Paul Coyne :: Blog :: web 2.0

Back in the office now after this year’s visit to Berlin for the Online Educa conference and exhibition. Now it its 14^th year this conference has become the largest and most comprehensive global e-learning conference for the corporate, education and public service sectors.

 

I like this event a lot. The quality and diversity of the presentations, subjects and speakers is very high and it’s a great place to catch up with people I don’t otherwise get the chance to catch up with.

 

This year I was invited to speak on the subject of ‘Web 2.0 and Work Based Learning’. Basically this was a piece on the mapping of appropriate web 2.0 designs/socialised learning designs on top of existing work based learning programmes. Ensuring that your audience is ready for the introduction of such a technology was one caveat, along with the need to allow users/learners to ‘on-board’ their use of Web 2.0 in the workplace as their mastery and confidence increases.

 

It’s a more sober piece than one I may have done even a year ago I think. Pragmatism and the realisation that adoption of Web 2.0 in the work place won’t happen just ‘cos I say it’s great, have caused me to temper some of the evangelism of recent years. I’m not sure that this approach is in the long term useful to anyone but it feels time to slow down a little I think and reflect on the last year or so worth of development.

 

I enjoyed delivering my presentation, and the chair, Phillipe, did a great job in managing the session. However, being in the main hall has its drawbacks. It’s a very large room and I think Q&A can be a little intimidating for the audience. This is a shame because it’s the best and most valuable part of any session I think. I’d like to see non-plenary sessions kept in smaller, more intimate conference rooms that do allow for Q&A, better for everyone.

 

Reflecting on the past few days and on some of the sessions I was able to attend a few strands has emerged:

• Web 2.0 is no longer the novelty it has been for the past 2 or 3 years – more cases and reflections on use of Web 2.0 but with more maturity and some criticism too.
• Second Life. There was a substantial SL presence and it appeared in the sessions too. This just isn’t going away and the Bavarian Library had a very good demonstration of their SL presence which I found intriguing. For me the jury is still out on SL, but perhaps it’s time to revisit SL?
• OER. Open Educational Resources. For me this seems to have come out of the blue in the last 12 months. A lot of time was given over to OER and I attended quite a few OER sessions. Sorry, but this is all smoke and mirrors and the premise deeply flawed. I congratulate Arturo Dyro of Young Digital Planet for his defense of publishing in an OER world the Day 2 plenary on ‘OER – Unstoppable or Unsustainable?’.
• Engaging with Gen Y, Millenials and Next Generation Learners. Lots of airtime on why the upcoming generation is different to the last and why current structures are ill-suited to meeting their particular needs. Ton Ziljstra talked about this too at the end of Day 1. Quite interesting.

 

On Day 2 I listened to the ELIG panel and session on Publishing Meets eLearning. I was invited to take part in this panel but unfortunately OEB policy dictated that I could not since I had presented on Day 1. The talks were given by Stephen Bradley (Elsevier), Diana Childress (Blackboard) and Eric Baber (Cambridge University Press). These were honest and realistic appraisals of the role of the publisher in an eLearning context and posed more questions than answers. There was (is) much confusion over the value add and the position in the value chain of the publisher in delivering, developing and commissioning elearning (assuming one has defined elearning in any meaningful way). Some slightly opposing views from the floor and the panel regarding statements like ‘Content is no longer King’ added to the general sense of wooliness, but I think that is to be expected in what is a traditional, and very successful business. Experimentation with content and business models, formats and modalities is to be encouraged but I don’t believe anyone knows what success will look like in a Publisher/eLearning world.

 

Overall this was a successful Online Educa 2008. I’m looking forward to following up on some very interesting propositions and developing Emerald thinking in new and innovative ways as a result.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting ready to return to the UK after what has been a very enjoyable couple of days in Sestri Levante, a gorgeous italian village on the Ligurian cost south of Genoa.

Giunti Labs has been our host and organiser this year for the European Learning Industry Group AGM (22^nd) and the Digital Education Content Marketplaces (DECOM 2008) conference and workshop.

I don't really know where to begin; I think these have been two of the most singularly useful conferences I've attended for a long time. The quality of the audience and the speakers was extremely high so the subsequent opportunities to network and to have extremely interesting conversations with decision makers and persons of influences was tremendous. The content was of an equally high standard and the design of both days allowed for quite a bit of interactvity, group work and conversation on a chosen stream.

