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Goodbye Facebook, You won’t be Needed in the Future

John — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 08:40:59 +0000

Big Ideas: The future of social media will not be application specific, it will be built in to the operating systems of all the devices we use.
Some sort of ‘Social IP’ address will connect all of our interactions, rather than applications like Facebook and Twitter

Stowe Boyd has a fascinating article discussing our social future.

Here are some highlights:

I believe that Facebook represents the high water mark of social networking, as we understand it today, a time dominated by social networking applications, as if our social interaction is something best managed in a single enormous database, whose rows and tables are designed by a small group of developers in one company.

Facebook is the new AOL.
Facebook is managing the chaos of social interaction on the web, normalizing it and standardizing it for us, just as AOL made the web neat and tidy. That seemed a winning proposition in the late ’90s, which led to astonishing valuations for AOL. They acquired Time-Warner using that wealth, and in 2002 Time-Warner wrote off $600M as AOL started to fall. Now, AOL has been spun out, and has no central role in our experience of the web. 10 years is a long time. Time-Warner is now the second largest entertainment company in the world.

We will see social operating systems where following people’s activities, or creating likes, or publishing profiles will all be built-in. These will not be features of apps, or managed as metadata in walled silos. The primitives that structure our social connections will be built into the fabric of the next generation of operating environments, just like file systems, URLs, and HTTP are well-integrated into today’s.

As a result, actors like Google, Apple, the Linux community, and Microsoft — as well as upstarts that don’t even exist yet — will be the implementers of the next generation of social web, with social interaction built into its DNA.

Imagine that I will turn on my next generation iPad, a few years hence, and I’ll be presented with various applications that show views over the streams of information finding their way to me based on my social relationships. But those relationships are not based on application managed information, but related to my device connecting to the web, like getting an IP address today. I would get a social IP, and ping out to all the other entities online, so that information from those that I follow would find me, just as email is routed to me today independently of what email application I choose to use.

Actions like following, liking, posting, and reposting have become the core of our social existence. And these core activities should be core to the platforms, not peripheral.

My Thoughts
Predicting the demise Facebook is probably not so prescient. All large companies fall from grace sooner or later (except maybe Google), so it is not hard to imagine that Facebook will lose out to some new start up or new standard of connecting to one another. Surely, there are better things coming in the future than Farmville.

What is most interesting to me is the concept of a “Social IP.” Widely accepted protocols, just like IP addresses now, take away control and power from companies and make access ubiquitous. It is common standards and protocols that have made the internet so universal. Imagine where we would be if Microsoft, IBM, Sony, Samsung, etc. each had there own proprietary version of the internet.

Sites like Facebook or Twitter shouldn’t dictate our social interactions. We need universal standards that connect everything we do to everyone we want to connect with. That is a powerful idea.

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The Death of the Website

John — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:29:20 +0000

If you use Twitter it is very likely that you don’t go to the twitter.com website at all. It is much easier to access and update your account through an application like TweetDeck or Hootsuite. Most queries of Twitter content are not directly on the website but through third party applications.

Is this the future of Internet?

NextWeb has an interesting post, The Death of the Website;

Many successful ‘Internet’ start-ups now run without the need for a website. They might still have one but it won’t be the centerpiece of their existence. Google without a website would be unthinkable. Twitter without a website? Not so far fetched at all.

For most businesses, attracting people to your website is a difficult battle. It is more important to go to where you potential customers are. Setting up outposts on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and Flickr are absolutely essential for social media marketing.

How necessary is it to blog or have a website at all? With millions of blogs fighting for our limited attention, might it not be better to focus on writing guest posts on other sites and just send the traffic to our profiles on sites like Linkedin or Facebook? Savvy companies are already monitoring what is said about them through online search tools. Why not go to people interested in your business rather than trying to pull them to your website?

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Forget Social Media, Business Need Results

John — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:38:18 +0000

Edward Boches of Creativity_Unbound has a great article framing social media into real business objectives.

I don’t talk to clients about Social Media any more.

He has five ways to reframe the questions.

Want to improve your organic search results?
Start a blog.

Looking for a better way to conduct real time qualitative research?
Listen in on ongoing conversations on Twitter and Facebook.

Would you like more out of your advertising creative ideas?
Try a crowdsourcing contest.

Interested in stretching your media dollars?
Use embedded YouTube videos and encourage sharing.

Looking for ways to increase positive word of mouth?
Introduce all of your customers to each other, on your site, on Facebook and on Twitter.

Collaboration Through Social Media

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