My core concept was that the social media sites were not the key relevance, but the way people self organized along topical rather than geographic lines was. That we and no more than 200 online friends would bop from one site to another finding each other time after time after time.
Yes, the “Social Networking” buzz is morphing before our very eyes. And yes, I have noticed a shift in “MySpace-like” to “Facebook-like” (and more instances of “my facebook account” rather than “MySpace account”
Global Neighbourhoods: Facebook. Is it my global neighbourhood?
Shel Israel seems to have taken up the conversation that he and Robert Scoble started with “Naked Conversations”. He does all the posts on Global Neighborhoods, which is the renamed original “Naked Conversations” blog, and Scoble is still around and sometimes commenting and perhaps rarely posting (I haven’t seen any from him in a while), while he is out doing his Podtech.net company (which reminds me: I need to pay more attention to what Scoble is doing (due to such things as this:
See, Facebook for the first three years of its existence was mostly a tool for college kids to pass photos and other funny things around. Now, if you have photos of your frat party at college do you really want your new boss and coworkers to see those? Probably not.
…. he’s a good source of “happening” stuff (even if he claims to be behind the curve on some (like Facebook) , at least until I begin to see who his inspirations are)
Anyway, Shel’s post here has some buzzing going on my head about getting myself out there into some of these latest tools (Twitter and the other variations, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, etc.) and Podcasting (ala Scoble’s company and others)…..here Shel sees Facebook as possibly a central model for how to get immersed in what’s happening. This “openAPI” for Facebook a couple of months ago is particularly enticing to me to get out there and “re-surf” and start taking notice of Facebook API usage.
I was never quite satisfied with our Naked Conversations ending. We declared the beginning of a new Conversational Era, replace the Broadcast Era.By the time you read the book, that was quite obvious, I would wager. For Global Neighborhoods, I wanted to paint a bigger picture with broader strokes, and I couldn’t quite see where all this was going.
Then Facebook opened it’s APIs. Two months later, there are 2000 approved 3rd-party applications and 10,000 or so, waiting to be approved. Students continue to do what they have always done on Facebook, not noticing that millions of business users are stampeding into Facebook, that most social media organizations are enjoying bursts of popularity by using Facebook as a distribution platform.
People are self organizing on Facebook. The are building their own small groups of friends who share common interests. They are bopping around from one group to another, sharing thoughts, watching video clips, watching pictures, organizing face-to-face events, meeting new people based on mutual friends or interests.
Facebook comes closer to being the Global Neighborhood than I had imagined something could.
Maybe I should just write a book on Facebook. Maybe I should write it, notion my blog but on Facebook.
OK, enough talk. I’m heading out there. I’ll report here in future posts. (I’m also interested because Community Server is promising Social Networking-like features in CS 2008, and CS is something I’ve been trying to move to for months…..having trouble getting my BlogML file export from WordPress (which I finally got to work, once) into CS 2007.
