Social Networking sites now hold the top 10 spots in global Internet traffic. That in itself is remarkable since most of the top sites are less than 5 years old.
It is also remarkable that ordinary people account for the lion's share of this traffic. Two questions keep coming to mind. What is the SOCIAL component that makes social networking so compelling? Second, as it evolves what of these social aspect will continue to experience explosive growth?
I think the people at Bazaarvoice have it right when they say the social element is the collaboration, cooperation, and participation that occurs in a social network.
But what are people being social about?
Recently, I attended a meeting of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs [1]. The four panelists were or had been involved as founders in Open Social, Linkedin, Hi5 and Jaiku. When asked whether social networking has peaked, the consensus was that there are many "objects" around which social networking can still socialize around. Here's where they were coming from. Flickr socialized photo sharing. YouTube did the same for video. Facebook did so for classmates. The advice to the room full of entrepreneurs was—find an object to socialize around.
Objects are one way to look at it. However, a more profound, compelling and enduring way to look at the social element is to think of it as socializing around issues that are important to a constituency. Think what do "collaboration, cooperation and participation" do for individuals and groups when they harness their collective brains and share their experience? It helps people adapt to a fast-changing and increasingly complex world. I think this is one of the reasons we are seeing an explosion of online communities organized around issues.
Change and uncertainty are the realities of our world. Objects will come and go. Sure we will always have images like photos and videos to share, but way we capture, manage and share these "objects" will change. Videos use to come in VHS format, then came DVDs, now we have Flash and on-demand. What I would like to learn from others is what does it mean to me? What experience does it enable?
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