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 …

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I know that this has been posted a bunch of other places, but the nostalgia here is cool

From Scoble’s flickr