There’s a lot of talk about sharing and being social on the Internet. Well, the trends say otherwise.
I recently wrote about how sharing is dying because of the numerous social networks. It seems that people want to share more but privacy concerns and the changing model of social networks is not allowing that anymore. I almost wish we were back to the “Have a webpage, will talk to the world” times.
http://nitinkhanna.com/sharing-but-no-joy/
Validation for this comes from an unexpected corner. A conversation between a few networking professionals on twitter was about this very topic. The irony of the situation – the way twitter is modeled right now, I saw any part of that conversation only because I follow each an every one of those individuals involved in the conversation.
The whole discussion revolves around the idea that the Internet itself is getting more social. Everyone is trying to create social networks around their products and this is fragmenting the concept of true sharing on the Internet, which at one time was all about hosting a webpage where your thoughts were readable by anyone who knew the URL. To add to this fragmentation, the concerns that every country’s government is having about the privacy of their citizens are causing those social networks to be more closed than open. In the above tweet, @EtherealMind has a very important point. The Internet was pretty social before these social networks came along. I guess the only point I’m making is that if you really want to be social on the Internet, start a blog, post on it and tell your friends to tell their friends about it.