Most people tend to think of social network “sites” or “services” such as Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace.  They are destinations, places you go to interact with friends, co-workers, etc.  But, what is coming is essentially a melding of the idea of a social network into everything we do online.  Social networking will be a tool or a feature vs. a site or a service.

Examples?  Consider web browsing.  The “browser” is becoming immersed into all sorts of tools now.  The iPhone twitter client Tweetie 2 embeds the Apple Safari webkit into the application so that a user does not have to leave the application to resolve a linked URL while viewing a tweet.  Email tools such as those from Apple and Microsoft also provide a way to view HTML content (essentially a web page) from inside the email too.  This evolution has really just started.  The introduction of Google’s sidewiki service allows a user who is viewing a web page to share their thoughts about a web page in a panel on the side of the page.  Other users can view the page plus the comments in their browser, which as I mentioned earlier is becoming embedded in all sorts of applications.  So, not only are users sharing links with other users, but they are sharing their comments about those links in a number of ways.

The “feed” is another example of something that has become better with the addition of social networking.  RSS feeds for web content have been around a relatively long time.  RSS requires that you subscribe (sign up to get notified) to a feed so that when something new is posted on a site, the tool you use to read the content is notified and thus you are able to see the new content from the place you choose to view it.  Readers such as Google Reader provide a common place to view all your news.  Soon, however, the capability to view RSS feeds was added to web browsers and the requirement to have a separate application was removed.  This evolution continues in many ways.  I observe that much of what is posted on Twitter is information gleaned from some RSS feed by someone and then shared with a group of “friends” called followers.  The value this provides is that people you associate with and hopefully respect, have reviewed the information and deemed it interesting enough to share.  This is socialization of RSS in effect.  As the web has increased in scope, by that I mean the amount of easily accessible information has grown, so has the “noise” level of the web.  There are so many things that you could possibly look at, how do you find what you are really interestefd in?  Socialization represents one direction that solutions to this issue has come from.  As I mentioned, being able to leverage the judgment of people you respect to “help” you find news or information you care about is a solid strategy.

Google Wave is brand new and is generating a lot of buzz.  After using it a bit over several days,  I see it as a step to something vs. a destination.  It is a fine example by some talented engineers and creative people of what can be done with available technology.  For what it is, I see many uses.  I think of a lot of times in the past where as an engineering manager I needed to interact with a project team.  I would call a meeting and get everyone into the same office.  This is just not reality anymore.  Project teams are global and rarely are available all at the same time for a lot of really valid reasons.  Combining synchronous communication methods (chat – video & audio) with asynchronous communication methods (IM, chat logs, content sharing), Google Wave is a tool for modern collaboration.  It makes more sense to me as a tool for the workplace at this time, but by blending socialization, I could see it expanding into other areas as well.  One thought I had was that it would be great for the Wave tool to think of everything posted in a wave as a search term.  Thus, if someone in the Wave said, “We need another PHP coder”, a list of free lance PHP coders (who are available for work & have been vetted in some way) would show up.  Now, that would be cool .

Bringing this back to earth, let’s examine our traditional sources of news.  A newspaper is a collection of information provided by people we have come to respect (a reporter for example) and then delivered to us in a convenient form.  We read the news and then we may look up from the paper at our spouse and say something like “Can you believe what ‘they’ want to build down the street from us?”  This sharing of the news you just read is a form of socialization.  Your spouse now may choose to read the article themself because you brought it to their attention.  Whether it is interesting on its own merits or because you found it interesting and your spouse values your opinions is not important in this example.  Moving into the digital space, we find that this same process applies to information exchanged in social networks.  But, this evolution continues.  Suppose, continuing our real world example, your spouse is not present with you when you are reading the paper, but the information strikes you as so worthy of being shared you want to tell them.  You might send them a text message using your cell phone to let them know what you just read.  They might respond asking you how you found out and you would respond, I saw it in the Sacramento Bee (insert local paper here).  If it was interesting enough to them, they would then go to get a copy of the Bee to read.  In the digital space, this is what happens with Twitter.  Now, let’s consider what happens when I am reading an online news story on the Bee’s website.  I am now able to share the story directly by pressing the Twitter button at the bottom of the page, but soon, I will be able to see all of the people who have either shared the information on Twitter or Facebook or wherever, while I am reading the article.  And, soon, I will be able to set my favorite notifier to alert me to the top stories read and shared by the people in my social network.  Logically, my notifier will learn which people in my network I seem to “care” more about by watching how often I actually read things they have “recommended”.  Then, the notifier will rank the news stories by how many of the people I respect have read and recommended the story.

I wonder if this will lead to more examples of “group think”, where the only things people care about are what their group of friends cares about?  It is entirely possible.  Could propaganda move more quickly to influence national thought?  Of course it can.  I know a lot of people who will decry this evolution on the basis of this.  They will shout that this is another example of what is bad about technology and the Internet.  I have the same response to them about this as I have had for the past 20 years, “Nothing is a substitute for being able to think and form your own opinions”.  What I like about the place called the web now is that it is an outlet for my natural curiousity.  Perhaps I grew up listening to too many people tell me to “Question authority”.  I am not sure of that, but I am sure that I like where this is headed.

This blog is mostly about the intersection of technology and education so to tie this post back to that main topic, I have some ending comments.  First, the goal of education should not solely be to fill our brains with information, but instead to provide us with the skills necessary to think for ourselves.  As a reminder, let me point out that the reason that the public education system is so important for us in the United States is to insure that our populace is informed enough to preserve the grand experiment of democracy.  For democracy to be successful, our citizens need to be able to think independently.  I believe that the reason we hold politicians in such low regard is that they tend to believe that they should lead rather than represent and decide for us instead of listen.  So, the opportunity for educators in the evolution of technology to be more inherently social is that we can teach our children how to use the tools to help them make their own decisions, and impact their own lives through what they learn.  The threat is that this evolution may just make it easier for them to let others decide for them and that would be a shame.

As always, let us know what you think…