(and more) is big news. The status update has become the ultimate
social gesture. You could see this coming if you were watching
carefully. All last year, Facebook, who is the leader in social
networking and will continue to be as far as I can tell, focused on
morphing the user experience, first to the news feed and ultimately to
the status update as the primary user experience.
But Facebook did not invent the status update. I honestly don’t know where the status update started but for me it was AIM where I first was asked to leave a short note telling people what I was doing. I’ve heard Jack Dorsey, the inventor of Twitter, talk many times about his inspirations for Twitter and one of them was the status message in AIM.
Much
of the innovation in social networking is being driven by entrepreneurs
in their late 20 and early 30s. These people were teenagers or young
adults when AIM came out in 1997 and they rapidly adopted the IM
interface for rapid (and rabid) communications with friends from their
bedrooms and/or dorm rooms. The status update is ingrained in their
social networking intuitions.
It seems to me, and I am certainly influenced as an active user of and investor in Twitter,
that status has emerged as the ultimate social gesture. If you look at
traditional social nets, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc, etc, they offer
many social activities; writing on walls, posting and tagging photos,
sharing videos, listening to music, playing games, etc.
But as
Joshua Schachter explained to me a few years ago now, reduction of
services to the simplest user experiences is a powerful generator of
focused activity. And that’s what is going on at Facebook and across
the social networking sector right now. Status is universal. Not
everyone takes photos or videos, or plays games. But everyone has a
status and it changes. It’s also quick and easy to post a status
message. And it’s massively conversational (something we didn’t quite
realize until Twitter users invented the @reply).
I believe
Facebook’s recognition of status as the most important and most
powerful social gesture seals the deal. Status is where it’s at in
social networking. This is very good for Twitter and its also very good
for the other social nets who recognize this and move quickly to
provide status updating features and open them up to the social web.
This
is also very good for third party Twitter clients who will now be able
to become status clients. We are going to see continued innovation in
and around the status message. We can use filtering, semantics,
indentity, social graphs, and a host of other important technologies to
weave a real-time web around status.
Of course, not all social
nets are the same. The big differences are around public/private and
one-way/reciprocal following as well as market positioning. A service
like Facebook, with its emphasis on privacy and reciprocal following
serves the user who values privacy and wants to have a smaller and more
intimate social experience (the private party). A service like Twitter
with its default to public and one-way follow serves the user who wants
to reach the broadest audience (the man on the soapbox). A service like
LinkedIn, which has adopted the Facebook model (more or less) but is
business focused will serve an even different user base.
All of
these services will be generators of status and the real-time web is
emerging as a result. My friend John Borthwick has been one of the
leading thinkers about the implications of this real-time web and he
penned an interesting post this week about the implications of all this on Google and the search ecosystem.
John talks about attending a Christensen talk at AOL around the time of the AOL/Time Warner merger:
the same theme that they began with. As a consequence they miss the
grass roots challenger — the real disruptor to their business. The
company who is disrupting their business doesn’t look relevant to the
billion dollar franchise, its often scrappy and unpolished, it looks
like a sideline business, and often its business model is TBD.
It’s
interesting to note how Facebook is behaving in this regard. It’s
impressive as hell. Say what you will about Mark Zuckerberg. He’s got
the intellectual curiosity and honesty to see what’s going on and deal
with it. He’s done it again and again, with the news feed, with the
platform, and now with status. And the social and real time web is so
much better because of it.
(Image source: farm2.static.flickr)