Mike Butcher - mbites

Mike - FB folk are all in 'test' mode right now. Sure - a lot of interaction and a lot more than can be achieved through blogging but blogs are not 'dead' although I doubt UGC was ever a totally viable concept. For another day but good food for thought.

Maybe its just me but isn't social networking just user generated content. So in Facebook me writing on a friends wall is user generated content by me. Me adding in photos and tagging or uploading a video is all just user generated content. Even the act of creating the vide can now been done inside of Facebook directly e.g in the mail message I understand your point and have had similar thoughts but would it not be better off being phrased as "Is the open web being replaced by the closed social silo." Right now the answer is yes but services like Plaxo 3.0 and Pulse as well as Spock, Google's recent support for Microformats and other initiatives hold out hope that the last 10 years of work on open standards was not all in vain only to be replaced by AOL 2.0 aka Facebook.

Thanks Sam and Dennis, good points all. I guess what we are seeing here is - dare I say it - a tipping point where a new generation of digital natives, who might have blogged in the past on the open web, are starting their online careers inside Facebook et al. Having invested a lot of time and effort in building their social capital inside these networks, it is going to make less and less sense for them to put their efforts into a place which is more "open", like the blogosphere. If you already have 300 mates on Facebook, why bother trying to reproduce that traffic and capital outside? Sure, "UGC" still exists, but put inside social networks it is no longer the kind other media entities or non-members can easily access. Sure, we may get another LonelyGirl15 or Geriatric1927 (the now classic YouTube examples) appearing on Facebook video, but does that "mean" the same thing as someone who produced content out on the more open Web? Especially since Facebook's terms and conditions, rights restrictions etc are so draconian? Perhaps the question is immaterial if they get traffic? I don't know the answer but I suspect the big test of this will be when there is a smash hit user on Facebook who, after garnering a million "friends" realises all the content they generated is invisible to the rest of the Net and not owned by them...

Great conversation starter ... yet as always I guess it depends what you want to do. The other issue I'm seeing is the growth of Facebook groups with nowhere to go. Flag up a cause, a topic, and a couple of hundred people may join the group without too much effort on the part of the promoter. A lot easier than doing recruitment to Ning or (old style) on a mailing list. But once everyone is there, what next? Discussion is limited because there are no feeds or alerts beyond personal replies. No easy ways to collaborate ... so you you may have to migrate out to something. Hmmm .... perhaps a mailing list/Google group would do it. Old skool, but works. The personal dynamics and functions are very different from the group ones. Maybe Facebook is a good gathering place, but for the moment the party may have to move to another venue to do something together.

Hi Mike, very interesting, it seems to me that the mega-trend is an open platform and constantly lowering barriers to entry - all shoved along by Moore's Law. The tools that are appearing as a result are becoming increasingly varied and that is both helpful, and rather exciting. But we don't argue whether spanners are better than hammers or if one will take over from the other...

I've noticed a number of bloggers, myself included, who while not exactly deserting their blogs, are certainly leaving them fallow for longer periods than they were a year or two back. I've been thinking along similar lines to yourself. The 'space' is certainly going through a very interesting - and far more relevant to your ordinary Joe - period of development. Mike, you say "If you already have 300 mates on Facebook, why bother trying to reproduce that traffic and capital outside?... I suspect the big test of this will be when there is a smash hit user on Facebook who, after garnering a million "friends" realises all the content they generated is invisible to the rest of the Net" I think this focus on traffic, hits and the like is really missing the point. That's blogweb thinking. Blogs and all that were always about connecting people, nattering about stuff. Now there are better ways to do it. And traffic and hits have nothing to do with it. They're simply not relevant. Technorati ranking and all that was always irrelevant anyway. Now it's obsolete. However, at the moment this kind of analysis is very difficult to be objective about. So, I'm not. I look at my friends use of the net and my own. I read blogs the same as ever, but I blog far less, I twitter far more. And I can't remember the last time I checked my stats.

Graham, you may have hit the nail on the head: "Blogs and all that were always about connecting people, nattering about stuff. Now there are better ways to do it. And traffic and hits have nothing to do with it. They're simply not relevant. Technorati ranking and all that was always irrelevant anyway. Now it's obsolete." This is going to sound like Pseuds corner but.. We are heading towards a "media singularity". That is the single point at which content is created. At it's smallest it is a status update or a microblog/twitter or a moblog from a camera phone. Anything after that becomes longer form and more involved - blog posts, long feature-style pieces, podcast, video etc, all the way up to the feature film. It's a long old tail, but the question is where does the source if that river start? Inside a social network or outside? Perhaps I am coming at it too much from the point of view of a media owner. One can't control (or at least it's hard) one's rights and media/ads/sponsorship inside a network, but you can on the web. You are right, traffic/Technorati NEVER mattered to the average person. And increasingly those things will plateau as lots of content creation emigrates into social networks and away from places that Technorati/Google Blog Search can reach. Perhaps the solution for media owners is to build or buy their own social networks...

Mike, I like the way you used "open" to describe blogs and the web as opposed to the social networks, which are more closed. I've long thought that online community in the traditional sense of message boards and chat rooms is a very inward looking model. Only people inside can see and participate. Blogging is more open in that anyone can at least read but I think that actually participating beyond simply commenting IS difficult for most people. In some respects, a lot of social networks are more outward looking than the online communities of old - the content tends to be linkable, rss spreads it, widgets republish it. The social networks also lower the barrier not just of participation via comments but in a whole bunch of ways. That said, social networks are, by definition, based on the idea that community is centred around the individual. The pros and cons of that model have been debated since before the industrial revolution...

Hi - great points. I don't think the issue is so much about whether social networks are killing UGC but whether our expectations of UGC were valid. Social networks work because they make it easy to talk to strangers who might like us. Yes, they're about sharing information and letting people know how clever we are in the same way we want our blogs to act, but mostly they're about gossip. That's why they're social networks not news networks. And I don't think you can say it's all UGC in anycase - so is texting in that model. I think it's fine for people to do whatever they want online (as long as I can avoid them doing it) but I also think we need to stop calling it UGC any time someone spots a story written by a paid journalist and uploads the link to Newsvine or whatever. I worry that what the web risks losing, with all the twittering and wall-scribbling, is UCC - user created content - that adds real value to it as a news media. The web has started to feel like sitting on train with everyone around me talking loudly on their mobile phones about what they did two days ago. When I started working on my own UCC/UGC (whatever) website, a bloke in Washington emailed me depressing figures from trials his company had run. He said people wanted to read news stories, lots wanted to recommend stories, but only the tiniest fraction wanted to actually write articles themselves. I think the problem with social networking is it feeds our natural laziness. We can pass on links or comments without a lot of effort and still feel we're part of something big and important.

Sue - I'd disagree - if a social network allows you to pass on comments etc without much effort then it's doing a good job. My concern is that making that easy - as facebook does - is a competitive advantage in business terms and therefore the amount of "openly accessible content" may start to slowly shrink.