Social networks as Hardware

by Alin Wagner-lahmy on January 18, 2010 · 0 comments

in Community,Online Networking,Product Management,Social Media,Social Media for Lawyers

: Image by bre pettis via Flickr

Paul Confer, a close colleague of mine, can tell you the entire history of computers and the net on it’s tiniest detail. If you want to host a Trivia game with the rarest, most cool details of the history of hardware and software – he’s your guy. In one of those times where we got into a conversation about ARPANET, Licklider and how online communities came to be, our conversation developed into comparing the history of computers, to the history of online networks.

40 years a go, a computer was a monstrous, huge, heavy and complex piece of equipment, which you could find only at the deepest, darkest basements of only a few companies. Today the majority of us own a laptop or a desktop; we all walk around with mobiles, netbooks, notebooks, eReaders, etc – all different versions of ‘a computer’. Just as the computer developed from ‘one big and complex machine’ into a personal tool, so I see online networks develop – from huge scale environments like ‘Facebook‘ and ‘Linkedin‘, into smaller and more focused and personalized networks.

Jeremiah Owyang spoke of ‘the era of Social Colonization‘ where social web is embedded in every site – to me, a targeted, personalized network is the next step of online networking. In all sites you will go to, you will be able to participate in community activity that is based on a social network -your social network – which happens today in a very sporadic, inconsistent way. Currently, going to ‘Facebook’ and ‘Linkedin’ is very generic experience, people talk about, and ‘do’ everything and anything; e.g. you may have missed that super delicious recipe your friend posted simply becasue you cannot cover the entire 500 activities of your 347 friends every day. Imagine going to ‘Food Network‘ and seeing your ‘Facebook’ or office friends there. Your ‘hang out’ and social experience will be much more contextual and focused on the topic of the site you are visiting. The generic experience (Facebook) won’t get lost, but the segmentation of your network will allow you to maximize your relationships as well as make the most out of the as the ‘search’ and ‘data consumption’ would be much more contextual and targeted.

WordPress’s BodyPress is a great example of the technological manifestation of that – an easy ‘create your own network/community’ tool which allows you, in one click, to create registration + profile on your site, that allows people to network. It is available to anyone – you, me – to download and use and I have covered numerous case studies of it when I covered WordCamp NYC 09.