The Pattern of Social Technology Evolution

Here is my strategic outlook on the evolution of online technologies: past, present and future. Please see the table below. Commentary follows the table...

	Content	Communication	Collaboration	Community	Commerce
1980’s   The Net	Desktop Publishing	Phone, Fax, Email	Database Applications	BBS’s & On-line Services	Phone, Fax, Early EDI
1990’s   The Web	Web Publishing & Web Sites	PIM’s, E-mail & IM, Phone, Fax	Groupware, KM, and Intranets	Web Portals	Web Stores & Marketplaces
2000’s   The Metaweb	Weblogs & RSS   (“Microcontent” and “Personal Publishing”)	E-Mail, Webmail, IM, VOIP, Video Conferencing & Web Conferencing	Wikis, Decentralized Collaboration & Semantic Webs	Social Networks & “Friendsware”	XML Web Services & Web Services Exchanges
2010’s     The Semantic Web	K-logs, Lifelogs & Personal Portals     Microcontent becomes primary enterprise KM medium. All information about a person is stored in their Lifelog. Everyone gets their own personal portal. Semantic routing of content becomes part of network stack.	Unified Communications     Persistent identity and relationship management across all devices, software, and networks enables seamlessly integrated synchronous and asynchronous communications.	Group Minds & Collective Intelligence     Anyone can know what everyone knows; everyone can know what anyone knows. New levels of collective intelligence are enabled by fusion of Semantic Web with distributed agents and knowledge management tools.	Emergent Communities     Communities spontaneously emerge and self-organize around memes (hot topics). Communities are decentralized; no longer “hosted” in any single location or controlled by any single service provider	Intelligent Marketplaces     Intelligent commerce agents interact semi-autonomously in a decentralized global marketplace.Self-optimizing trading networks

What we see is that "Social Networks" are the current-day entrant in the "Community" category. As the 1990's taught us, the Community category did not prove to be a big money-maker -- except for organizations that focused on becoming portals and eventually marketplaces, such as Yahoo!. Organizations that focused primarily on providing online communities became "features" rather than "stand-alone businesses" over time, and were either acquired or went out of business.

Communities can generate revenues from advertising and in some cases, paid subscriptions, however incremental revenue growth was primarily attained through commerce and classified advertising. If Social Networking services are to "make it" as businesses they will have to trend in this direction -- those that do not will go the way of the 1990's-era community sites.

Similarly, companies that sell "Social Networking Software Platforms" are simply the current-day equivalent of companies that sold "Community Platforms" in the 1990's. Those companies morphed into Web conferencing and collaboration companies, or were acquired, or went out of business. The key lesson here is that mere "Community Platform" companies did not become big businesses in their own right -- those that survived had to either verticalize or focus on enterprise collaboration. The same will be true of companies that provide platforms for social networking in the enterprise.

More commentary to come soon...

Comments

[Nova Spivack]

Thanks for the commments Paul!

[Paul Hughes]

Nova, great addition. You articulated the coming wave much better than I could have. :-)

[Denny]

Your forward-thinking perspective on "community" technologies is rich and compelling. I look forward to what your mind focuses on next...

[Paul Hughes]

It would be interesting to see what the next row of characteristic will end up being. My guess is something like:

Content: All the above, plus real-time video/audio/photo blogging content via ubiquitous internet access.

Communication: All of the above, plus real-time video/audio/photo content.

Colloboration: ??

Community: location-based services enable ad-hoc, transient communities of shared interest/barter to emerge in real-time based on locational proximity.

Colloboration: