[Infowarrior] - The Future Of Social Isn’t Content Spewing (I Hope)

[Richard Forno]

The Future Of Social Isn’t Content Spewing (I Hope)
Michael Arrington

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/02/the-future-of-social-isnt-content-spewing-i-hope/

A conversation broke out today on the future of social media.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson says his vision for the future of  
social media is very simply

“every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in  
any number of ways to the Internet.”

Putting aside the fact that most people just don’t want to publish  
online (and perhaps never will), I still think this vision is  
incredibly narrow.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not arguing that online publishing isn’t  
interesting. Scott Karp’s recent rant that user generated content is  
“a new form of pollution” and extolling people to publish less, for  
example, is almost not worth responding to.

I don’t agree with Karp, who’s taking a side that also happens to  
promote the ideas of his new startup, but I’m not sure focusing on  
services that simply help people publish their life experiences is all  
that interesting either. Back in 2000 it was fairly hard to do things  
like write a blog, publish photos (don’t even think about videos back  
then), or share bookmarks. Today, all that stuff is easy, and in fact  
there are so many blogging platforms, social networks, bookmarking  
sites, photo/video sharing services, etc., that consumers are getting  
overwhelmed with choices that differ only name, it seems. Hell, we  
even have a micro publishing platform that limits posts to a single  
word.

Now that there are services for virtually every kind of content that  
users might conceivably want to publish, we need open standards and  
businesses to emerge that help people link all their disconnected  
content together into a single online identity - the Centralized Me.  
This stuff is badly needed because our content is all of the place on  
the Internet. And it’s unlikely the big guys are going to do the right  
things for the community without being significant pressure. This  
isn’t necessarily sexy stuff, but it’s important.

Let’s Make All This Online Content Go To Work For us

The future of social media, I hope, isn’t in more tools to help us  
spew more content. Instead, we need ideas and technology that can  
leverage all this available online content (including status and  
activity streams) to enhance real world social interactions.

The mobile device will be the center of this world. Forget using that  
device to simply publish content (although it is particularly suited  
to publish location data, photos and video content). Your mobile  
device should help you filter out people around you to bring mutually- 
interested people together. And it should also help you remember key  
information about the people you already know.

Perhaps that’s exactly what Fred meant when he wrote his vision, but  
it sure looks like he’s focused on simply recording the stuff of life  
and getting it onto the Internet. That seems like a commodity business  
to me. It’s enhancing (and in the process controlling to some extent)  
all the ways people interact with each other that’s the exciting stuff  
we’ll be seeing shortly. Remember, the word “social” is there for a  
reason. The Internet isn’t just about broadcasting and consuming, its  
about interaction.