I often like to be one of the last voices on a topic as it rages through the blogosphere and news pages. I like to take some time to think through what it means or if it means anything at all. Google's OpenSocial is an example. Being announced officially today has been a more earth-shattering topic this week in Silicon Valley than our Earthquake. Google says that as of this morning, the first day of the OpenSocial nnouncement, there have already been nearly 600,000 mentions. Already, there are clips speculating on the deaths of XING and Facebook.
OpenSocial is essentially creates a simple way for developers to run social applications in more places by opening the APIs of a great many Internet sites. This is, of course, as significant as everyone is saying it is.
So what can I add? Perhaps, only a whiny little ego stroke. Fifteen months ago, I announced I was writing a book called, Global Neighbourhoods and renamed this site. My 'Big Idea' was that sites themselves would become unimportant as the power moved to small groups of users. The same people would find the same friends and share videos and photos and information and endorsements as thy bopped about from one site to another. The size of a site would no longer matter. Instead the small circle of friends forming around a topic, would become the focal point and these friends would influence each other far more than any marketing campaign or ad network could.
Global Neighborhoods was supposed to be visionary. But, a great deal has happened since I started out to write it. Facebook happened. Now this. In between the two, a whole lot else.
The result is that the Internet is being structured around small circles of friends, usually containing no more than 400 people. There are millions of these global neighbourhoods. In the not too distant future, there will be 10s of millions of them and they, by definition, will be self-governed. They will have a great deal of influence iover what people buy, watch, listen to and read. They will influence where we travel, how we get there and where we stay. They will determine, in some cases, who will get elected.
And mass merchants will have very little to do with it. Perhaps there will be new, micro merchants who are sensitive to Doc Seals, Intention Economy. Perhaps, they will become mass micromerhcants over time.
In any case, my plan to write a futuristic book, with my vision of what might happen some day, is already happening pretty fast. Maybe next time, I'll try writing something with an historic perspective.
Technorati Tags: opensocial, doc searls, intentioneconomy
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