Facebook is driven by relationships. Real relationships.

I say this to differentiate between the friends we have merely for stalkerish purposes, and those we meaningfully interact with. This differentiation is crucial to Facebook’s overall level of activity.

Take a look at your own wall and message feeds. We’re talking to the same people over, and over, and over again. For me, 99% of my Facebook activity is generated through interaction with ~15 of my 650 friends. I assume this is true for most other users.

In other words, 99% of the activity on Facebook – the stuff they track and use to create the products they sell to generate revenue  -  is caused by only a handful of existing “friend” relationships.

Taking the “average” Facebook user’s stat of 130 friends, we can guesstimate that the relationships with ~10% of a given user’s friends generate 99% of their activity.

So, want to kill Facebook? Steal the relationships.

Take the relationships and you take the meaningful activity. Take the activity and you’re left with ineffective advertising products. These no one wants to buy, and so revenue nosedives.

Google realized this with their launch of G+, but I’m not sure to what extent. If they’d been truly serious about beating Facebook they’d have had the balls to focus on the human bonds involved. Instead, they released a social network that is arguably just another suite of productivity tools.

I want to see something limit friends to friends. Force me to do it, for I – and countless others – are not strong enough on our own. Make 25 or 50 relationships the maximum. Then let something grow that’s build on positive emotion, rather than stalkerish he-said-she-said anxiety.

By nature we operate in small groups and are extremely selective of who we grant trust to. It’d be fantastic to experience a web app that forced us to be as candid online, as we are organically in person.

“South”, © Steve McLoughlin

The Humanized Net

“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.” – Isaac Asimov

Like everything on Earth, the Internet is a living thing – constantly changing as those interacting with it treat it in different ways, and employ it for new purposes. “Web 3.0” is the term used to mark the next stage of this change – think of it as the “Iron Age” of the Internet. Before we delve into that, however, here’s a little background on Web 1.0 & 2.0.

Briefly, Web 1.0 can be defined as the “first stage” of the Internet’s evolution, wherein sites were bonded to hyperlinks, and the WWW was released to the public (in 1993). In a word, we could say that Web 1.0 stands for connection – between sites and links, and between users and the net. The second stage, Web 2.0, has been defined by collaboration. As the number of connections between sites, users, and software exploded, applications and sites began interfacing (sharing data), design became user-centric, and mass information was achieved via content generated by users interacting together through social media. So, connection, collaboration – then what? What’s Web 3.0 going to be about?

Context.

Our world is saturated by content. Think about it. Everywhere you look there’s something trying to grab your attention and direct you towards an offer, video, tweet, update or article (guilty as charged). On top of this, the line between our online and offline worlds is rapidly blurring towards a point of homogeneity. Soon, we’ll be unable to stop a constant flow of information from crashing through our lives (it’s already happening).

Now, I have no doubt that the Internet will change us - heck, it already has. But, what I’m really interested in – what keeps me up at night – is  how we will change the Internet. In one of my previous posts – The Personal rEvolution – I wrote about dynamic filters being created, which personalize this stream of content for every individual. You’ve already experienced this, to a certain degree, every time you run a search on Google – think your results are the same as everyone else’s? Think again (most know this, some don’t). What all of these filters have in common, however, is context. Human context. This is the defining feature of Web 3.0.

We are symbiotically tied to the Net: we use it every day, and have deeply incorporated it into our lives. Thus the logical “next step” in its evolution, is for it to begin taking on characteristics of our patterns of communication. This is already happening.

A. We communicate most frequently in person, and over 90% of the total “communication” that occurs in an interaction, comes from what we perceive in body language and tone of voice. Is it coincidence, then, that the 3rd most trafficked site ever is YouTube, or that over 650 million people use Skype to connect with friends?

B. We are social animals. Guess who just passed 700 million users? That’s right – Facebook. It also serves one third of all online ads, and use is conservatively (!) averaged at 25 minutes per user, per day. It’s a huge part of the Web.

C. Human being tend to converse in short bursts, rather than long speeches. That’s just the way we talk. So yea, I’m bringing up Twitter – which averaged 3000 tweets per second on May 1st (during Obama’s “we’ve got him” speech).

How do I explain all this. Well, there’s a great quote, by Fast Company co-founder Alan Webber, that – I believe – perfectly summarizes the whole trend: “Content is a commodity. Context creates value.” I.e. In order for what I say to you, and to the world, to have any value, it’s got to be imbued with context.

Below are the 8 ways it’s currently being done (with examples):

A. Location

• FourSquare - let your friends know where you are.
• Voxy – learn a language based on your surroundings. In a restaurant – it’ll give you food vocabulary.
• Twitter – now offers location-based tweets.

B. Photographs

• Instagram – take photos with cool filters that add emotionality.
• TwitPic – the original photo-sharing tool for Twitter.
• Facebook Photos – the largest repository of photographs ever (100 million+ uploaded every day).

C. Video

• YouTube – 2 billion views a day. 24 hours of video uploaded every minute.
• Vimeo – high-definition video is more realistic than low-definition video.
• Skype – talk in person (sort of) online.

D. Audio

• iTunes – music on more computers than you can count.
• Soundtracking – share the “soundtrack of your life” on Twitter.
• Qwiki – think Google meets Wikipedia with sound and pictures. Basically the definition of ‘contextual search’.

E. Social

• Facebook – ’nuff said.
• Twitter – the world learned that Osama bin Laden was dead on Twitter.
• LinkedIn – context: professional.

F. Limitation

• Twitter – only 140 characters makes you speak more naturally.
• Tumblr – people don’t like reading long blog posts – keep ‘em short.
• Tubechop – think clippings of YouTube videos.

G. Timing

• Byliner - ebooks on breaking news (Three Cups of Deceit anyone?)
• Twitter – real time everything.
• Facebook & Twitter advertising (boo) – ads pop up in real-time based on what you’ve typed to friends, or set as your status.

H. Interests

• Google – we all know what Google does.
• Xydo - it curates your news for you based on preferences, and sends you 1 email per day with the most relevant/popular articles.
• Quora – the place to go to ask questions you’re interested in getting legitimate answers for (because everyone tells you who they are).