So what’s been going on? Why the “radio silence” on Twitter these past six months or more? And why no blog updates since February? Well, all these and more are intertwined together in a rather short-sighted mess that I’m beginning to wish I handled better now. But as they say, you learn from experience. Allow me to recap with what happened and how things have progressed.

Back in March I decided to put a rigid split between my various videogame twitterings and the rest of my social media usage. As a result, Mana Obscura was born. Based heavily on my experiences playing World of Warcraft, the new website quickly gained a following.  I enjoy creating new articles on a subject that still fascinates me, and for some reason people enjoy reading them.

At about this time, I started the @GamerGaz twitter account in order to impose a further separation. The videogaming blogging community has an awful lot of support available to it, plus a huge amount of infectious enthusiasm. I found a large amount of intelligent, articulate people who are brilliant users of social media, yet they’d never class themselves as such. They just pick up the tools they can find to form communities and share common interests and passions. Only natural, when you think about it.

One thing of course leads to another. The blog led to a podcast, which led to a forum, which may lead to who knows where. Everything that I previously talked about people doing, I was now doing for myself. And it’s all been easier said than done – the podcast has been a right royal pain to set up, and is still going through pains even though we’ve started broadcasting live every week.

That said, I’ve been amazed by the interest in it all. The blog attracts something like 200-400 readers a day, while the podcast has about 200 listeners a week. It constantly surprises me, and it’s something that I’m aware I’m very lucky to have.

So where has this all ended up? Well, it means I’ve neglected where I came from, what started it all. This blog hasn’t seen an update since Feb, with my original Twitter account suffering a similar fate. I’ve stopped networking, stopped sharing knowledge and generally fallen out of the loop. When you’re doing social networking, that’s a bad state to be in.

As a result, I’m going to be talking a bit more about my own experiences of social networking and social media, and what it means to me as someone who’s actually using them in anger rather than just someone who’s pontificating from the sidelines.

I’m also going to be looking at ways to help people manage more than one online presence. I found it very easy to take my eye off the ball when I started this new project. I’m keen to ensure that others don’t repeat the mistake, so if you have any thoughts then feel free to pipe up!

I’ll still be talking about tech and social media, just expect it to have a bit more context. I’ll also be talking about the balancing act and struggles I have of managing this online brand that I’ve somehow created.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m loving every minute of where I am. I just think I could have done things better. So I’m working on it. The first step is the new coat of paint here, with more to come in the pipeline. It’s going to be an interesting balancing act, but probably doable.

In the meantime, don’t be a stranger!

The problem is that as gaming takes on more co-operative multiplayer aspects, it becomes less a discrete or isolated activity and more a part of that player’s social network. Although the underlying technology is different, there’s not much difference between challenging a friend to a game of Scrabble on Facebook or inviting them to play a few rounds with you on Street Fighter 4 on a console.

Uncharted 2: one way Twitter flow.

When you move to MMO or virtual world gaming, a player might build up a list of tens or even hundreds of social contacts based on the various activities that player might take part in. A player might also have a social network on Facebook, Twitter or Bebo that’s completely isolated. Where games do connect with social networks, it’s all one-way.

There are ways around this problem: PC gamers can run their games in a window in order to track their various social networks. Console gamers have it slightly easier – the Xbox 360 for example has integration with Windows Live Messenger but it’s limited to that single service. It’s not an elegant solution, which is why many gamers turn to separate devices to monitor their social networks.

The interesting thing is that this kind of activity, where you’re displaying small snippets of personalised information to a user, has been around for a while in the smartphone and web industries. A widget engine, can create an environment for small applications to run, which can then interface with services running on the internet. All you would need is for the widget engine to be incorporated either into the console or the PC operating system. Developing and publishing widgets is then a fairly simple affair.

There are several challenges that immediately become apparent when trying to encourage widgets as a platform for displaying external information in-game.

