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How Fast is the Social Web Moving and Where is It Going?
Just two months after launching Meebo, Seth Sternberg spoke at our second San Francisco Net Tuesday in December of 2005. According to Seth's recent post on the Meeblog, on October 2, 2006, the 500,000th person registered for a Meebo account and 42,000 unique Meebome widgets have been embedded on web pages.
At the San Francisco Net Tuesday last month, Dan Bernstein of Business and Marketing from Meebo told us about a fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Uppman, who put the Meebome widget on her classroom web site so that students and their parents can IM her about homework.
Things are moving fast in the social web-o-phere.
In an interview on CenterNetworks, Seth's advice to other web application builders is:
I think there are a couple of things that are very important. It must be super-simple. When a user arrives at meebo.com, the first page they see needs to allow them to do anything they want to do. And that is consistent with YouTube, Flickr, you get there and it is clear what the action is that you should take and what you get out of it.
And the other thing is to do what you are passionate about. If you love retail stores, then do retail stores. If you love music then do something in the music space. If you just do what you are passionate and love, then you will create something for yourself that is really good that a lot of other people will love as well.
With more social web apps being built and bought everyday, where do you think the social web-o-sphere is headed?
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Comments
Thanks for this!
I've been researching widgets for a screencast and this is really useful! Thanks.
I wonder how your question relates to what Chris Messina was talking about here:
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/10/05/socially-networked-harddrives/
Where it's going...
...well, is anyone guess. (Thanks for the invite Britt!).
I think that we're heading towards unevenly distributed always-on connectivity. That means that kids coming out of college will expect to always be in touch with one another... whether via SMS, Facebook, MySpace, blogs, YouTube or other media. They don't just take it for granted, that's their environment and thrive in it socially.
What's not clear, however, is how the rest of the world both responds to that reality and also enables it.
For one thing, there's a portion of the world that cares about technology and lives in it (folks to a more or lesser degree like you or me). Then there's the section that benefits from and uses technology all the time, but could care less about it -- so long as it works for them. Then there's a third portion (I'm superover-simplifying) that really avoids technology or is confounded by... In any case, a lot of Web 2.0 hype has been around building apps for "developer's moms" or some VC's "grandmother". i'm not sure that they're being genuine or realistic -- not that they don't want to help, but whether that's the right way to even think about it.
I think Meebo works well because it's a general tool -- like a garden hose. And frankly, the Meebo folks never predicted that a large portion of their users would be military families. Or schools. But they focused on helping people connect to one another and never wavered from that goal given the implementation path they chose.
Now, as far as my post goes -- I think that we're going to see an improvement in services for the always-on, always-connected folks... where everything will be HD -- and experiencing TV, movies, music and everything else will be a communal act. In fact, the ease with which we'll be able to share anything digital will make it somewhat passe and taken for granted, but that's where the innovators will take that potential and build experiences and explorations from that original nexus of people coming together.
Think of a decentralized BarCamp that's experienced remotely but is just as rich as an in-person meeting... seems impossible now, but I think the hybrid real-unreal models like offline-online Second Life events reveal interest and promise in this idea.
We're still years away from this becoming a reality, but I guess, in some ways, now that I'm thinking about it, that's what my social networked harddrives idea is all about -- being able to reach out into a vast store of media, data and content and use it socially... to collaborate and learn, and to help build out the network (ideally) to reach those who have minimal or "subsistance" connectivity today.
That might be a long answer, but I hope it starts to reveal just what I was talking about. ;)
I pinged him and asked him.
Britt Bravo
Community Builder
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