/Message: The Revolution Will Be Socialized: Social Architecture and The Future Of Online Markets

Since there seems to a be a (long-overdue) frenzy of interest in social applications, I thought I would republish this snippet of somethign I wrote at the beginning of 2006, in a post called The Revolution Will Be Socialized: Social Architecture and The Future Of Online Markets (and I stand with everything I said):

/Message: The Revolution Will Be Socialized: Social Architecture and The Future Of Online Markets.

The Revolution Will Be Socialized

So (and with a nod to the Last Poets) the revolution will be socialized!

• The social architecture I have handwaved at here will come to underlie all the successful applications of our day, and the earlier apps will rapidly adapt to this model or be eclipsed by other apps that do.
• In the near future, all ecommerce will be socialized: where a user's transaction will feel as if it is taking place in the context of some social interaction -- like reading a review at a blog about a camera, or a vacation -- rather than the online catalog or classified experience supported by Amazon and eBay.
• All truly significant applications will span all three tiers of the social architecture model, and will demonstrate their worth directly by the creation of a market that brings buyers and sellers of some critical resource together in a new way.

As I tell entrepreneurs in my advisory capital work, if your business idea doesn't create -- or subvert -- a market worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, why build it? There are so many underserved niches, so many walks of life, so many needs and wants, why build another social bookmarking tool, or another blog metrics system, or yet another RSS reader? But this approach allows you to gauge -- at least conceptually -- whether some new idea is worth the trouble, whether you will ever make a business from it, and if so, how.

I know believe that all applications will become social -- at least the successful ones -- and the same rules will apply.

tags: social+applications, social+tools