the reflexions insider

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. [...]

Building applications with reusable, modular components is kind of the holy grail of software development. To be conservative let’s call it a general aspiration, and if nothing else a guiding principle of Good Design. We’ve been hearing about it since the seventies and several iterations later (OO design, Java/Struts, and more recently, the growing number of web frameworks such as RoR, CakePHP, Zend, etc.) we’re just starting to feel the impact on large scale distributed applications that are becoming the hallmark of this strange collective trip that is the early 21st century landscape of social computing.

While we like to think of ourselves as a pretty savvy bunch, we at Reflexions have been admittedly a little slow in jumping on the framework bandwagon over the last few years. Maybe it’s the control-freak mindset that comes with building custom apps, or maybe we just haven’t found the right fit. Whatever the reason, we’ve finally started to embrace the framework philosophy by doing what any other group of control freaks would do: we’ve built our own. More on that in a future post.

What’s struck me about building a framework is that in doing so one engages in the zen-like exercise of modeling one’s own notions of how applications exist and interact with their underlying components. [...]

Now that the Web 2.0 Expo is over I’ve begrudgingly returned to the east coast. For a New Yorker in the web development business, the bay area is like a mythical forbidden city where technology people are a kind of ruling elite. There’s no doubt that New York is a hotbed of web innovation, but web companies are still small potatoes compared to the other industries that call New York home: finance, fashion, art, music, publishing (and you thought Rodney Dangerfield had a hard time getting respect).

Coming from New York the energy around the valley is palpable. The cities themselves are woven into the history and culture of this industry. Names like Cupertino and Mountain View conjure up glowing corporate logos. And then there are the legendary hotspots like San Jose, Palo Alto, San Mateo.

At the Web 2.0 Expo you could almost sense the 6- and 7-figure deals taking shape in the bustling corridors of the Moscone Center. The San Francisco Chronicle had a special column dedicated to the event in the Business section. Web engineers, social media gurus, user experience consultants, web 2.0 designers. All there. And all using this new, amorphous language that seems to spout from Tim O’Reilly like beat poetry.

Just a few of the terms that [...]