Making social media meaningful: socialmedian
While overly simplistic, I’m starting to look at the current state of the web and its recent history as follows:
* Web 1.0 – Amassing great storehouses of content and letting people do interesting things with it within specified “silos” (I hate that word by the way, but it’s useful here!). Think Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Excite
* Web 2.0 – Web tools that have been around for a while are harnessed to allow for an amazing amount of content sharing, manipulation, and organization while communication and networking are greatly enhanced. Think: MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, iLike
We’re now in a phase that I like to think of as “post web 2.0.” It’s a little bit of an in between and undefined time as the economy shakes itself out, as the bad ideas of the web 2.0 era burn off, and as everyone is thinking, grinding, and scrambling to look for The Next Big Thing.
The great news is that there’s a flurry (whirlwind?) of activity going on in the social media space. And I’m becoming more convinced that this post web 2.0 period will be defined by those social media platforms that help to bring enhanced value and meaning to all of the massive storehouses of shared and organized and manipulated information and communication that is “out there.”
socialmedian, run by Jason Goldberg, is doing a good job of just this. When you hit socialmedian’s front page, it appears to be a social media site jammed to the rafters with features: you can submit stories, vote on them, comment on them, and interact with other people and the content on the site (gauging its “mood” for example) in all kinds of ways.
What really interests me though is what socialmedian is doing with widgets, embeddable code that the public can “take away” and publish on any webpage you like. Widgets are not hot news unto themselves, of course, they are also indeed a staple of era web 2.0.
But the fusion of widgets with targeted social media content is very intriguing, and a sign of where things are heading.
The “Obama Transition To Power” widget is a great example. Goldberg describes it on the socialmedian blog as “a live feed of news stories and user activities related to Obama’s transition to power.”
That specific slice of content – Barack Obama presidential transition news and related stories – tied to powerful social media tools and made “mobile” via embeddable widget could just be an indicator of where this post web 2.0 path is headed.
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