On "the future of the social web"

Jeremiah Owyang of Forrest Research published his influential study The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras. Briefly, he proposed 5 eras:
1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

In my view, this is the evolution path of the social web as the tool. Whenever the web is reinvented with social ingredients, the virtual social web will imitate and reflect the social functions in the natural human society. If we apply Marshall McLuhan's media theory, interestingly, the social web is supposed to reshape the "natural" human society. Probably this is what Jeremiah attempted to define in the 5th era - social commerce - but in a bigger picture.

With "tool reshaping" in mind, in reality, the timeline of 5 eras would be quite blurry. The only factor that matters is the scale of impact. Tribal level of scale of the 5th era may happen much sooner and is already happening (e.g. making t-shirt online). However, pervasive scale of the 5th era (social commerce) may not happen at all, depending how to precisely define the "social commerce". If the 5th era is about decentralization, we will not see the massive scale because it's against industrial productivity. Instead, we will experience a co-existed centralized and decentralized commerce (as well as government, or any aspect in society), again, depending on the social context that can be toolized in the 4th era.

Social media is a "noise" medium

Is noise information?
It is the common sense that a communication medium should intentionally avoid or reduce the noise. Also in common sense the noise is defined as nonsense message. Since the determination of "nonsense" is quite subjective, the noise is in fact "unwanted" message. Therefore, the noise is indeed information, unwanted information.

Big picture is hidden in noises
A filtered communication medium can only carry the "wanted" message. However, the wanted information only represents limited set of states of reality. In information theory, the full spectrum of information is the white noise, representing the entire picture of reality, including both "wanted" and "unwanted". Wanted information can only render a biased picture, while the big picture is hidden in noises.

Social media carry big picture
Social media offer large degree of media freedom. There is no singular filtering mechanism such that much more noises can be carried. As a result, social media are able to carry the big picture of reality. The evolution of social media will make communication more "noisy". The more noisy, the closer to true reality.

Are Chinese social networks falling behind?

Landscape of Chinese social networks:
#1 - 51.com - myspace clone in China
#2 - xiaonei.com (means "inside campus") - facebook clone in China
Catchups: 360quan.com (yet another myspace clone focused on 15-25 demos); heinei.com (yet another facebook clone by the same founder of xiaonei.com after its acquisition); yiqi.com (founded by a high-profile Chinese Internet veteran and made big noise, combined many current social app features copied from US).

Here's Alexa analytics (not quite accurate but there's no reputable data available from comScore or Quantcast for China)


Obviously, the Chinese facebook clone falls behind the myspace clone at this moment. Notice that 51.com has been missing media centric characteristics of myspace (music, film, video distribution).

Interestingly, when we check out the growth of myspace and facebook, the Alexa chart shows the similar trend of the two major social networks in US before 2007. Facebook is way behind myspace before it actively expanded its reach beyond campus and opened its social platform in May 2007.

In the social network evolution phases, Chinese social networks are mostly in the first or second generation based on user adoption. The big question is, given the culture difference, will Chinese social netters evolve into the third generation? If the answer is true, instead of the blooming of facebook clones in China, passive and behavior social messaging such as Twitter and FriendFeed clones in China will take off eventually.

Broken longtail

The longtail theory by Chris Anderson quickly becomes the bible when many web2.0 startups pitching their business models. One common misuse or misunderstanding of longtail is ignoring the cost of creating longtail channel.

The longtail channel is the mechanism to aggregate and distribute longtail items (content, services providers, merchandise, etc). The channel is not simply a web2.0 site. It is about how to move the items in and out of the site. Google, Amazon, Ebay now rely on branding to retain their longtail channels. Building brand is costly huge effort. Yelp aggregates longtail by leveraging users (crowd sourcing) and focusing on San Francisco restaurants initially. Without carefully crafted channel creation strategy, longtail channel will be broken and the longtail model will never work.