• Controlling the user experience: Developers are keen to refine and protect the look and feel of a game. System alerts are acceptable, but others are kept to the background. There’s no reason though why developers couldn’t extend the widget API in order to control look and feel, allowing widgets to blend in with the game interface. There are even imaginative ways this could be used, such as projecting messages onto in-game scenery before fading away, or adding Flickr photostream images as poster backdrops.
• Gaining mindshare: Persuading developers to take this on might be challenging. There is evidence though from the PC gaming platform that gamers are willing to learn the skills needed to customise their own gaming experience. These customisations can be shared with others, and there are already established networks such as Curse.com available for users to upload, rate and share addons.
• Allowing shutoff: Just like when you watch a film at the cinema, sometimes you want to switch off contact from the outside world. Features like whitelisting for important messages or contacts might also be an idea.
• Being extensible: New networks and utilities come online all the time, and it’s important for any framework to be flexible enough to cope with new additions. Likewise, being able to control which networks you interface with is pretty crucial.

Games have already started publishing updates to social networks. If these changes come into play, our social networks can start updating our games as well.

The question then evolved to one of business – should businesses just soak up followers, never follow up and just tweet broadcast, or should they use it as a tool to engage their followers and respond to queries as well? This one’s a trickier question to answer, and really needs to be broken down into chunks in order to understand how businesses are using Twitter already and how they can develop this in the future.

The passive monitor

It’s no secret that firms already monitor the internet for discussions involving them and their products. References cropped up during the twitter discussion, while anyone who runs a blog or similar will have seen the various media monitoring firms scan their articles whenever a particular business name crops up. It’s natural for this to extend into publicly viewable social networks such as twitter, where keyword searches are easy to perform and can provide instant results on what people are saying or linking to when discussing the firms they interact with. For some businesses, this is as far as their involvement with social networks goes.

The broadcaster

In previous years, it was the email newsletter, the RSS feed or the “news” webpage that kept customers informed about new products or services that a business was launching. Nowadays, Twitter feeds and Facebook fan pages are beginning to replace RSS as the medium of choice when informing customers about recently added product lines. News publishers are starting to use Twitter to announce new articles, with even blog authors getting in on the act of announcing when a new post has gone up. It’s a simple idea, but it only uses one half of a social network’s potential. Users become familiar with the concept of two-way communication, and can quickly get turned off if it becomes too businesslike or mundane.

The engager

Possibly the hardest trick to master is becoming more engaging with customers using social networks. Customers prefer businesses that follow them back, and perceive that those who don’t are usually unengaging broadcasters. Customers prefer to have relationships with the businesses they use, and some of them are now starting to use Twitter as a natural extension to this. Having said that, people understand that not all firms should be on Twitter and that it largely depends on what typeof business they’re in and what they’d use the service for.

The main concern when a business looks at using Twitter is cost – will it require substantial investment to engage with customers over Twitter? There’s no reason to suggest it would – customers already have access to their suppliers via phone, email or even face-to-face in a high street store. Corporations may be fearful of a deluge of complaints heading their way through social networks, without realising that their great power is being able to gain instant feedback and respond to everyone at once instead of having to send out individual replies.

One thing that all forms should be aware of is how customers want to engage with them and being able to cater for that. It doesn’t mean having to set up shop on every single social network, but making sure that the business has a suitable presence on ones that customers are using already is a sensible move. It’s what separates your local family butcher from a local electrical retailer – you would expect the latter to be more responsive to social networks than the former. It’s also sensible to understand what your customers prefer to use each medium for – do they prefer to phone up to discuss billing issues, do they prefer the high street store when looking to make a purchase? How does it interlink with other ways in which you support customers online – do you provide self-service or self-help online, or even live chat support? With each of these things, the likelihood of customers contacting a business via Twitter about these issues is reduced.

The future

Indications are that Twitter and social networks in general should be examined by all firms seeking to put together a communications strategy that involves some online aspects. Their strategic choices on how they build and use online presences will affect how customers perceive them, and should be considered carefully. One thing is clear though – more study and research is required in this area in order for businesses to become more comfortable with how hey handle this medium.

Communications constantly change. Call centres, email responses and online help tools are all examples of how business has needed to evolve in order to keep in contact with customers. All the indications are that this will continue to happen, with instant messaging, Google Wave and VOIP all becoming potential additions in how customers may want to interact. Social networks form a part of this evolutionary change, and it is important for business to keep them on the radar when forming plans. The challenge will be making sure these plans are developed and constantly refreshed as the communication landscape changes.

Putting the imagery of battling industry heavyweights to one side for a moment , it’s worth focusing on the intricacies of the deal itself. It’s interesting that TechCrunch reports that the deal is more about talent rather than product acquisition. With this, we’re more likely to see FriendFeed slowly wound down as a separate service as Facebook incorporates more of the former’s capability. This means that all of the aggregation and real-time feed management that currently resides in FriendFeed will eventually find it’s way into Facebook in one form or another. Users already use Facebook to comment on links, articles and posts made by their friends, so FriendFeed doesn’t really add anything new here.

