Hello Web 3.0: Open Web is Open for Business
posted by Jeanannv on December 16th, 2008Yesterday brought an exciting announcement from Google that Twitter will now become a part of Friend Connect. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Friend Connect, it is an effort to expand social networking abilities beyond single platforms, allowing you to connect with your social media friends. It’s not the only one of it’s kind…a similar effort called Data Connect was launched by MySpace. And this month we saw a collaboration between Flock, MySpace and Vidoop, creating an OpenID Login process essentially integrating the Open Web concept into the Flock browser.
This type of “Open Web” network has the potential to forever alter our understanding of communications and our brand promotion efforts. Right now, many of our social media applications are siloed. Each site requires a log in in order to access that community. Even sites like FriendFeed, which is an aggregator for streams of information from across multiple platforms, still requires you to go in, set up an account, then tediously log in and connect each application. Even then, you can’t automatically find your friends on all of those sites…you must go in and create yet another circle of friends to follow.
With Open Web technology and social media, we are talking about ultimate efficiency…instead of your finding followers on each platform, when you log in to participating sites, you will automatically know if your tweeps or FB friends are on the site so that you can auto-connect.
In 2009, we will move closer than ever to dreams of the inter-connectivity of Web 3.0. This type of shared information is a hallmark of the vision of our future web. But as we advance towards this new paradigm, will we be creating an ever widening digital divide? Conceiving of social media is challenging enough when it is in discrete, defined communities. Now that we are taking this to a quantum web configuration, will those who didn’t grasp it in the beginning have an even harder time joining the melee of social activity?
We must find a way to make our new media branding strategies user-friendly and help bring others along in this brave new world. In all of our efforts to increase accessibility and connectivity, let’s not create a hierarchical system of social media elitism.
January 14th, 2009 at 5:52 am
[...] There has been too much focus on the breadth of online connection building. Going to hundreds of sites, building profiles, writing articles, leaving comments. OK, yes, a certain amount of that will help with search engine rankings. But what about the depth of these connections? Do we have any level of relationship with other users on these sites? How in the world can this be a stellar branding strategy? [...]
February 25th, 2009 at 5:33 am
[...] All of my foodie folks would be there and it was an opportunity to network, while doing a bit of brand promotion. So, I [...]