Networking
I’m not talking about 10baseT or even 100, or Gigabit Ethernet. I could if you want. But that will be for a later time. I’m thinking more about the connections between people, that networking, of the social and relationship kind is more what I had in mind.
‘Social Networking’ has become the new poster child of the internet, as if back in 1993 on newsgroups, people weren’t doing the EXACT SAME THING. Ok, sure it was more basic, more simplified and had less Web 2.0. It was still networking, we discussed topics, shared the David Letterman Top 10 from the night before, and did basic things with information that are now seen as no brainers.
I’m not trying to talk as if I was 30 when this happened, I wasn’t. But I can say that I do remember it well, BBSs, Newsgroups and the like.
Where Myspace fails is that it, along with others has become the GeoCities of the Web 2.0 age, lacking every feature of the modern internet, and allowing freedom over the content and access to information. If Myspace was serious about networking, and by that I mean just making connections.. it would have been designed very differently. At least to me, it looks just like a way to turn a buck now than offer a valuable service.
Where Facebook fails is what I would consider the Chromehounds of the internet. Notifications never seem to stop, and the application base is only doing so and developing them to capture seemingly important demographic data of all kinds to use or sell.
There are so many now, that this is where ‘Social Networking’ as a whole fails. Fragmentation. As more and more of these communities pop up, you have less and less time to be at each, ultimately settling more on one if its important to you, than the rest. I don’t ever see ‘one’ winner.. which means that true social networking will devolve into a large group of fragmented sites and we’ll be back to a more modern version of the newsgroup days. At least now I know what some of those alt.* ones are and can stay away.