The Next Phase of Social Technology

Posted by Luigi Montanez
on Monday, March 31

The times, they are a changin’. These last few years, the Web has become much more social. You know about Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and all of that. Our recreational hours online are no longer considered to be aimless mouseclicking or “surfing the Web”. Instead, we’re interacting with others like we would around the water cooler. We’re sharing thoughts and updates. We’re making real-world connections and friendships. The Internet is neither seedy nor immature. It’s become a well-lit, friendly place.

This new phase has been called many things:

The final article in that list, on the Giant Global Graph, most clearly illustrates where we’ve been versus where we’re headed: From an Internet of computers, to a Web of documents, to a Graph of people and their relationships.

I’m placing my bets on “The Graph”, and will refer to this next phase as such moving forward. Why? I like the branding of it: You can get caught in the Net. You can get tangled in the Web. But you can only get orderly placed in the Graph. There’s a wonderful sense of order and direction behind the concept of the Graph, and the term comes closest to describing what cutting-edge social technology is now doing: modeling real-world relationships.

Despite which label actually “wins” the branding battle, there are certain values which are consistent to all of the above concepts:

  1. New Standards Are Needed – Since the Dotcom Era of the late 90’s, there has been exactly one truly game-changing standard adopted: RSS. HTTP, HTML, Javascript, and XML were all widely adopted in the mid-90’s, yet those are still the building blocks of any new web application.
  2. Open Web Services, Open APIs, Open Data – Users are rebelling against the data silos being created at every site they use. Data portability and distributed social networking are key concepts addressing this very problem.
  3. More Signal, Less Noise – Too many of us are suffering from information overload. Email, IM, SMS, feeds. They hit us at a rapid-fire rate, and we desperately need help. New technologies for filtering out the bad and letting in the good would be a godsend.

Two more seminal pieces on the social graph from last fall were Brad Fitzpatrick’s Thoughts on the Social Graph and Alex Iskold’s Social Graph: Concepts and Issues. Both are essential reading to get yourself up-to-speed with the concepts and technologies that will be described in this space.