Filtered Media

There’s a new social networking revolution brewing. Let me tie together a few threads.

There’s a growing chorus of people who rightly observe that social networking sites will begin morphing into something even greater this year. A reporter from The Economist eloquently argues over on Chris Saad’s blog that stand-alone social networks will dissolve. It’s not just an opinion. MySpace’s growth seems to have stalled, according to Creative Capital’s coverage of ComScore numbers.

Then it’s interesting to read between the lines of what Google’s Marissa Myer told VentureBeat:

I think there is the possibility of taking a social network and combining some element of annotations and searches done. For example, if I have 400 friends on Facebook, and I knew 10 of them all searched for one topic today, that might interest me. So aggregate statistics might work. In truth, there are a bunch of things you could try.

Marissa talks about “social search” because that points to Google’s machine-oriented mindset. Patterns and relationships among social networks can be automated and analysed by Google’s server farms. It’s a perfect science project for Google’s hoard of engineers.

But there’s a deeper agenda at work here, and it’s connected with our desire to congregate around discreet destinations on the web. In the early days we had public web portals like Netscape and Yahoo! Then we moved to media portals and an interconnected web of corporate sites and third parties. Somewhere in here many of us discovered RSS-powered newsreaders helped us sort through the chaff (I still rely on Bloglines, for example), so they becames something of portal to the web. Next up was the social bookmarking wave with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon notable examples.

In the background, search technology continued to tie the social web together despite the fact social networks like Facebook and MySpace rose to dominate the Internet agenda with grand (back to the future) portal plans. They were building discreet, proprietary social destinations. Walled gardens that hark back to AOL days.

Now it seems Google is creating a new paradigm. As VentureBeat writes of Marissa (in the article linked above): “She hints Gmail may be used to identify your friends, using their search history to influence search results for you and those in your social network.”

The stark reality is that social networking sites come and go. Email, on the other hand, is the great constant. Google, Yahoo! and MSN’s greatest assets are their free email accounts. Email might be out of fashion with some young people, particularly in South Korea, but for the vast majority of people it’s still where we store our contacts, keep valuable documents, and communicate with people.

Put in economic terms, free email providers still “own” (or at least faciliate) much of the baseline social networking and business conversations on the web. Even social networking sites rely on automated email services to notify users of changes to their profiles and sites.

To further illustrate the point, here’s a slide from a presentation that I give to corporates on social media, which shows why small and medium sized companies get broadband connections:

The short answer? Email.

Social networking, search, bookmarks, e-commerce, marketing, and venture capital are colliding to give us Email 3.0. The question is whether anyone can beat Google to the finish line.