I am a fan of social community sites and I think that the social networking aspect of the Web 2.0 trend is at the forefront of innovation right now. I love the feel of a community when it has a solid platform, a strong current of interaction and a lot of action by the site, not just the members. The community, by definition, has to have people who regularly take time away from their day to add something to the community. If the community grows stale, then the whole site could implode, sort of a Colony Collapse Disorder for the web.
I am frequently on several social community sites; in fact I just leave them in my tabs on Firefox for when I want to flip over to them. I use Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo almost every day, and I check in on several smaller ones when something reminds me to do so, or when I get a message on one of them. I have also moved away from several communities over the years. I left MySpace, not because I was lonely there, but because it was like high school. Too many silly things on pages, too many goofy designs and the songs blaring at me, maybe I just got too old? Facebook has a nice collegiate feel to it (no more high school for me) which is appropriate as it began life as a social site for college students and grew into the work-place.
I am becoming less excited about Facebook, even while many are clamoring to get onboard. I find that most of the Facebook applications are wearing me down. Don’t send me a gift, no more flowers, I do not have time to fight pygmies in the jungle with you and I am not that good at Scrabulous anyway. While I applaud Facebook for getting a lot right, especially when it comes to opening the system to third party developers; they need to reign in some of the applications. I don’t know, maybe I should have the option to elect out of the application invites totally, or select that I only want to see those invites from a very small group of my closest friends? (Oh man, now you know you aren’t in my closest friends group, I declined the invite.)
LinkedIn is clearly the community site of choice for the professional crowd. It feels like a business environment too; look and feel especially. They cater to my business needs rather smartly. Where did I work, what did I do, who did I work with, what did I think of them, what did they think of working with me; what associations or groups am I a part of in my professional life? LinkedIn is also moving out on to the cloud with an open API and integration with sites like the New York Times and tools like Xobni.
We are still in an awkward stage with these community sites and wondering how they affect us and what they mean to the Internet in general. Could these closed communities be the future of the web? Are we watching the net shrink itself into small gated communities or are we seeing those communities build mass transit lines between them? I hope it is the latter.
Micro-blogging applications like Twitter and Spoink are all the rage right now, and I am on Twitter all day too. (Not addicted! But I cannot wait to tweet this post…) Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn all have a ‘What are you doing right now’ or ‘What are you working on’ tool that is in effect an embedded Twitter on those sites, but you have to turn to aggregate feeds like Plaxo and FriendFeed to get them all together. Perhaps Google’s Friend Connect or an API like it will serve to unify the crowd soon? I hope so, but I also dread that just a little bit, that innovation I mentioned earlier, I want more of it, not less. I do not want people to innovate new uses for a single tool, but rather we need to see data integration across many platforms.
As the community scene advances, the Social Media movement is growing up too; and along with it so is a new generation of social savvy users. My children are already using avatars to talk to friends from school this summer, not to mention the new friends in other countries they meet on the net. On my Blackberry, I post to Twitter instead of calling everyone to tell them who I just ran into at the bookstore, and I cannot help but wonder how long until my son is sending me private messages to let me know he aced his test.
I want to hear from you now. Use the comments below to tell me what sites you frequent and how you use them. If you are bold enough, share some of your tweets too?
Matt
twitter.com/mattwilliamson
Links of Interest:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Disorder
- http://www.scrabulous.com/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-blogging
- http://www.google.com/friendconnect/
Tags: Blackberry, Facebook, Google, Internet, IT, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, social network, Spoink, Twitter, Xobni
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