The Social Interent

Chris in Just Some Thoughts does a shout-out to me to read something Tantek wrote in his blog…

Technorati is a service that follows the threads of conversations going on in the web. In this post, Tantek reports on some questions thrown out at a recent converence regarding the relevant sorting and presentation of inforamation. Of course it is focused on blog info, but the questions are interesting in general, too.

Very interesting. While I read this, specifically the line where Scoble says that he doesn’t watch much TV anymore now that there’s blogs to read, I was listening to the latest Daily Source Code by Adam Curry and at that exact moment he said that thanks to podcasting, he barely never watches TV anymore. (Cue eerie music).

Anyway, Chris and I have been talking a lot lately about Social Bookmarking (Spurl, del.icio.us and such) and what they can do, what they mean. Today I just started playing with a semi-public beta of a social task management site, 43 Things

In the beginning, we had virtual communities based on mailing lists and newsgroups (one such community is the Friends Zone which will be 10 years old in February) and some more niche groups in MOOs/MUDs. Then we had more web-based communities especially blogs. LiveJournal, for example, is a blogging service which greatly facilitates people posting about each other. Movable Type introduced the trackback system as a way of having something like that but I’ve never seen it used as powerfully as LiveJournal uses it. Somewhere in there we also had group services start like ecircle and, Yahoo Groups and Google Groups. Then we got social networking via Friendster and Orkut. Now we have social bookmarks and social task management.

And if you’ve ever listened to a podcast, you know how self-referential that community is as well.

Chris and I need to have one of our patented long-talks-over-beer about what this all means. Maybe I should trick him into doing this as a podcast. Yeah, that’ll work…