First came MySpace, which was bought by Murdoch's News Corp(se), and promptly transmorgified into the steaming pile of monkey poo that it is today. Facebook hasn't been quite as bad, but I give them props for trying to screw up a good thing. Career focused LinkedIn has far less foolishness and is a rich environment for business networking. Twitter's 140 character tweets leave no room for misbehavior and the clean, tight interface's only trouble is the very rapid system growth.
I was quite interested to see that the latest incarnation of the popular Tweetdeck client has grown from just Twitter to spanning all four of the systems I named above, but I think the days of social media system bridging being purely a client level function are numbered. Google has yet to weigh in on this market, but when they do it'll be a federated system like they've created for the very popular Wave. The others will get in line ... or they'll be left behind.
Google Wave is an interesting beast. Designers took a look at email, instant messaging, and then started from scratch designing something that would cure the versioning and concurrency problems experienced with email.
An individual wave can be thought of as a word processing document only instead of paragraphs it contains one or more wavelets, and each wavelet has it's own unique owner. A single user starts a wave, then invites others from among their contacts to read and perhaps contribute their own wavelets. We use this tool now with Progressive PST.
We had a conference call the other night involving four people – one of us would be talking while the others were making notes about the various points. This document is the foundation for a strategic partnership and once we've got it ground down to something close to a final form the lawyers get it to memorialize it. I'd say we shaved weeks off the amount of time a stream of emails and phone calls would have taken to get to the same point in the process.
Right now all waves are entirely in Google's space, but the wave system supports federation. I expect some time early next year to be able to load wave server software on one of our FreeBSD systems, apply for access to Google's wave systems, and then configure a gateway between the public wave infrastructure and our own internal system. This will address some privacy concerns we have without breaking the ability to interact with the much larger universe of the Google Wave federation.
The internet works because the Internet Engineering Task Force publishes open standards on how to build networks and then people load Open Software like Linux or FreeBSD on common hardware and start providing services. The for profit systems that were technically difficult or legally impossible to integrate have withered, while the free systems thrive. Google gets this at a deep, cultural level, and they've hit the mark by opening Wave's specifications and making internetworking possible.
Twitter is the only one of the four social media systems I named above that is equally extensible. Twitter has always been developer friendly, publishing clean application programming interfaces, or APIs, and permitting sensible access by remote parties to their systems. I think this has much to do with their underlying model of providing a bridge between web and mobile phones; you can only do so much with a 160 character SMS message as your default data object.
What will happen next is this: a protocol, or set of standards as to how one communicates, will be released. It'll be closest to how Twitter does things now as they're the least common denominator, and it'll add on namespace provisions. Don't recognize that last bit as English? A fair enough complaint – what I mean is that if you're going to merge the flow of updates from Twitter and Facebook you have to deal with the fact that JaneDoe on Twitter and Jane Doe on Facebook may not be the same person. You need some way to clarify the namespace – Twitter:JaneDoe and Facebook:JaneDoe? It'll be a lot more complex than that, since Facebook allows many users to share the same name, but that gives you an idea of the type of thinking that is needed.
Google isn't going to stand idly by while this social media business takes off. They'll either buy a top tier player, with Twitter being the most likely candidate, or they'll involve themselves in the standardization of the federation protocols and then produce an innovative system based on the lowest common denomiator message exchange, but with value added extensions found only within their environment. That's a fair use of the system – Facebook's games and marketing efforts will be their differentiator even after they're pulled into a standardized low level message exchange system.
Breaking down barriers is the theme in social media, both directly between systems, as we've just explored above, and at a higher level. I had a problem with my AT&T cell phone last week. They handled it quickly and to my satisfaction. Four years ago I tossed Sprint out on their ear due to their inability to properly provision three of my five business phones and they sent me a $2,000 early termination bill. I had to explain to their investor relations people that writing freelance articles about their crappy service was how I planned on paying the bill before they cleaned up their act.
Part of AT&T's newfound customer service focus is the fact that a tool like Twitter can easily permit angry customers to band together and take the vendor out behind the woodshed for a little tough love. We're seeing something like that aimed at Glenn Beck right now and it's working wonderfully – StopBeck puts out a Tweet about a new advertiser he's found on Beck's show, and his 3,259 followers spring into action. It took Cadillac all of a day to pull their advertising once we got after them. I believe the fallen advertiser count is now over 90 and we're not going to let up until all that Beck can sell is Chuck Norris video compilations and adult diapers.
The same dynamic is going to be brought to bear on primary campaigns, general campaigns, ballot initiatives, and even individual pieces of legislation themselves. And that is going to be one hell of a shock for the clubby, blue dog infested United States Senate. The days of sucking up to voters for the first six years followed by treating the state as a personal fiefdom and the voters' needs as a nuisance is all but done.
And the quicker we develop good customer service infrastructure for the various social media platforms the quicker the blue dog obedience school will be able to reduce the pointless, disruptive barking and the urine in the carpet that plagues us now.