Sociodyne

It seems inevitable: The Social Web will eventually dissolve into the fabric we now call the Web. In my last post about the future of the social web, “Facebook – Still Defining (and Defying) the Social Web”, I started predicting the future of the social web. People and business will be drawn to the same patterns that drive the Web as the Social Web matures. The Web is distributed, standards-based, and easy to access. How will the Social Web become integrated?

In the Olden Times, people signed up for various online services to communicate with people. I personally had 2 such accounts: QuantumLink (the original AOL), and CompuServe. I also dialed into a local BBS that had good games (Q-Link had some decent offerings, but my friends all played on the local BBS). Why is this relevant? Because the evolution of AOL and the impact of the open Web draw a roadmap for the Social Web. Q-Link evolved into AOL, which became the 800 lb gorilla in the dial-up network space. Companies bought AOL keywords (keywords that could be typed into the search box in AOL and take you directly to a company’s page). Tell me when this starts to sound familiar (Facebook Pages, companies giving out a Facebook URL, every man, woman, and child having a Facebook account). Facebook has won a game in which the grand prize could be serving as a warning to others.

So what happened to AOL? The Internet and the Web happened. Geeks first started to question: If I can use any dial-up service to reach the Web, why would I pay a premium to AOL? Eventually, this wisdom trickled down to the masses (except my dad… I’m not sure why he still uses AOL). Now people use whatever provider they want for connecting, and they can use multiple email providers (so their email isn’t attached to their provider), AND they have multiple options for online publishing (I’m using one right now, but it’s certainly not the only one).

Leaders and visionaries emerged during this time to explain the “network economy” and how it was going to impact the world. The thing is, these rules still apply. It’s natural for one or two big leaders to emerge early in the game, but eventually the knowledge and power dissipates. And that’s a good thing for the web, because as companies and individuals start understanding that they don’t need to rely on the leader in the space, competition starts to happen. And competition is a driving force in making things better for everyone.

So, who has a chance at being a significant competitor in the new Social Web? First, let’s look at consumers (e.g. getting off Facebook). Facebook provides a simple social presence for consumers. You can argue all you want about Facebook’s privacy settings, the fact that it’s hard to change the look-and-feel of your social presence, etc., but that’s really just a distraction. What’s needed is options. Who is likely to provide them? Some of the big players, Google, Microsoft, and even Yahoo!, already provide a “presence” for people on the Web. Yahoo!’s move to partner with Zynga (the largest social game publisher) shows a move in the right direction. All three already have products for content sharing. Once they figure out the game has changed away from grabbing users to empowering users to participate in an open Social Web, any of these could be a contender.

How will these big players push into a more open Social Web, though? There are small(er) players who also have good assets:

• Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. They provide other tools that are very interesting and promote an open Social Web. Take “Intense Debate”, their distributed social commenting tool. An Intense Debate user can start or participate in multiple “comment thread” discussions across the web and have a centralized dashboard of comments and responses. This is really powerful and provides a good model for how the Social Web will eventually work.
• Chi.mp, who provides a social dashboard and presence, including a free domain name (you can find me at jkinner.mp). They provide a model for maintaining profiles and presence on the Social Web, and they support emerging standards like OpenID.
• Brizzly, who has a great Twitter client, both for the desktop and for the web. I could imagine a social presence site that works a lot like Brizzly does. It also just so happens that the Brizzly experience is somewhat similar to the Facebook experience.
• Acquia, who is the commercial arm behind the popular web publishing framework, Drupal. Business who want to participate in the new Social Web will want a modular plug-in architecture for building their web sites. Drupal is already a popular solution for web site building, and Acquia’s focus on “social publishing” will likely serve them well.

All these companies, both big and small, have work to do to build the new Social Web. Attitudes will need to change, and new monetization models will need to emerge to fund the transition. Disapora’s crowdsourced funding model (via Kickstarter) is one example. Enough people care enough about a distributed social web to fund a big project (at least a year, comfortably; I hope those guys go ahead and put off school for a year or hire people to do the work; either would be a wise way to use the cash). Of course, not all their motivations may be positive, but that’s not relevant to the technology.

Next time, I’ll post about what work needs to be done to get this distributed Social Web off the ground.