My social network Minus was featured in yesterday’s New York Times. In an article titled The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social, journalist Brian X. Chen writes about the increasingly impersonal nature of big social platforms, and the space that shift is creating for smaller online spaces. He quotes Jonathan Zittrain talking about Minus as an experimental alternative that treats our time and attention as the finite resources they are:
One app that emerged from the program, Minus, lets users publish only 100 posts on their timeline for life. The idea is to make people feel connected in an environment where their time together is treated as a precious and finite resource, unlike traditional social networks such as Facebook and Twitter that use infinite scrolling interfaces to keep users engaged for as long as possible. “It’s a performance art experiment,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who started the research initiative. “It’s the kind of thing that as soon as you see it, it doesn’t have to be this way.”
If you haven’t tried out Minus yourself, give it a try.