The International Herald Tribune had an interesting article recently about the new wave of Silicon Valley companies who are focused on putting the social back into social networks.
The IHT had this interesting description of social networks:
Compared with other forms of human interaction, online social networking is really not all that social. People visit one another’s MySpace pages and Facebook profiles at various hours of the day, posting messages and sending e-mail back and forth across the digital void. It is like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator.
The goal of these new companies is to build a chat experience via the browser that is more like a Secne Life experience. They claim that the intermittent socializing on most Web sites ignores the primal human instinct that once drove people to the town square and now brings them into real-world social groups to watch the Super Bowl or the latest episode of “Battlestar Galactica.”
“A lot of basic human communication needs have been lost in this age of siloed, one-to-one communications,” said Roelof Botha, a partner at the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. “At the end of the day, we are a social species.”
Botha, an original backer of YouTube, is behind live Web companies like TokBox, a year-old start-up that lets people conduct face-to-face video chats on the Web, and Meebo, a two-year-old Web-messaging company that introduced a new generation of networked chat rooms last year.
Facebook said last month that it would introduce a live chat feature. Live video streaming services, from Yahoo and start-ups like Kyte, Ustream.TV and Justin.TV, are also proliferating. Those companies include live chat features as well, so users can discuss what they are watching in real time.
Keith McCurdy, the Vivaty chief executive, said he did not expect these live services to travel far across the generational divide. The younger video-game generation “has more craving for contact,” he said.
“They are using their computers for emotional experiences, and a video-game experience is more emotional than looking at a blue-and-white Facebook page.”
I have written in the pasty about making online shopping more social, but are chat rooms really the next big step forward for social networks?
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Chat functionality isn’t new, and can be added to any website by existing services.
What needs to happen is an evolution of chat to take on elements of status updates on Facebook/Twitter, and also Instant Messaging.
Part of the attraction of Facebook/Twitter is that you can participate in a conversation without a real time commitment, and something that can offer elements of that, combined with the benefits of realtime chat, would be a winner in my opinion.