* 6 main aspects of the social networking landscape
Welcome to the 1,000th issue of the Web Applications Alert newsletter! It’s amazing to think how far we’ve come with Web stuff in the almost 10 years that have elapsed since this newsletter started.
If I had to pick just one area that has changed everything in the Web applications there’s no doubt in my mind: It isn’t AJAX, it isn’t DHTML, it isn’t CSS, or even Web 2.0 (whatever that may be). In fact the biggest change has less to do with technology in terms of hardware or software than it has to do with people. No, my pick is social networking.
In the last decade we’ve seen social networking explode (not that we called it social networking in the beginning, that’s a relatively recent term), and it has rapidly morphed not only the kinds of things we do but how we relate to each other as well as to businesses and the government.
Social networking started back in the days of the online fora that connected like-minded individuals into rolling cocktail parties (or endless shouting matches). It was the rise of services that addressed vertical markets (such as Classmates.com and FriendsReunited.co.uk) that really got things going, but it was the rise of the mega social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook that really established the value of social interaction on the Web.
In the business world, the likes of LinkedIn and Experts Exchange emerged as important drivers, and more recently services like GetSatisfaction have created a new social networking context. All of these services supported presence (announcing yourself and your interests) and enabled dialog and with the involvement of hundreds of thousands of people their effect was huge.
Then there was the rise of blogging. Blogging transformed what we think of as “The Media” and, much to the disgust of the old guard “mainstream media,” has usurped their sacred territory with voices that many consider to be less biased (or at least honestly biased) and more timely. But it’s the interactivity of the majority of blogs – the ability for readers to make comments and post links to other resources – that makes blogs such a crucial part of the social networking world.
Alongside all of the foregoing social networking services arose the collaborative filtering services such as Digg, del.icio.us, and Technorati that provided yet another aspect of socializing: Communicating what you pay attention to – what resources and content you think have value.
Instant messaging had and remains a key service supporting presence and status reporting, but it was the rise of microblogging, mostly notably in the guise of Twitter, that redefined how we think of what presence technologies should deliver and provided a more generalized and easily used take on blogging.
So what are the main elements of the social networking landscape? I’d suggest that there are six main aspects:
1. Dialog (fora and blogs)
2. Publishing (blogging and microblogging)
3. Attention tracking (bookmarking and clipping)
4. Presence (microblogging and status services)
5. Reputation
6. Collaborative intelligence (crowd sourcing and services that “mine” social networks)
Today there are more social networking services than you can shake a stick at, and a huge number of us use some combination of presence, blogging, microblogging, and tracking services as part of our everyday lives.
As we rush towards issue 2,000 of the Network World Web Applications Alert newsletter (the first 1,000 just shot past), social networking will not be just an adjunct to the Web, it will be everything the Web is about. A Web site without at least some social networking attributes will not be a serious site. Meanwhile, a business user who doesn’t rely on social networking services on a minute to minute basis to track the world and mediate his interests will be a rare thing and effectively disconnected from the mainstream.
As I wrote at the beginning of this newsletter, it’s amazing what has happened in the Web world in the last decade and I look forward to writing the next 1,000 because things will only get more interesting.
