Social Media and the Open Web

It's apart of our every day internet lives, and now we finally have a name for it other than, "Web 2.0," a dreadful term that has caused more confusion and ambiguity in an industry seeking more clarity for the business-minded since its inception. Social media is the form that our interactions take when we create, respond and interact with various forms if digital media such as blog postings, short messages such as tweets, photos, videos, and any other content that can be created digitally and shared.

Dave Shea recently refactored his website, Mezzoblue, to focus more on his everyday interactions with social media -- not just his blog. This has inspired me to take a similar approach with elan3, in that social media is about sharing your contributed content.

Our personal web footprint really is no longer just what we blog about, but is really a collection of our interactions across various social media. I can see this being the future of blogs, in that they are no longer blogs at all, but rather centralized portals to the content that person contributes across the web.

The first natural question to this is how do you manage the firehose of content that we each contribute to social media every day? If people wanted to read every tweet you make, wouldn't they just follow you on Twitter? This is where tags and hashtags come into play, in that we find meaning and value in content we contribute through the metadata we and others provide with it. It's machine-readable, so it's easy to process.

Second, how to we make social media outlets communicate with one another? One primitive example of this is how Twitter can be hooked up to Facebook so that tweets can update your Facebook status, but there's so much more potential. With the rapid, widespread adoption of OpenID by big-name players like Google and Technorati, it's only a matter of time before we have a global identity and a single sign-on to all major social media websites.

The next step is moving towards an open web. The Open Web Foundation seeks to put developers all on the same page by proposing standards for data interaction so that it's very easy for social media content to be interconnected. Who knows, maybe someday it will all tie back to our global web identity, and we can just upload a photo to Facebook, and Facebook will know who your favorite photo social media website is, and handle the rest without you ever having to provide login credentials.

Here's a crappy diagram I made in two minutes which illustrates the concept, probably poorly:

I think of it like Trillian, except not just for managing your instant messaging accounts in one place, but managing your digital life in one place. I might just be dreaming, and there would be mountains of red tape to see something this great, but it's the right direction for the web.