With movements like Data Portability, the social web is moving to a more open platform. The big networks are joining or building service offerings to take content, user data, social graphs, and technology out to the wider web. Facebook has Connect, MySpace and Ning are part of OpenSocial, and smaller players like Twitter and Friendfeed were built on an open platform from the start.
The walls of the garden are breaking down, and it begs the question: What will this new social world look like? Where will we be socializing in the future and how?
We are seeing the start of this next generation social web with the emergence of social browsing applications. These projects range from browser extensions like Headup and Glue to actual full-on browser offerings like Flock. These tools help bring social conversation and content directly into the browsing experience. While each offers its unique flavor, not all of these start-ups will survive.
The ultimate winner will be the one that follows these two rules:
- reduce, don't create, social noise and
- leverage existing social data and connections
1. Reduce, don't create, social noise
The social experience can be a little overwhelming... all those tweets and pokes and flair buttons. The browsing experience should be more guided, about finding useful information. The biggest danger of a "social browsing" application is contributing to the noise rather than giving you relevant chatter in context.
Reframe It allows users to comment on any element of any page. It creates a contextual discussion around content. It could get really noisy, but there are filters. Still, it's a lot of work to joining the right groups and follow the right people. And every comment you make is tied to a URL, rather than the specific movie or event you commented on.
Headup leverages your current circle of friends. If you are browsing a site and there is text about a band or a person, a plus sign will appear to indicate social content. Headup tells you what friends liked/disliked this artist and whether there are events in your area. It's less noise and more about relevant social information.
Glue limiting social alerts to sites around specific verticals: wine, books, movies, television, music, etc. The idea is to bring back the conversation to the context where it would have the most value. It's at Amazon.com or Wine.com that you really want to rate, comment, or see what your friends thought. And the social data is tied to the actual object, not the page. So even if you are browsing a movie on Fandango, you will see how your friend rated it on Flixster.
2. Leverage existing social data and connections
Don't make me join another network. Don't make me reconnect with my friends, upload my photos again, or rate my favorite movies... again!!
Socialbrowse makes link sharing a more social behavior. You can browse pages and visually see the links your friends thought were interesting and why. It's simple and ingenious, only I already have platforms where I'm doing that. Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Delicious. Why do I need to follow people on Socialbrowse if I am already following them on Twitter? Why do I have to share again if I've already tagged it on delicious?
This is where the Flock Browser gets things really right. While it lacks the contextual page mark-up (maybe version 3.0?), it pulls in data from all your existing social networks. It connects you to all your friends, no matter where they are, and brings their lifestreams together. And best of all, it allows you to push the content you are viewing out to your social networks in an easy and efficient way.
In the end, the one thing that all the extensions and applications don't offer is that immersive feeling of being part of the mass conversation. They offer no way to find people on the network and soak in the patchwork of imagery and data bits that is their online social life. For that we still need the social network portal, the centralized and connected social web. But for everything else, I think we are going to see a lot less noisy and a lot more useful social web.
Marta Strickland
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the social net
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Strategists & Planners
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couldn't have said it better myself...right on
Posted on December 1, 2008 10:31
Marta, insightful framework for and treatment of evolving social browsing applications. Makes me wonder: 1. When / where social web and semantic web applications will intersect and 2. How these apps will deal w/ information and influence sub-groups. That is, there are some folks whose opinions I seek out on tech topics but not on, say, vacation destinations.
Posted on December 1, 2008 12:38
Good questions Michael. I think the answer to #2 is #1. The intersection of semantic web and social apps is what will help us deal with these influence sub-groups. The semantic web is working to build meaning and structure out of our language, but I don't think it would be too hard to adapt that to our relationships. There needs to be some human adjustment and correction of the machine, it will never be perfect... but an application that can scan my social graph, catalog common interests by analyzing my conversations, and then turn that knowledge into utility when I'm browsing on the rest of the web... that's a step in the right direction.
Posted on December 1, 2008 13:02