I had the pleasure of hearing Nick Love speak at the Web3.0 & the Future of Social Media last week at the Sheraton in Sydney. He was discussing the trend that more and more sites are providing a social experience.
Nick believes that all sites will soon consider social tools a must have rather than a nice to have and that the term social media as a term.
The social web is all about you: it’s not enough to know that the user likes sport, we need to know that you like Tennis on Wednesday nights and Rugby on the weekends.
The web is improving behavioural understanding – it is moving from observations about similar events to a knowledge of what you need or like and when. We are moving away from the collective intelligence approach that Amazon used to bring us the customers who bought this also bought to this deeper individual understanding.
That said – I think that some of the collective intelligence techniques are very relevant and under utilised to make intelligent suggestions about what the user is trying to achieve.
Websites are constantly using the social currency of reputation to encourage users to participate with their site – increasing engagement and length of site visit. Great for the popularity of their site and the advertising spend. Some great examples of common social functionality we see on the web are:
- tell others what you’re doing
- see the latest activities of people you know
- connect your identities – the activity from sites like Linked In, Twitter, Facebook is intermingled across the web
- build collections of things
- find others like you
The web is moving towards a deeper behavioural understanding from the current models that are used