Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 16 years 7 months 12 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
Google, Facebook and Myspace have all made announcements this month that continue to lead us down the road of social convergence.
Advertising Age magazine just published an article called, “A Web-Wide social network“, and it’s really worth a read for clients that don’t get it many people that are in “social denial” and still think the answer to everything is going to be found in higher search engine rankings. That’s very short sighted, in my opinion.
I think that if you really value your business over the years to come, and you have the foresight to look past next months SERPs and your sales figures, then it’s really helpful to understand how all this stuff is going to continue to morph your world as you know it.
At the Elite Retreat in San Francisco, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress and Automattic talked about where he thought things were going to go in the future, and what he envisioned for his company and for the evolution of WordPress.
He explained that in the same way most of us began with AOL, (or in my case, Prodigy), he thought that today’s communities that we’re all joining, like MySpace and Facebook, are all just temporary placeholders, until better options become available.
True sharing of information and data becoming available across common websites and platforms (like WordPress for example) is going to change the way our kids look at things. Do you think they’re going to have the patience to sit down and fill out 35 profiles? Highly unlikely, wouldn’t you say?
In the lower right side of my blog you’ll see a social community called My Bloglog, where people that choose to share and show their information will appear on my site with photos, and I would appear on theirs, and it’s all pretty cool. If anyone wants to find out more about a particular visitor, they can go to his profile and find it.
Another example or this sort of “interconnected sociality” that I’m using on this blog would be the Gravatar plugin, which stands for Globally Recognized Avatars.
This means that anyone who’s Gravatar member that comments on this blog instantly has their picture up here by their comment, allowing for true sharing of information. Gravatar Accounts are free, and you can sign up for one here. There are no real profile pages there to speak of, but I would guess there’s something in the works.
The author of the Advertising Age story, Abbey Klassen, quotes another blogger talking about how “social networks will be like air, saying this…
“I thought about my grade-school kids, who in 10 years will be in the midst of social network engagement. I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to ‘be social.’
Even if you don’t have time to read the whole article, then I recommend you at least scroll to the part where it says “Listen Up Marketers“, because this is affecting our future faster than we think.
