What means the advent of web social technological reality in a Search and Social daily life?
The web is increasingly a mix of Search and Social features. Since the manifest about web 2.0 from Tim O’Reilly a lot has happened and at the moment the differences between what is social or not is almost invisible. At the moment the web universe, whether we call it internet or web has expanded towards a social platform of technologies. These technologies include the search powerful mathematical algorithms, various browser experiences, applications, widgets, Social software, or technologies that encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data. And these technologies comprehend social features within.
“Web 2.0 is a set of economic, social, and technology trends that collectively form the basis for the next generation of the Internet—a more mature, distinctive medium characterized by user participation, openness, and network effects.” Tim O’Reilly source: http://oreilly.com/catalog/web2report/chapter/web20_report_excerpt.pdf
At the moment the faster technological advancements in the world wide web are based Social technologies. These new social technologies part of the daily interaction of Internet users worldwide has mushroomed to reach almost the two billion mark, according to the head of the UN’s telecommunications agency, Hamadoun Toure.
Image via Wikipedia
Social Technologies are in effect computer-mediated tools that have increasingly become part of the daily life of any user, whether coming to the web from a desktop computer, a smartphone, a tablet or any other web device. Social technologies have become popular with the advent of mainstream sites that started using social features and with its user growth made it part of any web user lives. Websites so different such as Yahoo, Google, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Bebo. Also media sites like Flickr and YouTube, commercial sites like Amazon.com and eBay. Many of these applications share characteristics like open APIs, service-oriented design and the ability to upload data and media. The terms social technologies started when the Web 2.0 concept was coined by Tim O’ Reilly. Some of these technologies have been integrated with cloud computing and developed in paralel for large-business applications. Some concepts also include Enterprise to describe this style of software.
In a recent article by Venessa Miemis: 4 Trends Shaping The Emerging Superfluid Economy states these key ideas:
- Quantifying and mapping everything;
- Everyone has access to the internet
- Self-organizing expands
- Peer-to-peer exchange changes the future of money
Venessa Miemis words are quite interesting to understand concepts such as Moore’s Law and Law of Accelerating Returns:
“Technological acceleration isn’t just a phrase. Whether looked at through the lens of the Law of Accelerating Returns or the trend described as Moore’s Law, computing capabilities continue to increase exponentially. Our devices are becoming smaller yet more powerful. Cost continues to drop.”
What is going on in the world is quite amazing because of its velocity, transparency and multiple layers of information and fluidity. For the first time in history, mankind is effectively dependent and immersed in all the different aspects of technology. If we talk about web in fact we communicate with other humans effectively through technology, algorithms, crawlers, spiders, social graph indexers. The relations between Humanity values and behavior and the web based technologies interacts and co-evolve at an ever increasing velocity. In mere fact a lot of cultural processes with thousand of years processes, and the conventional traditional institutions (and respective mindsets) are somehow in panic and out of sync with all these new developments.
Serial new paradigms are emerging one after other, faster then ever in history. In these (r)evolutions everything is increasingly technological connected and the nature of human collaboration, businesses, geopolitical trends and human productivity and work are all being continuously reshaped. This happens namely due to the shape and effect of the web social technologies. In turn, most of human traditional ideas about society, culture, geographic boundaries and governance are going to be increasingly forced to adapt to this present web social technological reality.
Bellow I decided to work in a lost of the more specific terms including collaborative software and groupware. These Web, Social Technologies are usually applied narrowly to software that enables collaborative work. There are some distinctions among usage of the terms “social”, “trusted” and “collaborative” namely in the applications or uses, not the tools themselves, although some tools are used only rarely for collaborative work. Recently other areas have been taken into the board. We have area specific for Consumer to Consumer, Socially-Directed Buying – F-Commerce, Socially-Facilitated Selling and some extra increasingly important areas affecting all social technologies: Privacy and security Social Features, Virtual and augmented reality and Virtual Money and currencies (an area in explosion that can somehow create profound disruptive waves in several industries and in the way one sees and interacts with the world.
These are the lists and topics I have been researching and developing towards a better understanding of the platforms and main concepts and its related technologies associated:
Consumer-to-Consumer, B2B (Business to Business) or B2C (Business to consumer)
- Connecting with family and friends
- eWord-of-Mouth
- Rating & Recommendation Systems
- UGC (user-generated content)
- Citizen Journalism
- Discussion Groups
- Business-to-Consumer
- Social self publishing
Socially-Directed Buying, F-commerce
- SEO – search engine optimisation as the holistic discipline to optimise any web presence and now a necessary total web optimisation
- PPC, Google Adwords pay per click
- Social Media
- eWord-of-Mouth (applies to both areas obviously)
- Organizational Voice (so many companies do not put enough time or thinking into this point, which frankly I think should be at the top)
- Online reputation management
- Crowdsourcing
- Location-based marketing (geo-loco is growing, i.e., Foursquare, Gowalla)
- Viral Video
- Virtual worlds
- Virtual Goods
- Business-to-Business social media platforms
Socially-Facilitated Selling
- Facebook social e-commerce
- Social CRM
- Social recruiting
- Rivers of information
- Online industry experts
- Organizational voice
- Online reputation management
- Virtual team support
On the top of this one can add the following social web technologies and areas of impact:
- Privacy and security Social Features
- Virtual and augmented reality
- Virtual Money and currencies
These series of interconnected web and social technologies are changing reality. Its wired and various parallel systems are affecting others in chain reaction. The (re)evolution are global as faster than in any time in history. These web social technologies are permitting access to data and tools to literally 2 billion people around the world. These technologies are making part of the daily life, somehow are effecting and putting a lot of systems in crisis and shifting parallel, and one may add systemic faster changes that have been happening throughout evolutionary history, though never so fast as now.
I repeat web and social technologies are changing reality, though they’re now happening at a new never seen pace of acceleration rate. All these mix of web social technologies are questioning ways to manage human connections, both personal, professional and in the scope of any social ecosystems. These new web, social technological reality have been creating endless new ways of operate and act. And the main result is that with these web social technologies each one of us are now somehow empowered, and responsible for our fate. Organisations and companies are facing the same challenges towards the way all of us have to expose towards these new reality and in the other hand all of us have to adapt by finding ways to stay open minded, aware of the challenges, resilient and mainly agile towards a constantly changing environment.
And the only way for finding success is through the path whereas one has to be adopting a “both/and” approach, rather than a black and white “either/or” way of looking at it solution. It is not necessary to abandon all cultural, common sense time-tested best practices and jump headfirst into something trendy and radically new. But, it is wise to think the best way to interact with these new social technologies and approaches as a sort of hybrid evolution, cooperation – going from experimenting to push to pull, defining a new way of reacting within the social graph, somehow a new society, and welcoming web, “social” technologies as the present reality necessary evolving each of ours acts and strategical move.
The fact is that each one of us, companies and organisations are facing the same challenges. Everyone has access, can write and manage web social technologies and is somehow affected by it. The question is how to use it? Will me or you use it to improve me , yourself, get lost in its endless distractions or make sure he / she has a purpose in life and go for it using it as powerful tools to improve life. And that is where the Web, social technological reality is and can indeed facilitate its enormous potential.
Related articles
- Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell – O’Reilly Media [free ebook] (oreilly.com)
