Tuesday, May 4, 2010

The Social Web

In a TechCruch interview lately, angel investor Ron Conway said
The Web is more social. We share a lot more about ourselves, and our lives, online than we did yesterday. We will likely share more about ourselves tomorrow. I am communicating with my sister in Japan, my cousin in China, and my Mom’s first cousin in El Paso about my lunatic brother who lives in Chicago. All in one Facebook post. I didn’t have that reach in 2007. I’m consoling a childhood friend whom I have not seen in 25 years as he suffers through cancer treatments. I could not have done all this in 2007.

I disagree. Facebook opened to the general public in 2006. Friendster and MySpace both launched in 2003. GeoCities offered free soapboxes in 1995 and was a huge success. By 1997 over 1 million look-at-me users made GeoCities the 5th most popular site on the net.

Even in 1981 on Usenet your lunatic brother could publicly pontificate about The Muppet Show, a decade before the WWW existed! What's so novel about "MyTwitFaceCitySter" other than the web itself is now just more pervasive? In the next decade some other service will connect 10x more people than Facebook does today and noobs will marvel yet again.