If ever there was a Web 2.0 buzz word that makes me reach for my metaphorical pistol, it’s “online community”. This phrase is pregnant with various meanings, some wildly idealistic, but all too often synonymous with ‘’punters ripe for plucking”. Most new Internet ventures describe themselves as online communities as part of their Web 2.0 marketing drivel: they’re all user-driven communities using tag clouds and wikis to liberate the wisdom of crowds. It make me think of a different kind of tag: the kind we’re playing with the Web companies.
They want to tie us into community models that are lucrative to them. We want to share our stuff and enjoy the best the Web has to offer. We’re going to win.
I’m very fond of the game of Go, which is based on the idea of surrounding or encircling the Web, sometimes thought of as “encirclement chess”. Think of the Internet as a game of Go. The object of us as individuals is to extract as much value as possible from the Internet’s network of networks by keeping open to all it has to offer. The object of Web companies like Google, Yahoo, and Myspace is to surround us with services of such unimaginable wonder that we join their communities and help them make money by paying subscriptions for services, or looking at advertisements.
The evolution of Web technologies is all about individual libertarian types developing technologies which give us as individuals freedom from encirclement. At the gentle knowledge-sharing end, RSS links let us siphon of the content we want and evade capture by the corporations. Peer-to-peer networking lets us share files and route around intellectual copyright owners and tedious corporate digital rights management software. Simple to use blogging software lets us publish what we like, and then search each other’s blogs, evading censorship and the agendas of the rich and powerful. At the extreme libertarian end, darknets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet) allow us to exchange encrypted information that even government agencies can’t decode.
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The way you play this game depends very much on your personal preferences. A generation of AOL users were quite happy to sit on one corner of the board until the cost of being excluded from the rest of the board became too high, and the company’s walled garden came crashing down. A new generation of Myspace.com users seems content to do much the same. For many new users such sites are their primary experience of being online and the rewards of a simple interface and a friendly host for their blogs and photos and chat outweighs the benefits of the big bad Web. For early adopters like myself, it’s weird to see people getting so excited about a new version of Geocities.com.
The basic benefit of the Net is connections between people. Everyone is trying to figure out different ways to package and sell this benefit, through e-mail, chat, Web pages, virtual words, but you see it most explicitly in the idea of online social networks, such as Friendster (http://www.friendster.com), FriendsReunited (http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk) Linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com). I’ve been a member of Linkedin.com, a business social networking site, for years. I checked it out again recently and was impressed by the way the company had developed the idea, making it easier to search for jobs, get people in your network to contact introduce you to people in theirs and so on. A lot of people in my business seemed to be using it, and although I’ve read some users complaining about being inundated with spam from users, the company appears to have taken steps to fix this, and I’ve certainly not felt the need to cancel my membership.
Yet while Linkedin.com appears to be doing what it’s doing well, there is also something strangely pointless about it. Almost everyone I would want to make contact with professionally has some sort of online presence, and I can find their contact details using Google. A lot of what I do is about working my network of contacts, so it’s not something you can outsource to a middleman. What’s true for journalist today is increasingly true for other people. It’s hard for me to imagine that for more and more knowledge workers, the Web itself will not become the primary way to be linked in.
The current generation of Web sites is applying the social networking mojo of online communities like LinkedIn and embedding these tools into a shared experience around a particular bit of content: so it’s social networking around links with Del.ici.ous, social networking around pictures with Flickr, social networking around video with YouTube, or for music with LastFM.com. I use Flickr because it’s a great service, needing to be able to send links of photos to relatives overseas, and knowing I have a secure back-up for my media, not to feel the warm glow of community. It’s exciting to watch these sites create fantastic tools for online content sharing, and they’re succeeding precisely because they add value to the whole Web, not just a walled garden: my friends who aren’t members of Flickr can enjoy the pictures I send them just as much as my friends who are.
The good news is that we all get to vote with our mouse, and if people try to encircle us, we can simply go somewhere else. Our online identify isn’t unitary or monolithic, but a mash-up of the bits we like, the bits we find useful, the bits we can’t be bothered to get out of. The evolution of proto-blogger Justin Hall’s online identity is an interesting illustration of this (as well as an object lesson in the way the same ideas keep getting resold to us online). In the early Nineties, Hall was a young techie in San Francisco who ran a website which narrated important events in his personal life with a straightforward honesty - unusual at the time - essentially a prolific and popular blogger before anyone had come up with the term. He hit 30 and stopped, no doubt somewhat chastened by the experience of a life lived online.
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If you Google him now you find he’s still there (http://www.links.net), but the “contact” link on his homepage allows you to add him to your contacts database via Plaxo (http://www.plaxo.com), his ‘video’ link takes you to his Blip.tv (http://blip.tv) account, his pictures link take you to his ‘Flickr’ (http://www.flickr.com) account, and his ‘bio’ link points to his entry in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Hall). The tools that have enabled his online presence have become far more sophisticated. The basic idea, Justin’s stuff online, is much the same. I wonder what will be on his homepage in another 30 years’ time? My guess is he’ll still be a member of the only online community we should take seriously, the Internet itself.
Michael Parsons is editor of www.CNET.co.uk