Dec 22 2005
Social Networking 3.0?
If Social Networking 1.0 is eGroups, Evite, Yahoo Groups and such, and Social Network 2.0 is Friendster, Linked In and such, then what is Social Networking 3.0? David Hornik defines it in a post as enablers of other compelling consumer experiences. He writes that “dozens of new social networks are emerging to enable specific, valuable consumer experiences that are enhanced by the underpinnings of the network.”
We’ve been thinking of the social networking integration into the BiM Active web service since the earliest days of development. We started with the assumption that communicating and sharing is an integral part of the use of the web service. It’s not an add-on, but is part of the normal use. Ironically, doing this well – so that it is just ‘there’ – is not a simple task, and we’ve left parts of that implementation incomplete. It’s our next big functional push. It’s become obvoius that we really have designed it in as an integral part, because the absence of more than the hooks is so obvious in our current state of implementation.
So it’s great to see some more validation for this model. We considered tie-ins to Tribe and the like, but couldn’t figire out to how to really integrate them into the fabric of what we’re doing. OK, so now all we have to do is do it well (yikes!).
PS: BiM Active will be publicly available (out of restricted beta) in January! February!