Gestures are the body language of the web.

The equivalent of the power of a glance. The roll of an eye. The shrug of a shoulder. The accents to talking and the rhythm to our words.

Facebook understood this early. They built a platform that encapsulated gestures as expressions through liking and sharing. Pure utterances of ‘yes’ around objects, mostly photos. Or cheerleading causes.

Brilliant actually. But their promise was bigger.

They understood the power of gestures as a dataset of engagement itself. As a variant of language.

The act of liking across the sweep of your interests was a funnel for personal information. The data fed the implicit social inference engine that personalized your news feed, hand delivered you ads and recommended people you should meet.

I buy into this idea of an implicitly road-mapped future completely– but it’s gone very stale.

Maybe there’s just too much noise but I think the problem goes deeper. Facebook’s taxonomy of gestures were too light and the data too devoid of context to really matter. The brevity of the expression isn’t the issue, it’s the limitation and core inflexibility of the gestures themselves.

The act of being liked today, to me, feels like a generational secret handshake from the past. Facebook is showing cracks and hints of mortality as the gestures themselves are trivialized and outdated.

My friend William Mougayar (@wmougayar), CEO of Engagio wrote a post this week on gestures as the lighter end of the hierarchy of engagement syntax on the web. It’s a great read. He sees the Facebook Like and a 1000-comment thread as the opposite ends of the engagement scale.

This is true certainly, but what’s true today for gestures may well be different tomorrow. Gestures as  the body language of the social web are being reinvented as a key part of language with import, not just exclamations of core emotions.

Our canvas of gestures today, mostly Likes, thumbs up and emoticons, as cute as they are, are just too simple for the complexity of emotions and thoughts we need to express. New gestures are needed.

At a basic level, Disqus’s new Beta software is a step in this direction. The removal of ‘likes’, replacing them with ‘voting up’ comments within a conversation string, addresses this head on.  It brings context to the gesture and makes the individual utterance part of a community action to vote rather than simply a back slap. It seems to be working.

Broader, more strategic strokes are looming in at least three areas.

1. Sharing 2.0

Mark Slater, CEO of Getabl talks about ‘Sharing 1.0” as the commoditizing of sharing as a gesture. When it becomes ubiquitous and simply a reflex, it is trivialized. Both less viral and less data viable. This is reality today.

My sense is that Sharing 2.0, will roll action and transactions into shares and links. Gestures, like shared links, will become social objects with transactions embedded. This could be the missing (transactional) link to  the idea of social commerce.

It’s easy to imagine a shared commercial object, like an article of clothing from an apparel brand, being transactable wherever it is clicked. A shared gesture as commercial object redefining the idea of what channel means for retail. The store will simply be wherever the object is shared.

2. Gestures as shorthand for a language of engagement

Limited input devices, like mobile, will no longer restrict either the richness of the data captured or the value of the output.

I believe that within a few years, a natural Morse code will surface as a mobile syntax of the future. Just because the input is micro-sized doesn’t mean the conversation or engagement should be lessened.

The idea of big data pools driving implicitly driven lifestyles from a population using mobile devices feels imaginable and concrete.

3. Horizontal networks will stop masquerading as contextual communities

The old truism in marketing is that whenever you go from a general to a specific you usually fail. Those of us who have engineered brand and product line extensions know this to be true.

The dearth of context on the horizontal social graph, the thinness of gesturing as a language and the transactionless nature of Facebook specifically, have pushed the emergence of niche communities of interests and marketplaces like Etsy, Ravelry, even Wattpad. More are coming.

My belief is that as mobile-base gestures are devised, communities that are mobile first, that exist wherever you are will begin to develop.

This is all about technology catching up with human behavior.

In real life, gestures are key to communications.

Great communicators, sales people and performers are as much artists of presentation as of content. Watching a movie without sound or people on the street in a different country tells this story well.

The crux of this stems from the reality that the web is about people. Not people online in some virtual world. Just people with extended behaviors from everyday life.

The more the on and offline borders blur, the more true this becomes. And the more there is a pent up need for companies and apps to crack the gesturing code.

This is not an idea in search of a market. I think very much a market in need of an means of expression.

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