The Internet sucks. It just hasn’t really evolved all that much since Netscape’s IPO in 1995. Aren’t you tired of having to visit 20 different sites (or more) to get content on your varied interests? And hard as you try, you still can’t make RSS feeds fun, right? There are other options out there but they’re just stop-gaps in the evolutionary process rather than true evolution.
The closest thing to the next iteration of the Internet, in my mind, is Twitter – and Facebook status messages, to some degree. With Twitter, I can build a community of people with common interest who are committed to sharing information with each other. I no longer have to search out content I want on the Web. The most interesting articles come to me from my fellow Tweeters – them sharing with me and vice versa.
All of this sharing of content has me wondering why large content companies like Conde Nast, Hearst and Time Warner sit on the sidelines instead of following that old “carpe diem” adage. I know there are people at those companies who are focused on these things – people much smarter than me, for sure (I know this because I’ve tried to work at them all in the past and have been unceremoniously declined).
The opportunity for media companies is not with Twitter or Facebook themselves (at least, not at reasonable prices). Instead, the opportunity is in the delivery systems, namely applications like Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop. These types of apps, I believe they are well positioned to become the Internet version of TV. They will give us access to all of our “channels” of information and, in turn, be a (maybe ‘the’) major interface to the Web (sounds outlandish but ask Twitter users who use an app how often they visit Twitter on the Web).
Media companies should be snapping up these applications because in the short-term they represent a way to provide targeted content to users. People are reading tweets by people they’ve self-selected as being interesting and sending tweets about their own interests. Media companies can use the content of those tweets to present relevant content from their publications (or even their competitors’ for a fee) in a separate pane. This content would be timely and easily shared.
In the long-term, as social networking becomes more popular globally and the demographics better represent the general population, media companies will have a real-time feed into a social barometer – allowing them to create content that anticipates where things are headed rather than reacting to where things were. Additionally, the media companies who figures this out first will own an interface to the web. That, in and of itself, is a big deal.
The evolution I seek is all about integration. I want my emails, IMs, texts, social networking streams and all of my other web communications to be connected by a single strand. I want the content I like to come to me rather than having to search it out. Most of all, I want it to be easy. Social media apps are at the nascent stages of making this real. When it happens, the Internet will begin making sense to me again.
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