A decade ago most of America connected to the Internet through some form of copper telephone line, and America On-Line was the service to be on. I remember dialing into a local telephone switch because hours on the Internet could run you hundreds of dollars in long distance fees. Oh boy has the landscape changed. The slowest cellular network available is still much, much quicker than the 56K dial up that I grew up with.
My good friend Kenny Katzgrau has written a blog post about his thoughts about the social networking phenomenon and some questions that he has about new “boom.” Has the service that Mark Zuckerberg stole pioneered a new type, a new form, of real-time communication and interaction with the world?
These social services such was Twitter and Facebook both provide a new medium to communicate around the world. This instant, publish-anywhere, status update has much more power than merely giving your ex-girlfriends the ability to stalk you on their iPhone. In merely 140 characters millions of people convey joy, hatred, love and disgust for anything and everything. Our thoughts, what we might have once kept to ourselves, can now be broadcasted to millions of people who are drooling to read the next quip from Ashton Kutcher. Mere mortals have become super stars because of Twitter.
Is this much different than Yahoo Chat a decade ago? There were literally thousands of rooms available for all sorts of pleasures. This then, instant communication tool, was a first of its kind. Yahoo pioneered one of the first social network web site providing photo profiles, chat services and much more – five years before Facebook even existed. Why am I going on and on about history?
- How will Facebook and other social networks become even more real-time?
I think that this answer is less about the technology and more about the ability to integrate, aggregate, information in a single package. A few years ago web portals such as Yahoo were shunned – we wanted the minimalistic design but the amazing power of Google’s search solution. We didn’t need a directory curated by Yahoo minions. But what is the most interesting morsel is that we are now looking to integrate services because it is a pain in the ass to deal with the replication of data and information.
As human beings we do not want to have to continually type in the same information into different services. I want to be able to log into websites with my Facebook account, and update my status on Facebook via Twitter. Why do I use Twitter instead of Facebook? Market share? Hype? Twitter definitely does not have a technical advantage over Team Zuck.
I believe that the future is aggregation. Facebook et al are going to integrate with each other. New data is going to be created because of this, and services will crop up to mine, analyze and display this information in new, interesting ways. Google realized early on that data and information is king.
- How will desktop software fit into the picture?
All of the JavaScript engines will eventually fall into oblivion and the Internet browsers will go with it. We’re going to see less and less differences between browsers and more focus on integrated experiences with services. In the case that Kenny brought up, Rock Melt, a browser designed with social connectivity in mind, is a first step towards this. Google has introduced a plugin-based software extensions for its Chrome browser. We’ll be using more and more services over the air via web API endpoints and less of the actual service through their web sites. The new crop of Internet businesses will be “cloud computing” style service-oriented websites that sell access to their API and offer a limited front-end to an overly simplistic service.
- How many investors will spend money on social applications?
What exactly isn’t a social application now on the Internet? Any new business will need to embrace the social aspect of the Internet or another business that does is going to crop up and displace them. Very few services are going to be able to get away with this.
- What is the sum of it all?
As I said before this is leading to an Internet that is a jumble of inter-connected services that are all providing data, for a price, to any client that is able to access the public API. We’ll a lot of services that both combine two competitors’ data into an application that trumps the user experience of both. The future of the Internet is decentralized information, plain and simple.
I could go on and on for hours regarding this. If any of you have thoughts please feel free to comment here, or head on over to Kenny’s blog and make sure to use both of our URLs in your WordPress callbacks!
