"I don't think it iseasy for MySpace and Facebook to adapt and bend to the needs of individualbrands." - Alexander Mouldovan, Founder, CrowdFactory
They had names like Compuserve, The Well, Tribe and Usenet.One of them, a little regarded place called America Online, became a behemoth,though the others fell either into history or obscurity. The Internet turnedinto the World Wide Web, into the entomology of modernlife.
Now there is Web 2.0 and "social" media technology -enabling an Internet created by individuals as well as corporations. But thisis not, as some people and media reports would have you believe, a new Internet- rather, it is a decades-old promise finally coming true.More than a year ago I said that 2006 would be the year thatblogging passes from novelty into utility, and it did - blogs are not onlymainstream media themselves, but they are a staple of traditional media newssites. The same shift is now happening with social networks, albeit with a significantdifference.Blogs were something new, a powerful self-publishing toolthat opened the door to a "read-write" web. Moreover, blogs will always be apart of the web, not the web in its entirety.But social networks -or to be more exact, technologies that allow people to interact and share ideasand content instantaneously - are becoming the Web. Eventually, theInternet itself will be one, giant, global social network, created by and forindividuals. The First Wave -Gated CommunitiesYou can't scratch the Internet today without finding theword "social." Instead of building static web sites, corporations are nowbuilding their own "social networks." Cisco Systems, which owns a socialnetwork development company, is purchasing Tribe.Net's technology so it canbuild networks for corporate customers. Nike has a social network. So do Carnival Cruises andSheraton hotels. There are hundreds of social networks with more going online allthe time - and while acting as separate membership communities, almost all havethe same "social" features like blogs, audio and video sharing, messaging andfriends lists. These types of social networks - led by the likes ofpowerhouses MySpace and Facebook, Bebo and Gather - represent the first wave. Theygive members freedom but within certain parameters and interfaces. They are notso much closed communities but "gated" ones, where members must act and expressthemselves in certain ways or discuss defined topics. Think of it as being partof a homeowner's association that allows everyone to have a garage as long asit's painted one of five pre-approved colors (sounds strange, but I live in Orange County, Calif., where this really happens.) The Second Wave - AnInternet Built With Bridges
But if Internet users hate anything, they hate constraint. Asecond wave of social networks promises to remove all constraint - in effect,to disband the homeowner's association and let people paint their garageswhatever color they want.
These networks - networks like Second Life and Ning, thelatest brainchild from Netscape founder Marc Andreessen - aim to turn theInternet into a tabula rasa where customization is king. According to a recentNew York Times article, Ning allows "anyone to set up a community on anytopic...Ning users choose the features they want to include, like videos, photos,discussion forums or blogs. Their sites can appear like MySpace, YouTube or thephoto sharing site Flickr - or something singular."
Furthermore, standards like OpenID hope to make identitytransferable from community to community. Just think - an Internet of trueimagination, entire worlds that people build themselves. An Internet built notwith walls or gates, but with bridges.
People Make It Social,Not Technology
For this to happen we need to do our part, too:
- We need to change our thinking of the Internet as something that includes social networks to something that is a social network.
- Technology allows media to be shared, but technology alone doesn't make blogs or RSS feeds or tagging "social." Only people can do that. In other words, a blog is "sharable" media - media that is easily shared with others anywhere, that can be updated quickly and with which we can interact - but it's how people engage with the blog that determines whether it is also "social" media.
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