This week, Doug and I had a chance to speak with Barb Dybwad, fellow social software blogger and Senior Editor of the Social Software Weblog. Spinning her site with the apt tagline "it's all about who you know," Barb has spilled a great many bits about key players, technologies and issues in social networking, tagging, blogging, collaborative filtering, wikis and the like. She has maintained a user's perspective on each, rather than devolving too far into technical jargon or abstract theory.
Rather than drilling down as far as we have tried to do when discussing particular platforms, then, we took the opportunity to examine some high-level questions. We spoke about the nature of Web 2.0 -- whether it's characterized by enabling technologies such as AJAX and wikis, or whether salient themes transcend the alphabet soup. We discussed unified profiles, meta-networks and federated identity. Barb touched upon those platforms she has observed to be faddish and derivative, and hypothesized about which ones will stand the test of time. Finally, she brought up Ning, Marc Andreesen's open SN API that I covered a few posts ago.
Barb's holistic perspective on the dynamics of social software makes strong sense -- blurred boundaries seem to be a steadfast rule. In this vein, I agree with her that the most successful social technologies will be those that innovate in bridging communications gaps. Her most recent post as of this writing underscores that point with a bit of color -- "I’m just sayin’... when do we get to the point where I get to own all of this metadata I’m spending so much time gardening in some way that is open, standards-based, portable, and flexible so that I can plug it into these other services instead of reinventing the friggin’ wheel in a new mandala every time?" Barb seems to have more confidence than I do, in the viability of third-party meta-platforms such as AlwaysOn is developing. She and I are on the same page about the inevitable shift of focus from features to user-content, and ultimately to content access.
The Social Software Weblog is well worth reading for anyone serious about understanding the path of Web 2.0 as it evolves. You can access it via our Blogroll, or alternatively by surfing directly to socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com.
In the meantime, you can check out the podcast by clicking here (MP3, 9.34MB).
Note: Podcast now available in cross-platform MP3 format by popular demand. Still working on the compression though. Hope to get the file size back down for next time.
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