It’s Reveloution that comes close to explaining why the deal is important, but relegates them to the bottom of a five-point list. Ask anyone that manages a portal, website or other content respository and they’ll tell you that one of the most important concepts they work on is how visitors can discover content, either through an external search or by traversing the site once they’ve entered it. Journalists and marketers want their content to be discovered by as many people as possible, while advertisers and site designers want to maximise the relevance and opportunity for advertising alongside it. Make it easy for a user to discover more content that’s meaningful to them and the theory is that they’ll return to read more content housed there at a later date. They also recognise that conversations happen around content, but that unlike older mechanisms such as blogposts and forums the conversations are shifting to areas such as Twitter or Facebook that can potentially be much harder to mine for feedback. Again, these conversations are happening in real-time (linking back to the importance of real-time search).

All this is good stuff, but it doesn’t exactly show where the industry is heading. And although a few key components are highlighted, it doesn’t exactly round off the idea. To get to that, it’s probably worth looking back on an older technology – portals. Back when Yahoo and Google were fighting it out, the concept of personalised search portals emerged. The idea was that you’d set one as your homepage so that every time you launched your browser, you’d have content that was relevant to you. Their two products – iGoogle and My Yahoo! – are still out there and being used, but have failed to make an impact on the world’s browsing habits. They’re underpowered and underpersonalised, relying on a more generic approach. And it’s in this area where the Facebook-FriendFeed tech can really shine. Imagine that your homepage is filled with content from across all areas in which you have an interest, all tagged and sorted for your convenience. Things that your friends have found might have conversations attached, encouraging you to delve deeper. You might find something and want to alert others to it yourself – the key thing is that be it a blog post, status update, news article or anything else, you get the opportunity to discover it, share it and discuss it in one place. And by incorporating all this in one site like Facebook, it provides even more opportunity to provide advertising around it.

So that’s the deal, but what about the tech? The key thing about a portal is providing interconnects for people to drop in their own content, and there are signs that Facebook is already moving in this direction. By providing support for a multitude of apps from image feeds to multiplayer games, Facebook is moving away from being a service that people consume and towards a platform that developers create their own services to run on. This is most evidenced in games like Mafia Wars, a micropayments based MMO game that is available via Facebook amongst other methods. It’s not a world apart to imagine some of our favourite content providers developing small facebook apps or even just facebook-friendly feeds to sit on our portal view in a similar way. The trouble is, running a portal requires awareness of the symbiotic nature of the many services we use, and it’s not exactly clear that Facebook understands this.

While it’s clear that some analysts see this as an opportunity for Facebook to take on Twitter at it’s own game (or that it’ll even prompt Google to push for a buyout of Twitter), I’m not so sure that it’ll happen or even that it’s needed. Nowadays, web content can be commonly exposed through APIs. Both Twitter and Google have a set of APIs that allow developers to wrap services around them, from user authentication to automated status updates. It’s one of the reasons why there are tens of iPhone Twitter apps each offering a different experience, while there still remains just one for Facebook. But by leveraging the power of these APIs, it becomes far more possible to generate a tailored experience. And should Twitter fall out of favour and be replaced by something else, all a portal would have to do is access those new interconnects or APIs presented by whatever replaces it.

It’s thoughts like this that make the recent announcement of Facebook Lite all the more confusing. Although it’s purportedly intended for users in India, China and Russia where broadband isn’t commonly available, it also has a very similar look and feel to the web view of Twitter. While producing a lite version of Facebook is commendable, I just can’t help but feel they should be focusing on what makes Facebook a unique experience, instead of trying to ape another service that already works well. Facebook doesn’t need to compete with Twitter, it just needs to think smartly about how it can integrate Twitter’s open services into it’s emergent platform.

If Facebook’s serious about becoming the home of all our networks and not just our social ones, it needs to open up a little first. The web connoisseur of today is a fickle beast that doesn’t much care for limitations or walled gardens, yet values being able to integrate or mash-up services for a personalised experience. Facebook currently have the momentum, but there’s always some startup working out of a garage somewhere that may just beat them to it.