Social disruptionOver the past few years I have written a fair amount about how the social web will change the way people discover and distribute information online. This started with a post in the spring of 2008 on the Future of News. Then in early ’09 I outlined how “social” would change the discovery process and disrupt traditional search. And then I wrote a long piece about what this shift in discovery means for the user experience on sites. These ideas, and subsequent posts, have informed a lot of what we have built and invested in at betaworks. New modes of navigation and discovery are being developed – from Summize to Tumblr to TweetDeck, and more recently from GroupMe to Ditto. It is now generally accepted that the impact of “social” on discovery and navigation is under way, but I believe the impact goes beyond discovery.
Undoubtedly, search has changed, and continues to change, the way we write, create pages, layout pages, tag and relate to content. It has also encouraged the creation of sites with limited or distracting content that exist solely to optimize search. Search has not driven a change in the content and user experience once a user is on a page that they value. By contrast, the “social web” is changing the web itself – ”social” is altering the nature of what we find. Social experiences are becoming the backbone of many sites. A web page that is part of the “social web” transforms content into a liquid experience, giving rise to a new kind of media: networked media. In the video from betaday, I walk through this shift and show data we have at betaworks that illustrates this change.
John Borthwick’s musings on ‘networked media’, which I think is synonymous with the web of flow term I use, and is congruent with the coming social O/S, as well.
I wish he had called it ‘liquid media’, actually. But brilliant, no matter what he calls it.
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