Web2.0 is global tribalization

It is much easier to talk about web2.0 from technology perspectives such as round corner css design, ajax javascripting, RESTful APIs, RSS/ATOM feeds, CDN, cloud computing, or the social application buzz words like wiki, blog, podcast, SNS, etc. However, it is difficult to reach consensus on the wikipedia definition. Tim O'Reilly coined web2.0 for "web as a platform". The immediate question could be, what the heck is the "platform"? Marc Andreessen even defined 3 levels of platforms in defending Ning's position against Facebook social platform.

Web2.0 is a culture movement
The evolution of web platform constantly reshapes our cyberculture in terms of the way people interacting each other. The collective view of our social intercourse that morphed in cyberspace is a cultural phenomenon, as we have experienced with AIM culture, Myspace culture, Facebook culture, Twitter culture. It is prominent in digital divide among age groups. The usage of fast pacing digital media distinguishes cultural demographics. As a sociologist discovered earlier based on social class analysis, Facebook was favored by rich kids from private universities, while poor community college students felt more comfortable to hang out in Myspace. When web platform functions as media, the usage of such media shapes our culture. Moreover, the culture morphing is the natural selection process in technology evolution chain. Cool and fancy technologies can die in cradle if there is no cultural adaptation.

Global village as a result of mass media
From wikipedia:

Global village is a term coined by Wyndham Lewis in his book America and Cosmic Man (1948). However, Herbert Marshall McLuhan also wrote about this term in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). His book describes how electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media.

From newspaper, radio, television, to Web1.0 version of Internet (Yahoo portal and Google search), the mass media made the world small, flat, and within instant reach. Mass media as a part our postmodern life, the culture of the global village created the problem of "singular modernity" as summarized by Fredric Jameson. The singular ideology or totalitarianism built up with the assistance of mass media, in Jameson's opinion, "secures the notions of progress and the future under the auspices of global-capitalism while preemptively dismissing any alternative as un-modern, outmoded, or old-fashioned". Global village is the colonization of the singular cultural sphere.

Tribalization as a result of web2.0 culture
Youtube (or UGC in general) could highlight the cultural anti-colonization in web2.0 culture movement. Time magazine's Person of Year in 2006 was "You". Social apps connect these individualized identities throughout tribalized explicit social networks or implicit social connotations (e.g. sharing same tags in del.icio.us). World wide tribalization is coming!

Ontologies of the present demand archaeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past - Fredric Jameson

Why FriendFeed is hot?

FriendFeed is the current hype. Some bloggers compare it with Twitter frenzy happened last year. It is a simple (at least today) social message aggregator and definitely it's not the first one (Mashable listed 8 aggregators). I have FriendFeed installed on Facebook and quite enjoy "spying" what my friends are doing, specially I love to follow my sociologist friend's new posts and book reading updates for my research purpose before I become a big fan of Twitter.

So, why FriendFeed is hot?

FriendFeed is a continental beacon
Facebook beacon and news feed are most compelling social messaging mechanism. The passive messaging makes social utilities evolved into the third generation of social networks - behavior centric. However, Facebook is an Internet island (note that the island is not a walled garden as Facebook is an open social platform). FriendFeed breaks the island effect through message aggregation. Hence, it is a continental beacon.

As Facebook demonstrated the business model that social messaging will be the key for social ads, which envisioned by many insiders that will potentially surpass Google in the future, FriendFeed indeed raised the attention on how far the social messaging can be reached. Yet another land grabbing!

3 categories of social messages

There are three basic categories of social messages:

1) Conventional greeting: In Myspace, the hotspot of social messages are thanks for add for new friend, birthday, holiday, congratulations to graduation, raise, etc. The greeting is similar to Hallmark greeting cards bought in department stores. Users can get fancy and flashy virtual "cards" from lots of image sites.

2) Social grooming: Facebook widgets expand the scope of message beyond conventional greetings. One popular widget "X me" just for sending "Jane chest bumped me". Another "Food fighting" widget delivers non-conventional social message like "Jane threw an icecream to David". Those "non-sense" social signals are subtle but important in social relationships in the way like animal grooming each other.

3) Passive: Facebook invented passive communication or passive social message. When you login into your facebook account, the first page is a news feed about what's going on with your friend, like "Jane and Mark now are friends", "Jane threw an icecream to David with Food Fighting" (Food Fighting is the link to the widget install page).