Day 1 was the AGM of ELIG. ELIG is positioning itself as the leading voice of the European Learning Industry which really is as broad as the title suggests – representation from Academic institutions, content providers, learning consultancy firms, system vendors, publishers, EU agencies ensured a diverse a range of views as it was possible to get in one room and I think ultimately that is the real value of the group, and the event itself. A couple of things stand out I think – ELIG as a group includes organisations that pursue very different agendas and hold quite conflicting ideas, particularly those around Open Content/Access. This issue alone caused much debate and from my perspective it was very valuable indeed to have a forum where contentious notions of Openness could be discussed frankly and in safety – and I think it worked to a degree. The question of openness is a very nuanced and complex one and this is sometimes not expressed when organisations espouse the moral force for social good that they believe Open Content almost certainly is. This in my view is too simplistic and fails t take into account a whole range of issues including quality, authority, credibility, relevance, preservation, sustainability (in particular), accountability and perceived value – that's just of the top of my head. The fact that there were a number of publishers present helped advance the debate around Openness and helped some organisations to adopt a less naive and a richer view of the question of Openness. This is my hope anyway. ELIG have an important task here to help manage the conflict and tensions of such a diverse group.

The ELIG event was much more than that however, but more later.

DECOM2008, hosted in Giunti Labs stunning coastal HQ, was an equally fascinating and enormously interesting day. The opening presentations from Fabrizio cardinalli, David Worlock and Judy Brown were real highlights for me, not because they were so very new – my own views were very much echoed by the presenters – but because my Chief Exec was in the room and it's nice to have him hear it from someone else – another Chief Exec helps!

This was another very diverse day and allowed for group breakouts in the afternoon to discuss any one of ten subjects on offer. I was pleased to report the findings of our table to the audience and to talk at some length about the future value of Community, social tools and the unbundling of content on the web. The question of Openness was raised again and the assumption always is that as a publisher I'm dead against it – however it's easy to point out some of the different approaches to Openness – Open software, no problem (InTouch is built on Open Source software since we believe building communities is a better use of our time not creating new software), Open Content – what content? User created content I welcome very much. I pursue a 3 C's strategy with InTouch (community, content and context) and UCC is an important part of that approach. UCC adds real value to Editorially created content (ECC) and in fact isn't new. We tie ourselves up in knots with this and it's not that tricky really – all content has spawned UCC however in the past it may have taken the form of conversation, annotation, notes and reviews (Quill pen, ink and parchment). So it goes on the web and we now call that UGC or UCC. I'm relaxed about that content – it's a natural expression of interaction with content and people and can help guide people to make informed decisions about content and communities in terms of relevance, trust, quality, ownership, perspective and agenda.

I'm very grateful to the organisers, Richard Straub at ELIG and Fabrizio Cardinalli (Giunti CEO) for arranging such a stimulating couple of days. It's not often such a diversity of insight, experience and perspective is assembled in the same space and to have the opportunity to challenge and to be challenged on some very important issues is very rare and correspondingly valuable. Thanks guys.

An interesting and relevent piece found on ReadWriteWeb.com. Wonder how this trend will inform our own web strategies? It's kinda along the lines i talked about at a recent web 2.0 talk and publishing and the overwhelming amount of choice out there now compared to 10 years ago, so it's timely too. Will watch with interest...

 

You are not the center of the universe, especially on the internet. That's the lesson that even the biggest web brands are learning fast, and we expect to see widespread cultural changes occur right along side their learning.

One week after we wrote about the leaked screenshots that have since been confirmed as the forthcoming home page design of AOL.com, where 3rd party content and functionality is now welcome to come on in through the front door, now Yahoo! is telling the press that its home page will soon be home to far more content from outside the Yahoo! network than ever before. The era of the walled garden is over.

What's Coming to Yahoo.com

Yahoo told the AP this morning that it will soon roll out the first major redesign of its home page in two years. That redesign will host a wide variety of widgets from rival services like movie links from Netflix, music from iTunes and Amazon. It will be something like the Facebook platform, but with more prominent placement for 3rd party services than even Facebook offers. Yahoo has talked about this plan before, but now is making a media push in preparation for action.

Left: The awesome logo for this week's Yahoo Hack Day

Just Like AOL.com, and Everyone Else On Top of Their Game

Yahoo's plans are similar to what AOL appears to be planning, where activity updates 3rd party social networks and possibly an on-site RSS reader will bring new functionality to AOL users.

