What next - Web 3.0 - when Facebook dies!!
FB is cool, but I just don’t get it. Perhaps it’s because I am 30+ - a Gen - Xer with no role models and therefore no need to show off the number of friends I have accumulated (hic).
Seriously though I do actually believe that the likes of FB and MySpace are doomed, because they offer little more than a vain effort to accumulate social currency. There are often referred to terms as ego-oriented versus object-oriented social networks. Ego-oriented are all about the person (or profile). Object-oriented is all about the items (object). For example, You Tube and Flickr are often cited as object-oriented, the video and image sharing are more important than the person doing the sharing. These sites have something tangible to hang your hat on and therefore will well outlast the social ego-centric networks such as FB and MySpace.
The thing about the social network sites is that it is so easy to change sites. You have not stored anything on Facebook apart from your profile. In fact, it is easy just to setup a new social site elsewhere and import those same friends again using your address books. Hence the migration from My Space to FB occurred almost overnight while us oldies slept. With object-oriented sites the actual moving of the data is much harder and in most cases not practical. Take Del.icio.us as an example; if you have built up a stream of your bookmarks going to the effort to move these is almost unimaginable and leaving them behind equally insane.
So, FB is dead, what’s next? Clearly it is about the data (the object) - the web as an application, collecting data and making it more useful for the user. Moreover, the user has the power to collect the data they want from anywhere and manipulate it in their own ways. As most know we are well underway getting the Travel Generation project live and are currently in private alpha testing. An important part of this development is this ethos - giving the user the power to collect travel data that is pertinent to them and build rich itinerary and mapping outputs that are meaningful to them. I will keep you posted when we migrate to beta release soon.