Ryan MacMillan

Spending my Easter Friday pondering possible future scenarios for social media. I am working from the premise that social media is a direct output of Web 2.0. If that is the case then it is worth returning to the source of all of this discussion and the original trends first identified in the oft quoted article by Tim O’Reilly “What is Web 2.0”

In his article O’Reilly posits some of the fundamental tenets of the new version of the web that he famously dubbed web 2.0. I thought that in order to understand the current state of social media and to possibly anticipate the future of it we might start by reviewing O’Reilly’s observations.

The first assertion is that web 2.0 is defined by “The web as platform: Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.”

So what is the gravitational core of social media? Taking Google’s OpenSocial as an example, it is possible to see how a user’s profile could act as that core.

In the specific case of Open Social the core is comprised three elements; Profile Information (me), Friends Information (my friends) and Activities (things that happen). The principle of OpenSocial means that as a user moves a widget between different social networking platforms their profile is maintained and the same as they move between widgets on a different or the same social networks; so my contacts on my industry network don’t have to all be uploaded again to my Bebo profile. The application I add to my Linkedin profile will also work on my Plaxo network.

Although OpenSocial is still very much in an experimental stage (and a questionable one to some) it suggests an interesting principle; that we could have a persistent profile (or profiles) the moves seamlessly with us across the web maintaining some core information as it moves from site to widget to application. What might we choose to add to this profile? Credit rating, sexual preference, search history, privacy settings, music taste - whatever we saw fit to.

And where might it follow us? Not just across social networking sites, across all sites that provide some level of interaction based on who we are and what we want, which is increasingly all of them. So my profile would have elements that are maintained as I do my banking, check my friends on MySpace and as I slay a few enemies in World of Warcraft. Which I may just chose to be the music I listen to in each environment so my musical preferences in my Last.fm profile stay with me and update according to which environment. Or it might be a lot more.

It might also be possible for this core to move across devices as well. From my gaming console to my mobile to my laptop there is a consistency in my core values or attributes. Which I may decide to vary depending on the situation and the environment. We are already au fait with the idea that we are who we are regardless of the environment we are in; work social or home. We are also completely comfortable with the idea that we can behave and be treated differently in those environments without changing the essence of who we are that we carry around inside us. As we spend more time in social media environments - we may well become comfortable with the idea of persistent profiles.