I’m in awe at the changes that the social web is driving us towards.
The Internet first shrunk the world. You know, we could find anything through search from info to products. Google invented, defined and prospered on this. New business models around search were everywhere from behavioral targeting by location to auto PPC engines. It was all about search and clicks.
The real time Internet flattened time and space and redefined online social interaction. Life without Facebook and my blog communities is unimaginable. I’m connected real time to friends globally in seemingly one time zone exchanging birthday well wishes with friends I haven’t seen in 10 years and feeling tied to folks I’ve met only on a blog comment string. I run into folks I know only online in passing and they say, “Gee your holiday in Italy was incredible, thanks for sharing”. This is the norm and it’s oddly enriching.
My experiences with the social web today are becoming much more local and personal. Made possible by what Mark Essel calls the “social/information efficiency” of the Internet. I’m impressed that urban and local are what mobile puts on top of real time and social. The power of tools like Twitter and Foursquare, to connect us real time by location not online, but on the streets. This is a natural extension of what Meetup.com put into practice.
This all seems kind of obvious. Most of the world lives in cities, with everyone with a mobile device, and everyone trackable. And as the density of connected social people increases, the distance between the folks on the blog and the folks you can meet for coffee just fades. This is a big idea that is not only changing VC investment direction, usage of the social web but also, over time, social behavior. Mark Slater said it well, “As it weaves it way in to our social lives and habits – it finds a far more natural home within large urban climbs, as these are the social epicenters.”
What’s interesting here is not the technology. It’s that we are taking the technology and making it part of our habits and changing how we make friends and interact with others. It’s taking the Internet up ‘there’ and making it really part of how we interact and meet people right ‘here’. It’s a new social behavior not possible previously.
This is the beginning of a revolution that is starting to tip. Most everyone has a mobile device. Most everyone is connected. 80+% of the world’s population lives in cities. Seems like the urban world is poised to move the power of the Internet from just news and information, into ways to connect in real time, in real places, in a social and controllable way.
This is not science fiction but early reality for some of us. The density of people participating is small but changing. I’m waiting for my small Foursquare community to get larger and more local so that folks that I already know conversationally online can grab a coffee or smoothie at the gym and continue the conversation we are already having. Seems like the natural thing to do.