As we wrote last week about AOL's strategy:

Aggregation of content from around the web is quite likely a key part of the future for almost all successful websites; the web is too large to pretend you're an island any more, even if your network is sprawling it just can't compete with the options offered by the web at large. While mainstream users used to think that AOL was the internet for years, they are not so naive any more.

This is an Important Trend

We've written here about the new class of powerhouse sites that specialize in bricolage, the art of assembling found objects. (Think BoingBoing and Neatorama). We've also written about why online noise is good for you. We don't expect the big portals to go as far with this strategy at first as the edge publishers have, but just like Google's indexing the open web blew the Yahoo! directory out of the water in search - so too is a new paradigm in aggregate publishing out-competing brand-selected, human edited portals.

Right: Hugh MacLeod puts it frankly.

It's an exciting time. We look forward to seeing how the rest of the world changes as the leading sources of information online turn towards a model of intelligent collecting and sharing, as opposed to a closed, self-facing broadcast model.

Discuss

First found this report via a site i visit regularly, the TrendsSpotting blog. It has produced a thorough overview of Online China, collected from a variety of sources such as Universal McCann, CNNIC, Pew Internet, Hitwise, comScore and more. The report focus on three key themes:

1) China as an online leader,

2) the competitive landscape in Search, IM & Web 2.0, and

3) Business in Online China.

TrendsSpotting says that these are "key indicators of the ongoing development of the dynamic Internet market in China." It's a great report, embedded below.

Posted by Dusan on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 10:43 am under Mobile Web, Research

The number of subscribers using mobile Internet services will rise from today's 577 million to 1.7 billion by 2013, thanks to the demand for collaborative applications known collectively as "web 2.0" and greater 2.5/3G penetration.

Established mobile players face increasing competition from web-based brands (Google? Yahoo?) and will have to adapt their strategies to accommodate greater collaboration with other members of the value chain, if future revenue growth in the mobile web 2.0 space is to be achieved.

According to the new Juniper Research's report titled "Mobile Web 2.0: Leveraging Location, IM, Social Web & Search 2008-2013," the emergence of such applications as social networking, user generated content, instant messaging and location based services call for delivery of the mobile Internet as it was originally conceived - OPEN! The idea is to allow users to share, collaborate and exploit content/information without any single party controlling the value chain.

This, however, marks a fundamental shift for the industry towards the D2C (direct to consumer) model and places growing pressure on both mobile network operators and handset manufacturers to relinquish some of their control over the value chain.

The report author Ian Chard says: "Major web players have already crossed the Rubicon and established themselves in the mobile domain, placing the onus on MNOs and other members of the value chain to form innovative relationships and grab a share of the new revenue streams being created."

However he also notes that the mobile web 2.0 market is still nascent and business models remain in a state of flux, giving time for players to establish fruitful and reciprocally beneficial partnerships.

Other findings from the report:

• The Far East and China region will be the largest market for mobile web, reaching almost 416 million users by 2013, up from 190 million users at the end of 2008.
• The greatest untapped potential for mobile web lies in South America, while growth will be more measured in markets such as Eastern and Western Europe where fixed broadband penetration is relatively high.
• As with the fixed Internet, many mobile web 2.0 applications will need to be provided at base cost/flat-data rates or even free of charge, forcing industry players to seek new revenue streams (advertising?).

More information about Juniper's report is available on their website.

It's generally the case that Executives tend to invest in new technologies and processes because they hold out the promise of either increasing competitive advantage (for example, by enabling new services or improvements to existing ones) or reducing costs. While opinions differ among discussion participants as to whether Web 2.0 technologies (like InTouch) have yet demonstrated any economic impact, a consensus is emerging that the technologies are valuable internally (mostly by improving collaboration) and externally (by strengthening connections among suppliers, partners, and customers).

Although no longer so very new the ideas and technologies that have become known collectively as Web 2.0 appear to be moving up the agenda for many Chief Execs and Boards. 

It's also clear that motives for this interest varies, as do expectations.

MckInsey conducted a global survey earlier this year, 'how businesses are using web 2.0'. The results are fascinating, and sometimes surprising.

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.aspx?ar=1913&pagenum=1

 

Successful Investments so far...

