I think people are going to do somewhat of a 180 and realize that it is easy to get lost in big sites.

People want content which is vital to their lives. Just a hunch…

4 thoughts.

That’s within the tolerance of web stats.

* The quality of traffic from most social media sites is terrible. Too often surf-in surf-outers in pursuit of the latest pic of Paris Hilton with a waffle-iron in her cleavage.

* The MSM seem to be chasing the traffic, which is reducing the quality of THEIR audiences (planning to blog this but have not had time).

* If we stick to our content knitting and pay attention to social media, there’s some potential there.

* I think an important one may turn out to be Wikio. They are small enough to be responsive to customer needs (and do respond – look at the phalanx of Welsh blogs marching up the rankings after a bit of listing work by Ordovicius a couple of months ago), and have a well-integrated system.

Matt

I strongly predict that ISPs will go back to the idea of giving you your own homepage when you go online, but it’ll be an aggregator of your friends SN/SM activity from all over the place.

Tools like Twitter, YouTube, blogging, etc will get ported to one place by each person, and then friends can pick up on that feed and put it on their homepage, all done so easily they don’t even notice they’re doing it.

In the meantime, the media will continue to hype about the Next!Big!Thing and projects like BuddyPress will continue to develope as open aggragating nodal points.

But then, I’ve been using an example of such an aggregating nodal point for so long that people forget it’s even possible. Shame the tech and usability side is so horribly out of date.

Summary: There won’t be one NextBigThing, or if there is it’ll be transient. Aggregation is the key, and people will set up disparate, small, interoperable networks using Livjournal, Facebook, DreamWidth, BuddyPress and similar, and for the most part those networks will talk to each other with increasing user friendly privacy controls.

At what point it will be possible to say that the growth of presence more than compensates for the wasted efforts it is hard to say, but every single new member is an extra potential body on the ground.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that there are many for whom social networks (whether online or offline – ie gossip over the garden wall) are the primary or only source of new political information or comment, so we neglect it at our peril.

Online services will never replace real world activities, but they should add to the spectrum of active outlets to form a more complete and naturally balanced complement.

Everything productive is positive.

What’s far more important than the technology is the human factor. Who’s going to run these things, provide advice on how to set them up, and check up on whether they’re working? There’s a bit of a problem with techno-enthusiasm in that we often end up assuming that technology is a magic bullet. Need to produce a document or create a strategy for something? Let’s set up a wiki and wait for wiki-magic to cause a document to emerge! Need mass support for a campaign on green issues? Set up a Facebook group!

Technology’s great strength is in lowering barriers to participation, but this is often quite unevenly spread. A wiki that anyone can edit is, in theory, a very low barrier to entry. Except for the fact that a lot of people don’t know what a wiki is, or how to use one productively, or what standards may be expected of them. And if mass participation is achieved, it may end up being just another eternal September.

The focus needs to be on people and what use they can make of the technology, and that means a focus on emotional appeal, usability and usefulness to the people using it. Having a purpose matters more than having a whizzy social networking tool, because ordinary people simply cannot identify with a website.

Hmm. Well, here’s my take.

Most people will continue to use the famous sites in the slightly confuzzled way they do now, essentially as a sort of colour supplement to email. But they will find the various mutating technologies too dull, confusing and inefficient to actually run their lives with, and will remain stubbornly resistant to any attempt to get them to e.g. post hustings questions on YouSpace, or link themselves into 10,000 alerts a day from MyTwit which are composed of three pieces of “news” which has been multiplied a thousandfold in the mirrors of the various updates/groups/RSS feeds they find themselves entangled in.

They will, of course, become Fans of various things on Bibblebo, make themselves amusing avatars to use on Friendfood, because that’s fun, but they’ll spend the rest of their lives fighting a nagging feeling that they should be answering an email, and they certainly won’t be moved to any kind of practical action as a result of any of this activity. Not a single extra penny will enter the party coffers as a result, not a single grassroots campaign will be generated, and not a single vote will be won.

A small minority of people will however remain utterly convinced that MyYouFizzleTwitSpaceo is the future of political communication against a mounting wall of evidence…

You get my drift? I’m sorry if that sounds negative, and I’ve probably over-egged the pudding, but this piece more properly belongs on a technical blog, and I think all that needed to be said.