Whether coincidence or not the new iteration of Facebook looks more than anything like its upstart microblog competitors, Twitter and Friendfeed. The emphasis is now on the status updates (which to be fair, you could say the microblogs nicked from them in the first place), with an improved ability to be able to comment on and rate the updates as they come in. While the chat has been mostly negative about the re-design this is probably just reactionism, and community engagement on the site appears to have revived as a result (having previously died so much 24 hours of updates wouldn't fill one page).
There has been a similar habit developing on Twitter, with tweeps using the prefix 'Like' to indicate their approval. This allows you to then search for the most popular discussions or items currently in circulation.
Social bookmarking sites like digg, de.icio.us, stumblupon have been popular for years, but have yet to properly cross into the mainstream. They may well make it now, following on the coat-tails of Twitter. Or they may instead be sidelined by the very same, as the search tools lining up around the microblogs become increasingly sophisticated. Depending on what you are searching for it can yield better results than Google already - of course people's recommendations are more effective than AI spider-bots as long as you have enough of them and can filter them smartly enough.
At the same time user review sites like Yelp or Qype are gathering momentum and starting to have enough content to be genuinely useful, a shift that is at least partially powered by the i-phone allowing fluid mobile access for the first time. As increasing numbers of phones connect up to these communities social search will start to overtake the traditional search engines.
It already feels like just a couple of steps away from the ultimate 'digg the world' review system, in which every time we buy a sandwich, visit a hairdresser or watch a film you immediately rate it, allowing us to build up a giant, up-to-the-minute database. And as another aspect of Web 3.0 - the semantic web comes into play and the internet develops the ability to learn from all of the different choices that we make and things that we discuss from across the web, and then cross reference these with the rest of the online population.
On holiday last week I had a weird sensation of being disconnected, not so much from Facebook and email, as these will wait for you until you get back, but from Twitter, which is all about the live discussion. I felt like I wasn't doing my part by not participating for a week, I wasn't contributing to the body of knowledge and opinion that is becoming the Hive Mind.
If people react against the mobile web with horror ('people can find out where I am?!') then it's going to cause a few mental break-downs to ask people to tap into the collective intelligence. We have been conditioned by Hollywood (from HAL in A Space Odyssey through to the eponymous war-mongering machines in the Terminator franchise) to believe that this is a dangerous thing. But it's not about computer's becoming intelligent themselves, rather them providing this filter to allow us to share knowledge.
As Forbes recently explains 'The social nervous system makes us aware of a broader context of relationship with humanity. My immediate relationships--with my family, my city and state--begin to span the globe. We can leverage the ubiquity of communications to coordinate real world activity--and just about anyone can do it.'
Which is actually pretty much the same thing that they do in the Buddhist Metta meditation on expanding the circles of compassion. Which has to be a good thing, doesn't it??
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