More than half of the executives surveyed say they are pleased with the results of their investments in Internet technologies over the past five years, and nearly three-quarters say that their companies plan to maintain or increase investments in Web 2.0 technologies in coming years. (A mere 13 percent say they are disappointed with previous investments.) Companies that acted quickly in the previous wave of investment are more satisfied than late movers. Less than a fifth of all those surveyed say they are very satisfied with their returns. Of those who rate themselves as very satisfied, 46 percent are “early adopters” and 44 percent “fast followers”.

Why web 2.0?

Executives say they are using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with customers and business partners and to encourage collaboration inside the company. Seventy percent say they are using some combination of these technologies for communicating with their customers. For example, about one-fifth of them say they are using blogs to improve customer service or solicit customer feedback.

Respondents report that to communicate with business partners and, secondarily, to achieve tighter integration with suppliers, companies are using Web services, peer-to-peer networking, collective intelligence, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and peer-to-peer networking.

Companies are using the same technologies to help manage knowledge internally. Just over half of respondents say they used one or more Web 2.0 technologies for that purpose. Just under half use these tools for designing and developing new products—for example, setting up systems to gather and share ideas.

Finally, among the executives surveyed, technologies for automation and collaboration appear to be gaining more traction than some of the technologies that have received more attention in the press. Blogs, podcasts, and mash-ups trail technology trends that allow people to contribute knowledge to a common effort or allow machines to exchange information more easily.

However, looking at companies that have invested in specific technologies, two distinct groups emerge. Some 43 percent of companies are even more focused on networking and collective intelligence technologies than the global average; these companies are likelier than others to be large, in high tech, and in Asia. And some 22 percent are much likelier to have invested in RSS, blogs, and podcasts than others; these companies are also likelier to be in industries such as media and telecommunications and located in North America. (might this mean that a Web 2.0 enabled Insight will be attractive to US buyers users?)

Some participants, especially those whose investments have focused on changes in their IT systems and who have invested less in Web 2.0, tend to view advantages as fleeting. “While we have been in the forefront of most technology upheavals over the past two decades, none of our investments have provided us with any significant competitive advantage for a significant duration. The technologies tend to get adopted by competing financial institutions with no meaningful time gap [and] tend to get commoditized very rapidly.”

Participants in the survey see these technologies as enabling a different way of doing business, both internally (for example, by aggregating knowledge from throughout the company) and externally (by tapping customers for product-development ideas). These respondents, such as this executive from a company using several technologies, tend to expect a more sustainable advantage. “Web 2.0 tools are helping to encourage interest in collaboration across the organization and helping us to explore new and different ways of collaborating. In time this may bring us some form of competitive advantage, but it would be hard to quantify anything at this stage.”

Clearly there is  a great deal of divergent opinion in the value of web 2.0 to the business and it's contribution to a firm's sustained competitve advantage but it appears that this uncertainty is not preventing many firms explore what the impact of these tools might mean for them.

It's very interesting to me that those firms looking to encourage and foster a web 2.0/social media approach, including aspects of customer inclusion, employee participation, value co-creation, rich dialogue and interaction, open data and services - are the same firms looking at the long term, strategic,  pay-off rather than the more traditional accounting ROI argument for IT investment..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Below is that list; I hope you'll find it useful and leave comments helping to extend the conversation further. In my mind I'm thinking of everything from RSS and wikis to Twitter, Facebook and blogging. Online tools that leverage social connections.

Last month we wrote about an initiative called The Working Group where people trying to bring about innovation in big companies. Many readers probably know about Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang's fantastic blog, where he explains social media in a business context, often in a format you can take directly to the boss. There are lots of different resources available online to help the intrepid early adopter and I hope this list will be one of them.

Ultimately, I'm not yet convinced myself that persuading anyone is the way to go. If you can make time on the side to use new tools and you can perform - perhaps the benefits can best speak for themselves. If that's not the case inside of a company, I'm sure it is between two companies with different attitudes towards adoption of new social technologies.

ROI is the elephant in the middle of the room, and it's addressed a bit in item number ten below. It's a topic I need more people to chime in on; I live and breathe this stuff and can articulate the benefits of it to a great degree, but it just speaks for itself to me too. So if you're an ROI-head, pipe up. Links, traffic, mindshare, connections between people and early access to actionable information are the things I usually cite without quantifying.

Let's get into the list though, and please do feel free to add your own thoughts as well.

A List of Objections, Replies and Concessions Regarding Social Media and Tools

1. I suffer from information overload already.

Possible replies:

Try just skimming messages in some fora - you may need to look closely at every email you get but you don't have to look at every Facebook friend's update.

