Social network fatigue and interoperability
From: Critical mass and social network fatigue « Jon Udell
Years ago at BYTE Magazine my friend Ben Smith, who was a Unix greybeard even then (now he’s a Unix whitebeard), made a memorable comment that’s always stuck with me. We were in the midst of evaluating a batch of LAN email products. “One of these days,” Ben said in, I think, 1991, “everyone’s going to look up from their little islands of LAN email and see this giant mothership hovering overhead called the Internet.”
Increasingly I’ve begun to feel the same way about the various social networks. How many networks can one person join? How many different identities can one person sanely manage? How many different tagging or photo-uploading or friending protocols can one person deal with?
Recently Gary McGraw echoed Ben Smith’s 1991 observation. “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network,” he said, “but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.”
Jon very much echoes my own sentiments. What really needs to be done is not just to connect the various social networks that do exist in internet network-of-networks style, but also to social-network enable our real social network apps: our IM, our email, our phone. Where, I keep asking vendors, is the Web 2.0 address book?
When one of the big communications vendors (email, IM OR phone) gets this right, simply by instrumenting our communications so that the social network becomes visible (and under the control of the user), it seems to me that they could blow away a lot of the existing social network froth. That being said, when I’ve had this conversation with Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, he’s pointed out that he’s well aware of that possibility, and has been working for years to layer additional value on top of the raw social network data. And he’s very right about that.
To use Ben Smith’s analogy about the internet as mother ship: if you were a proprietary LAN vendor trying to fight the internet, it was game over. But if you were a LAN vendor who was on the right bandwagon, you became Cisco.
Today, there are now over 300 proprietary video sharing networks. One of these days, everyone’s going to look up from these little islands of video sharing and see this giant mothership hovering overhead called the Internet. The future is in the meta-networks that connect and make those networks interoperable. It’s already starting to happen. Many key YouTubers are graduating to Moveabletype, Wordpress and other blogger platforms, and they’re finding services that support them. They are finding services that give them interoperabilty with a vast aray of hardware and software: iTunes, the iPod, the PSP, Democracy player, Fireant, and above all with a world wide community beyond the walls of closed communities.
Mefeedia is focused on improving interoperability. We already support Youtube, Google Video, Blip.tv, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, Myspace Video, and hundreds of other video sharing sites. Mefeedia supports interoperability and we’re building value into it all the time with standards like MediaRSS, Microformats, and all manner of rich metadata. Content creators can host and post media with any video hosting site (personally we like blip.tv for it’s openess and interoperability). When it comes time to share and keep track of your favorite audio podcasts and your favorite video shows like Rocketboom, Ze Frank, and Ask A Ninja, Mefeedia is the leader in doing this.
Your friends. Your media. Your network.
Mefeedia was the first - and leading - service which can track all your friends and media. But we also go a step further. We allow you to create your own channel or even channels so you can watch or listen to media anywhere you like, whether that be iTunes, your iPod, your cell phone, or your set top box.
At the heart of this understanding of what some are calling IPTV. The network effect takes over because it is about communications and entertainment becoming completely and wholly intertwined. On the internet, the space between mass communication and personal communication is fluid. You may be sharing videos with only a few friends and then one day suddenly find an audience of millions. Virility is a feature of an open, fluid and interoperable space and an expression of the fluididity and lack of segregation between so called mass media of the past, and the personal media of the future.
Every piece of media that crosses this network will be your choice - where, when, and how you want to watch it, listen too it, and above all, share it and talk about it.See more in:interoperability, network effect, social networks
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