The 8 Flavors of Social
Posted by Bob Warfield on October 19, 2010
1. Social built on email and message board traffic. Perhaps Notes started this frolic, or was it IRC? Both still soldier on quietly in their corners while forums won the day. Xobni and others want to go back to the future.
2. Social built on documents. Wikis, in other words. Blogs also get a run here somehow: Social built on Dear Diary?
3. Social built on people and activity streams: Twitter et al in the purest sense. Facebook too is all about “me”. But we had SMS, we had Instant Messenger, and maybe blogs go here more than as documents. We’ve had some of this for a long time.
4. Social built on questions ala StackOverflow.
5 Social built on geolocation and the check-in. This is closely tied to social reviewing. Foursquare, Yelp, and all of that ilk go here.
6. Social built on rich media: YouTube and the music social crowd. Photo sharing social ala Flickr and Photobucket live here too.
7. Social built on transactions in business software, e.g. Chatter? BTW, Notes did some of this in its day.
8. Social for business cards and the casual handshake. LinkedIn.
Have I missed anything? What’s next?
We’ve barely scratched the surface of what people are interested in talking about. Some of these are third and fourth generation while there are large areas never even touched.
Social Analytics? What might that mean? Social medicine? Some of that trying to hatch out there. Social buying and collecting? Funny how eBay totally missed that boat, but Amazon is trying to go there.
Figure it out the next big social category and you’ve got tomorrow’s headlines.
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