The right tools for you will feel helpful in time, not like a burden. Experiment for awhile with new tools and stick with the ones that deliver you the most high-quality information, whether those tools are high-quantity or not. (Thanks to Aaron Hockley and Ruby Sinreich for these thoughts.)

Check out tools like AideRSS and FeedHub - just two examples of services aiming to improve the signal to noise ratio.

Times change and so do information paradigms. Get used to it. The amount of information you had access to 3 years ago was infinitely more than people at any other point in history and we're in the middle of another huge leap right now.

Concession: If you think consuming all this new information is a challenge, wait until you try to find the time to make sense of it! (Thanks to Nancy White for that thought.)

2. So much of what's discussed online is meaningless. These forms of communication are shallow and make us dumber. We have real work to do!

Possible replies:

Much of it is not meaningless, but if you feel overwhelmed with meaninglessness - try subscribing to a search for keywords in a particular service and using that as your starting point for engagement.

Having a presence and starting a conversation is rarely a bad thing - bring quality conversation to a space and you'll find others ready to engage. (Thanks to Banana Lee Fishbones, obviously a fan of open, non-anonymous public communication :) for this articulation.)

Personal information can be very useful in understanding the context of more explicitly useful information.

If learning how the market feels about your organization, engaging with your customers and driving traffic to your web work - all very realistic goals for social media engagement - aren't work, then I don't know what is. Even in the short term, strategic engagement with online social media will have a clear work pay-off.

Concession: The signal to noise ratio will be easier to maximize if you can find an experienced guide to learn from. Just jumping into social media and new tools on your own will not neccesarily lead to a meaningful experience. It could, but it will take longer.

3. I don't have the time to contribute and moderate, it looks like it takes a lot of time and energy.

Possible replies:

If you aren't going to eat that lunch of yours, I'd be happy to, thanks.

With practice, familiarity and technology fine-tuned with a little experience you'll find the time required will decrease.

You might consider this time spent on marketing or communication with existing customer base - perhaps there's something else in that department that isn't working well and could be replaced with online work.

Concession:
Doing anything well does take time and energy. You've obviously been thinking about this stuff a lot, it is important - and it's going to take time and energy.

4. Our customers don't use this stuff, the learning curve limits its usefulness to geeks.

Possible replies:

You might be surprised to learn how many of your customers do already use these new tools. Even more will do so in the future.

The best designed tools are designed like good games - you can get small rewards right away and then learn more advanced skills to win bigger rewards. Among online services that are intended for general audiences, only poorly designed ones are too geeky.

Many of these tools provide value vastly disproportionate to the literal number of people they reach. These are like high-value focus groups where you'll gather information and preparation to engage with the rest of the world.

Try asking someone near you to give you an in-person demonstration of one of these tools. You'll find it much easier to learn once you've seen the right paths taken to show what it can do.

5. Communicators [bloggers, tweeters] are so fickle, better to stay unengaged than risk random brand damage. We don't want hostile comments left about us on any forum we've legitimized.

Possible replies:

If you need to, you can require that any comments left on your own site be approved before they appear. This slows down the conversation but if it makes conversation possible for you then do it.

There are far fewer people who will take the time to say hostile things, even on the internet, than you might imagine.

Engage - you'll be appreciated more for it. People are going to say what they are going to say - you can either let any criticism go unanswered or you can be the bigger person/brand for responding well.

Conversations are going to happen online, better to be engaged than to have it happening behind your back. (As articulated by Rick Turoczy.)

It's ok, no one believes that anyone is perfect anymore. Swing for the fences sometimes - you might strike out, but sometimes you'll hit a home run.

Even if you're not responding publicly, you should watch closely so you know what people are saying. Maybe you don't have a blog, but subscribe to a blogsearch feed or alert for your company's name. Maybe none of your people are on Twitter - you can subscribe to a feed for a search via Terraminds.

Concessions:
Some of the critical things that get said about you online might not warrant a response. Just decide which ones do and file the rest away somewhere.

Communicating in this different context is very new and challenging for traditionally trained business people. Good luck.

6. Traditional media and audiences are still bigger, we'll do new stuff when they do.

Possible replies:

They already are, from blogging to online video to social networks to mobile to microblogging - big, established brands are already doing all of it. They may be experimenting but they will bringing all their market dominance into the most useful social media sectors as soon as it suits them. Will that be too late for you? It might be.

