It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.

All of the techno “stars” came out in that first 24 hours of Google+.  There was Joi Itoh, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, Harry Joiner, etc.  Most of them seemed to keep it cool, poking around and commenting here and there.  One of them charged ahead, posting something every 5 minutes, often with some half-baiting question that subsequently invoked a huge chain of follow-on comments.   Because of the way that Google+ is structured, these posts came in real-time, and the page text would automatically scroll down.  It made things very difficult to follow anything else.  In short, we had a blabbermouth on our hands.

This person acknowledged that he was being a blabbermouth, and simply invited people to add him to a “blabbermouths” circle in order to clean up their feed.  Done, and done.  Ah, much better.

Soon after, I found other blabbermouths.  These were people that I had considered “friends” at first (and placed them accordingly), but when their posts came in too often, too self-promotional, and too meta, into the “blabbermouths” they went.  It’s like a garden with weeds, or a party with loud drunks, or a restaurant buffet with someone bogarting all the shrimp cocktail: you’re ruining it for the rest of us.

Tangentially, I went to Klout for the firsts time a couple weeks ago.  From what I can tell (and please let me know if I’m missing something), it’s just a “score”, with the supposed goal of getting a higher score– some sort of substitute for social influence, I guess.  Klout seems to be struggling for legitimacy, but maybe I’m just not seeing it.  I do see one helpful thing they announced this morning: Klout will now count Foursquare check-ins as part of the score.

Excellent.  Here’s why: In my mind, there are two types of online social interaction.

1. Group-Centric Social Media– is collaborative, centered on contribution to a whole, and serves the overall group. Examples include wikipedia, quora, flickr, instagram, turntable, or any other social network where people’s contributions are shared freely and allow others to manipulate, build, alter or improve as they see fit.  Facebook and g+ likely qualify here, as any contribution by a single individual goes out to all their friends, who can then comment (improve knowledge or clarify a point) as they see fit.  No one is keeping “score” publicly.  Twitter may be in this group, but maybe not.
2. Self-Centric Social Media– is promotional, centered on contribution to a personal record, and is centered on the self.  Examples include Foursquare, klout, and farmville.  The goals in these are to achieve a higher “score”, a wider farm, or a bunch of badges (that are really just little digital icons, Yeaaay!).  All of these are centered around gratifying the specific user, not the collective whole.  Twitter is in this group if you’re obsessed with number of followers or if you think you’re “promoting” something, and not “sharing” something.

Before you go labeling me a communist, hear me out: I’m not saying one is better than the other (okay, maybe a little bit).  What I’m trying to say is that it seems to me that the users who are rooted firmly in the self-centric models seem to be the ones that end up being the blabbermouths in the group-centric networks.  These are the ones that we tend to turn off, to unfriend, or to relegate to our ‘blabbermouths’ circle.  I welcome Klout now counting foursquare checkins.  If I could only figure out a way to get a script that would automatically filter those high klout score people into my blabbermouth circle.