What with all the, um, unpleasantness around FriendFeed this week, it reminded me about something that I’ve been thinking on for a while now. There have been a lot of new sites starting up in the last couple of years that are primarily focused on social communication over the web. Facebook, FriendFeed, Tumblr, Pownce, Twitter, Orkut, Jaiku, about a billion blogs, and so on. The social web it’s being called.

The idea is that the new web, ‘Web 2.0′, is introducing the concept of social networks to the internet as opposed to the ‘old’ web which was just corporate marketing.  Of course this is ridiculous.  If the internet has ever had a single defining feature, it is its social nature.  The internet was originally nothing but interpersonal communication. Anyone remember bulletin boards, Usenet?  Even with the advent of html and the font tag we had newsgroups and forums.  Myspace? It’s just Geocities with music. It was only in the very late 90s that the internet started turning into the corporate marketing platform that people seem to think it is.  The new social platforms are just newer, shiner versions of newsgroups.  Bulletin boards with animated emoticons and super poke.

So why does everyone think that the internet is just one giant marketing tool? And if social isn’t new, what is it that the new “Web 2.0” brings that is actually, well, new?  The simplistic answer to both questions is this: volume. 

The sheer volume of people using the internet now on a daily basis is enormous.  The advent of broadband and its relative cheapness (unless you’re in Australia that is) means that pretty much anyone can load up a page within seconds.  I’m old enough to remember waiting minutes for things to load.  Minutes!  And I’m not really that old (don’t ask my kids).  Now, if your website takes more than 5 seconds to load, people from above start asking questions.  Your average office worker now has super high-speed access to the internet. And while offices often block non-work related sites, they can’t block them all, and there are always ways around the blocks if you know what you’re doing.  The fact is that a lot of people are spending a lot of time online, and they’re bored.  Why bother with solitaire when you can load up Kongregate?  Not only do you get more entertaining games, you get to broadcast your l33t skillz through the high score lists (and parade your achievements on your Facebook account with their app).

But it’s not so much the number of people online that led to the idea that corporations own the net.  It’s the rate of growth …

If we could actually graph the unique users on the net over time, you would see slow, organic growth to begin with, then a jump about 10 years ago (circa dot-com boom/crash) followed by an enormous spike in the last 5 years (with mainstream broadband rollout).  That original jump is what lead to all the companies setting up web pages to promote themselves.  It’s also since then that the majority of internet users have been online, so the marketing is really all they know.

For the poor AOL users who poured onto the net in the 90s and early 00s it was even worse.  They didn’t even learn about the basic concepts of the web like urls and such.  The browser hid it from them and just sent them to AOL’s advertising partners.  The “AOL Experience” really promoted the idea that corporations owned the web.  Navigation was done via a list of keywords, only one site could own each keyword and you can bet it wasn’t the small user generated site that you saw when you typed in ‘movies’.

The advent of blogging software like Movable Type and WordPress and sites like Wikipedia reminded people of what the net has always been: User Generated.  Before the corporations were online, if the users didn’t put it there, it wasn’t there.

So why does the huge number of people online bring something new then? Well, it’s one thing being able to communicate with a bunch other universities around the world on Usenet, it’s entirely something else to be able to communicate with everyone everywhere. The internet is no longer the domain of the nerds & early adopters.  Everyone uses it.  My children use it.  Schools are using it for education, uni lecturers put all their course work up on the net.  Businesses are realising you can save a fortune in office space if you let people work from home.  All this means great things for the schools & companies, but, it’s also getting more and more people used to using the internet, and people want to communicate.  It’s in our nature, we want to be heard, want to have our say.

Last year at Drive we fairly quietly introduced the idea of ‘Owner Reviews‘.  People could come to the site and enter a review of a car they’ve owned and it would be listed on the site.  There wasn’t a lot of marketing around it, and we thought it would be interesting to see what happened. We expected to get a couple of hundred in the first month or so.  We got over 12,000 submissions in the first month.  People want to have their say & the internet gives them a platform to do this on a global scale.

Companies are also noticing this.  A lot of corporate sites are starting to introduce blogs.  News media sites are allowing comments on news stories and accepting photo submissions from the general public.  And it’s not just lame marketing efforts a lot of the time.  People are actually engaging with the companies, getting a voice, making changes happen too.  And sometime’s it’s still just getting your 2 cents in.  The Drive blog is ridiculously popular, we get hundreds of comments on individual posts.  On what is essentially a corporate media site’s blog.  People want their say.

The world is shrinking.  Despite the media hype in some corners, we are generally becoming more tolerant and accepting of different people.  The net has helped in some ways to facilitate this. You’re able to investigate places to go before you go there, but more than that, it helps you learn about people you meet.  If I meet someone for the first time from a culture I know nothing about, I can look up on the net and find out about their history, cultural norms, food restrictions and the like.  And all this written not by some media spin doctor or a company trying to sell something, but by people from that same culture, sharing about themselves.  Say you have friends who have Coeliac disease.  When you have them around for dinner, you’ve got no idea what they can or can’t eat. No problems, there’re whole sites dedicated to recipes for Celiacs, written not by food companies or government health departments, but by people with the condition themselves, or their families, to try and help others. These sorts of things are happening all over. You’ve got support groups for trauma victims in Facebook or Google Groups, scientific research being done on a global scale.  Social activism organised at a grass-roots level all over the world about a range of issues.  These things are possible because there are just so many people online now.

This isn’t to say that it’s all wonderful.  Anyone who runs a blog or a forum site knows what a hassle trolls and spammers are.  Some of those 12,000 owner reviews had to be culled because they were just spam or full of expletives and we’ve had to work hard to find ways to keep the Drive blog (fairly) spam-free.  Not just that, there’s also the whole issue of the cult of the amateur.   A colleague mentioned that he found himself putting too much stock in information he read on blogs.  That he was giving them an authority they don’t deserve just because it was written down and published on the web.  The fact is that the barrier of entry for putting information up is so low that anyone can do it, whether they know what they’re talking about or not.  And you can find them in Google the same as everyone else.  Wikipedia is running into this issue all the time.

So does this mean we shouldn’t bother? Is Wikipedia useless because we don’t know who wrote it? Of course not.  It just means we need to learn to think for ourselves.  This is a good thing. Heck, why should be believe the standard mainstream sources of information without question?  Who says that journalist for that major media company knows what he’s talking about, who says that the information you’re getting off that company’s site isn’t just marketing spin?  If the huge growth in user-generated content does nothing other than make us think before we believe what we read, it’s achieved something.  At the end of the day, the net is a tool, a communications platform.  And like most everything else, it isn’t intrinsically good or evil.  That’s still up to us.

I did say this would be a simplistic explanation.  The new social networks are different to the old Usenet.  The features that they offer now are huge, and with Facebook & Myspace opening up their platform to developers, the features are, effectively, limitless. And while some view these new developments with disdain or apathy, the fact is that while Facebook may be a fad, online social communication isn’t.  It’s what the net is.  It’s what it always has been, it’s just bigger now.

So welcome back to the social web.