I super don’t care what people from the internet at large have to say. I don’t care how many people that use a product like something. I don’t care what topics are trending across a gigantic cross-section of the internet. I don’t even really care about the zeitgeist.

What I do care about is what my friends have to say, what they’re interested in, and what they’re looking at. I even care about what their friends care about, though probably less. I even care about the content viewed and created by people in communities I somewhat identify with.

Recent additions to products I use daily (well, a dozen times daily) push online interactions more toward a mass audience than a closed social network.

Google Reader added the “Like” option in a not-even-paraphrased ripoff of Facebook’s similar feature (which I love). This feature sucks, and a brief search on twitter tells me that lots of people agree (umm, kidding). While reading my normal feeds I am now informed that some number of people also enjoy a particular post. I don’t know these people, I don’t care if they like the same webcomic I do, and that number has no significance to me. I hide the feature.

The other trend is the emphasis on buzz/search in twitter. I love twitter and I use it every day to keep in touch with friends both nearby and far away. I think it’s an excellent medium and I get immense pleasure from using it. However, twitter seems to be all about the trending topics and mentions on CNN right now, and not about facilitating communication between friends. I’ve never liked the “microblogging” aspect of twitter– I prefer to think of it as a big shared conversation with friends and friends of friends. Thus I don’t follow anyone I don’t know, except Stephen Colbert and a local music group.

These new features are even more disappointing to me because of the potential they really do have. I think there’s value in the “Like” feature and in trending topics, but not when the sample size is the whole internet. I want to know what my extended social network is talking about. I would guess my extended social network, the people who I could conceivably meet and get to know tomorrow, consists of around 2,000 people; it contains my friends, their friends, and so on, ranked by how many friends a person and I have in common. No one is adequately offering coverage of that group even though it is the group I actually care about.