I’m sitting in Union Square SF on a Saturday night at Starbucks getting some additional analysis completed on the Wave report, which should be publishing in a few weeks. I can’t but help think about some trends that I’ve been hearing from multiple people.
On Friday, I had a meeting with an SVP of Yahoo, to learn about some of the redesign coming to the homepage. What’s interesting is the focus is on apps, not the incredible large social graph that they’ve been building for 10 years. They know that not everyone is going to be a social participant (our technographic data indicates this also –although participation continues to increase) and everyone won’t participate on every website.
Right after lunch I talked with Scoble, who reminded me about the looming recession. we both agreed that this will shed off non-unique startups and force innovation, and likely higher CTRs for new types of marketing and advertising.
After lunch, I stopped by University Cafe in Palo Alto for an impromptu meeting, if you sit on the sidewalk table like I did, you’re almost guaranteed to see someone from the social media or tech space walk by. Facebook is just a few blocks away and many VCs, entrepreneurs take in business meetings here. Chris Saad (pic) of the data portability group came by, and he explained in depth his vision of the personal web –how content will be delivered based on historical, relevance, and not social data.
Chris showed me the upcoming Web 3.0 conference, which I tweeted “Did Web 2.0 jump the shark?” Minutes later I received a private message from Tim O’Reilly himself, we got on the phone and he explained his intentions of the term (most of us aren’t using it in the way he first envisioned) and loosely, his vision is that the behavior of networks will populate databases in which organizations can retrieve the data and deliver content –social activity isn’t always implied.
So that’s four conversations (in one day) that were outside of my usual ‘social’ discussions I have with clients, entrepreneurs, press, and VCs. I’ve heard and read a lot of folks explain what they think is coming (I’m avoiding saying the “S” word), but I’m not going to accept that as fact, I’m going to continue to explore, talk to folks, interview people to understand what this trend entails.
What’s interesting is that most of my clients (large corporations) haven’t figured out how to fully embrace the social web –let alone think about what’s next. The only caveat being here is that the social web won’t go away, but will integrate, and soon a new type of technology will emerge to provide greater relevancy to content, people, activities and ideas.
When I first started this blog, I titled it the “Web Strategy Blog” not the “Social Media blog” as I know there will always be new technologies and new trends, there’s something else coming beyond the social web. As I learn more, I’ll continue to report back to you all, stay tuned.
NB .. please forgive in advance my inability to articulate the ideas I am about to spew .. I’m still working out what I think 😉
We’ve known for quite a while that the Social Web helps us connect and converse, which can then lead to “the scaffolding of knowledge and meaning (Doc Searls, way back when). We also know this leads to and supports the development of our personal social networks focused on the issues that have interest and meaning for us.
Further, we have also all watched and experienced “echo chambers” and we recognize that consciously and unconsciously we place limits on our attention, thereby limiting that attention to those we interact with most. At the same time, in a (potentially) every-which-way-connected environment, the term “social” conjoined with the Web must, by definition, imply the possibility of coming into contact with ideas and people we have not previously encountered and do not know.
We also know that we cannot be “friends” or “colleagues” with everyone who connects to, links to, or follows us. However, with tools like Twitter and the increasingly sophisticated capabilities of making fragments and snippets of ideas “visible” in flows that pass before our eyes and minds, we are perhaps enabling new serendipitous and / or purposeful connections in the intersections between the Venn-diagram-like overlaps between your primary social network and my primary social network and someone else’s primary social network of interest.
Last night I called this the (perhaps) “semi-social web”. I don’t think that’s quite the right term, but I think we are in effect ring-fencing (with a sort of dotted-line ring fence) our professional or interest-based social networks by injecting them into publicly visible flows. In effect, while we are of necessity forcing our focus onto that to which we can pay attention (the “laws” of our cognitive capabilities and abilities to trust) we are also holding open the possibility to connect and co-create out into concentric rings of sociality wherein people we don’t know are in social connection with people we do or may know.
So, for know, I am calling this “semi-social” (until I understand it better) because it’s like the dryland process of meeting someone we don’t yet know at a dinner party or meeting .. they seem interesting and have piqued our curiosity, but we will have to exchange and interact more before we can get more ‘social”.
This emerging dynamic fits (to my thinking) with what I have been observing for several years now .. the social connections afforded by the social web enable us to grow and deepen some relationships while others stagnate or wither, dry up and blow away. As we move further into the future of the sociality the web affords, we will all learn more about how to navigate, cultivate, grow, use and sustain our social presence on the Web .. some of it will be primary, some of it will be secondary, some of it will be “semi-social” and will wax and wane depending upon purpose, interest, and the care and feeding we give it.
Just like real life 😉 Hey, it’s been said that that the sociology we are growing mirrors the sociology of real life … after all it’s real people behind the screens, avatars and hyperlinks.
When it comes to life activities and work, we will have to grow our abilities to focus, to stay open (there’s a concept from archery I know as “open focus”) and to float with purpose in the permanent white water of continuous flows of ideas and information, connecting the dots and people as and when it suits ours’ and their purposes.
From Bertil, above:
One aspect that will come with that is that your communications will be heavily dependent on filtering and relevance algorithms. Such algorithms will become too important to trust increasingly large Web companies with, so service modularity will expand, decentralized processing too and semantic description too: youâ„¢ll be able to choose, and have on your personal devices layman-understandable programs that will help you sort privacy, relevancy and social concerns.
Dave Snowden of KM and complexity theory / sensemaking fame, has reinterpreted Weinberger’s “Everything Is Miscellaneous” as “Everything Is Fragmented”, referring to how the human brain processes and works with information. We are natural pattern-recognition organisms (machines ?).
I think an important part of what I was trying to say above (and I know Dave S. says and believes this) is that no matter how sophisticated the machine algorithm, we will always be and use ‘social” filters because the raw material of the stories we tell others and ourselves is more powerful and more useful than the interpretation(s) that parsing, analysis, summarization and algorithmic filters can provide us.
But I think it’s also clearly a case of “both / and” .. we’re gonna need all the help we can get.
As enterprises work at adopting Enterprise 2.0, what we have come to call “change management” is also going to change a lot. Think eOD, and think major changes to how we design and describe knowledge work, design and implement compensation philosophy and practice, design and operate performance management, and grow effective management and leadership.
Though I am loathe to shamelessly self-promote, some of you may find my FASTForward blog post from 9 months ago “Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation?” of interest and perhaps useful.
I think the next evolution has to be about social productivity.  So, what’s after the social web that followed the information web, in my view is the “Productive Web.”  We need to find novel approaches to leverage our connections to work together and create more wealth and opportunities than we could independently.  Thus the productive web.