Chris Anderson, the author of the Long Tail book, has written a good blog post with the title “Social networking is a feature, not a destination” about social networking websites. His point is that social networking should not be the privilege of specialized social websites, such as Facebook or MySpace. Instead, every website should incorporate social networking features.
Around year ‘00 I was working with rich media. One large problem with the web sites of that time was that visitors of a site could not communicate with each other. They did not even know, if there were any other people on the same web site. These problems are still true for many web sites. Our aim was to improve communication between the visitors.
At that time we were really exited about Habbo Hotel, the Finnish virtual world for teenagers. We got an idea that it would be good to incorporate virtual worlds, similar to Habbo, to web sites. This would make it possible for users to participate in a web site and communicate with each other, instead of just visiting it. However, at that time, these ideas were still a bit too radical. Moreover, they were challenging to implement, since browser technology did not support well-enough dynamical features, which are now easy to create with technologies such as Flash and Ajax.
Nowadays many successful websites incorporate social features. However, on most web sites these features are still quite rudimentary. What we need is to think about web sites as places that the users are visiting and how to help the visitors to communicate better with each other. This is somewhat related to what Martti Mäntylä writes about in HIIT blog, whose view is that Facebook is an digital version of the Greek agora.
I think we here at Xtract have an interesting opportunity to participate in helping companies at transforming their web sites from directories to places where users can communicate and meet each other more efficiently. This means that web sites become “mini-Facebooks”, where visitors create the content, and in essence are the content of the web site.
