve made a few exceptions for cool folks I’ve met on the internet. It’s convenient to have almost everyone I know in one place, but I don’t trust FB with anything too personal.

For a while I had my blog posts going to FB automatically via RSS. I had to stop, though, because the way FB handles blog feeds is so irritating. FB renders imported blog posts as static snapshots. This is no good for me, because I tend to publish my posts when they’re still a bit unfinished, and then copyedit them after they’ve gone live. It keeps me from being too fussy and precious. Also, I use my stats to guide the allocation of my finite editorial resources — posts that people are reading more, I edit more. Having static snapshots full of mistakes on FB does me no good. Also, any comments that people were making on the FB posts aren’t visible to readers here (and vice versa.) So now I manually add links to new blog posts.

Twitter

I’ve resisted the temptation to cross-post my tweets to Facebook because I find it irritating when other people do it. My FB and Twitter friend lists overlap a fair bit and I don’t like reading all those 140-character witticisms twice. Also, on FB I’m writing exclusively for people who know me personally, whereas on Twitter I’m mostly writing for strangers, so the voice and content are different. I do send recent tweets to my blog sidebar automatically, I don’t find that too spammy when other people do it.

This blog

Nearly all the substantial personal writing I’ve done for the past few years has taken place here. There’s something about the public-facing aspect of blogging that keeps my fires burning. I love the WordPress platform for the way it facilitates my creative thinking like few other computer tools I’ve used.

LinkedIn

I keep my online resume here on the blog, but I like LinkedIn a lot and foresee it playing a greater role in my professional life over time. It has its own status updates, but that’s one too many statuses for me to be updating, so I just stream my work Twitter feed in there.

Friendfeed

There was a while there when I was so infatuated with Friendfeed that I made it the centerpiece of my personal home page. What could be a better landing page than an automatic aggregate of everything else I post on the social web? Well, as it turns out, there are a lot of problems with posting an unfiltered lifestream. While a comprehensive listing of everything I post everywhere is useful and interesting to me, it’s not so useful or interesting to anyone else. Looking at other people’s lifestreams is mostly just exhausting.

There’s also the problem of duplicate content. Let’s say I bookmark something on Delicious and also post it to Twitter. Friendfeed displays both posts. There’s no way that I know of to recognize and eliminate duplicates automatically. For a while I tried deleting duplicates manually, but that was too annoying. I still keep my Friendfeed active, though, both for communitarian and cynical reasons. The communitarian reason is that there are some people out there who like the lifestreaming format. It’s not a lot of people, but they do exist. The cynical reason is search engine optimization. A link on an automatic Friendfeed post counts to Google’s spiders, even if no human ever clicks it.

So, there you have it. I’m about to embark on a new social media consulting job, and that’ll probably extend my web footprint. Like, I just joined Foursquare and Yelp, not because I have much need for them personally, but because they’re significant for clients and I need to know how they work.

This landscape shifts fast, so maybe I’ll come back to this post down the road and chuckle at how obsolete it is. I still have a MySpace profile that I can’t figure out how to delete. Who knows which of the profiles above are going to look similarly comical in a few years?