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Stuck

Bobby Lilly just sent me a pointer to this article published by cnet last month. David Hornik talks about seeing one of many panels on blogging and social software and realizing they're all pretty much the same panel with the usual suspects. His take on the panel is pretty funny:

"Welcome blah blah blah relationship capital blah blah blah social contracts blah blah blah media businesses blah blah blah identify the rabid fans of the iPod blah blah blah utility media blah blah blah this is the future of the Web blah blah blah RSS blah blah blah spam blah blah blah killer app blah blah blah business model blah blah blah advertising model blah blah blah Is this a product or a feature? blah blah blah A feature doesn't make a business blah blah blah leveraging relationships blah blah blah decentralized system blah blah blah privacy concerns blah blah blah profiling people blah blah blah.

"Social networking is blogging dumbed down for the masses blah blah blah tribecaster blah blah blah widget blah blah blah What is the connection between social networks and blogs? blah blah blah the most efficient media platform ever blah blah blah read-write, not read-only blah blah blah All software is about people blah blah blah put this stuff in context blah blah blah monetizing relationships blah blah blah a new dimension to the Web blah blah blah I met my wife on Match.com blah blah blah.

"Network diversity is good blah blah blah reputation management blah blah blah open standards and open platforms win always blah blah blah it's group voice blah blah blah social context blah blah blah The entire Web is a social network blah blah blah Join me in thanking tonight's moderators blah blah blah Goodnight."

In the last couple of weeks, I've been in several conversations about Multiply, a social network site that is new and slightly buggy. Judith Meskill told me she'd talked to one of the Multiply principals, and their intention is to create a social network space, not for geeks, but for average Internet users who want to share notes and photos. That's a reasonable focus. If they can make the site more useable, they might have some degree of success.

Otherwise there's not as much innovation as there could be. A couple of sites that do stand out: flickr, an excellent site for exchanging images as well as words, and LinkedIn, a site that focuses specifically on business networking.

But the panelists Hornik mentions are all doing innovative stuff, too. Marc Canter is working on Open Media, Dan Gillmor has just published a book on weblogs called We the Media, and Ross Mayfield is CEO of SocialText, a company that offers business class wikis to companies and nonprofits. Innovative stuff is happening, so I can't completely agree with Hornik's contention that the social software world is "stuck on itself" and not moving forward.

jon posted this at 7:34 PM
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