I was reading this weekend about USA Today’s new Social Media features and it struck me that USA Today is turning itself into AOL or Compuserve. Two dinosaurs from the past, who thought that walled off content, separate from the rest of the Internet, was the way to keep users on their site so they could sell more advertising.
It is amazing how similar the social networking sites are to the walled gardens of the early 1990’s. You have all the features and you widgets that you want within a garden, but it is difficult to communicate with you outside the garden.
For example, if I read the Boston Globe and USA Today online and want to comment on a story, why do I have to enter my comment in two separate places? If I want to answer a question on my MySpace page, why I can’t I make that question and answer available across all the social networks that I belong too?
Revenue models have changed from eyeballs and banner ads to monitarizing via Google. As in the 1990’s, only a few of the social networking sites have a revenue stream that is not awash in red ink.
Social networks are an important component of the Internet. The next logical step is for them to upgrade to SMO 2.0, where users can easily switch between social sites without having to re-enter data all over again.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
FourthAxis 03.07.07 at 6:14 pm
Wow, this is an incredible thought. I’ve been thinking about limitations like this and I just don’t know how to make it all come together.
Basically, my thought is that people will soon have an online identity that they cannot shake. I am who I am on blogger, ebay, gmail, squidoo, digg, everywhere. Thus enabling some of what you are talking about. However, there is simply no standard for sharing data AND identity that could accomplish this. No magic bullet to tie it all together. I think RSS still has room to grow and could facilitate some things. There still needs to be a “master aggregator” for this all to work and no company can bear saying they don’t want to be this aggregator. So you end up with a bunch of disconnected gardens…