It’s time to take “social” for granted

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Thomas Purves

I would like to declare the social web officially invented already. Hoozah! It was a good, it was fun, like any tech boom, it made it’s share of wiz kids very successful and created a lot of value for the rest of us along the way too. Disastrous timesinks like Icanhascheezburger and Scrabulous not withstanding. Now lets move on.

The big deal in the late 90s was to have a business idea like “it’s a like giant petfood store but… wait for it… on the web”

The big deal of this decade was “omg, it’s like [insert whatever here] but we’ll web 2.0 the hell out of it”

Here’s the news. This later idea is no longer interesting. It’s time is done. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s still vast areas of everyday business, enterprise and government that still need to be beaten severely with the Web2.0 stick (even the Web1.0 stick would still help in some places). Rather, it’s now time to think of socialness and 2.0ness as “business as usual” in the IT industry. The substantive battle is over, this is a mopping up operation. And there’s a ton of rolling up the sleeves and value to unlock left to do in almost any vertical industry. [yes you can contact tom[at]thomaspurves.com to learn more about my agreeable professional services rates and lets get started]

Over time, the tools, tricks and interfaces for making social apps will continue to evolve. In much the same way that basic web interface design, SEO and architecting for scalability continues to evolve – as a specialist field, off of the main stage.

However, if you are the next young wiz kid innovator or trying to disrupt everything, forget about social. Oh sure, your app will certainly be social. But that’s just a basic prerequisite now, like an app being webaccessible in the first place is something we can take for granted. Social is no longer the goal onto itself, it’s the baseline from which to build on.

Rather than meta-obsessing over Social and talking about talking about social, it’s time that we all just got on to the next wave of using these great tools available to solve real human, consumer and business problems.

Next week: Building Web3.0, why it’s time to start taking Mobile for granted too…

Posted in Archive, enterprise2.0, socialmedia, socialplatforms | 5 Comments

Toronto tech scene in the papers

Posted on March 25, 2008 by Thomas Purves

In case you missed it, there was a nice article by the Post’s David George-Cosh yesterday on the Toronto tech scene including DemoCamap and MobileMonday. It’s a good reminder that, on the whole, these events have been a very good thing the last few years for stimulating ideas, connections and new ventures in the local scene (and across many other local scenes too).

If you had a chance to attend, you might have noticed the most recent events (like democamp17, MobileMonday, various StartupCamps) have been almost unfailingly chock-full of solid demos. It can be easy to complain about Web 2.0 fatigue or the how the startup environment could be better. But if recent events are any indication, the future of tech in Canada look pretty bright to me.

Link: Pitching to the heavy hitters

Posted in Archive, barcamp, torcamp | 1 Comment

Noise Aggregators

Posted on March 24, 2008 by Thomas Purves

bored
Jevon has a great post up today on how the new trend towards social aggregators is missing the point.

I’ve called these things underpants business models. Collecting a lot of people’s seemingly-useless personal stuff in one place, but then, through some magical step 2, everyone profits. I, like Jevon, and everyone else, are still waiting for anyone to come anywhere close to step 2. Yet the aggregator startup fad just keeps coming. Everyone seems to be wearing them these days… Jaiku, plaxo, friendfeed, socialthing etc.

But, as Google has proved since 1998, there’s little value in aggregating the whole internet, but a lot of value to be created in synthesizing it. Aggregating random data easy. Relevant, human-interesting synthesis hard, but the only place where value is created.

What exacerbates the synthesis problem is that, often with these apps, even the underpants suck. Most of these sites aggregate feeds based on any/all of what feeds your friends have available rather than what’s meaningful. No thanks, I don’t need an unfiltered list of every single track you listened to in iTunes yesterday.

I think only facebook -in it’s heyday, before the application spam took over, and drowned out all semblance of meaningful social interaction- ever had it close to right. (The original) facebook filtered heavily and focused only a few relatively high-social-value feeds of information. Even this has been debated.

As Bruce Sterling put it a year ago following a lot of blogs/twitter/social-presence can be like watching someone getting beaten to death with croutons.

Or to keep with the cruder underpants metaphor: Nobody wants an experience that feels like drinking from the firehose social diarrhea.

Anyway, thanks to Jevon for pushing me towards getting down the real post I’ve meaning to write…

Coming up on ThomasPurves.com : Why the Social media is still absolutely important, and why it don’t matter at all. (a.k.a. How socialness is just one of many vital prerequisites, but not the point, of the future of software)

Posted in Archive, socialgraft, socialgraph, socialmedia | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments