Social Media Starfish » Web 2.0 Experiment by Darshana

My Take

Today I just want to give an overview of what I think is going to be the direction of the web. Last year was probably a very important milestone in the growth of the web. I think it was the year that social media really came into there own. This new medium of social interaction has fascinated me from the moment I was introduced to it. One of the best descriptions of the different categories that had sprung up under the social media umbrella was the social media starfish model proposed by Robert Scoble. This has been represented as a cool graphic by Darren Barefoot.

This concept is something I thought of advancing in this year. To do so I need to identify all the tentacles of the starfish. Although scoble has identified most of them I believe that some other categories need to be used if we are to keep up with the shear amount of new sites. So what I promise you is to truly explore one branch at a time of this starfish in-depth.

We also seem to be heading towards the global expansion of the mobile web, which is probably going to be really great in terms of the amount of additional readers that will join the web through there mobile. Lot of steps were taken in this direction last year and this year more applications are developed.

I am pretty excited because I had a light bulb moment two days go. While I was thinking of all this frontiers of the web 2.0 I realized that we seem to be heading back to the good old days. What does that mean? Well earlier before the advent of the PC we had large computers that took care of all the processing for a certain agency. The users connected through dumb terminals which only displayed the content at the mainframe. Then came the PC and it gave each individual the power of one of those early machines and we did everything on our desktop. It was powerful, simple and effective. The Internet and the web also came around and we spent the initial years accessing information (one way) through pretty slow dial-up connections. But two phenomena has changed the way we use the web,

The wide spread availability of broadband services
The move towards the read write web with two way interactions.

Now we do many things on the web which earlier we could do only in our computer. Looking at all the available services it is very clear that in the future we can do almost anything o the web where remote servers act as the processors and data storage. Even now we have online office like packages.Eg: Google docs, Zoho.We can watch video of high quality. Listen to audio or create and edit audio. Upload and edit photos. Convert documents.Chating services on web, web mail, Simulation of technical models.

I do accept that some of these are still in there infancy. But the potential is huge. Better broadband connections that give phenomenal data rates will see us rely totally on online methods for multimedia and entertainment. Rapid advances in projects like Google Docs can effectively move all our basic office work on to the web(only thing preventing this now is the primitive nature of online office service) Actually there is so much to talk about but I will leave that for separate set of post. One thing I can guarantee is I will keep my hawk eye on this fact and convert most of my offline work online. Don’t worry I want keep all this great stuff for myself. Keep reading.