Daily Debrief: How long before a truly 'social' Web? Video

Daily Debrief: How long before a truly 'social' Web? Video Transcript

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>> Social networking has become such a mainstream part of the internet, but are we ignoring nuances which may herald change on the horizon. I'm Charlie Cooper, welcome to the cnetnews.com Daily Debrief. And I'm here today with Webware editor-in-chief Rafe Needleman [assumed spelling]. Rafe, you are at the Supernova conference which is taking place this week here in San Francisco.

>> Yeah.

>> And Joe Krauss [assumed spelling] of Google got on stage yesterday and said social is the new black.

>> He did.

>> Now I love when these tech geeks pull out these pop phrases. What's he talking about?

>> Well he's talking about social networking becoming kind of part of the fabric of the web instead of a feature that you, instead of sites that you go to, instead of going to social sites, it just becomes everywhere on the web.

>> In English, what does that mean?

>> It means when you go to read a story on a news site, you'll see which of your friends have read that story, and you can talk with them at that time if you want to. It means if you're buying something on the web, that you can see which of your friends bought it. So everything becomes a social experience. It means if you're on a site and there's something you like, you can flag it, and it'll show up on all the other sites that you participate in. So it becomes, what you do online if you want it to, becomes something that is everywhere that you are online -

>> We're starting to see -

>> Yes.

>> - bits and pieces of that.

>> Well Google's pushing it a lot.

>> Of course.

>> Yeah, with Friend Connect, which is their widget strategy for letting web developers put things on web pages that basically hop across all websites.

>> Can you talk about share, or the concept of sharing is modifying itself, it's changing.

>> So he was talking about, when it comes to sharing, Joe was talking about the idea that people right now restrict themselves from sharing information because they don't want to appear -

>> Pushy?

>> - vain, pushy, self important. So if something happens in my life that I think is interesting to me, I think that maybe won't be too interesting to other people so I won't share it on email. I won't put up my pictures of my new car, or tell people what I did for lunch or something like that.

>> Or post it on Facebook for instance.

>> Right. Well his point is that people actually do care, and that they do want to know. But if you give people a medium that allows them to share without being pushy about it, then people will actually pull that information in. Interestingly enough, he didn't mention Twitter, which is kind of the perfect example of sharing the minutia of life, and helping people develop a community around just the little things, just being connected at a very low level with your friends.

>> That is when it's up.

>> When it's up. He did mention Friend Feed though, which I thought was very interesting, which is another you know, sort of a competitor aggregator of Twitter and sites like it.

>> Now we have social sites.

>> Mm-hmm.

>> Do we have yet a social web.

>> Well it depends who you ask. I mean the web is by nature to me I think a social experience with all these sites that are out there.

>> But it seems you have these different, I hate the term -

>> Yeah.

>> - different silos.

>> Yeah.

>> That you don't have yet this consistent network, that overarching you know, glue that brings them all together.

>> By that definition though, the web is a collection of sites. It is run by people, by different people who are running different businesses on different servers with different user bases, and it is not one big social experience. I don't know if it ever will be, I don't know if people want that. But if you look at sites like Facebook for example, where they pull together applications from other developers, and become platforms and infrastructures unto themself for social networking, we have social webs, I wouldn't call them the social web. But there are certainly social webs out there that are very big and very powerful. Spacebook, MySpace, you know, you name it, where people come together, not just people but application developers come together with new ways to get together.

>> Good stuff.

>> Yeah. [ background music ]

>> And you can read more about this, Rafe has a piece up on that very same subject today. Thanks Rafe.

>> Thank you.

>> On behalf of Rafe Needleman, I'm Charlie Cooper. ^M00:03:56 [ music ]