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In The Future, Everyone Is A Social Network

One thing I am starting to realize with 9rules is the value of social features on a site and how in the future more and more sites will want to adopt the features of social networks. Now I don’t think every site will want to create a full-fledged social network, but certain aspects of social networks are simply to appealing and useful to users to ignore.

Now don’t take any of these features as being new or thought up by social networks. They have been around long before web 2.0, but social networks helped make them famous. If your site involves an audience and discussion in any shape or form, what makes you think that the readers don’t want to know a little about each other or possibly interact without you being involved? So often people talk about forming a community around a site yet they don’t provide the tools to allow a community to grow.

A small minority are skilled enough to help a community grow through a site by actively participating in the discussions and making everyone feel as though they are part of a community. However, what about those large sites where you know nothing but the name online handle of a person? Maybe that’s how many people want to keep it because maintaining a profile on a social site/network can be a tedious task since we have so many. However, not providing the tools to help foster a community because we already have too much isn’t the way to look at things.

All of this starts to bring up the need for a decentralized social network where your central profile actually becomes useful and not just another place to tell friends to go. The web itself is a community and therefore any community you create should not be an isolated one, but a sub-community of the larger one. Of course many people already are thinking along these lines like USA Today, but you see what happens when social features get put in the hands of bad designers.

In the future your site will be more than just an entry and some comments. It will be your community where people socialize. It will truly become your house in the large web community where people stop by for tea (do people do that?) and then move onto the next house.

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Published by Scrivs on March 30, 2007 in Web++ • Did you like it? Subscribe! Or Submit it to Blogosphere News!

6 people says things!

  1. I agree altogether with you, however, I disagree that every site will be a social community. I think that there will be 5 or 6 really popular social networks and each persons site will be a subset of that. Offering insight to specialized topics, very similar to the 9rules, however imagine if there were several 9rules types.

    Just as you mentioned that blog publishing tools are extremely popular I think community publishing tools will be becomign much more popular over the next year like drupal or pligg.

    By Jeff Brown on March 30, 2007 2:04 pm

  2. Imagine RSS, OMPL and OpenID connected?

    Your social network is the people who read your site and the people whose sites you read.

    You would need some mechanism of claiming any RSS feed as belonging to you, and letting it look at your OMPL to see who your friends are.

    By engtech on March 30, 2007 7:08 pm

  3. [...] Over at Wisdump, Scrives points out that In The Future, Everyone Is A Social Network. Remember, the internet is full of people and we want to interact with other people. [...]

    By Sunday Morning Goodness - 1 April 2007 at SuccessCREEations by Chris Cree on April 1, 2007 8:43 am

  4. I agree to an extent, and also with Jeff.

    There are only so many cups of tea you can drink in a day, and I visit many more sites than I drink cups.

    Interesting post.

    By David Airey :: Creative Design :: on April 3, 2007 12:51 pm

  5. Great post, Scrivs. I think 9rules is an excellent example of the way social networks form in a decentralized way. 9rules began as a blog aggregator, then grew to a selected membership community, then demand for participation gave birth to a forum, which generated curiosity about the other participating members and that warranted a more in-depth profile. What I like about 9rules profiles is the way they mash 9rules content with other communities content. I can easily see this moving to a standardized platform for a global, social profile with hooks into various sites. I would love to have a single public profile that could be integrated uniquely with sites I participate in that have communities.

    By Justin Kistner on April 4, 2007 11:38 am

  6. [...] In The Future, Everyone Is A Social Network [...]

    By Some random links at Virtual Generations on May 7, 2007 4:19 pm

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