the reflexions insider

Something extraordinary happened on November 16, 2008.

At 12:02:32 PM (EST) a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Indonesia. Within seconds, users of the microblogging platform Twitter who were located in the affected area had broadcast text messages describing the event. Minutes later, tens of thousands of users had learned about the earthquake as news fanned out across Twitter’s global web of social networks in the form of web updates, RSS feeds, mobile application alerts, and SMS text messages.

About two hours later the New York Times, CNN, and other news outlets “broke” the story. Granted, it was a weekend. But any observer of how Twitter has changed the dynamics of information sharing can see that the days of large news outlets serving as the de facto source of breaking news are effectively over.

As the currency of the web as a communications tool has shifted from documents and pages to blogs and tweets, the following trends have emerged:

1. The discrete units of web-based communication have gotten smaller.

2. The propagation time of information among social networks has gotten faster.

It’s worth noting that these two trends are related. Smaller chunks of content are easier to consume and lead to faster rates of propagation. Information flow becomes more [...]

Last week I attended the Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The atmosphere was a cross between an academic conference and a trade show, trending toward the latter. Sessions were mostly organized as panel discussions split into two tracks: technology and business.

I’ve compiled some comments and insights from the sessions I attended. I thought I’d share them here for anyone who’s interested. This is the first of three rounds of comments, split into Strategy, Technology, and VC/Startups. These are my best attempts at paraphrasing based on my notes and I’ve done my best to attribute these comments where possible.

Semantic technologies are about defining an architecture of participation (Tom Tague, Thomson Reuters)

Shared ontologies are a necessary condition for web 3.0 and therefore must be community-driven (Marc Hatfield, Alitora Systems)

Semantic tech is increasing the granularity of the web’s nodes, shifting from documents to things like objects, facts, places, and people. This increase of granularity is a defining characteristic of web 3.0. An effect of this trend is to increase the number of storable data points by several orders of magnitude. This presents an enormous information management problem. Therefore we need fundamentally new tools to process, organize, and consume this amount of data. (Tom [...]

When it comes to fragmentation of audiences, markets, and media, the trend line is clear: we are collectively becoming not a single audience of billions but a million audiences of thousands, hundreds, or even one.

It’s a fascinating long term side-effect of media decentralization that’s been predicted for decades by media visionaries like Marshall McLuhan (pictured right) and, dare I say, Andy Warhol. The one-to-many paradigm of network television and weekly newsmagazines understandably has a homogenizing effect, both in reinforcing a common identity and in shaping public opinion. The many-to-many model of social media and its various manifestations (blogs, wikis, social bookmarks) has been turning this model upside-down.

Of course marketers have been using this to their advantage for years, from the highly targeted narrowcasting as seen in political campaigns to highly personalized direct mail. But the social web is both responding to and further cultivating this fragmentation.

Social platforms like Ning have emerged to provide ad hoc and on-demand networks meant to service everything from 5-person knitting clubs to Jay Z’s millions of fans. The single-network solutions like MySpace and Facebook have been incredibly powerful in generating public awareness of social networks. But they have discovered that the users of today’s web are a fickle bunch, [...]

If the web of today was the music industry of the 1960’s and if memes were bands, then social networking would be The Beatles. And startups have been chasing after the next killer social networking app like so many crazed schoolgirls.

Tech axiom #1: innovation and perceived innovation are not always the same.

What’s difficult about analyzing social applications and to what extent they will actually change the landscape of the web is discerning the real innovation from the me-too-isms that too often pervade the business plans of web startups. And some of the biggest social networking sites are essentially a rehash of similar concepts from an earlier web. I’m not really sure why MySpace is that much different from Geocities circa 1995 with an embedded mp3 player but maybe I’m missing something.

Tech axiom #2: the most innovative companies are not always the most successful (see also: Xerox PARC).

Despite what some social web evangelists might have us believe, these tools will not fundamentally alter the dynamics of human social behavior. Instead the most successful applications will model and improve upon those dynamics. Finding a good doctor in the 21st century won’t be much different from the 20th or 19th centuries: simply put, you ask recommendations from people you trust. [...]