So yesterday’s post regarding my departure from FriendFeed was not well-received. That’s fine: I wasn’t submitting the decision to referendum, and how people take things is really up to them. I’ve gone out of my way not to look in on the discussion of the matter at FriendFeed, but the indignant blowback in my site comments and email inbox seem to center around how inappropriate it was for me to depart, and that I must never have really understood the service in the first place.
I’ve said about all I care to regarding FriendFeed, other than restating my respect for its capabilities and most of the community. I’m glad to remain connected to many FriendFeeders through Twitter and Facebook — and, of course, through my own publishing. But the angry feelings I seem to have stirred have an anachronistic feel to them, rather like the partisan spirit of old-school BBS wars. This isn’t social media, which is about the sharing of content. And that’s where social media belongs: welded to the content itself, not built on the shifting sands of Silicon Valley web services and startups.
Baby talk
The content, not a service web address, is the destination. Content can be a lot of things: text, media, discussion — whatever people wish to share and consume. Social media is still in its infancy, and, like a child, remains dependent on the parental auspices of those with the resources to bring it to maturity. That’s why it’s still napping in the cradle of commercial web services. But as social media learns to toddle and eventually wonder about the world beyond its front porch, it will become time to leave.
This won’t happen immediately, and there will be plenty of skinned knees before social media learns to walk on its own. The day will come, however, and given social media’s rate of growth and the increasing portability of technology, it will happen long before its mentors wish. Very few people want to belong to Facebook — they want the benefits Facebook provides. They want to easily locate and share with their friends. Very few people want to belong to Twitter — they want to chat with their buddies and exchange content links. These services are the current state of the medium, not its purpose.
There’s one thing most content has in common: It’s shared (or can be shared) in the browser. And this is where social media must go: directly attached to the content, wherever it is consumed.
Out of Babylon
There is nothing inherently necessary about social media services — nor is being tied to the beneficence of web destinations necessarily a good thing for anyone beyond the owners of these services. I’ve said this before: using services such as Facebook, Flickr (and, yes, FriendFeed) amounts to digital sharecropping.
It’s all fine and good to be provided with an acre and a mule in exchange for a portion of the yield (our personal information, social graph, pageviews, and advertising actions). It’s not so fine and good when a web service fails or is sold to another master, or when we’re summarily kicked off the land by a change in terms of service, API, or paywall.
This is why social media will break free from its current Babylonian captivity, and the promised land is probably to be found directly within the browser. It’s here that will both share, consume, and discover content. Browsers are going to get a lot smarter, learning our interests and gathering them in the form of both content and personal connections. Really, this is the only way we’ll be able to sort the torrent of realtime content becoming available to us. Social networks will become increasingly granular and transitory, taking form and dissipating with our shifting needs. The process will be agile, intelligent — and simple. Much of this sharing can be automated, and it probably will.
Into the great wide open
I’m not sure exactly how all this will look — I’m a content creator, not a coder. But if you want a glimpse of what’s to come, pay attention to folks like Chris Messina and Dave Winer. These are the people who are doing more than pontificating about the future of social media: they’re imagining it. They’re developing the standards and protocols we’ll take for granted in five years. They’re helping to liberate us from the soft chauvinism of social media web services.
And quit bitching (or not) about something so utterly trivial as my departure from a single social media service. I’m still writing and curating the same content I was this time last week. That, presumably, was the reason you paid attention to me on FriendFeed in the first place.
Hand image (detail) by Armadil060, distributed under a Creative Commons license
