Demystifying Social Media Hype, or "You don't know what Plurk is?!"

I used to think I was really up on this technology thing. I got my first e-mail address in January 1994, I've seen it all, from Usenet, through the web, through the dot-com bubble, through web 2.0.... So it came as quite a surprise one day, when I asked my fabulously 'net-savvy wife what she was doing on the laptop, and she said, "I'm Plurking." The look on my face must have said it all, because her next words were, "You don't know what Plurk is?!"

No, I didn't know what plurk was. And it was at that moment that I knew things were more complicated on the web than even I had believed. If someone like me, who has lived and worked online for over 15 years, doesn't know what Plurk is, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

Well actually, I'm here to say there's a lot of hope. Seriously. The fact is you don't have to know all about all of this stuff. The web hasn't changed all that much since it was first created. Even the much ballyhooed Web 2.0 didn't change any fundamentals, it just changed how they were carried out (if them's fighting words, let's hear about it in the comments!).

All you have to know is what you are trying to do on the web, and how to use tools that help you achieve those goals. Don't follow the hype and rush to create an account on every Social Media site under the sun. To understand what is truly novel about Social Media, I think it helps to go back to some basics, and look at what the web is for and how it works.

What is the Web?

The web is a part of the internet where anyone can publish information, and link to information published by anyone else. It's about information and communication...in particular, your communication with other people who read what you publish, and who publish what you read.

And guess what? You can build a successful book store using such basic technology! The trick of course, is that this publishing model is interactive: through clever use of the technology, you can make a website, that other people can use, to give you information.

For example, what Jeff Bezos knew early on, and pulled off better than anyone else, is that besides publishing lots of information about the books you have for sale, you can also ask visitors to tell your website what books they like and don't like, ask them to write reviews, and even ask them for their credit card numbers so you can send them the books in the mail. So unlike traditional publishing models in old media, publishing on the web can be a two-way experience: you give, and receive, information. "Interactive" is not just a buzzword.

What is Social Media?

Social Media is a term that people tend to use to describe a newer breed of website that is focused on allowing people to easily carry on this two-way communication on a person-to-person basis. On Facebook, we can declare that we're friends, and then we can share all kinds of information with each other, and even information about other people who we're friends with. On Twitter, we can declare that we want to keep track of all the "tweets", the short text messages, that each of us posts on the Twitter service, creating a kind of always-on chat space between us and all of our other "followers".

So far, maybe it sounds basically like a whole lot of hyper-publishing of lots and lots of little bits of information, but nothing fundamentally different from the original web? It's true that the ability to selectively publish more targeted and smaller bits of information is a distinctive feature of Social Media. But I think this just represents a refinement, a tighter focus, of the same basic interactive publishing technologies that made the web explode in the late 1990s.

What's new about Social Media?

The new thing Social Media brings to the table, is some added awareness of who you are, and how the information out there relates to you. When you login to an online store to buy something, sure, there is information exchanged about who you are, but that's not the same thing. When you login to Facebook, not only does Facebook know who you are, but all the information published inside the Facebook website is sorted and organized for you, based on who you are, and who your friends are. We might not know each other directly, but if we have a friend in common on Facebook, I can see information that you have shared with that friend, and vice versa.

In the end, it's all personal. Social Media is for people, not organizations. All these advances in web technology are about providing a layer of information about the real people in the real world who are adding bits of content to the web. Organizations can certainly harness this, but they can only really succeed if they have individuals inside them who are immersed in this technology already. More than any trend on the web that has come before, Social Media is about participation, by individuals. It can't be faked, you have to be part of it on an individual level.

So, Social Media adds a quasi-identity-layer to the web (although only within individual sites for now). This is the real heart of the matter, and behind all the cute names and graphics, it's what's really new and different. Social media is adding some semantic information to the web. This is a big deal.

What's important about Social Media technology?

For nearly a decade now, web technologists have been working on ever more elaborate ways for websites to track, and share, information. Websites can now easily share information with other websites, through "Web Services". Some people say that's the thin end of a wedge called The Semantic Web, which is a movement to add lots more information to the web, so websites can have some representation of, not just the information they contain, but what that information is about. As Social Media websites collect more and more social-identity information that relates their users to each other, they are taking some small steps towards a larger conception of what the web can be.

That semantic information is still pretty much locked up inside individual sites though. The full vision of The Semantic Web includes websites being able to share lots of information with each other. However, it may be a while before Social Media sites fully get on that bandwagon. Facebook already tried to make a way for your Facebook profile to interact with other websites, to show for instance what books you bought recently on Amazon. But some people were less than happy about the experience.

Nonetheless, I think this potential to capture semantic information, and use it to affect how things are displayed to users, is the fundamental defining characteristic of Social Media, and it will continue to be a powerful force on the web, shaping how people interact with each other and with the web itself. It may not sound much like The Semantic Web to those who know something about the "top down" way that many technologists are trying to build The Semantic Web. But I think Clay Shirky is on to something when he said (in 2003, I might add), "the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming....it is being designed a bit at a time....It is also being adopted piecemeal, and it will bring with it all the incompatibilities and complexities that implies."

I think the next big layer of information to get integrated into this "ad-hoc semantic web" will be location information, courtesy of the GPS systems built into everyone's mobile phones these days. Imagine Tweets that represent not just what you said, and when you said it, but also where you were when you said it? Imagine being able to search for what people are saying on Twitter, at a particular location in the world, perhaps where an important (or not so important) event is taking place right now. People are already experimenting with tapping into the information on the web, and mixing it with the GPS information on your phone, to give you an "augmented reality" view of information about the physical space around you at any given moment.

So hang to your hats everyone, the roller coaster of Social Media may be only the beginning of a whole lot of bit-by-bit developments that slowly turn the web from just an interactive information publishing platform into, well, something else. No sense in sounding grandiose, there's more than enough of that to go around.

P.S. What is Plurk anyway? Well, think of it like a more organized Twitter, where messages are brought together in a chronological view of when they happened, and you can easily see who replied to whom. Twitter is the killer app for people who like to "text" on mobile phones. Plurk is more about having that kind of interaction, with the richness of a web interface instead of a phone keypad. Don't worry if that doesn't make any sense to you...just go get an account and try it out yourself. :-)