ambiant intimacy on the web

Last week, I was sorting through the increasing amount of random friend requests on Facebook, and I started thinking about how adoption rates seem to be changing.

Overall, it really does appear that the types of people who joined Facebook earlier versus the types of people who adopted MySpace or even Friendster are quite different. This may have something to do with how Facebook was originally marketed, but I’m not sure. For example, someone from my high school was on Facebook quite early on, but was never on Friendster or MySpace.

Conversely, a good chunk of the (forgive me) scenester/elitist/early adopter crowd I know from either my Boston or NYC networks have not joined yet. Network fatigue? Perhaps. But perhaps not, and I have a hunch.

For awhile, I wondered where the hubs would float to, given Gen X / Gen Y ’s high aversion to blatant advertising and the continuing aesthetic (and functional) decline of MySpace into AdSpace. I thought Virb was a clear winner, at least for the music sub-culture types, but it failed to stick.
And now, there are thousands of social networks (if not millions) but few grabbed the core hubs of early adopters in the way that a few message boards and Friendster did a few years ago.
So where are we going next? Nowhere, actually. The past year has seen the rise of “micro-blogging” and the birth of the personal feed, like Twitter, FriendFeed, and even the site I work for, Widgetbox, which lets people create content or take a part of the web and place it anywhere they want. The New York Times Magazine wrote an article this past Sunday which introduced the term “ambient intimacy” to describe this constant stream of personal data that we now absorb on a daily basis. (Indeed, we refer to our users’ experience on Widgetbox as “ambient findability”) It’s a great article, but it mostly follows the rise of Facebook’s Newsfeed from a teen’s perspective, and doesn’t offer much in the way of predictions, except a somewhat hokey quote about kindergartners being on social networks someday soon and how scary it was that they might stay connected digitally to everyone they meet in their lifetime.

So what’s happening now is that we (the web enabled) are in the process of defining our personal data streams. That, combined with microformats like XFN will change the way we interact with larger networks. No longer will you sign up to a site and create a profile, you will instead simply link your feed to that community, and interact with it in a much more targeted manner. It will become harder and harder to be “anyone you want” on the internet, as your feed will need to be your true identity as compared to what others may create regarding you. And as Veronica Belmont and others have pointed out, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain “long-format” blogging. And in time, I imagine these feeds will start to have hubs, based on core groups of five or six people, and in some cases, one very highly linked person. How these hubs will be displayed visually is yet to be determined – it may build off our existing blogging platforms, or it may become something totally different. We’re not quite there yet, (give it another year) but my hope is that the web stays a beautiful place to be.