Traditional media audiences are also more passive - online audiences can engage with, rebroadcast and otherwise amplify your communication efforts.

Concessions:
That's true and fair, if you think your business can thrive while taking that attitude towards a period of intense social and economic change then you just rock on with your bad self. I'll be taking my love of innovation to the employer down the street.

7. Upper management won't support it/dedicate resources for it.

Possible replies:

A lot of technology adoption has for some time had to happen despite this reality. People adopt new tools on their own at work, without permission. They discover powerful ways to solve their problems and then they share them horizontally.

Compared to other expenses, meaningful engagement with new online technology does not have huge costs.

Concessions:
Meaningful engagement with new technology does require some expenditure of time, energy and money. If you're not willing to do this then you'll be unlikely to see big benefits.

8. These startups can't offer meaningful security, they may not even be around in a year - I'll wait until Google or our enterprise software vendor starts offering this kind of functionality.

Possible replies:

The skills you build and the connections you make will remain with you, though. This is a paradigm shift underway more than it is about any particular tool.

Chose your tools carefully - expect data export as an option so you can back up or switch services whenever you need to. This isn't widespread yet but the best tools allow it.

Concessions:
You do need to be careful, but if you do so intelligently then the benefits can really outweight the risks. It is very possible that any one of these services might shutter in a year or two, but you'll get a lot out of them in the meantime and hopefully won't lose access to your data if that happens.

9. There are so many tools that are similar, I can't tell where to invest my time so I don't use any of it at all.

Possible replies:

A little experimentation goes a long way.

Try asking people in your field who have some experience what tools they are using.

Try searching for keywords related to your work in various sites. You'll find out that way which sites are best suited for you.

Concessions:

It's true, it can be very confusing and very few people are able to keep up with all the new services that are launching. Don't worry about it, just do your best.

10. That stuff's fine for sexy brands, but we sell [insert boring B2B brand] and are known for stability more than chasing the flavor-of-the-month. We're doing just fine with the tools we've got, thanks.

Possible replies:

Some of these things, RSS and wikis for example, aren't passing social fads - they are emerging best practices and the state of the art.

ROI is very hard to measure, but try allocating a little energy over time to experiment and see what kind of results you get. From connections between people and projects, to search-friendly inbound links, to early access to important information - the benefits of engaging in new social media go on and on.

Conclusions

There are no conclusions, this is just a conversation. Please feel free to add your thoughts in comments and check out the comments to read what others suggest as talking points when faced with these objections.

In the 2008 Horizon Report, they discuss various technology trends including. Their comments around Social Operating Systems is interesting:

The issue, and what social operating systems will resolve, is that today’s tools do not recognize the “social graph”—the network of relationships a person has, independent of any given networking system or address book; the people one actually knows, is related to, or works with. At the same time, credible information about your social graph is embedded all over the web: in the carbon-copy fields of your emails; in attendee lists from conferences you attend; in tagged Flickr photos of you with people you know; in your comments on their blog posts; and in jointly authored papers and presentations published online.

This is a good definition of what we need from an open layer that allows a transportable, open social graph that we can leverage across various applications.

This address a critical problem that we face right now that I described in Social Networking Entrepreneurial Opportunities on my SoCal CTO Blog.

Certainly, what we are seeing with OpenSocial and DataPortability represents a possible future state where we can avoid some of this issue. If we could focus on building our "destination" on top of a set of open protocols that provide us with the social graph for users but that allows us to control our destiny, I believe that's the right model in most cases. It reduces friction for end-users and still gives us the leverage you want.

What I found interesting and I disagreed with was the statement that:

The essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content.

First, I don’t necessarily consider the social operating system to be “next generation social networking” – rather it’s a layer that allows us to have transportable information between all the places that knows about our information. Social networking sits on top of this and provides interfaces that allow us to interact.

Second, I don’t agree that next generation social networking will be based around people rather than around content. My personal experience is that content and social networks are intertwined. Blogs are both content and a social network. There is a social network around del.icio.us, YouTube, Flickr, etc. I’m much more likely to form and keep a social network when there is common interest in some form of content. And as we see more and more niche networks forming – they will almost invariably form around content. In fact, the Social Operating System will make it more likely that common interest and content will be the tie that binds.

If you go to the introduction page for OpenSocial, you can see that it too focuses as much on content as it does on person to person. The image is great and shows that OpenSocial thinks of the social graph as being BOTH people and content.